The end is near, and so is the beginning

Pictures from Yehuda Poliker's Concert on the
Student-Day, and a picture of my GSoC kit. Cellphone
pictures, so low quality :P

There is a feeling of an end in the air. The end of university, another chapter in my life. Yesterday I took part in the Student Day party at our university - there were amazing concerts by fantastic artists, including Yehuda Poliker, Monica Sex, Hadag Nachash and more. The Student Day is a known symbol of the end of the year, which happens 2-3 weeks before the end of the semester. The fact that is practically my last year as a student (I will have one last course left for the next semester, but that doesn't really count) does start to get in, and I am gradually getting used to this.

This week was also the official beginning of the Google Summer of Code coding period! After getting my cool GSoC kit (see the picture) 2 days ago I really felt that I'm a part of this great project - many thanks to google for organizing this! Anyway, I almost finished porting poly2tri to C. Once this is done, I can start coding my project. The milestones for my project are:

1. Port poly2tri to C (from C++), a library for generating Constrained Delaunay triangulations for given polygons.
2. Implement Chew's Second Algorithm to create adaptive meshes from CDT's*
3. Implement code to create polygons from Black/White (1-bit) channels (The edges where the color differs should be described by polygons)*
4. Combine all these to create an adaptive mesh from a Black/White channel (which symbolizes a selection area)
5. Create a triangle mesh renderer with color interpolation between vertices (actually, Cairo may be able to do this!)*
6. Implement the Mean-Value-Coordinate cloning, using these above, as a GEGL operation*
7. Add some GUI and put it as a GIMP tool

Marked with * are the steps that would require the actual work, most other steps should hopefully be trivial. But again, hopes and reallity don't necessarily agree :) When I applied for this GSoC I knew there was code to do adaptive mesh generation from polygon outlines. It's only too bad that none of the code to do this is small and in a GPL compatiable license :(

I hope to finish everything untill step 4 (and parts of 5 if I'll be able to use Cairo) untill the midterm, but I can't really set the midterm goals yet since I haven't started to seriously code yet because there is still a university semester going on for the next week or two.

To all students out there, good luck in the exam period! And for the GSoC students, good luck with the projects! :D