Category: General

Everything that doesn’t fit into any other category.

Painting

Not sure how I feel about this painting.

The colours aren’t right, the eyes are too far apart, the nose is too long, and the whole thing has a flat feeling to it… but, it’s the first thing I’ve painted for a while now and that feels good.

It was also a fairly brief effort only involving an hour or so Sunday morning and another hour Sunday night. So, I could probably put it’s shortcomings down to polish… although that’s not quite right.

I think the real problem was that I was not very confident. This is rather apparant in the “flatness” of the image. It doesn’t feel right to put bold change in colour down on the canvas, but it needs to be there. Something I need to keep reminding myself about painting is the need to be resolute: if you see it, paint it.

Mouse-drawn mini-comic

I’ve been using DrawTop quite a bit recent and have been getting better at drawing things with the mouse.

I was just practising in GIMP and made a short sequence of images and text. Probably a little artsy and rough for my tastes, but I figured that I may as well post it regardless.

I used black on white and the pencil tool with a 11 pixel circle (original image size was 640×480).


Images get worse after the jump. Continue reading “Mouse-drawn mini-comic”

Synfig: GPL vector animation software

http://www.synfig.com/

Looks like it is probably still a bit early in development to use for any production work. However, might be worth checking out.

Blurb:

“Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.”

Microsoft is “jiggy wid it”, they’ve got the “411”

http://www.xbox.com/en-US…-gamercards.htm

I was reading about My Xbox, Microsoft’s plans to integrate the Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and Xbox.com.

The article I was reading provides details in the form of a dialogue between Clinton Fowler (the Program Manager for My Xbox) and Trixie (presumably the author of the article). I think that they’re trying a little too hard to appeal to their intended demographic.

Choice quotes:

  • “if you’ve already got your gamertag linked to a .NET Passport, you’re golden”
  • “what if I’ve been a bad little monkey and haven’t gotten around to linking my gamertag yet? Am I hosed?”
  • “What’s that “My X80x Rocks” thing?”

A few final thoughts. Firstly, I get the feeling that they expect “gamers” will be more comfortable with My Xbox because the Project Manager is an Xtreme downhill mountain biker, or BMX rider (… do they still call it BMX?), or whatever he is apparantly doing in his profile image.

Secondly, I’m not sure that I want to know about the “secret sauce of Xbox 360”. It just sounds icky and… ewh.

Very brief game reviews

Just a few one liners:

  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike (NDS): Teh best game evar.
  • Kirby Canvas Curse (NDS): Innovative and fun… but like with most kirby games… I’m not sure why.
  • Meteos (NDS): Cool (like Rez + Tetris + Smash Brothers) but gameplay is let down by the fact that there is a “cheap” way to play that is very effective; It’s almost like a fighting game in which button bashing pays off.
  • Resident Evil 4 (GCN): Excellent, but voice for the guy who sells you stuff is really corny “so, whatcha buuuyyin’?”
  • Killer 7 (GCN): … yeah… I don’t really get it… but I haven’t played it much yet.

Installing the J2ME Wireless Toolkit under Ubuntu

I wanted to check out the current work on Antiquities and had to go through a few hoops to get the J2ME Wireless Toolkit (J2ME WTK) working on my home machine (Ubuntu, Hoary). I figured that I’d post a (very) brief run-down to save everyone else some time.

Ubuntu is a debian-based distribution and Java support is hampered due to the restrictive Java license. There is some support for older versions of Java (1.1), but not for the more recent version we need in order to use the J2ME WTK.

The most recent version of the J2ME WTK available for Linux is 2.2. You will need to have the Java2 Standard Edition (J2SE) SDK installed before you can install the J2ME WTK. The most recent version of J2SE available for Linux is 5.0, but it is incompatible with the J2ME WTK 2.2. Rather, you need to install 1.4.2.

I found the easiest thing to do is to install the J2SE SDK in a non-system directory (such as your home directory). When installing J2ME WTK, you can input this path for the J2SE SDK. I also used a non-system directory for the J2ME WTK installation.

After it is up and running, you can get Antiquities out of Subversion and place it in the “apps” subdirectory of wherever you chose to install the J2ME WTK. If you’d like to check Antiquities out elsewhere, just create a symbolic link within the “apps” subdirectory.

Links to download pages:

Just a few closing notes. There are some instructions on the Ubuntu wiki detailing how to create a Debian package from the SUN J2SE binary, but these instructions are only for the 5.0 version (which is incompatible anyway). The future looks bright though, the next version of Ubuntu (Breezy) will have open source Java 1.4 packages.