Random Link Find

Text messages from 1890. Early versions of LOL and BRB and of course, flame wars involving clockwork devices.

Tea

A random link find: Rate Tea

Python Continued

To day for a bit of motivation to pick up the bat and keep swinging I flipped towards the end of the book and read some notes by the author. A line jumped out at me about the book is aimed at giving a 'brown belt', not a real programmer, but ready to move into the real stuff and pick up real books.

Chapters 0 - 25 I had some bumps along the road with, things I just didn't understand but forged on and came back to later, sometimes figuring them out, sometimes not. I have a short list of mild stumpers that will eventually come clear with practice, I'm sure. But Chapter 26 was an exam. "Here's a program. Debug it, even if it takes a few days."

It took me about ten minutes, suggesting all that LSL gave me a green belt to start with.

I've moved on into logic operations, the section there was way, way better than any other logic table tutorial I'd seen, or maybe the student was ready, and then into if statements and loops, something else I'm an old hand with by now and am doing anyway for the syntax help and inevitable moments of 'oh god, I've been doing this wrong all along'. Sort of like the logic tables. :)

So far, so good.

Learning Python

I've some experience now with LSL, some days I've worked with it up to fourteen hours with few breaks. Some people have asked if I'm some sort of child prodigy. Ha. No. I'm just a hard worker when I'm doing something I find interesting. It's been my intent for awhile now to try my hand at something approaching a real programming language. I just have no clue what I'd do with it.

Today I stumbled across a link on Hacker News with someone asking for advice on what language to learn in order to learn, one of the suggestions was Learn Python The Hard Way. So I nosed around the web a bit querying what the language is used for, and learned I could conceivably use it to have my Second Life vendors sent information to my web server and dump the data into a table that I can download and back up more easily than I can with the Linden Labs tools. Okay, I have a basic goal even if I never get around to doing that.

So, looking at the lesson plan I've begun to appreciate Zed Shaw's sense of practical humour more than I already had, and also now have a gedit app and a Command Promt shortcut on my desktop. Thank gawd I'm familiar with DOS or I might have been lost there. Maybe my old age is an advantage in some ways.

My first stumper came in Exercise 3. I know my basic arithmetic, but had never before seen a modulo operator. ZenMondo, despite not knowing Python, was able to suggest what it was, and wikipedia explained the rest. Again, modulo operators are a thing I have no clue why I'd ever use it, but knowing it exists and being able to recall how to research its use, my math vocabulary has grown. I'm the same way with language, the more words you know, the more thoughts you can have. This is a good thing.

I think I might be able to get through this in a couple weeks if I keep at it.

Fun Picture Series

The year 2000 as imagined in 1910.

And after that giggle, here's the horror that is that was.



:)

Brief comments on Maya and Blender

Maya:
Subdivides edges more intelligently. When you're working in squares, it gives you squares.
The vertex selection tools are weaker, lack of occlusion ability ends up selecting right through the object, more orbits needed to check yourself. (Learned there is such a thing as back face occlusion, never learned where it is.)
Nifty sculpt options, but still prefer a lattice.
Nice extruding along a curve. The extrusion can be manipulated neatly after it's extruded.
Animation graph editing is the_bomb.

Blender:
Prefer the phonetic hot keys to Maya's keyboard placement hotkeys.
Prefer the extrusion in Blender, more hotkey, less pretty graphics.
Less overall crap in your way. Less camera battles selecting things.
Could have to do with 30" monitor at home running 2500 lines vs school 24 at 1900. But them Deluxe Handles in Maya were pretty big.
Googling help generally resulted in more and better examples. Blender nerds tend to prefix every explanation by declaring how easy X is, which I'm less convinced has to do with ease and more to do with presenting their massive E-nis for praise and adulation. But that's how the open source community works, where there isn't a financial incentive there's a posturing incentive. Net result, lots of help in varying shades of pedantic.

Both:
So full of options, good luck finding anything. Taking this class showed me lots of things I didn't know even existed and technique I hadn't thought of. Not bad for a weekend class.

Other observation on financial vs social incentives:
A large firm will want pro-paid for dev tools same reason it will want certified staff. Efficiency in standardisation and contracts signed in eloquent legalese for more effective lawsuits should it come to that.
Yes, a significant part of that 4 grand price tag is the cost of lawsuits. (And later learned Mental Ray rendering, which is irrelevant to Blue Mars.)
Smalltime operators may be less worried about suing and more about just getting the job done efficiently and cheaply. Blender will do just fine for a lone gun contractor or developer with no intention of hopping into standardised employment or expanding operations into the realm of Large. For the lone gun, things like Maya or Illustrator or Max or Photoshop are merely marketing points and might as well be classified as an advertising expense for all the difference I can see between the capabilities between them and open source alternatives.

I will probably be buying Flash Pro, though, so brace yourself, as soon as I jump on a wagon it means there's a strong chance it's headed off a cliff over shark infested seas, on waterskis.

Too Good Not Too Happen

Amalgam of:
http://xkcd.com/31/
and
http://xkcd.com/695/

I'm a hopeless romantic.

Talking to Grandma

Even before Grandma's health started declining, trying to explain technologies was... interesting. Now that most of my activities revolve around digital art it's even more odd. Apparently, moving abstractions around as an accountant is less bewildering than manipulating nothings for artistic purpose. :)

But once in a while I manage to explain things in ways she understands. I showed her a flash key and said, "This is a modern filing cabinet. A whole filing cabinet's worth of paper can fit in here."

And today she asked again what it is I do, and I said, "I'm making puppets dance."

And so I'm a puppeteer and finally respectable again.

The Future is Now

Your own personal Jet Pack.

A Left Turn on the Autobach

Computer learns to compose. Downloads here.

This was freaky, of all classical composers, Bach is my favorite, and the computer generated Bach sounds very convincing to me.

Win At Life

Key point from this article:

"If you can ever get two players to actually debate a moral point in a game as vigorously they might debate a StarCraft build, you’ve won at life."

Congratulations, Philip Rosedale. You win at life.

Quite Possibly The Most Awesome Thought Experiment Ever

Link.

Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous – Adjective

existing or being everywhere, esp. at the same time; omnipresent: ubiquitous fog; ubiquitous little ants.

I think I understand why I'm finding some of these design school readings readings miserably difficult to follow, it took until mention of Neuromancer for my interest to perk up. Well, perk up in the 'well no kidding' sense. I work daily in virtual worlds, developing and marketing products. Little nothings, sometimes things from the real world I attempt to simulate by using the tools available, often it requires a little programming genius mixed with other skills I don't have and am forced to learn in a hurry.

In developing a skill set with programming, animation, sound engineering, texture artistry, geometry, mathematics and being ept enough to put it all together, I've come into a variety or weird situations. Particularly interpersonal.

I've forgotten how to do small talk. An innocent “How are you?” can reduce me to Rain Man puzzling the meaning of life with a dredging of my mind for a way to sum up the entirety of life's experience. Bored people question, “How are you?” Or needing something and engaging in ancient introduction forms. I'm not bored, I'm just boring.

As for the meaning of life, I'm convinced that it's nothing more than having a reason to smile. :)

People asking to commission me for work. I quote my rate of $30/hour and it runs into a range of shrieks of horror to a tirade of laughter. “But it's not REAL!” The expected rate of pay the would be customer seems to expect to pay, on average, is less than what a child labourer is paid in a south Asian sweat shop. I don't know about them, but all them heartbeats I'd be expending on work for them feel very real to me.

The unreal as real is becoming ubiquitous. Those who struggle with the notion are gradually being urged from society the same way the scribal class was. Death. And it's still going to take some time. Am I not working alongside an American computer modeler and texture artist? They respond to my questions, I respond to theirs. We joke. We make an unreal thing that does stuff in its unreal world. We market it. People buy it. It will never see the light of physical form. The two of us may never meet in the flesh. Are we real? My heartbeats say yes, I am.

Very Interesting

Liquid Wood.