Assignment 4 for The Art Department Sketchbook class. Empathy.

If you own one of Thomson / Speedtouch routers, and the router restarts itself from time to time (you will see “Kernel warm restart” in the events log of the router), try setting a fan to blow at the router.

I used to have this problem. I tried upgrading the firmware, I tried disabling services (wireless, Dynamic DNS .. etc), but none worked. However, setting the fan on it worked. It wasnt even hot to the touch before trying this out, so it might be a solution that many don’t think of. Give it a try if you have this problem, it might work for you too.

Set the router on it side so that the fan can blow at the bottom side of it.

عندك مشكلة مع المودم يقطع كل شوية؟ جرب وجه عليه مروحة!

عندى واحد من SpeedTouch / Thomson  و كان يقطع معاى كل نص ساعة (يكتب لك “Kernel warm restart” فى اللوق حق المودم). سويت تحديثات، تعديلات ما نفع. جربت أوجه عليه مروحة مع إنه ما كان حار لما أمسكه. أشتغل زى الحلاوة لأكثر من 30 ساعة الان. جرب هذا الحل إذا كان عندك نفس المشكلة (ممكن تحطه على جانبه عشان تنفخ المروحة فى المنطقة السفلية، أو حطه قريب المكيف).

Sometimes the Stars from The Audreys on Vimeo.

“Sometimes the Stars” is a gorgeous new song from Adelaide, Australia band The Audreys, taken from their 2010 album of the same name. The accompanying short animated film, produced by Luke Jurevicius and directed by Ari Gibson & Jason Pamment, is about a lost girl’s journey through a surreal landscape, and her yearning to make a connection in this distant yet strangely familiar world.

Produced by Luke Jurevicius

Directed by Ari Gibson & Jason Pamment

Production Designers: Luke Jurevicius, Shane Devries, Jason Pamment, Ari Gibson

Story by Luke Jurevicius, Ari Gibson & Jason Pamment

2D Animation: Ari Gibson

Background Art: Jason Pamment

Compositing: Ryan Kirby & Jason Pamment

Colouring: Jarrod Prince & Joshua Bowman

Executive Producers: Stu McCullough, Taasha Coates, Tristan Goodall

Special Thanks: Sarah Macdonald, Makoto Koji, Jeremy Hill-Brooks

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Info on the full exhibition of art that includes animation and figurative works visit: www.conteanimated.com

Behind the scenes rough cut here: http://vimeo.com/16330140 and final cut here: http://vimeo.com/21096567

I admit it, I used to consider computing the Big-O of algorithms you write is ridiculously useless. “We have these powerful machines nowadays!” and boy was I wrong …. In http://leepoint.net/notes-java/algorithms/big-oh/bigoh.html and under Why Size Matters

Does anyone really have that much data?

It’s quite common. For example, it’s hard to find a digital camera that that has fewer than a million pixels (1 mega-pixel). These images are processed and displayed on the screen. The algorithms that do this had better not be O(N²)! If it took one microsecond (1 millionth of a second) to process each pixel, an O(N²) algorithm would take more than a week to finish processing a 1 megapixel image, and more than three months to process a 3 megapixel image (note the rate of increase is definitely not linear).

Another example is sound. CD audio samples are 16 bits, sampled 44,100 times per second for each of two channels. A typical 3 minute song consists of about 8 million data points. You had better choose the write algorithm to process this data.

A dictionary I’ve used for text analysis has about 125,000 entries. There’s a big difference between a linear O(N), binary O(log N), or hash O(1) search.

HOWEY! a week for 1 megapixel image using an O(N²) algorithm!! …. Ok, sure, on a desktop application where the data are usually small and the processor is fast, it doesn’t matter much. But for heavily visited web sites (huge data) or for small devices (slow processor) it makes a world of difference. I better watch for this in my current projects, one’s expect heavy traffic (huge data) and the other is a mix of medium/big data and slow-ish server. Better go revise the code.

Call it “source control”, call it “version control”, call it “revision control”,  or call it “Big Mac with no cheese!”. What ever you call it, source control is an important concept of modern day software projects.
“What is source control?” I hear you say.
Well, allow me to point you to Mr. Eric Sink. He works on Source Control tools. He also wrote a nice guide for complete beginners to learn source control (not surprisingly, using his own tools for the guide. But he does it in a general way so that the tool he/you use doesn’t matter much).
http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html
“…umm, still, what is source control?“
In short, source control is a way to keep your projects source code :
A) Safe (Backed up).
B) Easy to share between developers working on a project.
C) Allow developers to work in parallel.
D) Keep all the versions of your files (ie enable you to go back in time to see how the code evolved).
And other features that I currently cant bother to mention since these are the main ones.
And why should you learn it? well … because college don’t teach you how and employers (the good ones that is) expect you to know it already. Even with bad employers … its up to you as a professional developer to introduce professional development methods in the work place. Your boss will thank you, your team will thank you and the team that was hired after you got fired and has to work on your projects will REALLY thank you.
Enjoy.

I was reading Penelope Trunk’s blog when this line in “How to be more interesting to other people” just struck my

So look, interesting does not come from greatness. Interesting comes from conflict.

Something about this line just rings to me. It seems so freaking true, and I cant tell why. She follows it with this line, which I guess illustrates what is meant with the pervious line.

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with the line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

Even thought I’m in the last paragraph, I couldn’t continue until I share this line with someone. Now that I did that …. I’ll go finish that post.

Following the advice of many people (notably Penelope Trunk , Steve Yegge), one (I) must maintain and update a personal blog in order to success in the work place/job market. In You should write blogs, Steve lists 4 reasons why many don’t blog. I mostly identify with:

Reason #3: Nobody will read my blog.

and its simple, I got nothing interesting to talk about.

Here I am, a 24 years old software engineering Grad, freelancing on a game project. Technical issues? I’m still not experienced for that, and there are million of blogs for that and will do it 10-20 times better. Work place issues? I work from home and don’t get out much (so that kills talking about local events). And don’t say about working from home. Freelance Switch, Anti 9 to 5 Guide, Location Independent  all do a fine job at that. Drawing? again, million other artists got that covered. Video games … covered. Daily life tips and tricks? …covered (I love you lifeHacker!). Anime …covered. Oh coffee! I can … nope, covered.

That leaves me with the last thing, a blog that points to other blogs entries and talk about them (I know, highly original). I’m not bashing the people that do it, some of them give you a very interesting read, even without reading the blog they are pointing to. But again, there isn’t a single topic that I can devote a blog to (or make it worthy of following/subscribing to), nor can I give thoughtful insights on other peoples blogs.

But, I can try.

What comes to mind is that I can pull a Seinfeld and make it a blog ‘about nothing’. Just daily (weekly … every 10 days) ramblings that may seem interesting to someone. If I can build a crowed, write interesting stuff and get that great programming job in the process, great! If not, then at least I’ll have a log of what I liked and disliked in a certain period of my life (in case I had amnesia or early Alzheimer’s). Or I can read my blog 10 years from now and laugh/cry saying “What a noob!”

Noticing that I wrote 2 paragraphs with almost one ‘I’ per sentence, here is ‘my’ other problem with blogging from Steve’s list:

Reason #4: Blogging is narcissistic.

As much as ‘I’ love to stand out in anything ‘I’ do, ‘I’ hate portraying that ‘I”m narcissistic or even hint it (looking at all the ‘I’s, apparently I’m not doing a good job in that).

But I’ll risk it, just in case one day

When it comes down to it, I’m asking you to write blogs because I know you’ve got really interesting things to say, even if you don’t think they’re that interesting. Your life is interesting, and your opinions of technology, Amazon, and life in general matter to me, and to others. I bet you’ve got a lot you could teach me, even if you don’t think you do. Heck, I was in my mid-twenties when I realized I had a gross conceptual misunderstanding about the reason it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The stuff I think I know is an invisible speck compared to the superset of what all people know today. Do me a favor and save me the effort of tracking you down in the hall and asking you to enlighten me.

Besides, I’m not ready to hear what you have to say yet. When I am ready, it’ll be in your blog

— Steve Yegge

I’m blogging for you Steve (narcissism overload!!).

Thanks for reading, have a nice day!

Following the tutorial at http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Part+I.+Creating+a+Simple+RIA

Flicker image search :) ! try it!