This has been circulating for a while now: Hitler & Gmail (youtube vid, dutch subtitles).
It’s a mashup I created to have a swing at one of the low hanging fruits of our ICT department: the inability for students to access their e-mail through the POP3 protocol. Since the services switched to Microsoft Exchange, this ‘feature’ is only available for university staff.
But I don’t want to talk about the POP3 issue itself ; It’s quite funny to see something I cooked up on a morning in time which could have been spent better get so much coverage. It attracted the attention of one of my professors (Erik Duval) too, since he has been featuring the vid in several presentations on the topic of Personal Learning. More behind the cut.
Over the last few months, I’ve been building a calendar/event system on top of PmWiki. For our impro group, we needed a central system to store all events and internal deadlines.
At first,I hesitated to implement it in PmWiki syntax. Since PmWiki is a flat-file wiki system, no database would be involved. A lot of the stuff I would write would get pretty hard to maintain afterwards. Last summer, I already worked quite a lot on our PmWiki install, and it always striked me as a delicate balance between total syntactic freedom (there’s little rules on what you can and can’t do on a wiki page) and controlling pages with templates and tricks (in order to keep things indexable and uniform).
More behind the cut.
My thesis (which I’ll be working on next academic year) covers Non Photorealistic Rendering. Exciting and hard times ahead … My promotor is Philip Dutré of the CS department at the University of Leuven.
After a few months of uncomfortable silence, it’s official now: the mod project I’m involved in, Nuclear Dawn, goes retail. The new team (Interwave Studios) obtained a Source engine license, and kicked off the fresh start for the project with a lengthy post and some new media.
Exciting times ahead! You can check out my new colleagues on the team page. We’re listed on ModDB as a game now, too.
Since its release in 2004 Valve’s Source engine has been a popular platform for professional and indie game developers alike. A combination of great publicity through good games (Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead), functionality and solid mod support (I blogged about Steamworks earlier) has made it continue the legacy of the GoldSource engine.
I’ve learned the nuts & bolts the hard way, and I thought a quick rundown on how to compile the Source SDK on a linux-based system would be useful. Technical mumbo-jumbo behind the cut.
Some final results of my computer graphics project. I implemented a graphics rasterizer, which is the implementation one would follow if you wanted hardware-accelerated graphics on today’s GPU’s, which have pipelines dedicated to vertex transformations.
The other option was a raytracer, which is not (yet) suitable for real-time applications due to calculation complexity.
For my course in Computer Graphics, we had to implement the two basic algorithms in CG: Ray Tracing (using physics theory of viewing and lighting rays to evaluate the color of each pixel) and Rasterization (slap all triangles down to the screen using Matrix transformations).
More images beneath the cut.
A project I saw scrolling by on #thepiratebay.org on Efnet caught my attention a couple of weeks ago. Flox is an enhancement on several existing traditional P2P techniques.
“Flox is a technique in development which will identify the same parts from similar files and download those when needed. This will certainly increase speed, for slightly different files. This will also make the technique to strip off metadata from media files obsolete, since Flox will do it universally for ALL sorts of files, whether they have ID3 tags, ApeTags, or something completely new.“
The current development draft contains some very interesting stuff about palindrome pattern file splitting and hashing. I’ll surely get my hands on this when I have the time.
Hoping to see them this wednesday at the Lokerse Feesten (update: I missed them, bummer !), I thought this was the right time to release a remix I’ve been wrestling with during the last months. Danny The Dog (international title: Unleashed) was a mediocre thriller by Luc Besson (Taxi, The Fifth Element, …), but the soundtrack was composed by Massive Attack. For me, the title track really stood out.
I tried to add a subtle dubby feel to it, by overlooping the beats two or three times (it’s random), much like Portishead did in its recent single, Machine Gun. I also played around a lot with the echo/cutoff on the parts without drums.
I overlooped the piano synths by accident, but never corrected my mistake because I thought it sounded quite nice. There’s clipping and misplaced frames all over the place, including the odd vinyl crack here and there.
I’ll probably never finish this, so I’d better get it out the door. Most of the reverb/pitch effects and rough cutting were done using Audacity, with some additional drumkit programming in Hydrogen and strings generation by the ZynAddSubFX Synthesizer. Those are all free, open source applications.
and Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus, quoting the Wall Street Journal.
Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
So it is true. Javadoc was invented by a woman, because all Sun (planetary pun intended) guys were too stubborn to ask eachother for directions. If it wasn’t for women, we’d all be writing unindented lines of assembly. Bless them and their coding skills !
