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45 days ago
No… this isn’t about being environmentally conscious – although that is a good idea. Everyone remember my buddy Shelly? She’s got a small video thing going – and from time to time she hits me up for ideas. This time its a small Halloween Zombie flick and she’s been having problems getting a good clip of a virus growing out of control. So I ask her to get online and I share my desktop so I can see what’s she’s been doing. Let’s go over what she’s tried so far… clips of blood cells floating and even going disease ridden. Good – but they look a bit too much like the same clips of blood cells floating by you see all the time – and very… 1960’s Fantastic Voyage – not really able to build any tension when you see them – because you expect Raquel Welch to float by in scuba gear any second. Then… there’s Clips of viruses from CDC and other places …which… looked a bit too much like something from a High School Health Class once again – about all the menace of well… virus videos from ...
59 days ago
Everyone's talking about money these days. How much the salaries have dropped and how much companies have dropped in what they’re offering prospective hires. And the fact is – companies are offering less… for re-hires and we’d expect that. The economy has tanked, and after all a company’s gotta make a profit. Or… is that actually the real picture? Good question. Here’s some actual numbers for what’s been reported in for the IT sector anyway when it comes to what I do (and no… I do not make anywhere near what Salary.com reports and never have. In fact I think I know 3 people in the business who make even close to the middle of that … and they’re some major names. The reason why Salary.com’s numbers are inflated is they take into account benefits and stock options and so on… many of which really don’t exist anymore, but Salary.com is counting them as part of the salary. Thinking that having 800 shares of Lucrative technologies stock is worth $42k of salary is laughable since I ...
75 days ago
Anyone remember the Kings Row Taxi Service? Of course you don’t. Well you probably don’t unless you were playing City of Heroes on the Infinity server a couple years ago. They were a group of superheroes in the City of Heroes MMORP that I used to hang with. To say that the Taxi’s were awesome to hang with is an understatement. But the problem with COH was it’s basic limitations. Eventually between work and other pressures I stopped playing. The main limitation to CoH and what led to a lot of players leaving (myself included)– was the role that the NCSoft the parent company had in constant “balancing'” and driving game design decisions of the game not on playablity but what became obvious as business decisions that had less to do with balance than wringing more dollars in player time. This led to a series of nerfs followed by a series of power ups – well it’s an old story with any MMO that if you’ve played one we’re all familiar with. I got to the point where it was the ...
80 days ago
Portal Tranisiton Demo had someone ask me why they hadn’t seen me do anything with video or actually “post” anything but writings and musings in a while – and rest assured I will post more stuff very soon – so here’s the beginnings of some of the effects for a side project I’m working on. This is a bit of the standard glowing warping portal – and this is the pt 1 version – before all the toys have been added so to speak. It’s really only 4 layers – 2 particle layers that have had turbulent displacement applied, one which has a shine effect applied to generate the white/wispy/glowy globlets – the other uses the turbulent to give it the liquid look. In this version – it’s appearing before it’s cover effect so you can see that early on in the shot. If I didn’t have a cover effect coming – I’d probably drop in a gradual progression so that it kind of fades in – possibly even with a dissolve like Star Trek transporter type look to bring it in gradually. Just for reference – ...
142 days ago
Just when you thought it was safe… I drag you back into cXML validation! Hey – put down the torture devices…. it’s not what you think! Remember a few posts back – we built a quicky validation tool? Well had someone ask if I actually use that, and the truth is – no I don’t. The actual tool that I use is the one shown here. But all of this began as something very similar to the code you saw here. There’s a lot more exception handling – and slew of features added into it since we / I use this for all kinds of cool eCommerce tests around work. As you can see the initial purpose of the tool remains the same, which is to validate cXML documents. With this I can load the documents into the tool – and using any of the pre-populated addresses – it is capable of process an actual file, which is to say round tripping where we begin with the PunchOut set up request and go all the way through the Purchase Order (OrderRequest) and even the POOM (PunchOutOrderMessage). It was built ...
