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Monthly Archives: March 2007

This Spartan Life

In the spirit of Red vs. Blue, and so much other machinima , comes This Spartan Life: a real talk show with real guests (Bob Stein and Peggy Ahwesh first episode) in a computer-generated environment. It’s set in the virtual world of Halo (of course).
From the website: “Damian Lacedaemion is not your average talk show [...]

Stalker is finally released

“Stalker – Shadow of Chernobyl” available March 2007.
I discovered this revelation on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuAkR3FQ0c4
Quite a surprise considering I thought it had disappeared into the blackhole around which Duke Nukem Forever is orbiting (passing the event horizon?) I remember seeing a preview video for an earlier version of Stalker about six years ago! Apparently the open-endedness of narrative [...]

thebroken Episode 4

They’re back: Kevin and double_d hack the XBox360 (this is hardcore) and jam cell phones.
http://revision3.com/thebroken/ep4

Project Orion

A very interesting look into a chapter of nuclear propulsion that held such promise for space travel.
From Wikipedia: “Orion offered both high thrust and high specific impulse — the holy grail of spacecraft propulsion.”

Proving them wrong

One experiment I’ve started working on recently is getting behind the hood of motion-compensation based video codecs, specifically the decoder, and trying to distort the motion vectors before the macro-block is recontructed. The purpose is to see whether interesting/beautiful/ugly video sequences will result. I’ve often seen such if there’s an error in an existing video [...]

Writing my first university tutorial

This semester I have been appointed one of two tutors (with John Stavrakakis) for the third-year Multimedia Computing and Processing course that my supervisor (Dr. Masa Takatsuka) is running. I was called upon this week to write the content for the second tutorial on the topic of computer graphics animation and collision detection. Check it [...]

NetVideoBroadcaster for DirectShow

Quite a while ago I wrote a suite of applications that allows you to stream video and/or audio data across a network.
The first was NetAudio, and was particularly useful to me for streaming radio audio across my network from my radio setup to my webserver, where it can be streamed out onto the internet (my [...]

Bruce Schneider & Chuck Norris

I discovered (to my horror) that the maintainers of x264.nl (THE free encoder/decoder implementation of the H.264 Advanced Video Codec) removed the Chuck Norris theme. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can still experience it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060412205500/http://x264.nl/psp/
(Update: turns out the theme is still there. They’ve simply taken the link to it off the front page.)
Since you [...]