Category: Tutorial

OpenGL not Found, “cannot find -lGL”, and Other Issues with NVIDIA Drivers

Under Ubuntu,  sometimes when the NVIDIA drivers are installed, CMake cannot properly find OpenGL (specifically libGL.so). As a result, linking issues may occur. The easiest fix for this is to first create a symlink of nvidia-current to nvidia-xxx where xxx is the version of the current NVIDIA driver installed (e.g. nvidia-387) . Then create a …

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Visual Studio Setup Blocked or Can’t Uninstall

For some reason a Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition installation I had on one of my machines was experiencing problems: solution files were not loading properly, and what’s worse is that installation instance had gone totally missing from “Uninstall a Program” in Windows Control Panel. Also, every time I tried running the setup file vs_community.exe …

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Create Bootable USB Flash Drive from ISO Image (with UEFI Support)

Update: If you’re looking for Windows 10 UEFI installation, take a look at the addendum at the end of the post! Although there are a lot of applications for creating a bootable flash drive using an ISO image (such as UNetBootin), not many of them support the creation of a bootable flash drive that can be used …

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Align Depth and Color Frames – Depth and RGB Registration

Sometimes it is necessary to create a point cloud from a given depth and color (RGB) frame. This is especially the case when a scene is captured using depth cameras such as Kinect. The process of aligning the depth and the RGB frame is called “registration” and it is very easy to do (and the …

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C++ Function in Header throws Linker “already defined” Errors

If you define a function in the global namespace in a C++ header file and encounter linker errors (complaining about the function already defined elsewhere), there’s a simple fix! Simply mark the function as inline. This will prevent the duplication of the function in other source files. Note that using inclusion guards does not solve …

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Undo a Git Commit on GitHub

In case you’ve pushed an unwanted commit to GitHub (or any upstream Git repository), you can simply undo it. To do so, move the HEAD to the commit that you want to undo to and then run the following command: git push -f origin HEAD^:master

SimpleScalar Installation Under Windows

Installing the SimpleScalar simulator is relatively straightforward under Linux. For Windows installation, the Cygwin toolchain is required. Grab the latest Cygwin installer (setup-x86_64) from here: https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe (note that this is intended for 64-bit machines). After running the installer, just proceed through the wizard. The default installation directory is C:\cygwin64. When selecting a mirror website, usually mirrors.kernel.org is the …

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Git: Merge Specific Commit from Another Branch to Main Branch

Let’s say that in your git repository, you have a master branch and an experimental branch. You’ve fixed a bug on file A on the experimental branch and you would like to commit that fix to the master branch. This is possible using the git cherry-pick command. First, switch to the experimental branch and execute git log. Take …

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3D Line Fitting in 5 Easy Steps with SVD

Least squares fit is used for 2D line fitting. In 3D space, the line is called 3D Orthogonal Distance Regression (ODR) line. The line can be easily found in 3D using SVD (singular value decomposition). Assuming that we have a bunch of 3D points (x0, y0, z0) to (xn, yn, zn), the algorithm (in MATLAB) is as follows: …

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Intersection of a Ray and a Line Segment in 3D

This page contains methods for performing various intersection tests. Although it does not have an entry for ray vs. line segment intersection, I tried the suggested ray vs. ray intersection test (page 782 of Real-Time Rendering 3rd Edition) and it did not work in my case. I looked around quite a bit and based on an …

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