ricardocabellov5.5

These days I've seen 2 movies that are inspired in two very different hypothetic futures.



Idiocracy
From the director of 'Office Space', creator of  'Beavis and Butt-head' and others... The movie shows a very stupid future were, in instance, a clock on a big tower (something like the big ben) was swapped fr a digital one and it even was blinking on '12:00'. Hilarious! It also shows one of the movie on that time where you only see an ass for 90min. I've sometimes visions of a family watching altogether the TV where the only thing they show is a shit, just there without anything else... I have those visions when I watch TV with other people and I see them so concentrated with whatever they show.




Children of Men
Feel like more real future. If you enjoyed Half-life 2 you'll love some of the action scenes of this movie. I have to say that I was quite impressed about this movie, didn't know anything about it when I saw it after watching it and doing a proper imdb'ing I was again surprised when I read who was the director. The movie is cool, but the final sucks.



Anyway, which future do you chose? I think the one on Idiocracy sounds more probable. Just watch the television, everyday is more commercial and dumb. It's also funny that on this short review of both movies, I had more to say about Idiocracy than Children of Men. You would probably say that you never heard of Idiocracy, that's because Fox didn't want to do a Trailer, or even a Poster for the movie. It was released 2 years after it was done, something similar happened with Office Space too. Apparently they didn't want to release the movie, and in the end it was a real success when it went to DVD.

These things increased my interest for Mike Judge's work.

Right... What you're about to see is not a trick, it doesn't have any photoshop action on it (although I've used it for converting the screenshots from tiff to jpg). I know it's hard to believe it (at least it was to me) but what you're about to see is a real mix between MacOS X and Windows XP.

(Click on the images to enlarge).



Yep, that's right, MacOS bar on the top and Windows (without changing the skin yet) on the bottom. And check out the dock, Windows applications are being integrated there too. Should I mention that there is no Mac version of Winamp?

Wait wait! there is even more!



Again, this one is even more awesome. What you see on the screenshot is Photoshop 3 beta running under Windows which is also running under MacOS. And REALLY fast.

Wow, that's amazing, a shame that Windows 3D acceleration doesn't work (YET!).

There is even one more cool thing to mention, using this mix you can drag&drop files from one window to another (like from MacOS window a XP one).

If you wonder how is this possible.. just check the latest beta from Parallels (Coherence mode). And, of course, you need an intelMac.

So, yeah.. guess what I bought today ;)

PS: If you want to see how a video of how Parallels work, check this out.

PS2: I forgot to say something... Window shortcuts work!, WindowsKey+E is something I'm too used to! :P

PS3: There is even one more thing! With this beta version you can use directly the WindowsXP you installed with bootcamp (so no need to create a new image). That means that if you don't need 3D acceleration you can easilly use Parallels. And in case you need, let's say.. watch a Windows demo, or maybe produce one, you can go back to bootcamp/XP and you still have there all the data.

After this guy released his custom firmware the battle is over. I had a fight on my desktop between GP32 and PSP, PSP won so I sold GP32 and bought a GP2X to battle again. And after that firmware, the battle is over, GP2X died, it didn't last more than 2 months. Anybody wants a GP2X? It can uhm.. well, do things, it doesn't have wireless but, hey, it's fun! yeah.. the opensource platform.. doh..

I guess that's the main point because it didn't lasted to long, it lacks wireless, I believe that if it had wireless it would had a great success, open platform with wireless support... very interesting. But a closed platform hacked with wireless support won, and even doesn't use the wireless very well... yet.

Anyway, that custom firmware mainly lets you play to old PSX games on your PSP and also execute homebrew easily and also backuped .ISOs from PSP of course... I'm really looking forward to find Ghost in the Shell for PSX [video1] [video2] somewhere and play on my PSP. That will simply rock because the PSP version sucks :P

I may keep testing a bit the SDL stuff on the PSP if I find the inspiration some day, I'm well out of coding in C these days.

And you may be saying... oh no! another guy talking about iPhone... no, not really.

I don't see why should I want it... iPhone is technically cool, but, that's it, it won't make my life easier, at least not mine.

But, on the keynote there was another gadget released which was much more useful, and will make my life easier. There is something I really hate and that is wires all over my flat and having to connect wires to the TV (in my case projector) to watch movies or listen music on the big speakers.



However... AppleTV is iTunes (aka pain in the ass) dependant, which is a bit of a problem. I wonder how hard would be doing a custom app for avoiding this ;)

Must be that famous global warming because even the finnish people are complaining about this.

This christmas we went a couple of days to Spain (1 week in Valencia / 1 week in Barcelona more or less) and the first thing I realised was that the weather was really good. Even too good. Only the first days it was a bit cold, the others were even 18C during the day. Is this suposed to be normal? I remember some years ago having really cold christmas but Valencia and Barcelona were like on summer. A lot of people will like this but I would prefer having some cold weather once a year.

Anyways, the break is over, 2007 is starting and there is a lot of things to do. Keep working on xplsv.tv (which by the way, do you remember 2005 report? 2006 was the same ;)) After a long break without doing anything for xplsv.com vj-side I will be back giving some help to the crew content-wise. Also there is kind-of-personal new project that I'm not able to talk about yet, and some others that I even have NDA :S

So, busy busy year! I'll keep everyone informed! By now, have a nice and productive 2007 you all!

PS: Don't try to go inside a plane with a Bonsai, they won't let you go inside with it :( The present was very good tho! Hope someone takes care of it now :S

A couple of (spanish) friends already asked me the same question, so I guess this information may be interesting.

Some of you probably already know that some months ago I left the "rat's race" and started my own business. By now I didn't do too much but I hope to go quite far with all this.

So, to be honest, it's really easy and cheap. I think in Spain you have to pay something like 300€ each month, in UK It's £2.10 (Class 2, National Insurance Contributions) a month. This depends of how much do you earn, but for the basic stuff that's what you will have to pay. Also if your income is higher than £61,000 a year then you should also charge VAT.

The only thing you have to do is call to the HM Revenue & Customs Self-Employed Help Line, from there you just have to let them know that you want to register as a self-employed, I think you need to have a National Insurance Number ready (as they will ask you for this), and also, you need to know the name you want to use (in my case Mr.doob ;) The process may take something like 10minutes, no more!

Here you'll find the number you need to call to and also A LOT of information/check lists and stuff.

Then, you'll have to wait meanwhile they setup everything and in a couple of weeks you'll receive the information you need. At the end of the day what you're after doing all this is for your TAX reference. So in each invoice you send to your clients you need to put your name and this TAX reference.

And that's it. Let's say that in a day of work you can earn at least £240, so having said that, I think paying £2.10 a week is really a good deal. Isn't it?

The only thing you need now is clients! :D

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAAM SPAAAAAAAMM... oups! hehe... too much monty phyton latelly...

I wonder how is it possible that being in 2007 (almost) we (the humanity) didn't find yet a solution for the Spam. It's funny how the internet evolves, how many new technologies appear everyday, how much work the people does on the web side, and how little work the people does for real troubles like the spam. Wouldn't if be funny if whenever you fill a form to register for a bank account in the real world there is a box that says "Anti-Spam: What is the sum of 0 and 3?".

And I'm not really talking about receiving it cos there are some ways for detecting it. The real problem is when somebody decides to use your domain as the sender, something like random_name@yourdomain.com. That will made you receive a lot of MAILER-DAEMON emails saying that your email wasn't delivered, and the worst part is that your domain can end up in blacklist of spammers.

That is really pathetic.

A) The ability of sending an email being able to put any sender that you want, lets say bill@microsoft.com without having to authenticate or something. Is it me, or after a lot of years with internet we should have found a way to handle this?

B) I don't know how blacklist for spammers work, but if they can add a domain in a blacklist, that could be quite unprofessional cos they would be the first ones to know that the owner of the domain didn't have to do anything with the spam that was sent. Instead of adding domains to a database they could spend his time finding a way to improve the system properly.

Solutions?

A) Changing the way of how mail works, maybe having to pay for sending an email. I guess the main problem are the mail servers, would it be possible to change how they work so they only allow emails from certified email addresses?

B) No idea.. by now I will get rid of the catch-all account and will allow only 3 or 4 email addresses. So my server will give a mailer-daemon of a mailer daemon. Silly.

Does anyone know about all this??

Right, that's a funny one. Let's say that you have a folder  structure like this:

Class files / com / mrdoob_as2 / ...
Class files / com / mrdoob_as3 / ...

And then, you have a some new classes you want to copy on that folder, let's say.. that you have

com / other_guy / ...

So, as a Windows user (and probably Linux) what would you do? Probably just copy the com folder, then go to my Class files folder and paste there. So that's what I did. And how wrong I was when I suposed that the popup window was asking me 'Close' or 'Overwrite'. It wasn't asking that, it was saying 'Close' or 'Replace'. It found that there was a folder called 'com' and it was asking if I wanted to replace it with the 'new version'.

Why it can't just copy the files inside? No, it had to delete the folder first and then copy the new files.

What's the end result? I lost all my Classes! Well, atleast all the ones I did after the last backup.

Thanks Apple! :(

Ok. Too many hours spent on the spanish demoscene trying to improve it as best as it was on my hand since 1995 to STILL having to hear/read comments like these ones. I'm really pissed off now.

Sole: I'm sorry, I won't move a finger for escena.org from now on. I know I said that already some months ago but that's the final decision. I would probably do some more stuff demoscene-related (keep doing stuff with blackpawn mainly), but I won't move a finger for the spanish demoscene ever again. As you can see I'm not welcome there.

Thanks to everyone, and specially to shash for telling me the truth, and speaking for everybody. Thanks, I would have much more free time now.

Looks like the escena.org compos inspired me to finally improve my C++ & SDL skills.

The effect on the screenshot isn't optimised yet, but probably I'll get 30fps with it (I hope!).