ricardocabellov5.5

Lets just ignore the freak speaking on the video.

Marketing wise, am I the only one that thinks Microsoft and Apple work together? If they were really rivals, would Microsoft adopt the "I'm a PC" thing? I guess they need to work together so the free of charge option doesn't make them lose much money. That would explain why they never mention Linux as competitor but they mention the "rival", because the money goes the same place that way.

Yes, I love conspiracies.

EDIT:

Since I moved to Linux, one of the major frustrations was the lack of a decent Subversion client. I have tried many different clients during my time on Windows and on MacOS. My favourite from all of them, by far, was TortoiseSVN.

I've been using both RapidSVN and Eclipse's Subversive on Linux. I can't even begin to think how much time I have spent trying to fix corrupted folders and having to recursively remove ".svn" folders and copy on top of a clean checkout... I even considered stopping using SVN as such a bad experience made me feel SVN was a waste of time.

I don't know why, I though about searching for options again. You know, a new app that changes your computer experience may appear tomorrow. One of the search results was NautilusSVN, which, if I recall correctly, Spite suggested as an option some time ago. Turns out NautilusSVN has been renamed to RabbitVCS, seems they don't want to close themselves to Subversion only (which is good).

When I tried it some months ago I found it was quite rudimentary... command line installation as plug-in for nautilus, everything becoming super slow, crash again and again... Surprisingly, this time has been totally different experience. Straightforward to install, the file browser still performs fast enough and it certainly brings the TortoiseSVN days back.

Yes I know, "Use the SVN command line like real man!" yada yada... not!

EDIT: As per version 0.12 nautilus can get pretty slow over the time to the point that you have to wait 30 seconds to go up a folder. Apparently this is being fixed on 0.13.

As I posted on Twitter I'm no longer commuting from Victoria to Old St every day, nor having Franco's Fruit Salad every morning, nor randomly enjoying Franco's Spaghetti Carbonara, nor randomly enjoying BLT's Caesar Wrap, nor randomly enjoying Kick's Goat Cheese Salad, nor playing foosball matches at the end of the day, nor having beers and Brick Lane Bagels on Fridays and, most importantly, I'm no longer working on a studio with many talented and passionate people.

It's hard to believe that it's been already 2 years since I joined them. When you're having fun time goes really fast.

Thanks to everyone there, and specially to Theo and Mike for their constant support. It has been a great experience. :')

I forgot to mention here that my first Android App is on the Market already (took me less than a month since I got the device, beat that Apple).



So, for such a simple thing I had to learn OpenGL|ES, create my own little Tween engine, and so on...

Thanks a lot to all the people that were kind enough to answer my noob questions!

Now... let's get going with the next App :)

Over the weekend I changed a bit the system. Now, whenever the blog receives a comment, it's first checked against Akismet, if it gets flagged as spam, the system asks the user to fill a reCAPTCHA. If the reCAPTCHA isn't successful the comment gets ignored. Makes things harder for dubious commenters but normal (and honest) commenters experience is still simple.

So far so good.

Some months ago, the fact that the Hi-ReS! Stats seemed to be all over the internet made me come up with the idea of doing a A1 poster for the developers room in the office. Unfortunately, the idea got forgotten at some point.

This morning, while checking Twitter, I got intrigued by a Anatoly Zenkov tweet.



If discovering eedl yesterday made my day, I think this just made my month.

Now, what can I say? Thanks batch!! :'D

Whether it's prettier or not is something totally subjective. In my opinion it is much nicer in many aspects (spacing, cluttering, colors...)

Here it's a video showing some of the changes (so I save fingers):



Also, for the full effect, here it's the background I use:



Which is a matte painting done for this video.

Seems like I change my phone every 3 years. Quite surprising for a nerd.

This time I picked a HTC Magic.



Yes, it's an Android phone, that was the main reason.

Some months ago I realised I wasn't really using my phone, so I did a experiment of shutting it off. It was like that for about 3 months and it was an interesting experience. Like living on the 90s again, having to meet with people at specific places at specific times, ... Totally recommended. However, on that time I had a iPod Touch which made things easier (I could email sole if I was going to be home late from a wireless powered pub). I also used it to see the good things and bad things of the iPod Touch/iPhone platform, and guess what, as a Mac Hater I didn't like it much.

Recently the iPod Touch felt to the floor (while sitting down) and the screen got broken. That was the point when I stopped using it at all and started looking forward to getting an Android phone. (Although Mike very kindly managed to get it fixed. Mike, it's yours!).

So, now that I finally have the phone, I mainly have 3 complains:

1. WTF is with the headphones connector? Why not a jack? At least give me decent headphones!
2. Android OS doesn't really feel as snappy as the iPhone OS, plus the whole system ended up being a bit slower than I expected.
3. Apple sucks!. Apple "asked" to Google NOT TO put multi touch on Android yet. There are many evidences on the net that Android has the functionality ready, but it's not "connected". And guess what, my device does support multitouch by hardware, it's just waiting to Apple for the go ahead. Way to go Apple.

And you'll say - oh no! Another rant email! Not really, because apart from that I *really* love the device. It's like a normal computer in your hand (many apps runing at the same time, barcode/qrcode recognition, google apps interconnectivity, AR applications...) I really could do a very long list of things I like. Maybe the most important one is that developing for it is very easy and I've started :D I'm even planing to make a couple of games :P

You can track my progress on this here.

I got the feeling Android 2.0 will be released with the upcoming new Motorola handset, and it will bring multi touch and a few performance improvements (and many other things, but I'll be happy just with that).

If you ever need to take screenshots of your desktop every 10second (or whatever). Here it's a quick script:

while true ; 
do
scrot '%s.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Desktop/temp/scrot/'
sleep 10
done

Just paste the script on an empty file and change the properties to "Allow executing file as program". Double click and Run in Terminal. Control^C to stop it. That's it.

The terms lossy and lossless are something I learnt recently when I discovered the format FLAC. As example MP3 is a lossy format; distorts the data on the pocess, and the end result is not exactly like the original. FLAC, on the other hand compresses the data but keeps it 1:1 with the original, just like a ZIP does.

Lagarith is the same but for video. There are some other lossless video codecs but from my experience Lagarith, using the YV12 color space when compressing, is, by far, the best. Not only in terms of file size compression, but also in terms of playback.

As an example, I've compressed r08028 at the resolution of 640x480 60fps, which is the resolution it was designed for, and it ends up as 2gb file (uncompressed is 14gb). 2gb is still quite big for a 3 minutes video but with nowadays 1TB+ HDs maybe we can start archiving our demos in this way so we can recompress them to new video formats as soon as they appear without having to mess with emulators and rendering again.

Best thing of the codec is that the playback. On a multi-core machine can play 1920x1080 60fps videos with no problems.

Unfortunately, this codec hasn't reached mainstream and it doesn't have much support yet (ie VLC doesn't play it). But if you happen to be a Windows user, give it a try!

If you want to know more about the codec, here you have some extra info, and here the sources.

Now, if only FLAC could also be used for compressing the audio that gets encapsulated in a .AVI...

EDIT: Forgot to mention. You can use this codec from kkapture itself. And if that wasn't good enough, the whole kkapture process gets way faster (compared to capture to uncompressed frames). Capturing r08028 is faster than the demo itself.