I have been trying out Ableton Live for the past few weeks, and last night decided to buy it. (I should write a separate article on the virtues of full-featured but time-limited demos). The product registration process for Ableton Live is very easy to use, and I think more commercial software vendors should adopt this process.
After making the purchase, you simply start up Live again, and instead of clicking the button to get a trial usage authorization for the demo, there's a link to the Ableton web page to authorize the product. Since I was still in the same browser session as when I just bought the product, I was still signed in and it was able to determine quickly that yes, I had in fact just paid for a copy of the product, and it gave me a link to use to authorize my copy of Ableton.
Clicking on this link took me to a file type that opens directly in Ableton Live (you know when you get that Save / Open with dialog when clicking a file - this one had pre-selected "Open with Ableton Live"). Opening the link authorized my copy of Live.
This was fast and easy. No need to wait for the box to arrive, no need to cut and paste auth codes or type in a lengthy CD key. They have found an easy way to link the fact that I paid for the software (their web site) with the software that is installed on my computer.
Their explanation of this new feature is to allow top news stories to stay in the "News Feed" based on some criteria of interest that Facebook establishes based on your interaction with the site, while fresh stories scroll by on the "Live Feed".
This seems like a plausible explanation, but it leaves me with some doubts.
For one thing, Facebook will revert to showing the News Feed by default eventually, no matter how many times you click on Live Feed.
I suggest there may be an alternate explanation to the new feature, as well as some other changes the site has seen. Scaling problems.
This is only conjecture based on some observations I have made in the past two weeks, but here are some of the observations:
Facebook reverts to News Feed, which would be much easier to cache and give better performance than the Live Feed.
The feed no longer auto-updates to show new posts using AJAX like it used to.
The page shows fewer stories and does not auto-fill when you scroll down as often.
Apparently I coined this, I'm not seeing any results on Google for it. Nor "cthulflu", but there are results for "cthulhu flu". I don't want to be Hastur in making this judgment, though.
A Spoonerism, named after Rev. Spooner, is a phrase in which syllables of certain words have been swapped, often so that they form new words. A popularly used example is "Mardon me, padam, but this pie is occupewed, may I sew you to another sheet?"
Here are some new ones I've come up with I thought of*:
A Chinese man known for irony once commissioned a wooden sculpture of himself, which he titled "Chung in Teak"
Looking to start her day off with a kick, the martial arts instructor would often order a Tai Chi Latte.
* but it turns out other people have thought of these before (though I didn't think to search before making this post. doh!)
Ever wonder how characters from video games and other 3d animations are made to move around, and how their movements are getting more and more realistic with each new generation of movies and games?
One of the key components to making this happen is something called rigging, also known as skeletal animation. This is where a technical artist sets up a 3d model of a character or other object so that it can move and be moved. The animator makes the model jump and dance and swordfight and run, but this is possible because of the setup done by the technical artist.
Here is a demo reel made by my brother Dave, a technical artist and character rigger. The beginning clips show some examples of the various types of work he has done, while the second portion of the reel goes through some characters he has created for a new game as he explains the rigging available on each 3d model. See the explanation below for what some of the terms he is using mean.
And now a brief explanation of what some of these terms mean. And how this is done.
Suppose you want to animate a human character for a game. This character needs to be able to walk along, to jump, and to have facial expressions.
Some of the movements provided for the animator are set up to support something known as Forward Kinematics, or FK for short. This describes the computations necessary to make sure that, for example, when you move the upper leg of the 3d model forward, the knee, lower leg, and foot move along with it. The position of a particular piece of the model is calculated based on the angles of the joints and the length of the "bones" that connect it to the rest of the model.
FK is also typically used to tilt and turn the head, open and close the jaw, open and close eyelids, etc. With FK, you manipulate joints and the system figures out how the model moves accordingly.
Another technique used for rigging is called Inverse Kinematics, or IK for short. This describes the computations necessary to set a portion of the model to a particular position and figure out the angles and positions of the joints accordingly. For example, if you want to make your 3d person walk, you can just move the foot forward to take a step, and IK figures out how the leg joints need to move to make that happen. Additionally, the foot can then remain on the ground while the body moves above it, and IK will figure out how the joints move to make this happen.
Prior to Inverse Kinematics, the animator had to manipulate each joint to put the foot in the proper place using Forward Kinematics to make the 3d person take a step. Worse, they then had to counteranimate the foot to get it to stay on the ground while the rest of the body moved forward. This sometimes resulted in walking characters looking like they were sliding, or made the walking look jittery and unrealistic.
For facial animations, the rigger sets up scripts that do math that calculates how the various components of the face should move or deform to make the mouth move for speech, raise the eyebrows, scrunch the forehead, puff out the cheeks, and whatever other tools the animator will need to make the character speak, show surprise, fear, anger, and other emotions, and do other things like smile and frown.
Ever wanted to get better at speaking and writing in another language? You're not alone.
A former coworker of mine, Natalie Gordon, left Amazon to go travel, and in the course of her travels in Spanish-speaking Latin America and South America, recognized the potential to create an online tool for people who speak English and want to learn Spanish, and people who speak Spanish and want to learn English.
She created a web site called Lenguajero (www.lenguajero.com), and it connects Spanish and English speaking visitors with each other so they can improve their language skills. It provides themes for discussion, such as favorite food, current events, the movies, and even learning to swear.
Their most recent addition is a feature called "Write in Spanish - Escribir en Inglés". This provides a topic for discussion and encourages visitors to leave a comment in the language they are learning, or to leave feedback on another visitor's comment if you are a native speaker. Today's topic is Favorite Food, and some members are already describing ecuadorian food, pizza, sushi, and cebiche.
If you've ever wanted to improve your Spanish skills by interacting with native speakers directly, or if you speak Spanish natively and want to improve your English, this is an incredible tool that can connect you with other people who are also trying to learn. Try it out! I just wrote about sushi.
Some time ago, XKCD compiled a list of phrases that yielded no search results in Google.
Shortly thereafter, all of those phrases could be found in Google search, and almost all of them were talking about the list from XKCD.
This seemed an interesting concept. I'd like to contribute my own to the mix. Here are some phrases that seem like they could plausibly have Google search results, but don't:
"woolen life raft"
"extinct animal conspiracy"
"relocate a volcano"
"furby embargo"
"wicker airbag"
"tap danced to court"
"newfangled rib cage"
And here are some phrases that seem like they should have no search results, but do:
I have moved the rafb.net/paste source code from its old location (which, alas, broke when I moved my blog to Typepad's servers) to a new open source project at Google Code.
I have also managed to use Typepad's file manager to fix the existing rafb.net/paste and rafb.net/paste/source URLs that have been picked up by search engines and Wikipedia, etc.
Oops. I've recently switched blog software, from a self-hosted Wordpress-based blog, to Typepad, which runs on Typepad's servers.
As part of this switch, I moved the rafb.net domain to point to Typepad's servers to be able to continue to use rafb.net as my blog address.
However, I didn't account for the fact that this would, of course, make people unable to get to rafb.net/paste to see the message that I've discontinued it, or where to get the source code.
I'm going to work on getting that restored as soon as I can. I am thinking it would make the most sense to just create a Google Code project and upload the source there.
As I was on my way to lunch today, it occurred to me that most escalators I see are lit from underneath.
I began to wonder why they would do this, and the only reason that leapt to mind was that it helps show the gaps between the treads at the top and bottom of the escalator.
This seems like a waste of energy. Why don't they just paint a line on the gap between treads? This would serve the same purpose without using any energy.
This got me thinking of other ways we could save energy on escalators.
Use "regenerative braking," so to speak, from the down escalators to provide energy to run the up escalators.
Only run the escalators when someone is on it. Some escalator installations already do this.
Having escalators that run all the time and have powerful lights under the tread seems like a huge waste of energy. And in many places, such as the atrium of my office building, they don't even have stairs as an alternative.
