Binary Bonsai

Were I to launch into a full-scale rant about Photoshop, you would tremble in your boxers.

Easy the most widespread graphics program in the world, used in the games-, movie- and print industries just to name a few. And yet, it fails to include some of the most basic features, or provide the necessary plugin structure so that companies such as Io, can write their own plugins to accommodate for those shortcomings.

Just to throw you a quick example: I do a lot of textures. It's one of the things that I can consider myself rather proficient at. Now until - and probably even when - storage and memory capacity is of no concern, these textures have to tile. That is, they have to be able to repeat themselves on both axis without the repetition being readily apparent.

It has been this way in the computer games industry for years, and though I don't have practical knowledge of it, I guess the movie industry uses this technique as well. Even so, Photoshop is currently on version 8 (dubbed CS for Creative Suite), and it still doesn't allow for viewing textures tiled inside Photoshop! And the architecture isn't open either. So the only way of actually testing textures is to have an external program with which you can test your tiling texture for artifacts (that is, elements that betray the repetition by being too obvious to the human eye's pattern recognition).

It may not seem like a particularly big problem, but when you're embedded in Photoshop 8 hours a day, those 30 seconds of saving/exporting, switching to another application and updating the texture, looking for errors and switching back to Photoshop amount to a good deal at the end of the day.

I was, as you may know, born on April 30th 1978. I mention this because another rather interesting thing happened in april 1978, which would have a large bearing on my life as a whole. And that was when a couple of guys banded together to start Games Workshop. One of those guys - Ian Livingstone - also helped distribute the very first Dungeons and Dragons in Europe. There's a lot more to be said about this guy, but if you've ever played Games Workshop games or just plain old roleplaying games, you certainly owe a good deal to Ian Livingstone.

Now the interesting thing is that he also helped start Eidos Interactive back in the early 90's, and today he and a whole swath of other bigwigs visited Io (since Io is now officially an Eidos subsidiary).

Meeting childhood legends is empowering. It dissolves the illusion of the unattainable and makes it attainable.

Having a few Gmail invites lying around doing nothing, how abouts one more competition? Jolly good.

I want you to dig out a link to the most enlightening article you've read in the recent past. Again, it can be about anything. Design, movies, spirituality, space, music. In short anything you like.

Again, here are the rules:

• Begging won't get you an invite.
• It should be an article of some substance. Not just two lines and a picture of me in a tu-tu.
• Competition ends friday evening CET.

There are some problems with the SQL server these days. I am aware of it, but there is unfortunately nothing I can do about it personally. But thank you all for mailing me about it, I appreciate it, and while I rarely leave this site alone for more than an hour at a time, it does help me cure the problems faster.

That aside, I made an update to the comments section, where the comments have been segregated from the track- and pingbacks. It's all based on Scriptygoddess's plugin. It still needs some minor adjustments, but it's working fine as it is.

Oh, and 2-2 against Sweden, our arch-enemy. Good stuff.

The following post was written by Josh Lyman as an entry into the Gmail competition. Josh, your invitation is on its way. There were a couple of other entries, but I have chosen to not qualify them for various reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

DRM is bad. You already know this, or maybe you don't. It doesn't really matter which it is, because you should really spend the time it takes to read or listen to this talk about DRM by Cory Doctorow, given to Microsoft Research. It is well worth your time, and you might learn something.

Update: It would seem that the new Beastie Boys album install DRM code on your machine! Wow. Now that takes some big shiny stupid-ass brass balls to do. And they're actually, I mean actually expecting that I pay money for this stuff?

Hmm, let me see. Pay money to have unauthorised code installed on my machine, code that has in the past been shown to make the computer unstable... Or just copy that sucker right off the Internet and down to my HDD.

Guess I'll just keep on pirating music for the time being. And so should you.

Update: Here's an annotated Wiki.

Update: Cory by the way, in case you don't know it, is the guy who runs Boing Boing. He's also a science fiction writer, and you can download his books free of charge off of this website.