Friday, February 12, 2010 - 6:39 PM
I've been without a bike for a while, since my bike went missing when I got back from LA. This last Sunday I tried borrowed a roommates bike and went all around trying to find mine. I figured someone grabbed it in order to use it, and that they'd be somewhere around these parts, so I tried to scope out all the bikes on campus and in IV. IV isn't so bad near DP for going back and forth and methodically searching each patch of bicycles you see, but then it gets more tricky as you weave your way north, I found. I didn't end up finding it, unfortunately, although I feel I looked at thousands and thousands of bikes. No random drop of "my bike" when I inspected each one happened, which is kinda what I was going for.
Anyway, I've been getting a lot on my plate. Writing it all down in a to do list really helped out. My skeletal figure recognizer hasn't progressed much, besides doing some of the actual texture mapping of the image to the drawing pane when you draw something. There are some bugs with it I'd really like to fix, but I don't know where they're coming from. Tracking them down is a huge, huge pain.
I've started on the Person Paster application which is my masters project. It will use the skeletal figure recognizer as one of it's major components. I'm making it in C# so that I can take advantage of any C libraries for doing any of the video camera motion tracking I might want to use, and so that I'll have access to a GUI library, namely WPF. WPF is pretty straightforward to learn how to use. It's a lot like the Android XML based GUI stuff, since it's also using XML. I like that a lot.
I've gotten some job/interview offers that I've followed up on and am now waiting to hear more about. I'll see what comes of them.
Also, like... in order to do the C# stuff I needed Visual C#. But when I tried to install it that terrible problem with .NET 2.0 being broken on my laptop reared it's ugly head again. So I got Visual Studio Professional and Windows 7 Professional off of MSDNAA and installed them ( which in the case of Windows, was more troublesome than it should have been ). I'm liking both, somewhat, but as predicted I'm having issues with certain things, namely the touch/pen input. The pen's fine but currently the touch screen doesn't do anything. I tried fiddling with that last night but it ended up breaking the pen. Super. Had to remove and reinstall drives to get it working again.
Anyway, Tim Rogers has his next Kotaku article up here. I really like everything he does. His writing style, the depth to which he explores topics, the personal anecdotes he adds in order to illustrate his point, they're all great. He also sounds like an interesting dude. Also he did a FFXIII review which is also entertaining.
What did I say I was playing last, Assassin's Creed? That was really awesome. Makes me want to play Assassin's Creed 2 but dangit, I have my backlog. No more buying games until it's done! I played Mirror's Edge after that and now I'm playing Prince of Persia. All sorts of free running games. Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed does it better than Prince of Persia though ( so far, I'm only at the beginning ) - while PoP ( so far ) has brilliant art and visuals and characters and setting, all the acrobatics that you need to execute are all very scripted. For Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, if you miscalculate a jump you're probably going to go off the edge. In PoP the game is "smart" and auto-corrects you. IE no matter how you exactly run, jump, and angle yourself off a given ledge, as long as you're pointing towards a wall-run labeled piece of cliff face, your character will correct you and jump towards the same location on the cliff. It's user-friendly I guess, but takes away a lot of the agency - you're pushing buttons and not actually moving through the world.
To contrast the runnin' games and match my lack of bike, I also played Yume Nikki, finally, which is a game involving walking around. Or biking, I guess, which messes up the connection. That was some intense stuff though. Wouldn't know where to start talking about it.
Now what? I guess I'll just keep working on stuff. Oh yeah, our paper was accepted to the CHI workshop! Woo hoo! Now to figure out about traveling to Atlanta in April, which the school should cover.
Anyway, I've been getting a lot on my plate. Writing it all down in a to do list really helped out. My skeletal figure recognizer hasn't progressed much, besides doing some of the actual texture mapping of the image to the drawing pane when you draw something. There are some bugs with it I'd really like to fix, but I don't know where they're coming from. Tracking them down is a huge, huge pain.
I've started on the Person Paster application which is my masters project. It will use the skeletal figure recognizer as one of it's major components. I'm making it in C# so that I can take advantage of any C libraries for doing any of the video camera motion tracking I might want to use, and so that I'll have access to a GUI library, namely WPF. WPF is pretty straightforward to learn how to use. It's a lot like the Android XML based GUI stuff, since it's also using XML. I like that a lot.
I've gotten some job/interview offers that I've followed up on and am now waiting to hear more about. I'll see what comes of them.
Also, like... in order to do the C# stuff I needed Visual C#. But when I tried to install it that terrible problem with .NET 2.0 being broken on my laptop reared it's ugly head again. So I got Visual Studio Professional and Windows 7 Professional off of MSDNAA and installed them ( which in the case of Windows, was more troublesome than it should have been ). I'm liking both, somewhat, but as predicted I'm having issues with certain things, namely the touch/pen input. The pen's fine but currently the touch screen doesn't do anything. I tried fiddling with that last night but it ended up breaking the pen. Super. Had to remove and reinstall drives to get it working again.
Anyway, Tim Rogers has his next Kotaku article up here. I really like everything he does. His writing style, the depth to which he explores topics, the personal anecdotes he adds in order to illustrate his point, they're all great. He also sounds like an interesting dude. Also he did a FFXIII review which is also entertaining.
What did I say I was playing last, Assassin's Creed? That was really awesome. Makes me want to play Assassin's Creed 2 but dangit, I have my backlog. No more buying games until it's done! I played Mirror's Edge after that and now I'm playing Prince of Persia. All sorts of free running games. Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed does it better than Prince of Persia though ( so far, I'm only at the beginning ) - while PoP ( so far ) has brilliant art and visuals and characters and setting, all the acrobatics that you need to execute are all very scripted. For Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, if you miscalculate a jump you're probably going to go off the edge. In PoP the game is "smart" and auto-corrects you. IE no matter how you exactly run, jump, and angle yourself off a given ledge, as long as you're pointing towards a wall-run labeled piece of cliff face, your character will correct you and jump towards the same location on the cliff. It's user-friendly I guess, but takes away a lot of the agency - you're pushing buttons and not actually moving through the world.
To contrast the runnin' games and match my lack of bike, I also played Yume Nikki, finally, which is a game involving walking around. Or biking, I guess, which messes up the connection. That was some intense stuff though. Wouldn't know where to start talking about it.
Now what? I guess I'll just keep working on stuff. Oh yeah, our paper was accepted to the CHI workshop! Woo hoo! Now to figure out about traveling to Atlanta in April, which the school should cover.
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