Microsoft's programmer docs never have a sense of humor

March 6, 2008 Timothy Sanders

Objects with id as their type are dynamically typed, meaning that the class of the object is determined at runtime. You can use id as the type for any object. The dynamically typed object’s class can be changed as needed, even during runtime, which should invoke a sense of both excitement and extreme caution in even the most grizzled OO veteran.

Just so.

Lost's official podcast - surprisingly refreshing!

March 5, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So I've been listening to the Lost podcast lately. I've gone through the handful of season 4 podcasts and actually went back and downloaded some of the season 3 ones. I don't even remember what it was that prompted me to check out the podcast originally, I tend to have a dim view of "official" TV show podcasts. This mainly stems from the Battlestar Galactica podcast, which got some discussion in blog comments here and here. My original objection to the BSG podcast was mainly that I didn't want to watch the show twice, and I as understand the BSG podcast it is designed to play alongside the episode. As time wore on I got increasingly annoyed at the fact that important story information seems to be revealed in the podcasts. If you browse around BSG fan web sites you'll run into things where you say "I didn't know that!" and it turns out that you didn't know it because it's not in the show, it's in the podcast. So the Lost podcast isn't like that. For one, it's much shorter than the show, usually less than half an hour. But the part I like best is that it turns out that a large part of the podcast is Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reading questions submitted at an ABC online forum. And they make fun of the questions, they make fun of the posters, and they occasionally reveal something interesting and insightful. They'll often say something like "This question comes from LockeIsTheBest48, who has posted 400 times in the last 90 days. That's a bit too often with the posts, you may want to get outside for a bit." or something to that effect. My favorite so far was somebody asking whether the injuries inflicted in the hatch explosion were based on the "four monkeys". They went on to explain that Locke was mute, Charlie was deaf, Desmond had been blown into the jungle naked, and thus they predicted Eko would be blind. (This was early on in season 3.) Carlton and Damon discussed this a little, running down the Hear No Evil, Say No Evil idea before there was a pause and Carlton said, "Wait, what's the fourth monkey? Don't be naked? THERE ARE ONLY THREE MONKEYS!" After a pause then Damon said, "Yeah, so interesting theory, but no." Then they move onto the next question. I don't know how I existed without the internet to feed me a constant stream of mockery-worth content. To find out that it comes *pre-mocked* in the Lost podcast. Well, that's exciting! On a more serious note, they do say interesting stuff. One of my favorites so far was that they say they knew that ABC couldn't resist promoting the episode where Eko dies as "Somebody on Lost will DIE!" promos and the whole "Don't miss this episode!" sort of vibe. So they claim that's why they introduced Nikki and Paolo when they did, that basically the audience would assume that Nikki and/or Paolo would die and the whole thing would be a big tease. That way, when Eko dies it was even more as a surprise. I have to say, that warms the cockles of my cold, marketing-hating heart. The idea that they deliberately inserted "red shirt" characters into the show just to confound the marketing expectations is brilliant. It almost makes up for the fact I hate Nikki and Paolo for their spider-throwing ways! Both of them got exactly what they deserved if you ask me.

Spring is starting

February 27, 2008 Timothy Sanders

A couple of the new plants are already seriously blooming. I got out to the back yard this morning and took some pictures and spent some quality time with Aperture. This is my favorite photo from the set:

I also quite liked this one:

And just to prove that it's not just the vines that are flowering here's one of the camellias:

I also like how in the first two images you can see the depth of field of the 50mm lens coming into play. The flowers in the center are in sharp focus and even other blooms in the background are blurred.

Wrapping it up for Eye of Judgment(sic)

February 25, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So I originally posted about how I liked Eye of Judgment(sic). Soon after that it sort of fell of my radar. Nothing particularly wrong with the game, but the AI is sort of "meh", nobody I knew was interested in playing, the card supply frankly sucked, and I could just feel the "Stay away" vibes rolling off the so-called "internet community" at large. The cards are about twice as expensive, per card, as a Magic card. I probably feel fairly strongly that Magic cards should be the "gold standard" for your Collectible Card Game (CCG) pricing, but I cut them some slack and figured the problem was both Sony and WOTC needing their cut. But lately they've been rumbling about the new "set 2" coming out in March. I was starting to think "Hey maybe I should haul out the EoJ cards and play a few rounds." Then today I saw this blog post. So to play with the Set 2 cards you have to buy a software update from the Playstation store, and then buy the cards at the standard 2x MTG price. They are (rather obviously) not saying what the price for the totally useless PSN update will be. I think this will kill it. I don't think EoJ was actually doing well in a market where very few games survive. Paying the price premium was annoying. Adding some other Sony charge is just silly. Look, any obstacle you place in the way of *selling cards* is stupid. Charging for the digital content of Set 2 is exactly that - it's a convenient excuse for me to quit following the entire game. Whoops! So, anybody have good CCG recommendations for 2008? :-)

Playing with Aperture

February 21, 2008 Timothy Sanders

I haven't been posting very many pictures lately. There are several reasons for that. The main one is the majority of my photography time lately has been on Karin's clock project which doesn't generate interesting photos for the world at large. Additionally I've been spending a fair amount of time learning how Aperture (the software, not the camera term) works and what it can do. Then I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.0 and that process has been extended. In the meantime photos have been piling up. Also, in my day to day life there really are two picture sources: the landscaping and the cats. The landscaping hasn't produced a lot of great photo opportunities lately because A ) it's still winter and most of the plants are pretty dormant and B ) it's been raining like crazy lately so the lighting hasn't been very vibrant. Cat photos are such an internet cliche and I'm really conscious of not posting very many cat photos. But today I did post a couple of takes of a Schrödinger picture. My justification for this is that I'm doing a before and after of my Aperture changes. A couple of weeks ago I came into the kitchen and found that Schrödinger was up on the dining room table. She's not supposed to be up there of course, but it was also notable because she doesn't usually get up on high surfaces. I ran back to my office, grabbed the camera, and took a quick snap to email Karin. I particularly like her expression, as she clearly is giving me the "What?" defense. "I didn't know the table rule applied today!" So here's the original shot:

Then I did several color correction things in Aperture - White Balance, just used the auto-levels for levels. I ran the auto-exposure adjustment, but then further tweaked the "Recovery" and "Black Point" sliders to remove the clipping - her paws and chest are clipped to white and there are a few pixels on her back that were clipped black. I also cropped and I had originally cropped it very close. Today I learned about using the "Vignette" tool in Aperture, and I used it to darken the corners of the shot which meant I had to loosen the crop to avoid vignetting her shoulders and the right edge of her face. Here's my current version:

Schrödinger on the table - cropped, vignetted and color corrected

I really like Aperture as a tool. One very key bit is the nondestructive nature of the edits. Notice that I cropped this photo back on Feb 7, but when I learned about vignetting today (Feb 21), I was able to turn off the crop, play with the vignette, and make a new crop. Also I had auto-leveled and auto-exposured back in Aperture 1.5, but in 2.0 I was able to identify the flared-out white pixels and recovery them from the RAW image, restoring some fur detail that was lost otherwise. In a tool like iPhoto I could have gone back to the original image, but not just selectively gone back and turned adjustments on or off, or do something like recrop the image while preserving all the color channel changes.