Francis’ Weblog

About two weeks ago I was pulled in to help out a an extranet project (for a famous battery manufacturer) which really just needed a push in the right direction. Not enough design of the project was done in the early stages which meant some quite major issues were not identified until late on in the project. This therefore meant a load of code had to be re-written. Just even a little more design work or better prototyping could have figured it out … anyway gripe over

My next project is just a brief stint working on an eCommerce site for a couple of weeks. At the same time working on a travel site I help setup: www.qwertytravel.com. I’m going to see if I can improve it by putting a bit more “Web 2.0″ stuff into it. I’m currently looking at google maps and a JSP API (http://www.lamatek.com/GoogleMaps/) Google Maps is just great, Its quite cool technology. I do think that people have gone a bit “Web 2.0″ mad… Its not new technology its just I think the internet is in the “second coming” stage. Its become an everyday resource which people use without thinking about it… ok some people but some compared with the world population is a lot
Just found another good podcast for techies, its language independant and is focused on software engineering. Its great compliment to a programming specific podcast like Java posse. You can find all the info at: http://www.se-radio.net/

I’ve also found a site that pits different programming languages against itself. It definatly shows that C++ is faster a bit than Java but i’m not too sure if the algorithms used could have been improved to show better results. Which really shows that the speed of the language doesn’t matter if you have programmers that don’t optimise their code. Anyway its worth a quick look: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/index.php

Windows so slow? - Interesting article about the issues facing Vista (microsofts new OS) and that Microsoft bundling stuff in the 90s is to blame in the delay.

Just seen these two amazing vids and thought I’d share them with you:

The robot dance kid is amazing! Julian (ma bro) is going to be working on the ninja acrobatics this year for part of his circus skills course, kinda amazing too.

Ok, maybe not but if the popularity of his 17 year olds video blog is anything to go by there maybe a lot more digital comp artists out there! I think every teenager wants a logitech camera now! :). But it is interesting how motion tracking and even crude home auto blue/green screen compositing programs are appearing to go more and more into main stream. Ok notthing like the quality of shake and the 3D characters are.. hmmm… interesting, but after using shake and the crazy amount of little bugs around the place, and crashing randomly always seemed as a bit of a shaky (no pun intended.. ok maybe I did). Oh which reminds me a couple of people asked me what book to read about digital compositing… you have to get the bible:

 
The Art and Science of Digital Compositing 
by Ron Brinkman

But don’t get the 1999 version! a new version is just about to come out. This book is a good starting point and gives you a good feel on the technologies used and how compositing works. The book is supposed to be technology independant but definatly has a gearing to Shake.

You Tube is my link of the day… got loads of funny vids on it…

Ok well it cost $200,000 but you have to say that is quite an awesome home cinema system! I want one!

More info here

I managed to claw my ipod back from my little bro a couple of weeks ago! He managed to find it somewhere. He claims that I said I wasn’t using it anymore (shorly not!), anyway I got it back and i’ve REALLY got into pod casts in a big way. Kinda accidently really anyway found a couple of great podcasts to listen to on the train into work. Sync ma ipod in the morning and off you go!!

Techy:
Java Posse
A great podcast discussing java news and interviews, created by a guy from Kent University

The Twits
Technology chat

Security Now
Hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporta they talk about personal internet/computer security. Its really for the home user wanting to know more about cryptography etc but they have some useful stuff. I did listen to one episode and they kept going on and on about one time pad encyption. They said it was 100% impossible to crack. Which … yes is “technically” 100% full proof, but you still have to transfer the plain text pad to the receiver of your encrypted message and if that gets intercepted without you knowing you code is broken. So I wouldn’t call it 100% myself… they did get around to mentioning this near the end but not after I had shouted at my ipod a couple of times saying “no it isn’t what about transferring the pad!… etc…”. After receving a couple of strange looks from people on Clapham Junction station I swapped tracks to the Simpsons

Info:
New Scientist Podcast
New Scientist has a number of articles and news from the mag in the podcast and has some really good interviews with knowledge matter experts.

FOXCAST: The Simpsons
Well think this one is quite self explanatory.

WOW what a year to go and do the Rookie Snowboard course! For those who don’t know I did a snowboard instructor could in new zealand last year and it was… AMAZING! really good fun and learned so much, not just snowboarding, which have really helped in my professional career as well. You can see all my rookie posts by clicking Rookie Academy in the catagories.

ANYWAY the reason I say its a great time to go is because the UK -> NZ exchange rate at the moment is amazing! Its currently cheaper than when I paid for it so you can get quite a good deal.

I’m hoping to get back out there this coming season. I did the course with my mate Mikal and he stayed out well popped back to the UK got a visa then went out

Todays cool site of the day: http://www.deviantart.com/
Some of the images on it are amazing my favouite sections are:

3d Wallpaper
Abstract Wallpaper
Icon Sets for programs etc
A mate from work showed me the site, he said most of the icon sets are on GPL but to get permission to use them usually only takes a quick email to say could I use them and the fame and recognition for the designers is enough

I feel a blog design update coming on which reminds Wordpress (the blogging software I use) has been upgraded to 2.0.2 so i’m now going to attempt to upgrade it. Wish me luck!

I’ve created an Amazon wishlist which has a load of good Digital Compositing books and also a load of DVDs which have really good extras which show you how to do digital compositing in the real world. You can get to it here.

Another day in webland another dollar! or pound. Anyway I was hunting around the net today and Microsoft has released some code!! All the code for Microsoft MechCommander 2, hey its not Windows XP but I think its kinda ground breaking…ish! Its all in C++ but has everything you need to get it working. If anyones interested in game programming tis great! The game came out in 2001 but its basically a demo for XNA from what I understand..

The 2006 Jolt awards are out. Microsoft won the best development environment for Visual Studio Team System 2005. But IntelliJ IDEA was on their heals which is the IDE I use for writing Java (highly recomended!) but i’m kinda getting into Netbeans as it has some great stuff for creating mobile phone apps.

OOhhh almost forgot. Take a look at VMTM (if you haven’t already), its VMWares “technology network”. Basically you can download a whole range of different VMs and also a FREE VMWare Player. The upshot being you can run Fedorra Core 4, MySQL, Oracle 10g!!, DB2 or even just an “internet browsing VM”! The browsing VM runs firefox so you can browse the web in the safe knowledge that you won’t get any spam installed on your computer, or attacked by any viruses, because if you do all you have to do is delete the VM and restart the fresh copy.

For all my Uni mates! remember David Barnes? Well I was listening to an interview with him on the BlueJ IDE. Its basically a Java learning Tool that Kent Uni has produced to help students learn OO in a visual way without going straight into the code (if only we had it when we were learning!). ANYWAY… Its seems that its soo good microsoft has copied it. The BlueJ team have done an article on their website about it so you can make up your own mind, dialog box for dialog box!. It does look very much like they have used the BlueJ ideas. Just as an aside a special version of Netbeans is being created by Sun which integrates BlueJ more info on Roman Strovl’s blog.

My Digital Compositing Mates! I know a couple of you program java, well there is a new Java framework out for key frame animation and timing. I haven’t tried it out but looks quite cool. More info here, and continued here.

Ok i’m off to bed, go faster caffine tablets on standby for the morning!

My course is now finished and it was GREAT! learnt loads, i’m working on my showreel which should be finished soon before I forget how to do everything. I’m currently working of a media company at the moment doing some OO web development (had to dust off a couple of my books.. no only joking! :)). Just found a really interesting page on wikipedia…”Comparison of web browsers” listing all (or most) of the web browsers over time from WorldWideWeb back in 1990. Oh and even quotes spyglass as the original maker of Internet Explorer (at least you know microsoft will never charge for the use of IE!).

Anyway i’m off to play around with Netbeans…