I sure hope so. The Zune is a great device for many reasons, most important to me being that it works every single time I want it to. I use the Zune software everyday and while it does crash sometimes, it isn’t morbidly slow and isn’t bloatware. The problem, however, is that the Zune really hasn’t received the hardware treatment it deserves. No touch screen, a touch pad that is glitchy (specific spot on the pad), and lack of full graphics development (no shaders) really hold it back. Hopefully this Zune “HD” will fix all that…

Shots via Engadget

Got my first full zipper jersey, but it is a little tight. I think my goal for this season is to fit in this jersey which means losing a lot of weight… like 30-40 lbs because I would lose the first half of that elsewhere most likely.

Watch them. Laugh.

Via SuperNews

I have taken a quick look at the data gathered by my XBLCG Report Tool and have compiled some of the more basic stats. This is based on 17 reports, 3 of which have incomplete data.

Total Downloads: 100 890
Total Purchases: 9 366

Average Downloads: 5 935
Average Purchases: 551
Average Conversion Rate: 9.28%
Average Cost: 263 MS Points

Total Gross: $25 418.10
Total Net: $17 792.64

Average Gross: $1 495.18
Average Net: $1 046.63

Microsoft
Total Net: $7 625.42
Average Net: $448.55

Thanks to all the creators who submitted reports! As I get more data I will be able to produce better views including the all important price analysis we are all wanting to see.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for anyone who messes up their computer after reading this post. If you are someone who isn’t confident with computers, stop reading now.

It seems everytime I visit an electronic store such as Best Buy I see at least one person talking to an employee about what antivirus software is best for Windows. As an average user they are taught to fear for the safety of their bits and taught that Windows has some open door policy for attacks. The scariest part of this is that they buy this software without really looking deeper into why it exists. They figure it is an absolute necessity because everyone talks about it.

A lot of these people will end up on message boards throughout the internet stating the same thing: “My PC is so slow after only three months!!! VISTA SUCKS!” You would think it was some crazy epidemic; that Vista implodes (or explodes?) and becomes slow from too much use. At least I figure this is what some people think since most other material position in life has this characteristic.

The big thing these people don’t realize is that some software is worse than the viruses and spamware they thought it would block. Users across the globe install this software not realizing it leeches itself on tons of different events and processes on their systems. For instance, AVG will latch onto Internet Explorer to tell you whether or not links are safe! Thanks AVG for installing an inefficiency on my system! Similar software like Norton will attach itself to your email client to make sure that everything you do is virus free!

I have been antivirus and anti-spamware free for roughly seven years now. Once I gave up the idea that I needed extra protection I stopped having problems. Coincidental? I think not! This anti-* software is good for some things though: cleaning up a mess you make. So it stands that if you don’t make a mess, you won’t need the software.

I plead you to join the revolution. Educate yourself a little into how attacks happen and how you are protected by Vista itself (ie. don’t turn down UAC). Don’t click oddball links that promise you something and be concious when you are using the computer. Use things like common sense and good judgement. If a long lost buddy is sending you an email with a program in it, think twice about opening that attachment. Join the millions of people who don’t run anti-* software because they don’t need it. Join us in not dishing out millions of dollars to companies that “protect” us only to be strapped into their system.

Dear Guy In Front,

No not you, the other guy. The one that decided to stand in front of fifty people waiting patiently for their train’s track number to come up on the TV screen. You who came late to the station and quickly came to the conclusion that you would never be able to read the numbers from within the group. You who decided that getting the track number was so important to you that you had to sacrifice fifty peoples’ views of the monitor. Thank you for not standing still either! Your gentle rocking back and forth both made me sea sick and made me angry as the ten people in front of now had to start counter swaying just to see the monitor. Thank you for giving the people behind me a conversation starter into just what a jackass you are, causing the inevitable laughter between people within earshot. Thank you for also talking on your blackberry VERY LOUDLY so that we may know you are an important business man with a schedule to keep. As if without you the trains wouldn’t exist at all. Thank you for disregarding the unspoken rule of a the 10-15ft arc, the unwritten rule of make sure the person behind you can read.

Here is to you jackass of all he stands before. Here is to you making our days seem just a little crappier.

Got a trainer for Christmas (see below) and got my bike setup on it. Man is training instense on this thing! It is quite different than riding on the road, really really different. It is totally intense! If you stop pedaling, the bike just slows done a ton, and it isn’t as if you are going anywhere so why stop pedaling. So I keep pedaling and man does it wear me down quickly. I also have to figure out how to get a breeze flowing through my room so I am not just breathing in stale air. But man the trainer is going to be awesome!

I have a bone to pick with game developers and graphics artists out there using the term HDR incorrectly. I understand the notion that a word can mean something different under two different contexts. For HDR, however, the idea and term are rooted in how a scene is lit. Whether you are using it to describe a scene in a game or a photograph the term means the same thing. The H in HDR stands for High, not Low.

I am sick of seeing articles that explain how a developer can equalize tones in a scene by increasing or decreasing the exposure for each rendered object only to end up with the addition of glowing and blurring the scene. Bloom has nothing to do with HDR, it is an entirely different concept used to simulate the effect of an object appearing overly shiny. This is commonly done by downsizing the scene, blurring it and then pushing each pixel towards dark or bright. This effect works great if you are attempting to render a lightsaber, but not if you are attempting to use HDR.

The point of HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is to equally expose different parts of a scene. For example let’s say you had a dark room with a desk. On the desk is a lamp that is lighting the top of the desk. To the right of the desk is a chair that is dimly lit by the ambient light. Using HDR in this case would allow an artist (game developer, photographer, etc) to brighten the chair while darkening the desk (or leaving it alone). You can think of HDR as corrective lighting surgery for an image of a scene.

Even Wikipedia contradicts itself on this topic:

One of the primary features of HDR is that details in a scene with a large contrast ratio are preserved. Without HDR (for the purpose of this article, low dynamic range or LDR) areas that are too dark are clipped to black and areas that are too bright are clipped to white. These are represented by the hardware as a floating point value of 0.0 and 1.0 for pure black and pure white, respectively. Graphics processor company nVIDIA summarizes one of HDRR’s features in three points[4]:

The Wiki page is stating that HDR scenes provide a mechanism for preserving the details over the entire scene regardless of current exposure. It goes on to say that without HDR, you get over and under exposure problems. The contradiction occurs in the sample image (below) which depicts HDR incorrectly. On the side that is supposedly HDR, the scene contains hot spots of over exposure, a component of a LDR (low dynamic range) scene. Fortunately the right side of the image isn’t HDR either but simply the left side without the bloom applied.

It doesn’t stop there: one of the most commonly used examples is a person coming out of a tunnel. We all know the effect as we come out into the sun from being in the dark. Because our eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the tunnel they are over compensating when they come out of the tunnel and thus it seems bright for a fraction of time. The problem is that people are attempting to use this as an example of HDR. Rather the desired effect is done through blooming (over exposing) the entire scene for a fraction of a second and then turning the exposure back down.

I am open to discussion (you will have to register to comment) to whether or not HDR means something different in terms of gaming but I will tell you right now that the term must be based on some idea. It isn’t valid for us to just use a term that has a meaning and change it because we need a word for that meaning. I am a firm believer that the term is rooted in how a scene is lit, as demonstrated by this other Wikipedia entry which actually uses 3D graphics to get the point across.

A new take on an old fable…

1
2

while(!Activities.Contains(DefaultActivities.KissedByPrince))
     sleep(0);

So tonight I decided to have a drink and dive headfirst into coding. Seems to be going quite well actually as I have gotten a lot of work done on the Vodka front. I don’t mean the drink, of course, but rather my new Content Management System. Right now I am working on finishing up the Content Service and integrating it into FGDN.

But I digress, the point of this post is that I was discussing some refactoring decisions with a few friends and it came to me about how much I have grown. I never really thought about it until now; that I have changed so much in terms of how I see things. When I started coding when I was eleven years old I was using Visual Basic 5 and could see things only in terms of what they were on the most basic level. I understood that text belonged in a textbox for instance, but I didn’t know that the textbox was an object.

These days I can visualize data, problems, questions, designs, et cetera in terms of objects. If someone is speaking to me about a table in a database for example I see it not as a bunch of data but rather an object of sorts. Each row representing some part, whether it be whole or not, of an object. If someone gives me a problem, such as how to make sure UI controls follow certain rules for mouse events I see the entire UI as a tree of objects. It is instantaneous for me, instinct to put things in terms of concrete objects that I can play with and affect.

Of course it doesn’t stop with code! As I learn more about coding I learn more about life, the parallels can be drawn everywhere. There are certain things that are still to be explained but even emotions can be paralleled to an advanced choosing algorithm that works on many levels (conscious, sub-conscious). How do I see this? I see it as a producer-consumer relationship: the different levels of consciousness are providing input for the emotion algorithm. Each person an instance of some human class, acting on other objects, consuming objects.

This brings up a few questions:

1. Is thinking this way correct? Is programming in an object oriented manner correct? If not, what is?

2. What is the quickest way to corrupt a beginner so that he or she can think this way? How can we educate them quickly?