Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 4 January 2011 07:18, Jaroslav Hajek <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> wrote:

>> What I wanted to ask is whether there are some ideas for projects
>> to work on that could fit for GSoC or in general something which is
>> possibly not "fixing bugs" or doing a lot of "minor" improvements
>> but seperate "new" things to work on and getting started.
>
> My favorite is implementing the OOP versions of delaunay triangulation
> and interpolation functions. See
> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/delaunaytriclass.html
> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/trirepclass.html
> http://www.mathworks.ch/help/techdoc/ref/triscatteredinterpclass.html

Speaking of Delaunay triangulations, I just came across this, which
was wikispammed in Wikipedia's article about the topic:

     http://www.s-hull.org/

The algorithm does indeed appear to outperform QHull at least for some
cases. The code is in really bad shape, though. It's not actually
GPLed, apparently. The actual license you see in the tarball is more
BSD-like, but it's homegrown, and the author seems to have little
patience for licensing administrivia, as he frequently includes silly
conditions like "you must not wear a red tie". It's also got a lot of
dead code, cargo cult sections (e.g. none of the libraries the
Makefile links to are necessary), many unncessary #includes,
uncommented debug code, "goat" as a frequent variable name...

Regardless, the algorithm seems to work. It could be worthwhile to
polish the code and contact the author about providing reasonable
licensing conditions. I've been doing the former privately, but I
don't think I should publish my modifications before asking the author
if it's ok.

- Jordi G. H.