Next tuesday it’s once again MacWorld-time – Apple will kick off it’s developer conference with a keynote and the guys of bits-und-so are going to meet and live-stream their comments and thoughts.
Source: http://www.bitsundso.de/live/
Oh joy! It seems that the public-law radio and tv channels in germany start to think about the possibilities the internet can bring us.
One of these channels is the WDR radio which just started it’s internet push: the WDR RadioRecorder is available now – and it allows you to select a broadcast and mark it to be recorded. Actually it sounds a bit strange because I tend to think that the people at WDR radio don’t really get it when it comes to “on-demand”. Recording is not on-demand… The tool is available for Windows only at the moment and looks a bit like iTunes…
It’s made entirely with free software and released under the creative commons license: Big Buck Bunny is the name of the brand new short movie made with blender, inkscape, gimp and more.
“The Amsterdam based ‘Blender Institute’ announced today the premiere of the short 3D animation movie ‘Big Buck Bunny’. After a production period of over six months, the short film will premiere with a grand party on Thursday 10th of April, in the hip new Amsterdam cinema ‘Studio K’.
“The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software” said producer and Institute director Ton Roosendaal, “But the result equals on artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity the quality of what you would expect from large animation studios”.
The movie differentiates itself mostly by its totally open character. Not only open source tools such as the 3D suite ‘Blender’ were used to create the movie, but also the movie itself – including all materials as used in the animation studio – will be freely accessible for everybody to reuse, to learn from it or just to enjoy it.
The promotion of Open Content creation and distribution is one of the main goals of the Creative Commons, the organization that created the ‘Creative Commons’ licenses, which have been widely adopted by artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who wish to freely share their creative endeavors. Blender Institute in Amsterdam is one of the first companies worldwide exploiting Open Content professionally and commercially. Currently 14 people are working full-time in the Institute, wrapping up Big Buck Bunny and working on an Open Game based on the characters from the movie.
Big Buck Bunny is a comedy about a well-tempered rabbit “Big Buck”, who finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three rodents. In the typical 1950ies cartoon tradition Big Buck then prepares for the rodents a comical revenge.”
Source 1: http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/
Thank god there’s now a .NET Compact Framework profiler available – we can now start to optimize our compact framework applications – and the best of the story: this one works well and is completely free.
Key features:
Source 1: http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler/features
They landed on the mars again…and they will launch a space shuttle within the next 22 hours if everything works out as planned. So maybe you, just like me, are interested in getting some live-information about that.
There’s NASA TV but on the NASA website you only get low (150kbit) bitrate streams. If you want better quality, just try these links:
Of course you can always go with the standard website livestream…
Since we already got them this is not an option for us… but maybe for your wedding:
Source:http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10501732
There’s a lot going on in the world of opensource these days – but it seems that not the development side of things is discussed most of the time in some projects – it’s the social side, the “I want this, you want that, I don’t like you”-side of things.
Ever so often some opensource project split up and do a “fork“.
These are just two examples for your reading pleasure and studies of human behaviour:
1. Project Pidgin:
Well – the developers and users of project pidgin are not able to reach a consensus on the question how their beloved software should look like and behave. Believe it or not: There’s a project fork and a hefty discussion just on the question wether or not the Chat Input Text field should be resizable or not.
This picture should visualize the problem:
The developers did not want to make it resizable, the users wanted it to be resizable. Problem – Discussion – Fork you!
You can read the whole story here.
2. Project XBMC / OSXBMC
OSXBMC is the team that forked in this example: They develop – aside of the main XBMC team – the Mac OSX port of the Xbox Media Center (which actually runs on Xbox, Linux, Windows, OSX now).
Obviously there were hefty discussions going on with the main XBMC team. Mainly because teh XBMC main team thinks that the OSXBMC guys didn’t check-in their source changes often enough.
You can read one side of the story here and click you through to the other side.
The problem with these forks is not the fork itself but the way the people in these projects seem work with each other. Many very promising projects died because people just could not work together…
As far as I am concerned: For opensource projects I prefere the maintainer-scheme that for example the linux-kernel uses. Have one gracious dictator who has the final word about the release and people that maintain different parts of the project.
Source 1: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986
Source 2: http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/21/exodus/
Source 3: http://xbmc.org/
I just found that Mozilla Firefox plugin that allows me to blog from the Mac (which still lacks a great and compatible blog-tool for this site).
If you can read this text AND if you can see the picture – everything worked fine.
There’s this tool called “Processing”…apparently you can create stunning things with it:
The video was created by flight404 using Processing…
“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”
Source 1: http://www.flight404.com/blog/?cat=1
Source 2: http://processing.org/download/index.html
This past Saturday I had the rare pleasure of being the exclusive attendance (along with a friend) for a screening of the movie “Speed Racer”, the new one from the Wachovski Brothers.
To cut it short – it was a 135 minute cotton candy eye overload. Some nice actors (with cameos of German actors), but nothing real and therefore nothing of deeper interest.
Like rumored before in Hollywood: This movie has the aura of a big flop. My experience now confirms that.
Jens Heymann
You don’t even need to have an extra tool installed! Just use this handy keyboard shortcut:
Since the good old mac mini is gone and a new mac arrived – and since I moved to a new place I think it’s time to share my current desktop with you:
If you want to know how it looked in the old place an 9 months ago take a look at the fourth part of this series.
You may – just like me – be curious about the things that might or might not be inside of the plastic housing of a SD card:
