Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Undead Lobsters

    Via Jim Cheng.

    You can tell I’m so frikin’ excited for Dawn of the Dead this Friday. Her majesty is jetting for up north, so I’ll be alone this weekend. Plan A is to defend my house from the undead. Plan B is to watch the movie Friday night, and then go to school Saturday. I watched Patton last night since I found my DVD adapter for my XBox, so naturally, I’m so amped up about battling for ones life.

    In the meantime, fellow developer’s fuel my desire by sending me articles like this. I grew up on seafood, but I still think this sounds a little unhumane. The robotic lobster reference, however, reminds me of that floating barrel submarine invented by gnomes from D&D. I always hated how the PC’s drove it backwards to go faster.

    Undead Lobsters

  • Rememba’ Da 80’s, JXL Quote, & Backyard Idea

    Rather than sacrifice a worthy blog entry to determine if my DNS entries truly have propagated, I’m just submitting rambling… I need to test my re-re-re-re-re-installation of MoveableType.

    …oh yeah, and sorry for the construction. “Pardon our progress” as the Baltimore/Washington Airport up in Maryland put it. ‘Course, they said that for 4 years, my site won’t take that long to get all of my files back up!

    *******

    Rememba’ Da 80’s

    I learned confidence from Mr. T,
    I learned suave Michael Knight;
    Knightrider & A-Team on the TV,
    Male role-models to learn from at night.

    I learned to laugh at it all from Murdock,
    I learned da playa-playa from Face,
    ‘Course when kit pulled up at the end of da block,
    The C button confirmed David Hasselhoff wasn’t chaste.

    The Dukes of Hazard did mad doughnuts,
    Airwolf kicked chopper skillz,
    Daisy Dukes drove our father’s nuts,
    While a Dodge Charger flew over streams & hills.

    The Unknown Stuntman was your other uncle,
    Transformers your future job,
    You awed as the Goonies stared at One Eye Willy’s treasure like a carbuncle, …and always wondered how the bullet ratio of GI-JOE didn’t make it more macabre.

    *******

    Starbucks Friday Night Discussion

    “There are only two things I’m sure of life, Erik. One, I can’t live without Brandy. And Two, killing zombies is the only time murder is justified.”
    — JesteXL

    *******

    Dude, I want to put a waterfall in my backyard. However, her majesty doesn’t think that some of the stones will match the brick of our house… so I drew a rendition of a modified pool (cut in half so you can sit on the sides) of it built into our hill. …I don’t know man, I still want rustic, but not sure yet…

    Backyard Idea: Attempt 1

    Did I mention not having Perl on a website is a fate worse than death? I truly learned I could not live without MoveableType. Rolling my own blogging solution was NOT an option. Too busy for that stuff. It’s funny how my loyalty dies a quick death, though, when it crashes.

  • Avalon Graphic Composition sounds like Flash & Director

    Via Navneet @ onClipEvent.com/enterframe.

    Dude, it’s so funny reading that article that Navneet just posted. It’s like reading “The Geeks’ Version of Flash & Director Compositing”. Course, Director comes a close second. Mainly because the article discusses the off-screen buffering of screen drawing, Flash does not give you direct access to the screen, but rather limited control of objects that utilize commands that can happen faster than such a screen refresh via updateAfterEvent(). Director on the other hand gives you direct control to the on-screen drawing via updateStage(), which you call wayyyy more than once a frame.

    All the stuff I learned in art school, they are breaking it down technically so programmers realize what they can do with Avalon’s graphic compositing engine. For someone like me, I go, “Duh, I already have that.” Course, this is an OS we’re talking about with about 1 step away from a hardware call. That’s where the fear comes in. You pray for the Japanime ‘esque cocoon Central is currently in to be infused with mad optimizations, hax, and mods to the Flash 7 Player, so when it emerges, it is the faster Flash Player to date.

    The real problem is Avalon, or whatever the heck Visual Studio will morph into, doesn’t sound like it’ll have a timeline. Just as the thought of developing Flash Appz via MXML (Flex) is sickening, so to is using XAML to do the same thing in Avalon. The same Ravenloft horror check programmers experienced and (some failed) because of Flash’s timeline is reversed in this case for someone like me. I respect those people who are comfortable and dig tweening engines, like Robert Penner’s DynTween, and all of what is built into the Flash MX 2004 AS2 component framework. But that’s not for me. Suddenly, although I feel compelled to dive into a C# sharp book, at the same time, I’m praying that Microsoft realizes I, as well as many other animation-talented Flash Developers, are a valuable asset to promoting their products, and therefore provide some familiar way for us to contribute.

    Maybe there could be a powerful merging, as I explain layering techniques, they explain thread mutagation. Bleh. Come on Central, don’t let me down… :: crosses fingers and prays ::

  • DNS Change & Files Removed

    Ok, changing my DNS to my new server as we speak. Additionally, all of my files are offline until I can update my site to something more manageable. If I’m not back in 5 minutes… just wait longer.