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Author Archive

Raytraced Lightning: The Movie

by Devin on Apr.29, 2009, under Programming

Heres a preview of a lightning render from my raytracer. Lightning generation code created by Chris Lapointe. Expect a more detailed explanation in a later post. Youtube video after the jump.

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Facebook is circling the drain and knows it

by Devin on Apr.04, 2009, under Webpages

Facebook’s new scheme to not stop existing is to try to convince users that they want to give each other ‘credits’ for especially good updates (at the tune of $1/100 credits). The only things you can use these credits for is to give them to another user or buy a virtual gift and give that to another user. So by doing almost nothing Facebook hopes to rake in some of your cash. I’m sure you can see why this won’t work, why cant they? This is just the latest in a long series of events that shows Facebook is on the way out and is well aware of this fact. From multiple UI changes to a fairly constant firing of CFOs, there is no shortage of signposts pointing down for Facebook. It’s death certainly won’t happen soon, their userbase is still growing nearly exponentially and they’re still one of the best social networking sites there is, but its only a matter of time until the end.

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Twitter Hook 0.1

by Devin on Mar.31, 2009, under Programming

Twitter Hook is a small PHP app uses Twitters search API to pull the most recent tweets containing a specified keyword. This is just an early version. I plan on converting it to a wordpress plugin along with adding a few features it in the near future. Download link and demo of it searching for the keyword ‘twitter’ after the break. Please leave any comments, criticism, or questions in the comments.
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Facebook vs Twitter (except not)

by Devin on Mar.28, 2009, under Webpages

Facebook seems to have gotten the idea that Twitter is its main competition. As of the most recent homepage redesign Facebook essentially functions as a Twitter clone with a beefed up profile page. The concepts of a status update and a wall post have merged together to approximate Twitter’s tweet and has pushed everything else to a small bar on the side. Which honestly is not terrible a design, except for the fact that Facebook is not the same kind of thing as Twitter. And it probably never will be. They aren’t even competing. I use both quite frequently, but for completely different purposes. To the best of my knowledge that’s pretty common among users of both. Even as similar as a tweet is to the new version of a status update, I rarely if ever have the same content for both. So even if Facebook perfectly clones every feature of Twitter, people won’t use it as the same way use Twitter, simply because that’s not what Facebook is to them. Sadly Facebook is breaking itself to give its users what it thinks they want. Here’s a heads up Facebook: Sure we want all that stuff, but not from you, and certainly not at the cost of the features we knew, liked, and actually wanted.

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Toribash

by Devin on Mar.23, 2009, under Video Games

Toribash is a very interesting game I stumbleupon’d the other day. Its a fighting game with ragdoll physics, but instead of a default move set you control the limbs individually in a turn based fashion. This makes the game very unique and interesting, but also gives it a massive learning curve. After playing it for a day I feel like I still cant do very much. Even when I manage to get a hit my character ends up curled in a ball on the floor. I have seen a couple players who can do some very insane things with it though so I know more is possible. Its rather addicting for the difficultly and steep learning curve. Plus as a bonus its cross platform (Win/Mac/Linux) and runs quite well on them all.

Toribash

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GrepArt

by Devin on Mar.21, 2009, under Webpages

GrepArt is a webpage created by a friend of mine. The idea is an image is uploaded and voted on and as long as it gets voted highly it stays up. But if people vote it down, it gets replaced by another image. I think it’s kind of a cool concept. Check it out.

GrepArt

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CImg

by Devin on Mar.13, 2009, under Graphics, Programming

CImg is a nice little C++ library that I discovered the other day. It’s described as a ‘Image Processing Toolkit’. It consists of a few classes. First CImg, a representation of a image. Its a pretty versatile class, It can handle up to 3 dimensions of image data with a variable number of channels. It has tons of functions ranging from your basic load/save to more advanced image manipulation functions such as drawing graphs and various blurs. CImgDisplay is the second class and it basically handles the creation of a window for your image so you dont have to learn opengl and/or your OS’s window manager of choice just to display a simple image to a window. It will keep track of any input or any changes the user makes to the window. The other classes (CImgException and CImgList) are nice, just not as massively useful as the other two. Its great for the new incarnation of my raytracer and would have been great for some of my old projects from way back. I highly recommend it for any simple image related work.

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Watchmen

by Devin on Mar.06, 2009, under Movies

I was cautiously optimistic for Watchmen. I had heard of the reputation of the graphic novel and read it before the release of the movie. I went in expecting a simplified action boosted version of the book. So, after just returning from a midnight showing of Watchmen here are my general thoughts on it, in no particular order (Minor spoilers ahead): (continue reading…)

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Hey look, its a blog!

by Devin on Mar.05, 2009, under Uncategorized

Yea, so I got this wordpress thing set up now. Just need to learn what all the shiny buttons do. Will use this to post updates on any programming work I’m doing or anything I find generally interesting.

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