Ii’ve setup a uservoice to collate ideas.

I copied and pasted this from their site…

“Escape Studios are offering you a chance to win a course.

The winner, who will be announced in one week’s time on Monday 9th July,
will be offered the course of their choice at Escape Studios absolutley free!

That doesn’t leave much time so if you’re interested you’d better get a move on!

To enter the prize draw all you need to do is fill out the questionnaire that can be found on the
following link.”

http://www.escapestudios.com/news_07.php?id=36

The first is the actual 60second film and I remember having about 3 hours of other footage which made the thing make sense but we strangly couldn’t fit it into 60secs. The second is a test reel we did to try out a couple of locations and how we were going to do things…

Well you have to start somewhere!

Lost Identity

Lost Identity Test Reel

“The Father turns 60. His family, which is a big one of the kind, gathers to celebrate him on a castle. Everybody likes and respects the father deeply…or do they? The Youngest Son is trying to live up to The Father’s expectations. He is running a grill-bar in a dirty part of Copenhagen. The oldest son runs a restaurant in France, while the sister is a lawyer. The older sister has recently committed suicide and the father asks the oldest son to say a few words about her, because he is afraid he will break into tears if he does it himself. The oldest son agrees without arguments. Actually he has already written two speeches. A yellow and a green one. By the table, he asks the father to pick a speech. The father chooses green. The oldest son announces that this is the Speech of Truth. Everybody laughs, except for the father who gets a nervous look on his face. For he knows that the oldest son is about to reveal the secret of why the oldest sister killed herself.”

It was quite a good show, I especially liked how they represented everyone getting ready for bed. They had one bed centre stage which was used by all the characters in the scene at the same time but acting out their own little scenes totally independantly… worked really well

On the way back on the plane the cabin crew announced that the film was about to start and I overheard a passenger saying that it was a really good film, so I thought I should tune in… The film is called Kenny and was about Kenny Smyth who delivers pora-loos. He’s ignored and unapprciated, but its hilarious! … It was really bizare! on a plane at 30,000 feet, trying not to laugh. In the end I just gave up trying to hold it in, the rest of the aircraft was laughing so much! Toilet humour at its best! From what is says on IMDB it doesn’t have any release dates outside Oz at the moment, but I hope it does! Its the second film in as many months that has come out of Australia that has been great.

It all started one dusty day in April. I embarked on a research project to find the best laptop to do digital compositing and digital effects. It needed to be a laptop because I knew I would be travelling quite a bit over the next year or so and I wanted to had a bit of a beast to process all the high-end graphics. The first decision was do I go with a Mac or a PC… in the end I decided to stay with a PC because I knew how to use it ok probably not the best argument but hey!

The Research:
My list of requirements was this:

• The system needed to run Shake for Linux; this is a digital compositing package which I will be using the most
• The system needed to run Maya for Windows
• The system also needs to run Adobe products ok enough to do work on them… so After Effects, Premiere etc
• Built in microphone for conference calls
• Bluetooth for linking to my mobile

The main thing which I knew was going to be an issue was the graphics card. After looking at the technical specs your basically locked down to an Nvidia Quadro graphics card, there was basically an alienware MJ-12 or a… alienware MJ-12 the only problem being that it didn’t have built in bluetooth, but hey I can live without that.

End of May: The purchasing:
I knew that I was going to Australia at the end of may, so I looked into seeing if it was cheaper to buy the laptop in australia or the UK, because alienware have a website in the UK and Oz. Now the Australian website didn’t sell the MJ-12 laptop so I went onto the UK website and changed the delivery address to australia. When you do this all the prices change to dollars and it became VAT free. I checked the import duty to Australia and it was 10% so I made 7.5% saving already, and also the price was a lot lower so I made in all an £800 saving. Some eStores have difference prices for products depending on where they are being shipped, so if they want to get into a market they drop the price.

I mulled over if I should get it went back to the site and suddenly when I changed the delivery address to Australia it changed the price to… wait for it… Euros!?!?!?!! ok it was working with dollars the week before I’ll ring them up. So I rang them up basically saying I can pay either in Oz dollars or pounds but not euros otherwise I would get charged 2.5% in bank charges. First of all I was fobbed off that there was a problem with the website. I rang back a couple of days later and still a problem. So I ask them if I could buy it over the phone and pay using pounds, they said they would find out and ring me back… they didn’t … so I ring again and again each time being old something or other, in the end I gave up and ordered it on the internet using Euros… I rang my bank just to say that a large transaction was going through and it was a mail order which wasn’t going to my house in the UK. They said that would be fine and they would authorise it. Just to be on the safe side I ring them up a again and ask them if there was anything on the system and they confirmed that I had asked for this transaction to be accepted.. cool!

So on 28th May 2006 I purchased the laptop, knowing I was going to be in australia in a couple of days time for just over a month, plenty of time to ship the laptop.

On the 30th May I get an email asking me to ring up and confirm my order, which I do and they say that they have processed the order and everything if fine, I ask when it will be dispatched and they say its about 7 days sometimes less.

31st June:
I get and email saying:

“The bank will not allow us to perform an AVS check (a name and address check on the card). The country you are resident in does not allow us to perform an AVS check as either they are a data protected country or will not check the details over the phone for security reasons”…

Interesting! its a UK bank card… all banks that I know use AVS and the country is the UK?!?

1st June @ 15:53 (isn’t skype great!):
I give them a ring and ask them whats going on. They say I need to photocopy both sides of my card, and a card statement or an offical letter from the bank. I said it was a british card and its been authorised and I can’t see how it could have POSSIBLY been declined. Me now being in australia, I just didn’t think about bringing a bank statement with me, silly me! So they want a photocopy of my card! BOTH sides after thinking I decide that they aren’t getting it… I can’t even get to my bank statements anyway. So I know i’ll ring the bank just to check whats happened. I ring the bank.. they reply saying that no transactions have been declined at all. In fact no transactions from anyone in the last couple of days declined or otherwise. Right… so what your saying is Alienware isn’t telling the whole truth…

3rd June @ 10am:
I ring alienware and manage to persuade the person on the end of the phone that they can charge my card with the delivery address details and it will work FINE!… and after a bit of persuading they do it… and guess what … it WORKS!

I took a look at the alienware website and they have a nice little page which tracks your order status. It says on Pre-processing.. it hasn’t even got to the card charged bit, I wait a day or two because it may just update at night or something so it could just be out of date. I say I need it quite urgently and they put the order on priority.

5th June:
Its still on the pre-process stage. I ring them up to be told that the status page is not linked to there system and has to be updated manually and sometimes this doesn’t happen… GREAT! But you must be nearly done because I was told it would take 7 days to dispatch? and I am told its been delayed because of missing parts. Great only 2 weeks before I leave Oz!

13th June:
For the last couple of days it says its been saying that payment has been received but not a lot else. I give them another ring to check the progress and they say they have received the parts today and they are building now and it should be dispatched on friday! yupiee!!

16th June:
I ring up to check the progress of the order and its been shipped! I ask for shipping ref and it was on DHL Express so I would get it on wednesday for my flight on the friday to New Zealand for a filming project that I needed the laptop for.

I track the shipping online and see it going from Dublin to London to Sydney…

19th June (5days before flight):
I check the DHL website and it says “Clearance delay” … clearance delay? its in sydney but its stuck in customs. I ring up DHL and ask what that means and they say that its been delayed because it has missing paperwork! ARGH! and could take up to 3 days to be approved. ARGH! I ring up alienware, they ring DHL and fax over the paperwork.

20th June:
I go to the depot and pick up the laptop as I need time to install things on it before I fly to New Zealand. Yupiee!!! I have a laptop!

I install things on it…

I start doing some graphics work and try and increase the resolution… strange I can’t get higher than 1440×900. But the laptop I ordered was 1920×1200… they have installed the wrong screen! ARGH! no built in camera, no Wide UXGA 17″ screen.

22nd June:
I can’t bare to ring Alienware so I send them an email saying about the problem with the laptop… I get no reply. But I need to use the laptop but I make sure I keep the plastic over the screen.

8th July:
I send them another email… still no reply…

12th July:
I ring them and ask what I need to do, they ask me if I notified them… which I did and after AN AGE they find my emails…

After communicating with them some more I they ask if I want a refund as its cheaper than sending the laptop back to them. Which I would love to do but unfortunately I need the higher res and better screen so that I can see the colours better for my digital comp / graphics work. The screen and the graphics card was the only reason I got the laptop in the first place. So I suggest to them that I send it to Australia as they are based out there… Each time they say they will call me back .. each time they do not.

One point I ring them to be told by a sales or receptionist that they are all in a meeting… ALL of customer service!!! how bizarre!

…

29th August:
I ring them and I get someone who says that someone else is now dealing with my call, but he’s unavailable but will call me back by the end of the day. So I ask her to DEFINATLY send me an email by the end of the day or ring me even if nothing happens. You never guess what happens… yup… nothing… I even say that I will be contacting Trading Standards on wednesday next week if this hasn’t been cleared up.

3 months and 3 days since I attempted to purchased the laptop online … and counting.

You can take a look at the trailer at the Caterpillar Wish website. Just hope its one of the very few Oz movies that gets out of the country. But so far no release dates, maybe see if I can salvage a DVD when/if it gets released.

Just take a look at the quality and the size of the guy in front of the screen! So when’s it coming to the UK? give IMAX a run for its money, ok maybe not

Just have to be a bit more careful on the rotoscoping! people will REALLY see your mistakes up big!

More Cinevision 2006 photos can be found here.
You can see more information of the Cinevision 2006 here.

Knowledge transfer (training):
No one developer knows everything or maybe only a couple of developers know how the system works inside and out. The code reviews can act as a way of spreading the knowledge of the system around the room. Making other developers aware of new updates to the system and how they work. So if something does go wrong they at least know roughtly where to look.

For example if you have an expert database guru or someone that is more knowledgeable on systems security, their input can increase the understanding of the other developers and help pull the no so knowledable developers up…

Even just developers talking and saying “Oh I would have fixed that problem but doing x y and z” increases understanding so that next time maybe they will try to tackle a problem in a more efficiant way.

Risk Management:
There have been very few companies that I have worked for where development documentation of a system has been “uptodate”. The only documentation that every seems to be the most correct is the user documentation, internal documentation? well thats another thing altogether. The moment documentation has been written it usually becomes out of date in no time at all. So in the end only the developer who developed the software unit/class etc knows really whats going on and therefore you get the all eggs in one basket problem. This was very real to one company I worked for when a developer went on holiday and wasn’t contactable. In a code review everyone see how things work.

… the list goes on and on. Code security, other developers seeing a potential security hole in anothers, more manageable readable code etc…

Ok now the nitty gritty, how to do an effective Code Review…

Firstly I don’t like the phrase “Code Review” it usually scares off developers…. So your going to look at my code and criticise it! I’ve called it a Weekly Project Review or Development Review in the past.

I’ve always done a review in the form of a meeting:

Moderator – Their prime role is to keep the review moving fast enough to be productive but slow enough to find the most issues. They would also distribute design or code to be reviewed and an inspection checklist, setting up the meeting, reporting inspection results and following up on any actions.

Author – Quite obvious, the coder of the code

Reviewer – Anyone who has an interest in the code. The reviewers take a look at the code before the meeting and discuss any bugs or questions during the meeting.

Documentor – This could be the role of the moderator if the group is small, but should not be the role of the author or reviewer (as its got a bit of a conflict of interest). The documenters role is to record the bugs/issues and the assignments of any actions during the review meeting.

Management – No way, this is purely a technical review so the focus is technical not political. Managers could receive a review report (list of actions from the review or notes on the checklist) very simple report which can be written during the meeting. But this shouldn’t be used to evaulate developers in any way.

* To have checklists which focus the reviewers attention on areas which have been problems in the past.

* The emphasis is on bug/issue detection, not correction.

* Reviewers prepare for the review meeting beforehand and arrive with a list of issues/questions.

* Information is passed on to the next review to improve future reviews (eg: adding/removing questions on the checklist)

* The meeting is for technical people and not management.

* Under no circumstances should the review results be used for performance appraisals, its just like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It doesn’t make sense anyway performance should be based on final products/projects and not work that isn’t finished. Another reason why there is no management It just means everyone is a lot more free to say what they think.

* The meeting should have a minimum 3 people and maximum of 6 people; any bigger and the review gets too big to manage and ends up becoming a hindrance.

Planning: The author gives the code/design to the moderator. The moderator then distributes the code to the people they think should review it including the checklist which focuses the attention of the reviewers so they don’t waste too much time looking at the code.

Overview (optional): The overview is used only if the reviewers aren’t familiar with the project. The author will spend some time just describing the project. This is generally a dangerous practice because the reviewer could end up glossing over issues. The design or code should speak for itself, the overview shouldn’t speak for it as that’s what the whole exercise is all about.

Preparation: Each reviewer works alone to become familiar with the design or code. The reviewers use the checklist. For every 700 lines of code the reviewer “should” spend about an hour but its really down to what works best in the organisation.

Review Meeting: To start the review meeting usually the author reads the code/design. They will explain all the logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object etc… while they are talking the documenter records any issues/bugs but all discussion of the issue stops as soon as they have been recognised. The documenter also notes the type and severity of the issue and the review moves on.

As I said above the meeting needs to keep moving otherwise you’ll loose concentration. So, depending on the project this shouldn’t take longer than 30mins/1hr. Everything needs to stay focused, I worked in one place where the group was banned from even discussing weather an issue really was an issue because they assumed that if one person is confused enough to think an issue existed then it was an issue and so the design, code or documentation needs to be clarified.

Inspection report: The moderator creates a review report usually during the meeting that lists each defect including its type and severity. At this point you could just put them straight into a bugtracking system while in the meeting as this will save time, and the report can be a list of these bugs. This therefore helps to ensure all the issues will be corrected and can also be used to develop the checklist which will in time highlight problems in coding etc and can help when creating risk registers… it can also give a good indication on the number of issues/bugs found. From the report you can find out the time spent on the issues over time which can be used to prove the usefulness of a review by giving hard data otherwise you are just left with saying reviews are good … because they are! This is also a good guide to see if they are working or not. Some people generally prefer end testing rather than reviews and it maybe that you will have to modify or even abandon the reviews. It depends on if it works in your company.

Rework: The moderator assigns issues/actions out to someone (usually the author unless its a larger project) for repair and the assignee resolves each defect on the list.

Follow-up: The moderator just checks to see how the issues/actions are being carried out.

Third-hour meeting: The code review or review is just that… a review so the people in the meeting shouldn’t be discussing solutions, but of course we will, so its better for those who wish to discuss different solutions to do this at another meeting either straight after the review meeting or at another time, this also allows it to be a bit less formal and get more people involved .

Fine-tuning the review: Hopefully over time the checklist will become more refined and things will be added and things will be dropped. We should find the same common issues appearing on the checklist and we can work on refining how we work to fix them. The checklist should be short and sweet so max of one page.

The Checklist:
As mentioned above this is used to track common issues so the developers use this as a guide when developing. It shouldn’t exceed more than one sheet of paper, an example of one is below, based on a PHP project:

Code Review
23/03/2004

Uni-Login Script Review

Moderator: Mr X
Author: James X (PHP), Peter Y (Architect)
Reviewer: Alistair X (Senior DB)
Reviewer: John X (Java Developer)
Reviewer: Simon X (Technical Documentation)
Reviewer: Tim X
Reviewers: Please make sure you prepare for the review meeting beforehand so you can become familiar with the code and arrive with a list of issues/questions and make use of the Checklist below.
Author: In the meeting you will be expected to read the code/design and explain all logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object.

Code to be Reviewed:
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSUniLogout.asp
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSUnifier.asp
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSkeepalive.asp
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/forumsUnifier.php
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/account.php

Related Files:
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Code Review Checklist.doc
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Uni-Login Script.doc

Results From Review:
ForumsUnifier.asp
ACTION: Missing Header/Footer
ACTION: ASP Comments (including related files) missing
ACTION: Use include to lmskeepalive.asp rather than static code

LMSUniLogout.asp
ACTION: Header/Footer missing
ACTION: Point to gatekeeper (update link)

ForumsUnifier.php
ACTION: Header/Footer Missing
ACTION: Not enough documentation
ACTION: Remove code which is not being used (Line 15,17,34 to 40, 41)

account.php
ACTION: Header/Footer needs to be updated with latest versions, with more information
ACTION: Line 247: Needs a header refresh to index.php and remove acountDetails() reference and function.
ACTION: PHPDoc comments missing.
ACTION: Line 97 – 99, 229 comment removal
ACTION: Lines: 127 to 171; Remove echo’s and drop out of php instead.
ACTION: Line 113; Remove magic numbers
ACTION: Line 114, 113; Remove rand functionality
ACTION: Line 212; replace “relevant” with “NCALT Systems”
ACTION: Line 218; change to “Back to NCALT.com”

CheckList Items Added:
9. Any duplicate code should be put in a separate module for reusability.
10. Removal of code which is not being used.

Duration: 1 Hour

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while I had a small problem with my laptop (I think the photo shows you why!). They always say things come in threes. My laptop harddisk died on me last week, I had a loverly time running around Sydney trying to find a replacement hard disk. I’ve spent the last week trying to recover my data, that of course I had carefully backed up! ok most of it but not all!

I’m sure everyone knows about The Universal Law of Gravitation, but the same thing can be shown in class rooms. You may be witness to The Second law of Gravitation.

“Students will gravitate towards the back of the class room. The seats in front fill up last.”

The only reason I think that this happens is so that the students don’t get picked out by the tutor or just don’t want to get eye balled by the tutor. But I generally prefer to be at the front. Less distractions on whats going on and also its a lot harder to dig out a book when you get bored .

It turns out that if you sit at the front or down the centre of the class your more likely to retain more information. Research shows that people placed randomly in the front and down the centre of the room will retain not just 10% more infromation but almost twice as much!

At Uni I remember a mate of mine who sat right at the front of the lecture hall. Unfortunatly for him he fell asleep. The lecturer then walked up to him and slapped the table next to his sleeping head. He awoke to see the entire lecture hall looking at him. From that day on my mate religously stayed at the back of the lecture hall, for all his lectures. If only the lecturer knew that that one incident could have reduced my mates learning capacity by nearly 50%!

How to snowboard for free in Austria
This is a clip about how a couple of snow bums stayed in Austria (one of the most expensive resorts in Europe) for the season for free. I especially like the ketchup soup!

After posting to my blog I had a couple of suggestions… ok one. That was Jame’s idea of “you could try the old stick it in an air tight freezer bag with some silica gel and bung it in the freezer for 30 minutes trick.”. Which I slated him at the time but i’m slowly coming round to the idea. But still seems a bit radical. I’m sure silica can freeze as well and not soak up the damp as well…

Anyway I needed to test my last theory. Because the drive wasn’t being recognised by WinXP it maybe the controller card in the lacie drive which was not working. So the drives could be fine and dandy. The data could be fine. its just the interface to the computer which isn’t working. So in desperation I purchased ANOTHER Lacie 1TB Drive. The theory being that the hardware would be the same so I could swap the disks around and basically “replace” the controller card, and hopefully it would all work. Anyway posted my theory to Lacie to see if it was possible and got this back:

As long as both drives are the same make and model and both devices are Bigger Disk EXTREME devices bought around the same time, then yes in theory it will work.

Any variation of that it may not work. We don’t test this, for we don’t do any data recovery. Some bridges are only made to support particular models of drives. Drives newer then the case may not work. In the same regards certain makes and models will not work with certain cases.

This is of course in theory. We do not have a direct answer for you. This is not something we test.

Right so in english… maybe if I’m lucky. There was one minor flaw in my plan. The new lacie that I purchased was a tripple interface (USB2, Firewire, Firewire-800). My old drive was just a double interface (Firewire, Firewire-800). So the interface/controller was already quite a lot different, just need to hope that the RAID disk controller part hasn’t changed. Also it looks like Lacie have swapped disk manufacturer. As the disks in my old lacie were Seagates and the new system was maxtor, this maybe because they were having so many problems with failed disks in the past. So the harddisk params could also be different if they are not auto detecting the drives … the RAID array setup could be different connecting all the drives together as one… loads of things could go wrong and all kinds of chaos could happen… Also the backing plate screws are under a “Do not break this seal or your will invalidate the warrenty” so by openning up both of the drives will invalidate the warrenty on both. Anyway for £400 quid per drive to save my data. It was worth the price…. ok so I started to job, and hey if I was right and the disks were working I could easily put them in another machine so i’m not loosing the disks.

Here is what I did because I couldn’t find any photos etc on the net of what the lacie looks like inside and how easy it actually is to do:
1. Firstly I took the 4 screws out of the backing plate.
2. Removed the outter cover as you can see from the photo, by sliding it up and way from the front, looking down on the lacie drive you can see the double interface.

3. Now write down the serial numbers of the drives and where they are located in the unit so that you can put them back in exactly the same place. Just incase if they have cable select on and you put the drives in the wrong order then things will get very messy.

3. As you can see from the image above its in two parts a fan in each. Each side of the lacie holds two harddisks with the controller on one of them. What you need to do is unscrew is one little screw at the other end of the unit.

You can see that i’ve already taken the screw out. Then all you need to do is shift the two harddisks towards you and that “unclips” the two drives from the front panel. Make sure you take off the side with the controller attached to it, then you only have to remove two drives rather than all four.
4. Make sure you take off the ribbon cables and power cables carefully. I actully had to unscrew the drives from the chassie to get the power cables out.

5. You basically now just swap all the drives over with each other so you end up having all your old disks using the new controller… and put everything back together again. Both the double and tripple interface drives had exactly the same insides. The only difference was the fact there was three interfaces connected to the board… anyway a lot easier than I thought it would be
OK then came the big switch on. I replaced the lacie cover, plugged everything in … switched it on… the lacie seemed to boot up ok. Then plugged it into my computer and… BINGO! It worked WinXP regognised it and all my files appeared. So in my case it was the controller that was broken, not the disks. THANK GOD! Now i’m trying to get Lacie to send me out a new controller card for the drive which is “just” in warranty but isn’t really anymore because i’ve broken the seals to get into the drive. But even if they can send me over a new controller for 50quid i’ll do it.
I’m now copying all the stuff off my drive onto a mates lacie drive so I can then rebuild the new lacie that I just purchased. He’s also keeping a backup of some of my stuff… just incase

But PHEW!

http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/

Ok now back to the pain… All I can say is AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH… My 1TB lacie hardidsk has stopped working. I plug it into Windows XP and it just does nothing… WinXP isn’t even detecting it, nada, zip. Oh boy am I happy… not. It has ALL my digital compositing work on it, and of course no backups as its a 1TB disk, its quite hard to backup.
I’ve tried every combination of switching the lacie on, with the computer on… off, with the lacie on… off switching it on with it plugged into the computer, without then plugging it in.. you name it i’ve tried it and I tried everything!

Next… the search of the net
Ok I recommend against that, all you find are stories of wo. People crying over broken hardware and general upset people, mostly blaming lacie for selling drives that have no way of cooling down properly and blow up within 6 months. A perfect example is D’Arcy Norman’s Blog, he had so many comments to it he had to switch them off because it was getting too much!

What to do. I checked the lacie.com website, downloaded the lacie tools knowing that it wouldn’t work because XP can’t even see the drive so how would the tools work.. anyway tried it… failed. Also they say if you return it to them their standard process is to format the disks as they don’t do disk recovery. So sending the drive back to them was a no-no if I wanted to get the stuff off again.

They recommend sending it off to a disk recovery centre like OnTrack who do data recovery services and are infact about 20mins drive away from where I live. Anyway gave them a call and they said basically it would cost £300 for them to inspect the laice and between £1,500 and £11,000 to recover the data. BLIMEY! Their must be another way!
… to be continued

A mate of mine does art of a living and thought his gallery needed special mention He makes some awesome stuff. Anyway check it out if you get the time. Hit the round circles at the top to see more… (its not immediately obvious).
http://martintidy.tripod.com/

Found a good show Reel on YouTube for Digital Compositing Work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDvBy0bkyvg&search=vfx

This is quite a nice example of some camera stabilisation work. Nicely done, you can do this kinda thing using the stabilise node in Shake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9vRV8FgCu4&search=rotoscoping

I can only find the old version of the book on amazon but for some bizare reason it has the new cover on it. Its definatly the old version tho.

Found this cool site www.topcoder.com, the basic premis is that topcoder put up a request for a component to be built and you supply a design or code for it. It then gets reviewed and if it is passed you get the dosh. topcoder then uses the code in one of their client projects and put the code in their repository for everyone to download and use. Found one Guy who calls himself adic and he’s made over $81,000, kinda crazy money.

Just found firefoxflicks.com made by fans of Firefox to get people using firefox, some of the vids are quite funny.

I was reading the register and came across this article… I feel a classic Copyright Police Train sniffer dogs to find DVDs

Ok, in T-Mobile’s T&Cs it says that your not allowed to use Instant Messanger or any VOIP over there mobiles. Which I think is just not right. If you are going to have an internet enabled then you have the right to use it however you please. If that means connecting to Skipe over your mobile or another VOIP service because its cheaper, then so be it. If they are worried about themselves loosing money then they should either reduce the cost of the calls from the mobile or increase the cost of their internet charges. But hey mobile operators are going to be dead in a couple of years anyway. Nokia has already decided that all new mobiles produced from Nov 2006 will all be wifi ready… so the death of all the mobile carriers in about.. say early 2007

This is going to be quite cool. Soon you’ll be able to add “notes” from google so you can store links in your google profile. Some screenshots here.

VNC Security Hole! IntelliAdmin has found a hole in VNC, basically anyone can get into the server without typing in a password. They have a proof of concept on the site but its been taken down because the site got overloaded.

Daddy, daddy want one! A Russian foldable helicopter! nice!

Software Asset ISO Standard

But before you go take a look at this… the World Largest Tetris Game!

Here is quite an interesting article about search engine optimization. The guy who wote it has worked for a number of search engine companies, so you get some interesting insights to how the closely guarded algorithms work! http://www.webmonkey.com/06/16/index3a.html.

BUT Google have launched another great web app “Google Calendar“. It looks quite good, this is the second project since gmail that directly completes with an existing Microsoft exterprise product Exchange because you can share you calendar with any other people on Google! Google is also making Outlook plugins for it and also integration into gmail so that if you get an email saying “Hi francis do you want to meet up on thursday for a pint at the kings head” gmail scrapes the email and turns it into a calendar item that you can put straight into your calendar! This is cool stuff The only thing that is a little worrying is the privacy concerns, the amount of info google will have on people, their emails, calendar and if the rumours prove correct with GoogleDrive then your personal files as well.

Heres a couple of articles i’ve found recently which are quite interesting. Also a quick Ruby on Rails tutorial.
The State of the Web.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial.
Password Cracking Times.

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.

 
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…

More info here

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!

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!

Anyway i’m off to play around with Netbeans…

Anyway I finished the the first animation piece today but forgot to upload it, so heres the one from end of play thursday, i’ve retimed the camera shake, got rid of the pulsing sun and added a cloud, shadow and a bit of colour correction

Well here it is … the first compostion… its a bit dodgy as i’ve only had half a day on it. The sun jiggles around a bit too much and the camera jerk is at the wrong time but hey! getting there This composition was made up of 6 elements: Vanilla (the girl), the tree and grass, the smoke, the background hill, the sky and finally the sun. Also if you notice there are a couple of blades of grass infront of her, these were originally on the background plate (the tree and grass) but I brought them to the front so that she walked behing them.

It also looks like there is still a huge demand for Digital Compositors in the market at the moment (which is good), anyway more tommorow…

Large:
Media Player (10.2mb)
Real Player (11.7mb)

Smaller:
Real Player (6.9mb)
QuickTime (6.3mb)

I’ll put the “wipe outs” vid up once i’ve converted it.

Since i’ve been back i’ve been working on the rookieacademy.com website and producing some promo vids for them using the footage that I got while I was in NZ. I also setup a discussion board for them, which so far hasn’t been used that much, I think mainly because all the ex-rookies from this year have been communicating via mass emails… hey ho, give it time Also been getting back into Maya and creating a space station, should have some piccies soon.

I’ve also been working on a Travel website bit like Expedia.co.uk but a bit simpler hopefully that will be complete mid-january. I’m also getting a mate to help me out on it.

Just after I came back to the UK, and signed up to a Digital Compositing course at Escape Studios in Shepherds Bush. Now for all those who don’t know what Digital Compositing is… here’s the dictionary definition:

“The digital blending together of a background plate and one or more foreground elements to create one seamless, well-integrated film image”

It starts on January 9th and goes on for 8 weeks, part of which you work on your show reel which ends up being your CV really on how good you are at digital compositing and giving pointers on what to and not to put in your show reel too. I’ve been wanting to get into a more media role for some time to get out of doing constant programming. When I look back on the stuff i’ve done so far i’ve found working for media companies like the BBC or print/design companies more fun! Hense doing film & video work over the past couple of years.

Well after 3.5 weeks of filming ‘Harry Potter Goblet of Fire’ they managed to compress my bit into 2minutes… maybe which even for a multi $$$ movie is quite amazing, yes they were very tech shots but hey! well I supposed i’d better get used to it.

Well Christmas is a coming! so HAPPY CRIMBO EVERYONE!, have a great new year if I don’t see you!