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Cross-computer bookmark synchronisation
July 27, 2007 – 4:55 pm
The following are three major extensions for bookmark synchronisation if you have Firefox installed across multiple computers:
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (via their servers)
Bookmarks Synchronizer (FTP) (via your own FTP server)
Google Browser Sync (using the Google toolbar, does more than bookmarks, via your Google account)
This Spartan Life
March 22, 2007 – 5:04 pm
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 host.He lives inside an online game where daily existence is a struggle against overwhelming odds (and other, much better players.) So he has taken it upon himself to create a little oasis of sanity where he can talk to people who aren’t bent on his destruction. He invites guests to join him in a live game where they can walk about and discuss some of the finer aspects of life, music, art, sex, movies and yes, even games.But he is finding it easier said than done. When other gamers join the game and don’t know they shouldn’t be shooting at his guests, Damian is sadly forced to revert to his old lethal self and clear the map of these brutes with their curt utterances and barbaric tactics.
But once the fighting is done and the guests are blue in the face, the fine Solid Gold Elite Dancers are there to shake their avatars to the latest chiptune music.”
Stalker is finally released
March 22, 2007 – 4:33 pm
“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 is comparable to Half-Life 2, and if the the new trailer is any indication of the game, it promises to be both spooky and action-packed - perfect for full-screen gaming in the dark of the night.
thebroken Episode 4
March 22, 2007 – 4:29 pm
They’re back: Kevin and double_d hack the XBox360 (this is hardcore) and jam cell phones.
Project Orion
March 22, 2007 – 4:24 pm
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
March 21, 2007 – 1:12 pm
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 stream and the decoder leaves behind artifacts. I’d like to make this an interactive process.
In order to do so, I needed to get the source code. Easy: libavcodec (part of ffmpeg). Next (since I do most of my development on Windows) I needed to compile and debug it using Visual Studio (MSVC). Hard: since the authors wrote it conforming to C99, it won’t compile under MSVC since it doesn’t support the spec. It does however compile using MSys+MinGW - this is still no good as I need to interactive debug the damn thing under MSVC. Furthermore, I’d like to quote the guide: “FFMPEG DOES NOT BUILD UNDER MSVC++, AND WILL NOT, EVER, BUILD UNDER MSVC++.”
So what do I do? I spent a day porting libavcodec to Windows (albeit not in its entirety: no networking code, and all encoders that rely on external source are disabled). I compiled a fresh version of ffdshow, plugged in my compiled version of libavcodec, and voila! It actually works!
Writing my first university tutorial
March 21, 2007 – 1:01 pm
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 out. I really hope the students will enjoy this one. It’s based upon a similar N-body simulation program I wrote back in highschool before embarking on my Cosmology major project.
THE GAZE
March 21, 2007 – 12:56 pm
Julia Burns is showing her latest interactive video artwork “THE GAZE” at First Draft Gallery. If you find yourself around Central Station, drop by (it’s just two short blocks up Chalmers St) and experience the piece coming to life and telling you to Get Out of the Way! The software/hardware interface was created by Ardrian Hardjono.
NetVideoBroadcaster for DirectShow
March 21, 2007 – 12:47 pm
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 WebRadio project).
Next came NetVideo (which uses Video for Windows). This allowed me to stream TV from upstairs down to my ‘lab’ and let me record content on-the-fly to my HDD.
Unfortunately NetVideo fell apart when I replaced the computer upstairs with one running WinXP (the old one ran Win98, hence the use of the VfW API). Since capturing video under WinXP with VfW doesn’t work with modern capture cards, the broadcaster component failed to work full stop.
Last Friday I wrote the new, shiny DirectShow-compatible version of NetVideoBroadcaster. It creates a capture filter graph and streams the captured video and audio into two sample grabbers, which pass media samples to the broadcaster to be send out across the network. The nice thing I’ve conformed to the same protocol I designed for the original VfW so I didn’t have to alter the code of the NetVideoReceiver - they’re all compatible with each other.
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