Archive
The Grizzly vs. the Frog
Guess who wins when you put a frog in front of a grizzly.
As a french national and entrepreneur myself, I am a bit appalled at how little our government understands the basics of economy. The way French Minister Arnaud Montebourg dealt with Mittal or Titan shows this crass ignorance. It does not save jobs, it just pisses investors off.
Here is one: when a US company wants to buy a plant, you don’t tell them to speak with the unions first. What if Arnaud Montebourg visited the US to negociate a big contract with US airlines to sell them planes, and was told by the US department to get in line at the airport front desk to talk with a company representative?…
Boiled frog syndrom: France has to stop thinking that unions are representative in economic matters. They are only relevant as far as people matters are concerned. For economics, French unions like the CGT have repeatedly demonstrated their ignorance.
The promise of glasses-free 3D – Dolby’s vision
The promise of glasses-free 3D – Dolby’s vision
The article is a little low on details. Based on the fact that the article mentions Philips displays, my guess is that this is based on the 2D+Z technology. In other words, the picture is split between a color map and a depth map.
The benefits of this approach is that it is easy to transmit over a regular channel, since the picture is basically the same size and format as a regular HDTV picture. The drawback is that the display has to reconstruct at least two images (and for auto-stereoscopic displays, several pictures) from the information.
It may seem simple to reconstruct the required pictures from a color map and a depth map. But in reality, it’s a bit problematic, because a single color map cannot encode both the color of the front objects and the color of the objects it hides.
Imagine for example that you have a plane in the front, and the sky in the background. The sky is blue, the plane is grey. Now, at the border of the plane, the gray hides the blue. But the two eyes don’t see this limit at the same exact location. It’s a phenomenon called parallax.
So what happens is that for at least one of the pictures, the system has to “invent” colors. Basically, it’s going to extrapolate the background color of the parts you can’s see based on the color of the parts you can see.
This is one of the drawbacks of the Philips approach compared to traditional stereoscopic and auto-stereoscopic systems that send all the pictures separately (meaning that they don’t need to invent colors).
This is not very visible on movies, if at all. That’s because borders of real objects tend to be a bit fuzzy. But for synthetic images as those created by Tao Presentations, this tends to cause relatively visible artifacts.
I wonder if Dolby solved that specific problem…
Building a 3D clock in under 10 minutes
In this screencast, I show how you can build a dynamic, real-time clock in less than 10 minutes with Tao Presentations.
Coding a DNA strand in 3D
In this live coding session, we demonstrate how to quickly create a DNA strand in 3D:
The whole code is below:
import LuckyStarsTheme
theme "LuckyStars"
picture_slide "Did DNA come from outer space?",
light 0
light_position 1000, 1000, 1000
translate -300, 0, -300
rotatey mouse_x
random_seed 12345
dna_strand with -30 .. 30
slide "Arguments in favor",
* "Tardigrades can live in space"
dna_strand N:integer ->
locally
translatey 50 * N
rotatey 10 * N
locally
rotatey 90
color "#BBB"
cylinder 0, 0, 0, 10, 10, 200
dna_base_pair random (0, 3)
dna_base_pair N:integer ->
dna_base_color N mod 4
sphere 100, 0, 0, 40
dna_base_color (N + 2) mod 4
sphere -100, 0, 0, 40
dna_base_name 140, N mod 4
dna_base_name -140, (N + 2) mod 4
dna_base_color 0 -> color "red"
dna_base_color 1 -> color "blue"
dna_base_color 2 -> color "green"
dna_base_color 3 -> color "grey"
dna_base_name X:integer, N:integer ->
text_box X, 0, 40, 40,
font "Arial", 30
color "white"
align 0.5
vertical_align 0.5
dna_base_text N
dna_base_text 0 -> text "C"
dna_base_text 1 -> text "A"
dna_base_text 2 -> text "G"
dna_base_text 3 -> text "T"
Is it worth disputing the title of “first 3D game on a PC” to John Carmack?
Recently, someone posted a comment on “The Dawn of 3D Games” which I suppose disputed the vaguely stated claim that I wrote the first 3D game for a PC. So I felt like I had to reply and give my point of view on exactly why me, myself and I alone consider that Alpha Waves was a small milestone in the history of 3D gaming.
In reality, there is in my opinion not a single “first 3D game on a PC”, but for a given definition of what a 3D game is, you have a first one that matched these criteria. And for a set of criteria that seems to be relatively reasonable to me (like: it has to be a game, it has to run on some kind of PC or microcomputer, it has to be true 6-axis 3D on a reasonable portion of the screen, and you need some kind of immersion and interaction with a large number of objects), Alpha Waves may very well be the very first. Change a tiny bit in the definition, and some other game gets the crown. So let’s put it that way: Alpha Waves was innovative, and that’s my personal favorite for the title, for obvious reasons.
All that doesn’t matter much, except that in my attempt at documenting this bit of useless ancient geek history, I visited the id Software web site, and I was surprised to see that there’s still the following on their web site:
The first 3D PC game ever! Hovertank 3D debuted the amazing technology that was used to usher in the First Person Shooter genre with Wonfenstein 3D.
Is this a boiled frog approach to marketing? Just by leaving patently wrong stuff on the web site long enough, folks will stop noticing and end up thinking it’s true?
Come on, John! I hesitate writing that about Alpha Waves, when it predated Hovertank by a good year and had a significantly better 3D rendering (if only because it had three axis of rotation). And Alpha Waves is by no mean alone, there are easily half a dozen games predating Hovertank and offering better 3D. You are a celebrity in the world of video games. With all the credit that is due, why do you need to keep this little lie on your web site?
Why does it matter? Precisely because you are a celebrity, so everything you say has a huge impact, including minute details of wording in a long-forgotten corner of an old web site you probably don’t even remember existed. Nonetheless, just fix it. Simply write something like “The first id game ever.” That would do just fine. And that claim is a significant milestone in its own right. Probably a bigger one than “first 3D game on the PC”, as far as the gaming industry is concerned…
And if you feel concerned about your personal place in history, I’m sure Armadillo Aerospace will take care of that.
Oculus Rift Demo
Oculus Rift Demo. A pretty interesting virtual reality headset designed primarily for games. But this could be interesting with Tao Presentations as well…
When Google oversteps its authority
Recently, a user of Tao Presentations informed us that Google Chrome displayed a dire warning after he downloaded our software: “Tao Presentations may be malicious software”. Uh oh, for the average Joe, that’s a big no-no.
Google locks out “unapproved” programs
It’s not just us. Recently, I tried to download some of the amazing demos created by Iñigo Quilez. Same thing. Seriously, a 4K exe that manages to display a complete mountain? And Google Chrome would have me believe that there’s room in there for “malicious software”? Get real.
Now, it took me quite a while to find a solution to this problem. Apparently, you just need to record your site in Google’s Webmaster tools, and after scanning your site and ensuring (I assume) that there’s no known virus signature in the files, things should improve.
I still find this really annoying that a browser vendor would, by default, tag unknown files as “malicious”. Who are they to make this judgment call?
Why didn’t Google implement a real solution?
Shouldn’t they instead have something a little more sophisticated, that actually detects malicious signatures? You know, like a real anti-virus? Don’t tell me that Google doesn’t have smart enough engineers to write an in-browser anti-virus that doesn’t completely suck.
Nah, instead they went the easy route: anything that we don’t know is malicious. And we tell your users so.
I used to be a big fan of Chrome. Not anymore. Because of this single issue. I think this demonstrate an incredibly stupid arrogance and lack of technical diligence on Google’s part.
Google overstepped its authority and took advantage of their weight. Let’s not get used to it.
Adding chapter numbering in Apple Pages
At Taodyne, we mostly use Apple Pages to create our documents. For large documents, I’d like to be able to create numbered chapters, something like “Chapter 1″, “Chapter 2″, and so on. Apple Pages does not seem to have that feature. Let’s not get used to it, and let’s fix it.
Apple Pages can read numbered chapters from Word
One thing that I observed is that when you read a Microsoft Word document that contains numbered chapters, Apple Pages preserves that formatting. In other words, if the user interface may not know how to edit numbered lists with text in them, the rendering engine knows how to render them, and the regular editing within Pages will correctly renumber these documents.
To verify that my recollection of this capability of Pages was correct, I first created a document in Microsoft Word that looks like this:
Section 1 – Hello
Chapter 1 – This is a chapter
I. This is a numbered section
1. This is a numbered sub-section
It doesn’t just “look like” this. The Section and Chapter text were edited in the Numbering section of Microsoft Word, so this is auto-numbering.
Then I saved this document to disk, and imported it into Pages. And indeed, when I edit it in Pages, numbering works just like in Microsoft Word.
The Pages XML format
Let’s look inside the document to see what’s there. A quick tour through the command line shows that Apple Pages documents are really zipped collections of files, including XML files representing the document itself:
% unzip Hello.pages Archive: Hello.pages extracting: thumbs/PageCapThumbV2-1.tiff extracting: QuickLook/Thumbnail.jpg extracting: QuickLook/Preview.pdf extracting: buildVersionHistory.plist inflating: index.xml
The most interesting of these documents is the index.xml file. It contains the actual description of the document in XML format. And if I look inside, I see something interesting:
<sf:list-label-typeinfo sf:type="text"><sf:text-label sf:type="decimal" sf:format="Section %L -" sf:first="1"/>
So this sf:format= accepts a rather general format, with %L serving as the marker for where the number should go.
The solution for adding chapter numbers
So the solution for adding chapter numbers is simple:
- Once, you will need Microsoft Word to create a document that has the kind of chapter numbering that you need. You may have multiple levels of numbering (e.g. chapter, section, etc).
- Import this document in Pages. This will give you a new list style.
- When you want to number chapters, select the given list style.
- To edit the formatting of the numbering text, select the whole line, change colors or fonts, and in the list style, select “Redefine style for selection”. In other words, the list style defines the font and color for the numbering independently from the paragraph style, and can do that for multiple levels.
Now, you have proper chapter numbering in Apple Pages.
Christophe de Dinechin
