I have recently fallen for boost::serialization. Super useful. Beats making your own file format, and you get serialization of stl containers for free. The newly added boost::property_tree also seems like it will come in handy.
The holidays are just about over. This last weekend was pretty fun. We went for a 13KM x-country ski (which, due to our lacking technique, just about killed us). The only thing that kept me going through the last bit was the the thought of the ravioli we were going to hand-make afterwards. It turned out pretty damn good. The dough was a little thick on the first couple batches (evidenced by the fact that the recipe was supposed to make 150 ravioli and we only got like 48 out of it). For future reference, we used the recipe from http://www.ravioliroller.com/recipes/basic.html.
And we went for a short shred today (at valley of all places). This lasted all of 1.5 hrs, but was fun nonetheless.
Finally finished up the vertmat blog. Check it http://www.neilbirkbeck.com/?p=1652. Still have to fix up some things, and possibly rebuild the binaries. I have to return the book that helped understand the derivation of the stress matrix, again for a personal note, it is the book cited by the IVM paper: Finite Element Modeling for Stress Analysis, by Robert Cook. All that was needed from this was the understanding of the strains (and how they are used with the linear strain tetrahedron). The strains are the partial derivatives of the displacements w.r.t x, y, and z (along with three mixed derivatives). As the displacements are interpolated over the triangles, I derived these from the barycentric coordinates of a point in the triangle.
