ricardocabellov5.5

Some old workmates from my time at Spring Digital did a really nice hack for Hackday07:

http://hackday07.carlgaywood.co.uk/

Way to go guys! o/!

http://ochremusic.com/mp3s/ochremusic.com.zip

Or you can listen/download single tracks directly from here:
http://ochremusic.com/music

Btw, it's IDM.

Great!

There are some things that I don't like about Trillian. GoogleTalk doesn't work with the free version, it keeps crashing and sending files sometimes is hard. I'm aware that Cerulean are working on Trillian Astra, but seems like they're just doing too much, too many things that I won't need (I may be wrong tho). So, now that I had to setup this new machine I looked for a Trillian alternative and there wasn't really a lot of options.

I found a program called Pidgin, which I never heard of before. It turns out that Pidgin is in fact GAIM, but as it's clear to see, the guys behind GAIM have been doing a really good job these days. It's quite similar to MacOS's Adium.


So, if you are also looking for a good alternative, don't look further, the answer at the moment is Pidgin!

(No, they're not paying me for doing this :D)

Yesterday I finally received the Windows license for the Intel PC that we were supposed to do the demos in. That means that I can test and work on the demo on the final machine at this point. I couldn't before because we received a Deutsch version of Windows and well, there is no way to change the language on Windows :/
I was testing the machine on a cheap flatscreen I had which had the colours totally broken until now, so, now that I had everything ready I went to the Apple store and I bough a nice 23" screen. It's not the first time that I work in a 1920x1200 environment, in fact, all my Dell laptops used to have that resolution, then, unfortunatelly, I had to move to smallest resolutions with the Macs.

The machine is quite fast, I tried a couple of demos today, rendering at 1920x1200 and they run really well. However, not too many demos allowed that resolution on the config menu and 90% of the demos that allowed that ended up looking quite bad. Demos look cool, well, everything look cool when it's in low resolution. Back in the days of 320x240 it was easy to make something look good (besides the pixelated effect). Nowadays demos look quite ugly because we got used to those small resolutions. In instance, Track one in some scenes look very unpolished at that high resolution.

The only demo I saw that still rocked at 1920x1200 was Debris, mainly because it's all 3D, and ovbiously it's all generated, which means that will look well in any resolution... here you have an snaps... (click on the images)







So, whenever you do another prod, I think you should consider how it will render in super high resolutions in the future. Maybe we should start moving the size limitations for demos a bit, mainly for doing the text/images at 1920 so they don't look bad at that resolution?

So, after being a week away of computers/internet, and having listened the track (which now is finished) a thousand of times and with the pad in front of me. The demo finally has a theme/topic that fits the music and effects available together quite well.

From now one is time to start working. Blackpawn is still working hard setting up the new version of DemoStudio (DemoStudio 2) for this demo. A workmate of Blackpawn is also helping with the 3D modelling for the demo.

We have come up with a couple of never-seen-before (we think) effects that can work really weel.

There is a lot to do and no much time available :S

Most of you probably know that I'm not really a fan of speaking in front of a group of people. However, Tink seemed quite interested and was asking me if I could do an speech in this month's LFPUG.

Right now I'm quite overbooked with 2 projects plus the day job, so I didn't have much time to prepare it, so I mention that to Carlos and since the beginning he was up for giving me a hand on it.

We still have to prepare the speech in detail but by now we know that it will be a getting started talk going from the basics and ending up understanding how my weird (for some people) experiments were done.

So... yeah, I'll see you there :)

While on holidays I woke up inspired one morning and having my ibook with me I decided to find the bug that made the pv3d previewer stop working on macOS. After a bit of testings here and there I found out that under macOS, the type parameter of a fileReference returns always undefined (while in Windows returns '.ASE', or '.DAE'...)

So in a couple of minutes I had a quick workaround for that:

function getFileType(file:String)
{
    _file = file.split('.');
    return '.'+_file[_file.length-1];
}

As simple as that... so now, with some minor amends, I've updated the little page and the 1.1 is out.



http://mrdoob.com/tools/pv3d_previewer/

Back from holidays... Menorca is alright, some photos would be up shortly. After checking all the emails, rss and news, the best that has happened while I was away is this:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Testing it with my MacBook Pro... something that before this update was running at 11fps, now it runs a 30fps! :O It's really impressive. All my 3D experiments run much smoother now (specially the 3D webcam ones).

Keep it up flash player developers!

Some days ago, when I was about to create a new folder (right click) I saw the new briefcase option. It has probably been there for a long time but I never realised. I learnt a bit of what I was and ended up being something that I really needed, a sync tool between folders. However, seems that is a little bit dangerous. You can delete stuff easily from the original source. I googled a bit for other options, and I found SyncToy. Done by Microsoft. It's freeware, looks cool, and its easy to use.