by David R. Nadeau, Andrea L. Ames, and John L. Moreland
VRML, the "Virtual Reality Modeling Language," is a platform-neutral file format used to describe 3-D shapes and scenery for the World Wide Web. Different platforms, however, create different VRML-performance bottlenecks. Our authors present optimization techniques that let your VRML worlds look good and perform well.
by Will Schroeder and Bill Lorensen
Visualization is the ability to transform complex data into visual form. What makes this possible is the contouring algorithm presented here.
by James D. Murray
James examines SPIFF, the "still picture interchange file format," which is a generic bitmap file format defined by the ISO for the storage, compression, and interchange of color or grayscale continuous-tone images and bitonal image data.
by Gary Aitken
Because Java doesn't require a header file, documentation is really important in a Java environment. Gary examines some of the documentation issues related to Java programming and discusses how to automatically generate documentation for Java classes using javadoc.
by Charles Letner
Charles presents a C++ class that lets you use multiple threads to implement "loop splitting"that is, dividing processing of a loop over multiple processorsunder Windows NT.
by Tony Garcia, Jeff Woodard, and Craig Liddell
Our authors describe the design and implementation of a real-time system that monitors and logs environmental characteristics. Among other features, the system accommodates remote access to the data via the World Wide Web.
by Joseph Hlavaty
Joe created WinMock, short for "Windows Sockets Mockup Tool," for testing and debugging Windows Sockets applications, without a network connection.
by Douglass L. Campbell
SmartSockets, a message-oriented toolkit for developing systems that require IPC, lets you embed messaging capabilities into your applications so that they can communicate across different operating systems.
by Robert Lord
Bob shows how to embed links to World Wide Web URLs in your standard Windows help files. What makes this technique possible is a DLL implementation of a WinHelp macro that accepts a URL parameter.
by Michael Swaine
As Michael finds out this month, what can go wrong, will go wong, er, wrong.
by Al Stevens
In building his multimedia CD-ROM project, Al implements a derived application class for the dialog-based setup program. He also takes his first sip of Java.
by Carlo Pescio
Dr. Pescio extends Cichelli's hashing algorithm to obtain a general implementation that improves the original algorithm's performance by more than an order of magnitude.
by Robert R. Collins
The Pentium Pro's undocumented Physical Address Extensions (PAE) let the processor address up to 64 GB of physical memory (36-bit address bus), and access page sizes of 2 MB.
by William Stallings
Emerging Internet protocols are discussed in IPng: Internet Protocol Next Generation, edited by Scott Bradner and Allison Mankin, and IPv6: The New Internet Protocol, by Christina Huitema.
by Jonathan Erickson
by you
by Michael Swaine
by Monica E. Berg