Dragon's Lair

If you were an arcade rat like me circa 1983, you probably remember Dragon's Lair. It was the most exciting game in the arcade when it hit and large crowds would gather around the console to watch. Animated by veteran Disney artists, it was enjoyable simply to watch. Besides it was cheaper! :) It was also one of the first games to cost more than the standard $0.25 (I believe you played it for $0.50).

Well, now you can re-live the experience in full 1080p HD on your PS3 or Blu-ray player (from Digital Leisure).

Rome Reborn

Most often when you think of 3D animation, you think games and movies...entertainment in general. This is a very cool example of using 3D animation for real-life purposes. Researchers at the University of Virginia have used 3D models and animation to reproduce ancient Rome with elaborate detail (article in Newsweek). Visit http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/ and choose Gallery->Video Clips to see very cool fly through videos.

Federal money for bike commuting

I caught the tail end of this NPR story this morning. Marin County was awarded $20m to promote bike commuting. Adoption will still lag because unfortunately most of our modern cities and communities are just not laid out in favor of bikers or pedestrians. They were built based on auto transportation. The distances between pointA and pointB become too long for people to seriously consider anything but driving. Also, the car has made us expect quicker arrival times. It takes longer if we walk or bike. Nevermind that obesity is an epidemic in this country. What's more important? Getting there faster or dying of diabetes?

Fear of willfulness...

While the brew-haha over Microsoft's latest patent lawsuit is decidedly not a news story (also see Slashdot), I did learn more about the absurd nature of software patent law.

In fact, searching for potential patent problems can actually leave a company financially exposed: if a lawsuit concludes a patent was infringed, a company or individual that knew about the potential infringement must pay triple the financial damages compared with an unknowing infringement.

"The fear of willfulness is so great that often firms instruct their engineers not to look at patents," (from CNET)

How stupid is that? The image I have in my mind when I read these stories about software patent litigation is that of pin-stripe suited lawyers in imaginary WWI trenches lobbing big paper stacks across to the others trenches. "Take that! That's my patent!" "Boom! Here comes my patent right back at you!" :)



Obviously a very broken system in need of repair. But in the meantime it keeps many a patent attorney and IT tabloid reporter employed. :)

The semantic web is here...again

The O'Reilly Radar is at work again. Tim is focusing his attention on what I found to be the most compelling point in his web 2.0 manifesto...data.

There is a lot excitement on the web these days relative to the old topic of the semantic web. The term used is metatagging. It has been popularized by websites such as del.icio.us and flickr where you can ascribe your own meta data to information (bookmarks or images) that you are posting to an online database. Now the idea is being taken further by some folks at a company called MetaWeb (lead by AI guru Danny Hillis). Their project Freebase is a free database of information, a lot like the Wikipedia, where users can assign their own metadata to entries and also dynamically help create the ontology. Other companies have similar projects in the works, like Google Base, and Open Directory project.

Technology rarely wins

Someone had forwarded me this. I found it to be an interesting discussion on the state of "web 2.0". In particular, how quickly the marketing machine kicks in to capitalize on the promise of new technology (e.g. read discussion on Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, the anointed "Godfather of Web 2.0")

"...technology rarely wins. I'm a technological optimist who believes that great technology always wins, and if the planet is to continue spinning properly, great technology must win, less there is no justice. And, naturally, I'm constantly disappointed. Technology rarely does win, and when it does its normally the result of a lot of marketing that shouldn't be required. Because at the end of the day, in the real world, people don't care about technology but rather what it enables them to do."

Perhaps in the end the biggest impact of web 2.0 (ignoring all the hype) is that it actually enables people to do things they care about.

Flex is the future

Bruce Eckel writes that Java has lost it's edge. In particular, he sites the very old problem that Java applets never capitalized on the promise of rich internet applications (RIAs). Instead of embracing AJAX (in fact he rejects it based on his disdain for Javascript), he is recommending Flash/Flex. It appears he is now working for Adobe (literally, he says "Full disclosure: I’m in the process of working out a consulting contract with Adobe, to help them teach people about Flex. But long before this, I became convinced that Flash, and Flex in particular, was the best solution for the user-interface problem, and I began writing this article long before Adobe expressed interest in my assistance.") I also find it funny that he rejects Javascript, but is embracing ActionScript (on which Flash is based) when they are both derived from EMCAScript.

Should we trade carbon emissions for nuclear waste?

This commentary suggests that nuclear power is the answer to the IPCC's report on global warming. That the U.S. should lead by investing in nuclear power plant construction as a bridge from our carbon-based energy economy to future uses of renewable-based energy. Should we simply trade our carbon emissions with dangerous nuclear waste? Have we really learned any lesson if we continue to pollute our environment? Only this time instead of greenhouse gases we will be producing waste that lasts thousands of years without any form of safe disposal. Yucca Mountain is not the answer for disposal. It's suggested the issue of disposal can simply be overcome by showing a political will to resolve "not in my back yard" complaints. Is Mr. McNeil suggesting that he'd be happy to host a nuclear waste disposal site in his backyard? Until physics research brings about a truly safe method of disposal, we as humans are being irresponsible to our future generations by generating this nuclear waste.

The economics of the argument are not convincing either. It is suggested that nuclear technology is available in the short-term, while renewable energy would take more long-term investment. When costs for a new plant run from $3 to $4 billion and time for construction is 7-12 years, this seems like neither a cost effective, nor a timely solution. Wouldn't this money and effort be better spent on truly renewable energy research? Or perhaps investment needs to be made in nuclear physics research that can lead to safe disposal methods?

Procrastination

Interesting piece on a new study on a subject almost everyone is familiar with...procrastination. Interesting take-away for me were that technology, instead of being the savior of productivity, is apparently the culprit causing chronic procrastination. Most procrastination is caused by temptation. Temptations that are more pervasive and accessible because of technology (tv, videos online, the internet, cell phone, iPods, etc.)

The other take-away was that people incur more credit card debt when doing last-minute Christmas shopping, due to procrastination. Sort of an obvious observation, but worth noting the added economic impact of procrastinating.

Best quote:

"That stupid game Minesweeper— that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society."

Your laptop has free will...

...by one definition anyway. Interesting NYT article explores the concept of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

Something to think about next time you boot up.

Comic Life

I got an unexpected surprise with my new MacBook. The software bundle included a cool little program called Comic Life. It allows you to take your digital photos and create a comic strip affect. You cut-n-paste photos into cells, add ballons and text, you can even include the "Pow!" type of words. Perhaps the funniest feature is the sound effects that come with each action while you're running it. Usually I find sounds like this annoying, but in this case they add to the fun of the package.

I put together this holiday card version for fun.

Bagel Man the Movie Star

Found out that my semester project from my 3D animation class was chosen for display on the video wall in the new ATLAS center at CU. Sorta cool. Here it is posted on YouTube.

Hard Times in the Arctic

It's a hard time to live in the arctic.

Ancient ice shelves the size of Manhattan are falling off into the sea. And if you are a polar bear, you are now a candidate for listing as a threatened species due to shrinking habitat (sea ice).

Do you suppose this has something to do with that global climate thing Al Gore has been talking about?

iBook Repair

I just did my own repair of my old iBook G3. I used this site, ifixit.com. I got my parts (hard drive and battery) from them and used their incredible Fixit Guide. Including a wonderfully useful screw guide that you print and use to keep track of the 20-30 screws you will have to remove to get to the hard drive. For those geeky enough to want to take apart their own laptop, it's highly recommended.

Colorado, Hawaii and Water

Learned from an interview with outgoing governor Bill Owens that Colorado and Hawaii are the only two states that are independent in terms of meeting their water needs. Every other state has to share water from elsewhere outside their state. I didn't listen to the whole interview, but I really thought that was an interesting fact. Hawaii, the issue is obvious. They have to be independent because there is no pipeline. Colorado has an abundance due to the Rocky Mountain snow and the associated rivers.

Bagel Man

Earlier I had mentioned my 3D animation class. I have not posted much of my work in progress throughout the semester. Perhaps, I'll go back and post some of my more interesting stuff. But the main thing was my "final project" for the class. It's Bagel Man. He is based on silly notes I put in my daughter's lunch (when I'm packing a bagel). Here you can see him in all his 3D glory. I used Maya's tooning effects to render him as a cartoon with purple shading. His eyes come from Muppets characters like Cookie Monster (bulgy eyeballs on top of the head). And he's got arms and legs to give him full action. I used the biped skeleton built into Maya to give him life-like movements. Ray-tracing was added to give a reflection on the floor and shadows. Finally, I added music from Dave Brubeck, "Take Five", for the dancing fun.

dotMac crashing Finder

I got tired of problems with Finder crashing when connected to the .Mac (dotMac) iDisk. iDisk is actually just a WebDAV server and there are a number of options for connecting besides iDisk:

• Goliath - this is an old OS9 app (available on OSX too) that acts like an FTP client app would except for WebDAV.
• Transmit - in addition to FTP, WebDAV is supported.
• cadaver - for command-line fans.
• most web-site tools (GoLive, Dreamweaver) come with fairly robust WebDAV browsers.

Your WebDAV address for your .Mac iDisk is http://idisk.mac.com/username and authenticate with your .Mac userid/password.

Also, if you're tired of paying for for .Mac, check out notMac Challenge and Joyent.

Lightbox for displaying art photos

Ever since I heard about the Lightbox script a while back, I thought it would be cool to use for my father-in-law's artist website. Lightbox displays a modal dialog of images (or other content) overlayed on top of the current web page. I explored Lightbox Gone Wild, which uses prototype for asynch rendering (AJAX) of any type of content in the lightbox. In the end, I settled on Lightbox v2.0. This version is from the original group that coined the term. It uses prototype for the AJAX as well, but what really sold me was the "fancy pants transitions" from script.aculo.us. Check out that bling! :)

To see how it works, check out the beautiful art at Michael Wagner's Paintings and click on any of the art work to zoom in.

Sci-Fi and Hollywood

Wired News: Hollywood Eats Sci-Fi's Brains

Good piece on the doldrums that sci-fi movies are in.

Engineer It!

What a fun time. Took the kids to see the Engineer It! exhibit at DMNS. We built earthquake-proof structures, an arch, paper rockets, and a geodesic dome (design by Buckminster Fuller).

It was also great to have a new way to explain my work to the kids. The tag line for the exhibit is "Think it, build it, test it." And I can explain simply that this is what daddy does, only it's inside the computer. The "think, build, test" cycle is what my day at work is all about.