About a month ago, I decided to change the direction of my thesis. My previous topic, Non-Photorealistic Rendering, is such a massive topic that I was getting lost in the details. At some point, an idea hit me, and I think I may now have a unique contribution to provide to the study of edge detection and rendering. Thus, that is now my new thesis topic: interactive edge detection and rendering.

Now that I have a more focused goal and a more limited set of data, my progress has been speeding up. I implemented this paper, and have been trying various ideas to improve it.

Soon, I hope to start implementing my own solution, one that will surpass the above-mentioned paper (which is one of the most recent techniques).

Recording issues as I find them. This is on a Snow Leopard clean install, 24 inch iMac (2.33 Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM).

• As mentioned previously, system wide folder settings are not getting applied.
• iCal never finishes restoring from iCal exported calendar backup, stuck half-way through.
• The automatic spell checker in Safari textareas mark many correctly spelled words as misspelled, usually at the beginning of the sentences (such as the one I’m typing in right now). Often, the spell checker ‘forgets’ commonly misspelled words in its suggestions (such as not suggesting “receive” when typing “recieve”).
• Arabesque screensaver is noticeably a bit laggy and jumpy (it was perfectly smooth under Leopard). [CoreAnimation changes making high-end graphics programming go haywire?]
• Full-screen Hulu videos are noticeably jumpy, even though full-screen SWFs and full-screen HD YouTube videos appear to be fine.
• Both in QuickTime X and QuickTime 7 are now slightly jumpy when playing very high definition video in windowed mode (works fine in full-screen mode). Tested with my copy of the Speed Racer Trailer (1918 by 1078 pixels).
• Transitions between windowed and full-screen modes of QuickTime are jumpy. [CoreAnimation again?]

Changed view options don’t apply to the rest of the operating system even when you tell them to.

Direct Link

There’s no easily visible option to do the “Erase and Install” for the upgrade version of Snow Leopard (the $29 one). There’s a lot of confusion on the net as to how to do it. It’s actually pretty easy, you just have to do it manually.

1. Insert install disk
2. Run installer
3. Click the Utilities button
4. Choose the option to restart
5. When it reboots into the installer, click Utilities > Disk Utility
6. Erase the hard drive the way you would in any other full disk erase (obviously, this will delete all your data and programs, so be sure to account for that)
7. Once done, close Disk Utility and return to the installer
8. Finish the installation normally

This worked for me just fine. I’m now installing my old apps, customizing my settings, and copying over my files.

If this doesn’t work for you, you can still do a clean Leopard install, and then do the normal Snow Leopard upgrade.

Google Wave is a pretty awesome technology. Even more awesome: making you smile during major errors.

Via Norsefire’s Slashdot comment