Last weekend Demodays 2011 [aka Buenzli 20] took place in Olten Switzerland, and I was finally, luckily able to attend it. It was an awesome party, and even more awesome was meeting some of the people I had only known by nicknames till then, in person. I also had a chance to meet with the founder of one of my top 2 favourite demogroups, Satori. The weather was quite lovely, the BBQ was great and all in all it was quite a load of fun. I only wish I had taken more photos. But the few that I did take, you can find here.
There was also a good number nice productions this year. The OHP demo compo was as always very cute. In the “interactive” category, someone had come up with a type-writer, auto typing one liners from various scene websites for the duration of the party. In the PC demo category there was a lovely new demo from Satori, and interestingly enough Calodox had a prod after pretty much forever.
The Satori demo, named “Burnside Odyssey” is definitely one of the most awesome demos I’ve ever seen. It really is a work of wonder, with breath taking visuals and lovely music. Some of those colours and patterns really send me tripping. Seeing that demo on the big screen was quite fantastic. Even though unfortunately due to hardware efficiency issues the demo was running at a pretty much slow motion rate, it still was a marvel to look upon. Below you can see a video of it, but it’s best if you check out the exe here.
The one thing that I find somewhat less than fortunate, to be completely honest, is the result of the demo compo. I’m sorry to be saying this, but I find the winning demo completely and utterly dull. To me it looked like a poor remix of scenes from a few previous demos of the same group, dyed with a rather awful layer of gray on top. There were at least 2 demos in the compo that would have deserved the spot quite a bit more… but anyway, it looks to me like the events that followed have caused a bit of a drama… check for yourself here.
A friend of mine with an awesome taste in both music and visuals just shared this piece of perfection on my Facebook wall. =) The clip totally blew my mind, mainly due to the brilliant effect of the right combination of audio and visuals. The track is called “Fear” by µ-Ziq. I completely love it. This is the fist time I hear the name of this musician, and now I’m surely going to get my hands on his albums.
The video, seems to be a part of the process of building a robot that can simulate emotional responses among other things. I have a feeling that I’ve come across this team’s work before… I have to dig it out of my archives. It’s pretty fascinating work.
Oh my God I don’t like this… I don’t like this… I don’t like this one bit! =P Arrrrrrrrgh… I don’t like this!!! I do however still find it very much worth watching, specially with the nice concept robot and everything… but I DO NOT LIKE THIS! xP
A short film about a helper robot who doesn’t prove as helpful as the advertisement claims. Written and directed by Ruairi Robinson.
As of last week, Microsoft Sho [the .NET Playground for Data] is publicly available for download. Check it out.
“Sho is an interactive environment for data analysis and scientific computing that lets you seamlessly connect scripts (in IronPython) with compiled code (in .NET) to enable fast and flexible prototyping. The environment includes powerful and efficient libraries for linear algebra as well as data visualization that can be used from any .NET language, as well as a feature-rich interactive shell for rapid development. Sho is available under the following license.”
I’ve been trying it out a bit, and skimming through the book. I think there’s a possibility that I just may like this thing better than R. There’s also a rather interesting Channel 9 video on the topic. Here it is:
Holy cows! A friend just shared this video on my wall on Facebook. I realize it’s just concept and a lot of things happen in “just concept” these days, but this is sooo bleeding impressive!
Morph is a new concept design by Nokia, that supposedly will revolutionize mobile devices using a whole load of nano-tech. Read more about it here.
I’ve been using the new Firefox 4.0 Beta for about a week now and I LUV IT, certainly enough to make a mention here! =P New features are awesome… tabs appearing in Win7 taskbar as if they were separate windows is great, the new way add-ons and extensions are handled and organized is fantastic, new look is quite pretty and a whole load of other new features are great as well. I also like the few new extensions that I’ve seen so far, that work with the new abilities of FF. The retractable add-ons bar for instance is quite handy.
I’ve always been a huge fan of FF’s customizability, and now there’s even more of that to be happy about. I also like many of the technical upgrade and oh, don’t forget the WebGL support. Aaaand the private browsing feature is pretty interesting too. You can check out the full features list here.
The only issue right now is that once you switch to the beta, 90% of your current add-ons will stop working because their version is not compatible with the new Firefix. The thing is, many of these add-ons can technically handle the FF beta, and only get disabled due to the version check. So you have 2 options:
Disable the add-on compatibility check. To do that, go to “about:config” on FF, create a new boolean variable, call it “extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b” and set it’s value to false. This works, but I DO NOT recommend it. Because this will suddenly enable all your old add-ons, some of which are sure to not work properly on the new FF. As a result all sorts of bugs and malfunctions will start showing up on your new FF. So… kind of a bad idea.
Tweak specific add-ons to work with the new FF. This way, as soon as one of these add-ons starts giving your new FF hick-ups, your going to know it and get rid of the add-on. To do that, you’ll have to download the add-on first which you can do by right clicking on the download/install link of the add-on, even though you’ll see a “not compatible” sign on it. Then rename file extension from “.xpi” to “.zip”, and extract the “install.rdf” file out of the package. Open up the rdf file and find “em:maxVersion” in it, and change it’s value from whatever it is to ” 4.*”. Return the new version of the file to the package, change the extension back to “.xpi” and drop it into FF so that it’ll get installed.
I hope that helps someone. The 2nd one is what I’ve done to most of my extensions, and everything works like a charm so far. Really looking forwards to the final release now!
October 29th is a very special day. It’s ASIMO’s birthday! Yes, ASIMO turned 10 years old a few days ago! Below is an awesome video by Honda, showing a timeline of the development of ASIMO.
It’s hard to believe that ASIMO has been around for 10 years already! In the first 7-8 years, the improvements and new capabilities that were added to ASIMO were rather frequent and pretty impressive. However I’m afraid that I haven’t read anything on the ASIMO website in the past couple of years to really WOW me! And now with some serious competitors [like NASA’s R2], I think ASIMO has some catching up to do! So happy birthday ASIMO, and whatever you’re doing, hurry it up! =P
You can read about ASIMO’s birthday here, and here‘s a story released by Honda about development of ASIMO.
Pretty cool article I found on MS research today. Check out the awesome AI receptionist avatar!
“Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, has an equally distinguished receptionist. After eight years of working with him, she’s developed a feel for his habits and routines. She can predict how long his meetings are likely to last, knows when he can’t be interrupted and senses when he’ll be running late. Not bad for an avatar.”
I think Bing just fell behind in the search engine wars, big time! Today I gave Google Instant a try. Love it. That’s the way to go! Given the recent changes in the Google image search and all the new options, and now this… I think Google is back to being my favourite again! =D
Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me.
You can reach me here:
aasemoon.blue
Zorbas is my kitten. You can see some pictures of him below. =)
enough to make a mention here! =P New features are awesome… tabs appearing in Win7 taskbar as if they were separate windows is great, the new way add-ons and extensions are handled and organized is fantastic, new look is quite pretty and a whole load of other new features are great as well. I also like the few new extensions that I’ve seen so far, that work with the new abilities of FF. The retractable add-ons bar for instance is quite handy. 
October 29th is a very special day. It’s ASIMO’s birthday! Yes, ASIMO turned 10 years old a few days ago! Below is an awesome video by Honda, showing a timeline of the development of ASIMO. 
