Primordial Ooze

Greg Schechter wrote a blog entitled, Introducing 3D in Avalon and 2D/3D Integration. He says, and I quote:

2D/3D Integration

The programming model of Avalon is fundamentally a 2D one.  Elements are rendered via painter's algorithm, back to front.  There's no notion of interpenetration of elements.  A challenge for 3D is figuring out how it fits into this 2D world.  The approach we arrived at is pretty straightforward - each 3D “world” or “scene” (called a Model3D) is an island onto itself.  It takes a Model3D to be paired up with a Camera before it can be incorporated into the 2D world.  The Model3D+Camera can be thought of as a 2D projection of the model from the viewpoint of the camera, and that projection is what gets incorporated into and composited with the 2D scene.  The 2D element that represents this combination is called a Viewport3D, and is just as full-fledged an element as our Image element, Text element, etc.

As other bloggers have said before. This model works for most desktop applications, but falls short for games programming where the 3D experience needs to be much more emersive.

By Nick at 8:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm using using BlogJet to make this post. I just heard about a new blogging tool called Visual Blogger by Interscape technologies.

Both products are early, but Blogjet is further along. Actually, that's not fair. BlogJet is "finished" since it's non-beta version 1.0.0.  Visual Blogger is still in beta, which is a good thing since it's so rough around the edges.

Visual Blogger seemed to spend a lot of time making the UI look like an Office 2003 application and not enough time implementing features that bloggers need.

BlogJet wins this round hands down. Blogjet isn't enormously feature rich, but they took the features a blogger needs and nailed each to perfection.

Visual Blogger may improve over time, but for now I'm totally into BlogJet.

By Nick at 10:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't usually comment on hardware news, but I found this Infoworld article on the new PCI Express bus very intriguing. Looks like AGP8x is going away in favor of a newer slot that will be fast enough for every high-end graphics need, plus Gigabit Ethernet, 10-Gigabit Ethernet even!.

Over the next few years, these new slots wil appear side-by side with their PCI and AGP counterparts, but will eventually dominate all slots in new PC's.

Cool.

By Nick at 10:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As a followup to my original "Seductive Longhorn" blog, I wanted to point out some new relevant information. I also explore some ideas on how Windows Forms could solve some of my "Wit h Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" concerns with Longhorn.

In my original entry, I admitted my fear that all of the sexy stuff in Longhorn will wreak havok on the user experience. With all of that power and expressiveness, perhaps every Longhorn application will look and act differently from the next.

It just so happens that I'm not the only one to be thinking of this (thank God, because if I were the world would be in trouble). Joe Beda points us to some Aero User Experience Guidelines: Sampler for PDC 2003.

The last section called "Application Archetypes" was most relevant to my rantings, but mostly useless. They present different application  types:

• Document Editor Applications
• Database Applications
• E-Commerce Applications
• Information/Reference Applications
• Entertainment Applications (A picture of Halo for the PC)
• and Utility Applications

All of these application types were merely screenshots of existing applications. They all seemed to be running under Longhorn, given the way controls looked, but few if any were Longhorn-specific applications. So, there was little guidance in how to contruct a form or a dialog in such a way that you can make your form or dialog look cool, but which wouldn't require a massive investment in time to understand how to manipulate.

Perhaps Windows Forms is the answer. A Windows Form application has familiar structure. You start with a form, you slap controls on that form, and you program the form from there.

I suppose some future version of Visual Studio (Orcas?) could allow the user to write standard Windows Forms application, but suddenly present a family of properties and options enabled by the power of Avalon. For instance, when working with a Windows Form and controls, perhaps you are presented with these additional Longhorn-specific options:

• When the form is dismissed, would you like it to explode into butterflies and fly away?
• When a combo drops down, would you like the selection list to be fade in and remain semi-transparent?
• Would you like me to auto-generate a algorithmic texture for your form and etch your controls on this canvas? Would you like marble, quicksilver, or stone floor?
• When you expand your options dialog to show advanced options, would you like the the advanced options controls to be caught off guard, scream at being suddenly exposed, and quickly fall into their proper places?

You get the picture.

 

By Nick at 10:12 AM | Permalink

What a cool tool!

UPDATE: Changed title, sorry for the extra entry in my feed.

I'm taking a new blogging tool called BlogJet for a test run. It offers a pretty basic HTML editor, which makes somewhat complicated posts somewhat easy to publish. Also, integration with the blog publishing system is very good. The UI is clean and modern. I can access multiple blogs on multiple sights, pick multiple categories per post. Font formatting is a cinch!

Some recent photos of our trip to Disney... 

 

Antonio spazzing out
	Giovanni submerged
Marco in the sky
	Papa and Giovanni

By Nick at 9:02 PM | Permalink

Simply, I want my $20 good-faith donation back before I pay for a license.

By Nick at 3:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jon Udell writes about "personas":http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/17.html#a1001 and points be back to an "blog entry":http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/06/13.html he wrote a while back about a well-covered topic (though he recognized this in the end by providing a link to a "google search":http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=extreme+design%2C+extreme+programming on his entry's title). My favorite quote form the article was:

It's extreme design versus extreme programming. I don't buy either one completely. Call me an extreme anti-extremist. Call me a bundle of contradictions. There's more than one way to do it. I'll never sign up for a methodology, no matter whose. But I'll learn what I can from all of them.

He points out an interesting contradiction between Extreme Programming and Interaction Design ("Extreme" design). The former school promotes interative discovery. The latter school promotes a complete up-front thought process about the problem domain which is aimed to produce a complete specification. The google link points to an article specific to this topic in which Kent Beck (of XP fame) and Alan Cooper (of Interaction Design fame) defend their philosphies. The article is called "Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design":http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/ In the article, Copper explains how XP is a developer's self-defense against problems in the organization. Rather than try and solve the problem through the tenets of XP, Cooper would rather fix the organization. Cooper says,

I think XP has some really deep, deep tacit assumptions going on, and I think the deepest tacit assumption is that we have a significant organizational problem, but we can't fix the organization.

Beck holds fast that all of the interaction analysis doesn't have to hold up the production process. He contests that once the customer sees what has been created, they can tell you what's right, what's wrong, and what needs to happen. Cooper's main point is his assertion that the customer cannot give the correct answer. Cooper says,

This is one of the fundamental assumptions, I think, that underlies XP—that the requirements will be shifting—and XP is a tool for getting a grip on those shifting requirements and tracking them much more closely. Interaction design, on the other hand, is not a tool for getting a grip on shifting requirements; it is a tool for damping those shifting requirements by seeing through the inability to articulate problems and solutions on management's side, and articulating them for the developers. It's a much, much more efficient way, from a design point of view, from a business point of view, and from a development point of view.

Fascinating. I can't help but to raise the glove of Alan Cooper. Even though the two tried to kiss and make up in the end, they got back into a fight and Kent Beck just seemed desperate to validate the code-right-away philosphy. Alan Cooper's lets-just-think-about-the-problem approach seemed to much more rational to me. I say that with one caveat, though. IMHO, The waterfall approach is fundamentally flawed and my agreement with most of what Alan Cooper says does not in any way imply I approve of long discrete phases of development. It's damaging for a developer to work on a recent bug in code he wrote months ago. There is information and understanding achieved once development begins. When Kent Beck and Alan Cooper were both charged with finding a way their philosophies could interoperate, it was Alan Cooper's description that seemed to make more sense to me. Read the article and tell me if you disagree.

By Nick at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (481) | TrackBacks (0)

For the first time ever, I'm pretty happy with my video editing rig. It's nothing too extravagant, but the performance is finally acceptable. For one thing, I'm able to suck in video over Firewire to my 7200rpm drives, while copying 5Gb of files over the network, while blogging. My CPU never went about 20%. It would be nice if I could suck in video at a speed faster than real-time, but I'm happy that I can finally import all of that data without choking my machine. My new machine is only mid-range. It's a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with HT technology. This gives me 2 cores to play with. I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. This is more than I need, but I accidentally placed 2 1GB orders instead of 1. The first order said it was on back-order, so I ordered from a different vendor. Both showed up and I could not resist installing both. I'm weak, what can I say? My camcorder is new and I love it. I got a "Canon GL2":http://www.canondv.com/gl2/. The unit is kind of bulky, but the quality difference between this camcorder and my last JVC unit is huge. My old clunker was one of the original DV cameras made, kind of 1st generation. The quality of video in low-light conditions was particularly poor. The loading and ejection mechanics needed a gentle nudge to get tapes in and out. The straw that broke the camel's back was the on/off switch breaking off. For months, I had to hold it in place and carefully turn it between record, play and off positions. Eventually, the button just plain fell off for good.

By Nick at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just watched the Last Samurai and I enjoyed it immensely. It was well paced, had fantastic fight scenes, and managed not to be too full of itself. I thought the way they paralleled the slaughtering of the Indians with the slaughtering of the Samurai. Tom Cruise's character went from one side (fighting indians on behalf of the U.S.) to the other side (defending the Samurai from the onslought of the imperial army). Very nice.

By Nick at 11:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just installed the WinHEC build of Longhorn. It didn't seem any different than the PDC version I had previously. Before the install, I was aware that there were some spectacular changes available, but I didn't know if it was part of the new WinHEC build. Then, a colleague told me to run "sbctl.exe start" in my \Windows\i386 directory and I instantly saw what all of the gasps and awes were about. Holy cow! The shading effect below all Windows is neat. The fade/scale-in technique used by appearing dialogs is neat. The Alt-tab 3D task-switch stuff is also neat. There are all sorts of new UI tricks for standard stuff like Wizards that MS is playing with. Some of it's kind of icky, IMHO. I saw a lot of different UI styles in a lot of different Windows. I think each team must be experimenting since the experience seems a bit of a hodge-podge. This made me think of a danger Longhorn poses to the user. I think that standardization of UI’s will start to fall away once the developer starts XAML'ing their way to UI Nirvana. Each application will be as unique in Longhorn as each web site you visit on the web. I don’t think I like that. I think there is a productivity gain, an intuition, in knowing that the Tools menu has an Options item and that the File menu us used to save and load files. Obviously a menu bar is probably one UI element that will stay around in the Longhorn world, but I feel so much will change from application to application that the user experience will suffer. Perhaps this isn't true. Perhaps the tools in place and the UI guidelines will be clear enough that I'm worrying about nothing. I'll just have to read more and see for myself.

By Nick at 4:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Holy Cool Feature Batman! A colleague sent me a link to a "blog entry":http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/bsblog/archive/2004/05/10/13199.aspx! written by Brendan Tompkins. He has an idea for enhancing the history view of IE to allow navigation back to and into past histories. A must read. After reading it, I had an idea of my own! I'd like to search the text of pages I've visited recently. Ideally this would be in realtime. Perhaps something like this is an ideal problem for WinFS to solve?

By Nick at 11:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently bought external enclosures for two 250GB drives I bought. These drives store my home video collection. The drives are very attractive and the construction is solid. The casing is aluminum, which should dissipate heat well. However, after running two drives stacked for 8 hours, I was sure I could have fried an egg on the top drive. So, I unstacked them and put their flush side on top of a meat and fish thawing board I own. The drives have been running for 16 hours and they are merely warm. I wanted to avoid a fan, but I suppose a fan combined with this setup would cool the drives rather well. You can see my setup here: A somewhat brief review of the enclosure I bought is shown here: http://www.3dxtreme.net/index.php?id=bytecc3.5enclosure1 I wish they would have went into more detail about cooling scenarios. Anyway, one thing I noticed about my rig is that the drives never seem to spin down. Perhaps they do and I'm not aware. Under Windows XP, the drives do become offline after a period and I have to go into "Administrative Tools" to "Reactivate" the disks since the drive letters disappear. I would expect the drives to cool to room temperature when they go offline, but this does not seem to happen. So, I assume the drives are not actually spinning down. Any insight from anyone? UPDATE: Someone on a newsgroup informed me that these thawing boards are merely aluminum with a black surface. From the feel of the board, I would say this sounds correct. In any case, I also found that having a single drive on allowed the drive to stay room-temperature cool, which is better than searing hot!

By Nick at 12:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)