…really – you can’t deal with that? It’s actually a big enough problem for you to think it’s an error?
Windows Vista was so horrible that anything else was better. So Microsoft made Windows 7. Which on the surface seemed to address all the things wrong with Vista. If you’re just a normal user, it probably did. But as a developer – Windows 7 is equally horrible or perhaps even worse than Vista.
Windows 7 is still as frustrating as ever. Things just stop working randomly with out any rhyme or reason. You reboot and it’s fine. But then something else stops working. For instance, the “Add Existing Item” in Visual Studio 2010 now just won’t come up. I never had this problem in Vista. Why is this happening in Windows 7? Did I press the wrong key or did the security? I don’t know.
Who does know? Who knows.
I can’t really say racist white people – because some Europeans might take offense to that. And to be quite frank the probability of them being racist is significantly less than Americans.
The thing that stands out to me when white Americans are racist is that they act like they own this country and built everything that could possibly exist in this country. Like no one else besides white Americans have contributed to the progress of this country. I will not list the immigrant groups and their contributions – but trust me there are many. If you don’t know at least a few of them and are America – looks like that education system you designed failed you. Oh wait, sorry it’s because all the illegal immigrants coming over here and degrading your education.
The worse part about it is that it’s okay in their minds to have people like me live as a “checked” first class citizen. Effectively a second class citizen. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically like Nazi controller Germany where someone asks you for your papers. But if you accuse them of this, they try to be very intellectual about it. “Oh, it’s not like that all. We just want to be sure. If you’re here legally we just want to see.” That’s not any different you fucking idiot.
Racist white Americans also like to act like people are stealing from them. Illegal or not, if you’re not white – you’re taking away from them. Yes, this includes you Black Americans. It’s beyond me exactly what we’re taking away from them, but apparently we’re taking something.
I’ve heard lots of people complain about iTunes in the past. I never understood why. I mostly used it to listen to music. Which is probably why I never understood. Anyway, wow. What a piece of garbage.
iTunes unlike other Apple applications seem to assume that the user is completely freaking stupid and can’t find their head from their ass. An example of this is the inclusion rules for Music/Movies/TV Shows. Why is this so complicated? There should be two options: All or Selected. They’re very obvious. But iTunes tries to be smart in this respect and puts all kinds of crap in there. I set my iPad to sync and come back a few minutes later and it says that I’m trying to put 100GB on it. What? I just wanted like 6 episodes from a TV show and I had gone through and select them. Turns out I had to select a specific number/recentness from their Automatically include. Oh wait, maybe I can just uncheck that. Oh look, now it makes you select every single episode by hand – no ability to select based on the TV show.
Who wrote this thing and thought things like that would be a good idea? It’s a UI nightmare. The menus are cascading top to bottom, show to episode. There’s a perfect logical order of how these things come together.
Goodness.
If you’re a amateur film maker, you’ve probably heard of RedRockMicro. They make some pretty cool stuff and most of it works. There’s also a fair bit of it that just doesn’t work unless you want to break your fingers. One these products is the microArm. Looks cool online, but might actually turn out to be worthless.
YMMV obviously. Based on the other arms I’ve seen which look like they could handle a decent amount of weight, I figured there wasn’t too much different. I was very wrong. I use a 7″ Marshall with an Anton Bauer mount from time to time. Let me just tell it to you straight: don’t even think about it with the microArm. The microArm has a particular weak design that can probably sustain things that weight a decent amount less than 1 lb. Anymore than that the arm will not stay stable. The shifting weight will also probably damage the microMount that you attached the arm too as well. You’ll be happy deceived into believing that you can tighten the plastic knob tighter to get things to stay. Just wait until you pick up your rig quickly, the microArm will begin to malfunction.
If you’re looking for an arm, I’d recommend staying away from the microArm.
Alright, so enough angry ranty posts. I ran into this recently and it confused me for about 5 minutes before I figured out what was going on. Figured I’d make a posting about it.
So dynamic_pointer_cast makes use of RTTI. If you think about it, under different compiling circumstances the RTTI information will be different from compile to compile. So imagine if you compiled a shared library which some object that you intended to use dynamic_pointer_cast, it will work in the same library. However, if you’re in another library, you might get a NULL back. It’s a litte too early in the morning to get into the gory detail of it all. But you can work around by having a base class that has a method to do what you want. You could also cast using the raw pointer, but this might be going against what you intended originally.
I don’t know why this is regarded as news…
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/general/278200/top-10-things-hollywood-thinks-computers-can-do
…but whatever…anyway, thanks to the 90,000 crime drama shows out there, a lot of lore has crept up in the recent years about how computers operate in Hollywood.
Lets get the important bit out of the way…with the exception of a few very misguided individuals, no one in Hollywood believes computer really operate the way the articles describes.
How do you know?
Well, for one, I work in visual effects. Two, some of my friends had to design those UIs you might have seen on TV for computers.
Okay, so I know the article is a bit tongue and cheek. But from a nation that took over a nation that produced Jonathan Swift – the art of satire seems to be all but lost. Okay, so that’s a bit unfair. It’s only posted on a UK site – there is a possibility that someone wrote it somewhere else.
I tried reading the first part of it, thinking it was going to be funny. You know, poking fun at the absurdity of it all. But from the tone of the article, this person really seems to believe that Hollywood believes that computers believe that humans believe that’s how UIs should work. How’s that for mockery?
The problem with these types of articles is that it proliferates stupidity. Yes, we all get that the computers in movies are absurd. There’s nothing really funny about it. Really? Yes. Because movies and TV shows would be boring as all get out if they really copyright real life. I mean, can you imagine if they word for word copies the crap that chicks talk about when dudes aren’t around? It would be like 2.5 hours of chicks talking about their period. While that is funny in like 30 seconds, it begins to lose its humor value after a few minutes, let alone 2.5 hours. Or vice versa, it would 2.5 hours of penis, booby and gay jokes.
I imagine the only people that find this truly funny have and have sustained humor value are the Comic Book Guy type personalities.
Hollywood thinks you’re a fucking moron and knows that you’re slacked jaw. They probably think you watch TV with drool dripping out of your mouth…that is why Hollywood had to make “computers” do those fancy things that you make fun of. Yeah, in the end, it’s really them that thinks you’re dumb. Amazing isn’t it? Good heavens, get over it.
Yeah, we get it Captain Obvious. You can stop trying to sound smart by pointing out the absurd.
I’ve been friends with Andrew Bell for a long time, every since high school. Since I’m approaching 30, I guess I can say that’s a long time ago. While we are here to visit some old memories we’re also here to make new ones. If you haven’t heard, Cinder is going public this week. The world of creative coding will never be the same.
History
Since I’ve been friends with Andrew for so long, I’ve seen Cinder in its many forms and by its many names. A long time ago, in a computer lab in Richardson, TX – probably one of the first incarnation of Cinder was called HAGL: Hai and Andrew’s Graphics Library. I can’t recall specifically what was in it. But there wasn’t anything official to HAGL, it was just a bunch of source files that Andrew and I would often used in whole or in part for our various projects.
Some time later, parts of HAGL became what Bare Knuckle Software called libdt or lib digital terra. Digital Terra existed for a bit and released a game called: Atlas: Gift of the Aramai. I think the only thing in that project from HAGL was probably a PCX loader I wrote one evening at Andrew’s house. I’m not entirely sure why we kept using Digital Terra related names – but we did.
libdt went through two versions. The second version, by Andrew’s doing, became Flint. Flint was later renamed to Cinder for various reasons.
So one could say that Cinder has been 10+ years in the making and has been through various versions used in a variety of projects.
All that aside, what you will soon get is an open source library that comes with a whole arsenal of tools ready to meet any demands and challenges of creative coding going forward. But it doesn’t just stop there, Cinder will continue to be developed and expanded to a variety of different platforms. I bought an iPad recently with the specific intention of using Cinder to explore my crazy ideas.
Why Cinder?
There’s lots of ways to answer this question. The reason why someone should use Cinder in my opinion is because of its design and because of its design the power it brings to the table. Library design can be a difficult thing, especially if other people are using it. I believe that the people working on Cinder, mostly Andrew, strives to keep things sane for everyone that might use it. I’ve had lots of conversations with Andrew about how a Processing user might want to try to a certain component and what can be done to make it function the way they think it should. For someone like me, code philosophy is a big deal. It can make or break a system in the long run. Since there is a committed effort behind Cinder to keep things organized and well thought out for the users, it will have a long and prosperous life.
Is Cinder really that powerful?
Yes. One area that Andrew definitely has not shied away from is optimization. Wherever speed has matter, there has been a substantial amount of time invested into making it as optimal as possible. While there is always room for improvement, you can count on Cinder to be reliably fast in its operations.
Should I be using Cinder?
If you’re just starting out and are familiar with Java – you might want to check out Processing first. If you’re just starting out and are familiar with C++ – you might want to check out OpenFrameworks first. Why? While Cinder is designed to be coder friendly, it might be a bit much for your first go at this creative coding stuff. However, if you are up for a challenge, then by all means.
Have you used Cinder?
Yes. I worked with Andrew on the Augmented Reality project for Esquire. One of my major tasks on this project was writing an animation system that used data from Maya. Because of the way Cinder is designed, it was relatively easy to simply implement the animation algorithms once we had the data exported how we wanted. I’ve also written a few toy applications for Cinder.
So go check it out and make something awesome with Cinder. I’ll be right there with you, I’m hard at work porting the Moonshine code to be a Cinder component.
Recently the website OSNews released a statement about people accusing them of being biased. Lets get one thing out of the way, opinions are generally biased. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what makes us interesting and human.
However, this is not true of OSNews. OSNews, especially Thom, openly and blatantly presents information skewed to their particular perspectives and ideology. In the big picture, there’s nothing wrong with this either, if it stopped there. OSNews continues to create an unprecedented amount of FUD in the other direction. This is what I believe…aka my opinion…is the bias that people don’t like. I could take the extreme low road here and be a complete bigot and say that Thom doesn’t really understand how the English language works since he’s not British or English. I don’t really know what he is, so please don’t take me seriously here. However, I’m not. I’ll just simply state that I could have done that. Read how he writes, you can judge for yourself. You can say the same thing about me as well since I wasn’t born in America. I’ve only spent 25 years here.
But back to the statement…it begins by saying that in the past they’ve been accused of being pro this and anti that. Whatever. They’re all true. Most of the editorial on OSNews are written with a fair bit of emotion behind them. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an native English speaker to figure that out. Again, this is what I think most people, who have a problem with OSNews’ bias, have a problem with.
Even further, OSNews goes out of their way to state how the opposing direction is highly biased…hinting at the fact that OSNews is valid journalism and the opposing view is not. Carefully placed insults and and demonizing statements will be placed throughout the article. Both the Nazis and the Communists did the same thing. However, when a view don’t agree with does, we label it propaganda – or call it some flavor of bias to make sure that Satan or Hitler is somehow involved.
Yet even further, OSNews goes out of their way to demonize you and make you feel like completely fucking utter pieces of lame shits if you happen to have an opinion that is different. And of course your opinion is bias. Not only that, chances are your opinion could cause the total collapse of modern society as we know it. In fact your opinion, if it opposes OSNews, also opposes humanity, logic and reason, open source and probably questions our fundamental understanding of everything as we know it. Possibly ccording to OSNews, your opinion has caused uncountable numbers of rapes (the majority of them anal) and murders (the majority of which happens after the rape). It is beyond all understanding why your opinion is even allowed to exist. Again, this is what I think most people, who have a problem with OSNew’s bias, have a problem with.
Thom is a child in most respects – this is my opinion. It’s very evident in the fact of how he presents information. He has to go sit down because he gets so upset about M$ picking H.264 for IE9. Jesus Christ! Is that the most important thing in his day?! Really?! There are no shades of gray with this guy. If you don’t agree with him, you’re probably going to Hell. I don’t know if he believes in Hell. So if you don’t agree with him you are either a stupid religious fanatic that doesn’t understand two shits about science and shouldn’t be allowed to live or you’re going to Hell – whatever his perspective is.
Okay, the last few bit was tongue and cheek. The point is, that’s general spirit of how OSNews presents “news” stories. It’s almost impossible for me to ever feel I read something objective on that site. But of course, OSNews exist in some super libertarian state in which they can do no wrong. But if you try, they will bust out with their whaa cannons like there’s no tomorrow.
In summary, OSNews is very biased. Will they admit it? No. They honestly believe they are objective journalist.
I rarely try to have an opinion on political things – mostly because it tends to jump around so much it’s hard to keep up with. Nothing like your own opinions getting ahead of you. But there are things that getting kind of stupid and it needs to be talked about and addressed. The one thing that is still annoying is that a fair number of White Americans still live under some delusion that the United States of America somehow exclusively belongs to them. And because of their good graces and tolerance the rest of us are allowed to live here. By us, I’m including you, European Americans and South American Americans of a lighter complexion. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that has to deal with this.
I’ve had the following things said to me by some of what I thought were my close White American friends…
“With all due respect, there is no way you know how it means to be a true American.”
Apparently there’s some kind of innate knowledge that is built into you when you’re born here. Oh wait, you have to be white to get it.
“No offense, but I hate it when I see foreigners come to this country and succeed.”
They took our jobs. Or at least I took your job. Or maybe it was Juan or Chin or Samir. Who really knows.
And while I’m at it, let throw everything out there. These statements didn’t come from some bizarre religious fanatics. They came from self proclaimed and anti-religion Atheist. So don’t for a moment begin to muddle in that racism is exclusive to those ignorant religious people.
Lastly, Arizona – go fuck yourself. Way to go in opening up the doors for people to get harassed. Maybe you should bring back segregation while you’re at it.