Second last day of practice...let's see what's starting to happen.
Posted at 02:47 pm Tuesday March 18th 2008
Where's the sun?! It's started raining now and it's supposed to do so over the weekend/tournament. Weren't many willing to practice today so I did a walk around the city. Of course, the lighting was bad so nothing good to report of...but here's a video taken of the beach and the shells.
Posted at 06:37 pm Monday March 17th 2008
There was a lot of shaky camera work today so I'm posting the only good clip that made it. For the rest I'm going to have to edit heavily before I post it. This clip is also in 720p30 so don't be surprised by the big window.
Posted at 03:44 pm Saturday March 15th 2008
I'm posting a short clip now for each of the days. I plan on putting together a longer movie when I return with much more footage. For now though, enjoy an approximately 30 second recap of the last two days.
Posted at 07:26 pm Thursday March 13th 2008
Things get boring when you're sitting around. Here's some poorly shot video. In better news, I found a power source!
Posted at 05:06 pm Thursday March 13th 2008
Well...things are delayed...probably because of that storm out east. Let's hope it doesn't affect this flight. Not much exciting to post but hey, you can see video of me sitting in a terminal.
Posted at 02:25 am Thursday March 13th 2008
It's the night before I head off to Italy for a few days...yes...I know it's a surprise but it's going to be interesting. I've thought about getting a little video blagging going and this is my attempt at it below. I'll try to have pictures and video posted as often as possible.
Posted at 04:48 am Monday March 10th 2008
I get in moods sometimes. Moods where I'll be able to write interesting things. Moods where what I write will mean something. Moods where I don't feel like writing and what I write doesn't mean much and doesn't read read well.
I've made it a goal to write more and post more to my blag. You'll experience all the moods with some good writing and quite a bit of bad writing. Like with everything else that I've done so far: Practice will make me better.
As for various styles; I'll see what I run into and write appropriately. I suspect you'll a gradual transformation and who knows, maybe someday I'll write something good each day.
I've made it a goal to write more and post more to my blag. You'll experience all the moods with some good writing and quite a bit of bad writing. Like with everything else that I've done so far: Practice will make me better.
As for various styles; I'll see what I run into and write appropriately. I suspect you'll a gradual transformation and who knows, maybe someday I'll write something good each day.
Posted at 03:18 am Sunday March 9th 2008
I purchased a Macbook Pro a few days ago as my old laptop was terribly slow. Don't get me wrong, old laptops have their uses but over the years I've been taking more photos and video and when I travel I need a laptop that can be used for the purposes of managing, storing, and editing content. My old laptop used to take 2 hours just to copy 4GB of content whereas my new laptop takes around 5 minutes.
As far as I'm concerned there's very little difference between operating systems. Linus Torvalds <add link> has mentioned something similar in the past in that end users care very little about the OS; users tend to care about the UI and apps. The applications is one of the reasons I selected the Macbook Pro. There are a wide diversity of photo and video editing applications but the most important are: Lightroom, Photoshop, and Final Cut. The three aforementioned applications provide me with a video editing base.
The Macbook Pro also has a fast processor which is required when editing photos and rendering video. The Intel Core 2 Duo in this machine isn't the fastest but it gets the job done and results will be posted shortly to demonstrate that fact. That the processor is an Intel also holds special meaning as the capabilities of this laptop are greatly enhanced in one particular area: it can run Windows.
Yes, while most OSX users hate Windows I don't particularly care about the OS aside form...the applications. Windows development presently takes up a significant portion of my day to day programming life. The game that I'm working on requires XNA which presently won't run under Crossover but will run under Windows proper and that's where Bootcamp becomes useful. Bootcamp is a utility which allows an Intel based Mac to run multiple operating systems. The utility is generally straightforward and doesn't require much technical knowledge to use (but that knowledge is useful).
Having both OSX and XP on the Macbook goes a long way towards satisfying my development needs but there's one little last item that needs to be resolved: Linux development. I know what the Mac-heads among you are saying: "OSX runs BSD you can do all your development on that". While that is true the situation is more complex (just slightly). While I can run Apache (comes with OS 10.5), install PHP, install MySQL, and a whole bunch of other applications it isn't the right way to do things. I need to make my development platform closely mirror the production platform. My production platform is Debian so installing all the above applications on OSX isn't the best route to go. Perhaps running Bootcamp into Debian is the best route. That's sounds yucky and complex as now whenever I need to do any web dev I'll need to boot into another OS.
Presently I share some folders on my Debian dev machines to my Windows machine and edit all the scripts on Windows and do all the testing through web browsers on Windows. It's the best route as I don't need to switch operating systems and I can continue to use all my chat applications and email as well as switch to playing TF2 (video game) whenever I'd like. So dual booting (triple booting) in this case is a major break from my current dev style. Fortunately Parallels provides the solution. Parallels is an application that runs a VM of an OS within it. In this case I'm running Debian which has all the applications I need running internally and sharing (via Samba) the folder where I need to make changes. It's a win win situation as I can do all my development without booting into another OS. Windows development still needs to be booted into another OS but I'm more focused on a single task there and it's worth the "pain" of switching operating systems.
From a development point of view the Macbook Pro meets the requirements I have for comfortable software development. What else does it have though?
Well, it's fast, it's slick, and...I think that's about it. It is well designed (the Apple way) and from that end it's fairly impressive. The laptop is light, simple to use, looks good, and for the most part well designed. The most bothersome part is that the screen doesn't recline past ~ 110 degrees.
I maintain my position that Apple products are reasonable.
As far as I'm concerned there's very little difference between operating systems. Linus Torvalds <add link> has mentioned something similar in the past in that end users care very little about the OS; users tend to care about the UI and apps. The applications is one of the reasons I selected the Macbook Pro. There are a wide diversity of photo and video editing applications but the most important are: Lightroom, Photoshop, and Final Cut. The three aforementioned applications provide me with a video editing base.
The Macbook Pro also has a fast processor which is required when editing photos and rendering video. The Intel Core 2 Duo in this machine isn't the fastest but it gets the job done and results will be posted shortly to demonstrate that fact. That the processor is an Intel also holds special meaning as the capabilities of this laptop are greatly enhanced in one particular area: it can run Windows.
Yes, while most OSX users hate Windows I don't particularly care about the OS aside form...the applications. Windows development presently takes up a significant portion of my day to day programming life. The game that I'm working on requires XNA which presently won't run under Crossover but will run under Windows proper and that's where Bootcamp becomes useful. Bootcamp is a utility which allows an Intel based Mac to run multiple operating systems. The utility is generally straightforward and doesn't require much technical knowledge to use (but that knowledge is useful).
Having both OSX and XP on the Macbook goes a long way towards satisfying my development needs but there's one little last item that needs to be resolved: Linux development. I know what the Mac-heads among you are saying: "OSX runs BSD you can do all your development on that". While that is true the situation is more complex (just slightly). While I can run Apache (comes with OS 10.5), install PHP, install MySQL, and a whole bunch of other applications it isn't the right way to do things. I need to make my development platform closely mirror the production platform. My production platform is Debian so installing all the above applications on OSX isn't the best route to go. Perhaps running Bootcamp into Debian is the best route. That's sounds yucky and complex as now whenever I need to do any web dev I'll need to boot into another OS.
Presently I share some folders on my Debian dev machines to my Windows machine and edit all the scripts on Windows and do all the testing through web browsers on Windows. It's the best route as I don't need to switch operating systems and I can continue to use all my chat applications and email as well as switch to playing TF2 (video game) whenever I'd like. So dual booting (triple booting) in this case is a major break from my current dev style. Fortunately Parallels provides the solution. Parallels is an application that runs a VM of an OS within it. In this case I'm running Debian which has all the applications I need running internally and sharing (via Samba) the folder where I need to make changes. It's a win win situation as I can do all my development without booting into another OS. Windows development still needs to be booted into another OS but I'm more focused on a single task there and it's worth the "pain" of switching operating systems.
From a development point of view the Macbook Pro meets the requirements I have for comfortable software development. What else does it have though?
Well, it's fast, it's slick, and...I think that's about it. It is well designed (the Apple way) and from that end it's fairly impressive. The laptop is light, simple to use, looks good, and for the most part well designed. The most bothersome part is that the screen doesn't recline past ~ 110 degrees.
I maintain my position that Apple products are reasonable.
Posted at 03:51 am Saturday February 16th 2008
I've been anticipating the next Pixar film for quite some time...that film, of course, is WALL-E. There have been many trailers going around but the newest bit of information that contains a tidbit of information was recently posted at Slashfilm and Cinematical.
If you click on the image in the link above you'll see some text under WALL-E's hand. With some trivial manipulation in Photoshop you see this...hmmm...strange language...considering what we've seen in the trailers so far. Of course, it is known by this point that the ship that visits Earth in the future is of human creation...or creation of a creation of humankind.
Posted at 03:32 am Wednesday January 23rd 2008
No sooner do I buy and import "Dragon Tiger Gate" on DVD do I find out that it's out on HD DVD in one month. BAH! On that front...I'm going to continue purchasing HD DVDs discs if I find a movie on it that I enjoy. Why? I have plenty of HD DVD players, spares are going to be inexpensive to purchase, and...content is going to drop in price. I only started purchasing DVDs in 1999 and I'm already upgrading to HD...I'm awaiting the next media format eagerly...early early adopter :)
Posted at 10:52 pm Monday December 31st 2007
Just a few hours ago I met one of the last goals for 2007 (the other goal for Winter 2007 specifically is uploading right now). I have a small prototype of the small game working as previously mentioned. The game is simple but with the lack of time these days it was important to make a push to get it done.
I reached my goal a few hours ago but I wasn't happy with it as it only ran at 6 frames per second at 1080p. Lowering the resolution didn't work so I had to track down some particularly nasty memory allocations that were being done during rendering and voila...60 fps :)
Work can now continue...must fix the controller handling though, it's no fun right now.
Posted at 02:17 pm Sunday December 30th 2007
So...I wanted to share content to my 360 from my machines. I have a mix of Windows and Linux running throughout the house but most of my content comes from two main sources (one windows and one debian box). Sharing content from Windows to the 360 is quite easy with WMP but I have most of my content on the Debian server (set up specifically as a data repository). I tried to use EnableRemoteContentSharing (search google...but not really needed) to try and get the data to the 360 from WMP directly and although the content was listed I was unable to play any of it back. So...now to share directly from the Debian box.
Solution? Fuppes. It's a free UPnP server that can run on Windows and Linux. I grabbed the latest SVN release, compiled it, set it up as per instructions for 360 compatibility and was off! Of course, it didn't work right away. There's a few things one must ensure. First, the fuppes user (I'm on Debian here so I'm not running it as root) must be able to read the directories being shared as well as all the directories that are parents of the target share. I believe that most people are running into issues at this point. Second, avi files aren't being listed by the 360 for some reason...lots of reasons probably but you can rename your files to have them appear (after rebuilding the fuppes DB). I also disabled transcoding as the 360 supports the formats I need it to support.
I got it working this morning at around 0530 so I haven't had much time to test it but hopefully this will those of you running into issues with it.
Posted at 07:02 pm Thursday December 13th 2007
End of year to have a prototype of that simple game that I posted about earlier. Time has been short but things should free up just enough soon.
Posted at 12:38 pm Thursday December 13th 2007
Akshay skated for the first time in 15 years! Congrats! It's time to take it to the next level.
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Total Posts: 1580