Recently, I’ve been working on a rainy scene in Three.JS. One of the most important parts of this scene is a greenhouse with big glass windows.

I decided to take a stab at making some realistic raindrop-covered window panes for them using Three.JS’s built-in transmission shader. The result turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, so I thought I’d write up my process for building it from start to finish.

I have an Anker USB hub that I use with my work laptop - an M1 Mac Pro. I use it to plug in two USB-A peripherals (mouse and keyboard) as well as to plug in a HDMI monitor. The hub itself connects to my laptop via USB-C. In addition to the hub, I also have a second HDMI monitor, a USB-C internet adapter, wired headphones, and my charging cable connected to the laptop.

While watching some logs for my webserver recently, I’ve noticed a significant amount of requests coming from a bot I didn’t recognize with the user agent of fidget-spinner-bot. It seems to be pretty aggressively crawling my personal network of sites that I maintain, following links and downloading page contents. Some requests are also coming from user agents including my-tiny-bot, thesis-research-bot, test-bot which seems to be the same or related. I usually recognize most of the user agents of bots making significant amounts of requests to my server, so these stood out to me.

Recently, I’ve been working on some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS. For one of the levels I was building, I had the idea of importing something I built from one of my old MineCraft survival worlds in to use as part of it.

I figured that there was a pretty good chance of some software existing to export MineCraft levels to some 3D model format for 3D rendering or other purposes, and that indeed is the case. There are multiple options out there, but the one I chose to go with was jmc2obj.

I was reading a Hacker News thread for an article comparing GCP to some alternatives like AWS. I’ve been a GCP user for a good while now, and it’s definitely my go-to public cloud. We also use it at my dayjob at Osmos.

Reading the article and comments got me thinking about some of my favorite GCP features. GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:

I’ve been building some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS, and I wanted to deploy it on my server. I export the models used by the level from Blender in glTF format, which is a modern, well-supported, and commonly used format for this. Specifically, I exported the models as a .glb file.

The Problem

When I loaded my levels in the browser, I noticed that the .glb file wasn’t getting compressed with gzip. This was a problem because the file is quite large - over 4MB - and glb is a format that should benefit greatly from compression.

As part of some recent work in procedural mesh generation, I’ve been working with a computational geometry library called geometry-central to trace geodesic paths on the surface of 3D meshes. geometry-central is written in C++, and I compiled the library to WebAssembly with Emscripten in order to use it in the browser.

As I recently learned, a geodesic path is the straightest path along a surface. It’s the path you would take if you were to walk in a straight line across the surface of some manifold for some distance in some direction.

Recently, one of my coworkers added code that uses v7 UUIDs. v7 UUIDs are a new type of UUID that contains a timestamp along with randomness, making them useful for DB primary keys and similar things.

However, that code broke my rust-analyzer install for local development. I already was running rust nightly locally, so there was some other issue. It said that Uuid::new_v7() wasn’t a function even though the v7 feature was enabled for the uuid crate and it was at the latest version.

I’ve been using Stable Diffusion XL via the Automatic1111 web UI to generate PBR textures for use in my Three.JS projects, as I’ve written about previously. Everything was going great until at random, the generation started crashing at 100% and I got this error in my console:

:0:rocdevice.cpp :2786: 58285575154 us: 154003: [tid:0x7f59ee1216c0] Callback: Queue 0x7f583ec00000 Aborting with error : HSA_STATUS_ERROR_OUT_OF_RESOURCES: The runtime failed to allocate the necessary resources. This error may also occur when the core runtime library needs to spawn threads or create internal OS-specific events. Code: 0x1008 Available Free mem : 13386 MB ./webui.sh: line 254: 154003 Aborted (core dumped) "${python_cmd}" "${LAUNCH_SCRIPT}" "$@"

I’ve been working on some procedural terrain generation for my 3D work in Three.JS lately. I wanted to try out a fresh noise function for generating terrain; everyone has used Perlin noise or some variant of it for decades.

I came across a blog post by Bruce Hill describing a noise function he designed himself - called Hill Noise. It works by combining a bunch of sine waves together with different offsets and rotations. If you add enough of them together, the results can look pretty organic and random.