ricardocabellov5.5

This company kind of reminds me SGAE in Spain. I wouln't be able to run a company creating fear in the people in order to paying me. It's just annoying.

Check out the letters that they send:

Dear Owner/Occupier, OFFICIAL WARNING - THIS PROPERTY IS UNLICENSED You are hereby notified that we have authorised officers from our Enforcement Division to visit your home and interview you under caution, as our records show there is still no TV Licence at this address and as yet we have received no response to previous communications from you. Your statement will be taken in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evicence Act 1984*, and is the first step in our action to prosecute if we find evidence that you watch or record television without a valid license. I feel it is my duty to inform you that if found guilty, you could receive a maximum fine of £1,000, and your name will be added to our National Enforcement Database. We take this offence very seriously and last month alone we caught 24,184 people. To avoid an appearance in court before a magistrate I would strongly advise you to call 0870 241 5698 or buy a TV Licence online at www.tvlicensing.co.uk Yours faithfully, John Hales Head of TV Licensing Enforcement Division Please see reverse for important TV Licensing information, including exclusion and how to pay. A TV Licence currently costs £131.50 for colour and £44 for black and white. *In Scotland interviews & cautions are made in line with Scottish criminal law.

So, imagine receiving letters like that every month. Now imagine receiving letters like that being a person that HATES TV!

I wish I could just flah the mail as SPAM like in gmail, and don't caring about it anymore, but that's oldschool mail that you can't stop. If you want to stop it you have to call them and then let them do a check of your flat to see if there is a rubbish tranferer to your brain machine (aka TV).

F*U*C*K O*F*F!

For some reason, I was trying to code a plasma effect yesterday with Actionscript. I never tried to code an effect like that, and never know that it was a very basic code which really need optimizations in order to make it work fast. However, I liked better the interfere function, so I used that one by now..

I didn't do any optimizations to the code yet (so it's just a 50 x 50), but managed to do my own colour palette, and also added a Convolution Matrix to give it a little bit of bump effect.



Surprise! this time the source file is available ;)

David Domingo aka Sml/Fuzzion ha escrito un muy buen articulo explicando el porque y el como de la demoscene para la revista Mosaic. El articulo esta vez no esta en ingles, asi que para todos aquellos que ponen como excusa el ingles para no enterarse de que va esto...

Aqui teneis el articulo!

Ok, breakpoint'06 is over.I feel like empty, I don't have more deadlines right now. I'll have to plan what to work in from now on.

My gigs
The party was great (as usual), I'll probably go there next year again. However I'll have to rethink about doing visuals for the gigs or not. I mean, it was fun, it was really fun, but at the same time, doesn't matter how much I work on that before the party, because the musicians will probably do some changes to the schedulle and will give some ideas for the visuals during the party, so I'll have to spend time working on it during the party anyway, and that means lose quite a bit of party time. In the other hand, it's a bit hard to do, mainly because 3 things:

1) They are mainly rock, that means: hard to syncronise. "Solution": FFT, which I'm not really a fan of.
2) Demobased stuff. The people will expect to see a demo or a remix of the demo as visuals. But I just don't have time to redo any of the demos,
3) So, as they expect the demos to be shown, I need videos of them, and using kkapture for this isn't the best solution, mainly because it takes ages to record the demo, and to have a proper quality of it needs a lot of space and if you would like to do "video scratching" you need a keyframe everyframe. And that will be probably 250Mb+ for demo. So, you end up just with a crappy 320x240 resolution video, so you need to add another layer on the top just to hide the poor quality.

So well, I ended up doing two gigs, one for Ultrasound (which Jeenio asked me like the last week) and another one for BASS which I had more time to work for. Anyway, I didn't have too much time and the result isn't what you can say GREAT. But I think it was much better than on their previous gigs.

xplsv demo
Regarding more scene-ish stuff. Sole released an xplsv demo using a tune i did like 3 years ago with sml and wizard for a fuzzion's 4k. They didn't used, sole liked it and then did the demo with it. Check it out.

Quality stuff
The productions do have a good level, in some categories they aren't a big deal tho (4kintro), but you should really check these ones:

deities by mfx (1st at PC Demo)
sts-02: electric kool-aid by Synesthetics (2nd at PC Demo)
lux aeterna luceat eis by Ephidrena (2nd at Amiga Demo)
meet the family by Fairlight (1st at PC 64kintro)

Scene.org Awards
Well, that has been the worst thing of the party imho. As soon as I heard that Ithaqua had to read some kind of text as a VIP guy giving the price in a suit. I was like .. what the fuck?! Do we really need to do it that "serious". Was easy to see that was going to look wanabe. The videos were great, but, I really prefered the last years prizegiving ceremony. It was more familiar and funny, steeler and melwyn knew how to keep the times so you really can't wait to hear the results. This year, the guys that were giving the results were just thinking about leaving the stage so they were not giving any time for creating any suspense. Also some of the guys forgot the lines that they had to memorize and read.

Also, they keep doing that crappy connection with the gatering in the middle of the awards which it's very dumb, mainly because there is a 2min delay and they expect to have a conversation or something. Oh.. well..

So, then it's when I think.. Do we really need all this? If I ever get nominated for some of those awards and they keep doing the ceremony like that. Don't expect me to join it. I'm sorry.

Frankfurt-main Airport sucks
During the trip we were able to confirm the legend about the trains arriving in a precise time. But at the same time we were able to see how Frankfurt-Main Artport really sucks. When we arrived on Friday, after walking throught all the airport just to get our baggage, we were stopped by the police. Everyone had to wait 10min. They didn't say why. So those 10mins were enough for us to lose our shuttle bus that was going to bring us to the partyplace. It wasn't only the police guys fault, mr. Uncle-X was also there just caring about the suomi people and not giving a shit about us, so the bus left without us, thanks dude!

But that wasn't enough. Today, when we were going back to London, we had to do something like 10 different checks before finally going inside the plane. 10 different checks that took us something like 1hour. Check the tickets, check the baggage, checking the baggage again, checking the passports, checking the tickets, checking the baggage AGAIN!, gate changed, walking back, queuing, checking the tickets to get some seats, queueing again.... Veeeery annoying. But we were able to keep relaxed (more or less) until the end, and in compensation, the guys of Lufthansa which weren't really helpful either gave us sits on the Business class (mainly because there were no others left). So atleast we were able to enjoy the service, food, and space that the Business class means.

Did I ever said that netvibes fucking rules?! I'm so used to it that I can't live without it. I got all my 2do lists there that I can check anytime anywhere.. bybye 2do.txt files lost in my HD.

The last weekend they added tabs. And again, it's awesome! Before I was starting to have quite a lot of RSS in the same page, now I can sort them by.. "world news", "software updates", "friends".. and stuff like that. And it's super easy to manage, if you want to move one box to another tab.. just do it! drag the box and drop it on the tab you want to move it. Isn't that clever?!

I'm still missing a calendar tho..

Ok, 2:56am, time to go to sleep. But before that I'll spam you with my latest experimental work. I called it doobscii. These days I had to do an illustration done just with types for Spring. At some point, I had the idea that instead of just doing the illustration with Illustrator (er), it was going to be much more interesting doing it with Actionscript and Flash8. I still don't know how i'm going to export the render to a vector file (maybe exporting to .ps as it's an easy format (and fun!!)), however sole mentioned something about exporting the flash to .pdf, but i don't know if it will export as a vector.

Anyway, the firsts tests I did ended up quite well imho, so I did an small gallery with all them, hope you like it!

Althought you probably know at this point.. but just so you really know ;)



Our secret tool is now public. Hope the people use it properly ;)

Here you have a link for some videos which show what you will be able to do with these new Microsoft applications...

Microsoft Expression: Tour & demos

These videodemos, just confirm that Microsoft doesn't know how to d proper software demos yet, but with a little bit of imagination, you can see that they are doing powerful tools.

In case you didn't realize, these are the battles:
Graphic Designer vs Photoshop, Fireworks & Illustrator
Interactive Designer vs Flash & Director
Web Designer vs Dreamweaver

Anyway, I'm glad M$ is doing this, so they will force Adobe to work harder in their products.

The war will begin soon...

Looks like I finally got the best solution for doing a multiplatform video. It hasn't been easy at all. My target was to do, somehow, a Quicktime movie using that super cool H.264 Codec. After doing some tests I found out that, saving the demo as .avi without compressing the frames (with kkapture), then I was able to open the file with Quicktime 7 Pro and export a .mov using my desired codec. Easy!

Well, the problem comes when you save the whole demo to .avi, and the file is 4gbytes. Looks like Quicktime doesn't believe that a video file can be that big and decides to give an error. Crap! So wasn't going that easy after all..

So, to make all the history shorter, i'll just skip all the testings I did during all the (long long long long) day. The best solution I found is using kkapture to export the demo to .bmp's and .wav. You'll probably need quite a lot of space for doing this (5GB+). Then.. using Vegas you import all the .bmp's as a image sequence (when you click the first file in the folder the program may stop for a while, as it's like checking how many frames there are (in my case there were 7053)). Having the bmp's sequence (make sure you're always using the same fps) and also the .wav in vegas you only need now the codec 3ivx, which is a MPEG4 codec for VFW and Quicktime, and it's for FREE. So using this codec, you can render the video in a nice .mov which anyone will be able to open.

Yes, I know, Quicktime Pro can open an image sequence too, but in this case I didn't have the patience to wait meanwhile adding 7053 frames into Quicktime, and also, when I did the test with less frames, I didn't know how to add an audio track to the image sequence.

The result: http://xplsv.tv/motion.php?id=550

So.. that's the end of the story.. If you know a better way for doing this and ending up with a .mov using H.264. Please, let me know.

Some of you were probably thinking if I was in a "touch it" period or something.. not really, I just didn't have time to update the portfolio. Today I found sometime to do a bit of CMS to help me updating it and also I did a huge update (no this is not an April's fool joke..).

Mainly, all the added stuff are commercial website i've been doing in 2005 and 2006 at Spring Digital. And to be honest, the quality isn't great at all, but hey! great things are on the way!!

Ardanaiseig hotel brochure
Border Energy Glazing Systems
Chase Zander
dbdmedia
Douglas Westwood
Ethical Network
epico
Faith Fantastic
Financial Objects
Halo Financial
ICH
Isis
Mr.CD
Nomad
Partnerships in Care
Tennyson
techMondial

and...
ifparty'06

Enjoy! ;)