UNIX Power Drills

September 5, 2007 – 7:26 pm

Why am I not surprised that Neal Stephenson could actually nail down the way I feel about Windows and other toys.

After being introduced to the UNIX philosophy via Linux way back in 1996, I still can’t cease to be amazed at how a thirty year old design still maps almost perfectly to most computing tasks and systems.

The simple beauty and power of the UNIX principle of building a tool that does only one thing, but that excels at doing it and then hooking all these tools together via simple text files and filesystem abstractions is still lost to all the GUI junkies out there. Sad.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in unix, technology, hacking, linux | Comments (0)

Chiba City Lights

September 5, 2007 – 7:14 pm
The sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.

The starting words of Gibson’s “Neuromancer” echoed in my mind yesterday as I returned to Oporto after two weeks immersed in art and code in Vila Nova de Cerveira. Everything around me seems grey and busy, although my creative batteries seem fully recharged and my mind filled with new ideas and projects. It’s surreal to say the least, and it will probably take some time yet to digest it all.

To get a feel for what these two weeks where like, check the photos of the performance that closed off the work at the Digital Art Lab, courtesy of Miguel Estima.

To all of the people involved in any way with the work done in the Lab, I’d like to send out a big heartfelt “thank you” for the wonderful time I had.

Regular transmission follows in just a few seconds.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, digital art, news | Comments (0)

Workshop’d

August 23, 2007 – 7:42 pm

The main reason why I won’t make it to Barcamp-PT this year is because I’m once again part of the Digital Art Lab tech staff at the Cerveira Art Biennale. This year however, besides tech support I have the added responsibility of helping to organize a series of digital art workshops as well as running one of them. The workshop series will run a wide gamut of topics, from using Free Software for art work to Computer Vision and Sensor Electronics. If you’re planning to stop by the Bienalle anytime in the next two weeks and feel like learning something new and have a bit of fun, you should definitely check the program for the complete list.

So far we’ve already had the Free Software workshop and my Visual Programming workshop, and Eduardo is already running his Computer Vision workshop.

In the Visual Programming workshop I introduced the participants to the demoscene culture and it’s influence in current realtime programming aesthetics. Somehow, seeing Second Reality almost fifteen years later still feels as fresh as the first time.

Next I took them on a tour of some tools that help simplify the task of creating visual programs. We checked out Processing, NodeBox, OpenFrameworks and Puredata, and I highlighted their strengths and weaknesses, something that should be worth a blog post sometime.

After that we took up Processing and I showed them the basics of the Java language and some basic Computer Graphics techniques.

On the second day we reviewed the basics and coded some classic oldskool demoscene effects like fire, plasma and interference.

Sadly, the available time wasn’t enough to get to the last part of my workshop plan. Inspired by this other Processing workshop, I coded a basic clone of Every Extend without win or loss states and was going to ask the workshop participants to hack it into a visual perfomance program. I’ll post the source soon to see what you guys can come up with.

In retrospect, I think there were some parts of my workshop plan that can be improved, especially because this was the first time I tried to teach someone anything related to computer graphics, but in the whole this was a great experience for me because I got the oportunity to meet people with interesting ideas and expectations about visual programming, which it sparked me to put down on paper some thoughts I have been toying with for some time.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, gatherings, computer graphics, digital art | Comments (2)

It’s on: Barcamp Portugal 2007

July 28, 2007 – 9:18 pm

Following in the steps of last year’s successful edition, this year’s edition of Barcamp Portugal is starting to shape up rather nicely.

Sadly, I won’t be able to attend this year, but if you are in Portugal by that time and are interested in exchanging ideas about web2.0 and innovation in a casual laid back atmosphere and also have a bit of halfbaked fun, then you’re in for a treat.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in web 2.0, gatherings, technology, news | Comments (0)

Back on the blog

July 20, 2007 – 9:15 pm

At last I’ve managed to find the time to migrate the whole planet to an install of mu-wordpress and take Eduardo’s design and hack the sandbox theme to fit it.

There’s still a lot to do, but I’m planning to add the missing stuff bit by bit as time permits and try to get back to writing regularly.

While I was away, there were some interesting bits that are worth noting:

  • The whole doubleMV site got a fresh redesign in a very web2.0-ish style that I like a lot, including the web20-conformance-required “beta” logo and finally we managed to put up a project portfolio that shows some of the things we’ve been up to during the last year. There are still some missing features that we plan to add in the future and some issues that need a bit of polishing, so we are all ears if you have any comments or suggestions.

  • Miguel, our intern from the Oporto Faculty of Sciences did a splendid job proving that it’s feasible to add a GLSL preview to Blender and because of it he got a gig expanding his internship work in Google’s Summer of Code.

  • Planeta Asterisco, the portuguese blogging community of which I was a member morphed into PrintScreen, a project that I’m also a proud member that aims to be a lot more than just a simple blog network. Just wait and see.

  • Bel, Sérgio and I teamed up with Luis Loureiro and Rui Campos, two notable portuguese Blenderheads, to create Blender-PT, the first portuguese Blender community. It’s been really cool to discover that there are a lot more Blender users in Portugal than we thought, and we are now hosting our first compo with some cool prizes, so if you’re a portuguese Blenderhead, what are you waiting for?

The next couple of weeks will be interesting as we are finishing off some very cool projects and preparing some nice surprises for the summer.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in doublemv, life, news | Comments (0)

Be right back

April 5, 2007 – 1:29 am

Oh my. It’s been three months since my last post, I wonder if anyone still reads this.

Anyway, I’m just posting to give you the heads up that since we’ll be overhauling doubleMV’s aging web infrastructure over the next couple of weeks this blog will probably disappear from your radar for a few moments.

I’ll be back soon with some actual content.

No, really.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in news | Comments (0)

Blender-fu

December 14, 2006 – 11:00 am

Yes, it been a while now. I’m still trying to organize my very short supply of free time and blogging is one of those things that keeps getting pushed back.

This lack of spare time is not helped by the fact that for the past two months I have been taking a post work hours course on 3D Modelling and Animation using Blender taught by my friend Luis Belerique. I believe this course to be the first of it’s kind here in Portugal.

Blender, the cross platform Free-as-in-Freedom 3D modelling and rendering program has been our internal 3D content creation tool a while now and we are seriously considering adopting it as our tools platform. In order to do that I have to not only know how the program works under the hood, but also the community around it and how people use it.

So far it has been a great experience and now I’m just starting to put together the final course project, a 15 second short film. Next, after dabbling a bit with scripting the application, I’ll be looking for a small feature to add to the software to learn my way around the code. Any ideas?

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in fresh meat, free software for freedom, computer graphics, research, digital art | Comments (0)

The “View Source” key

November 2, 2006 – 12:45 am

Yesterday, while casually browsing my RSS feeds I came across this intriguing post that mentioned that the people behind the OLPC project are considering dropping the standard Caps Lock key in favour of a View Source key that would allow you to view the source of the program you are using.

I consider this a brilliant idea, I mean, just imagine a whole generation of children grown with the concept of software as a shareable commodity completely modifiable to do whatever you want it to do.

However, I believe that successfully implementing such a feature will boil down to two key factors, namely plasticity and granularity.

By plasticity I mean the possibility for a user to be able to not only view but also modify the source code of the running program on the spot, getting immediate feedback on the changes. Clearly this can only happen if the programs are written in an interpreted language, something which the OLPC project is taking care of by using Python as the application level language of the system. However, the users will be a paying a performance hit because of this. Also, not every program can stand being modified in runtime making some sort of checkpoint-restart system a functional imperative for every application.

By granularity I mean the possibility for the user to view and modify only the relevant portion of the code for the task he’s performing in the application. Nowadays, software applications are heavy beasts comprising dozens of source files and thousands of lines of code, and if the user triggers the “View Source” key while using an application, he would certainly not want to be presented with a thousand line source file to edit. Therefore I believe that this View Source mechanism should be tied to some sort of debugging framework that would not only show the user the source code around the part of the application he was using but also allow him to move around the source code an edit it at will.

All things considered, This idea of shipping educational computers with a View Source key is definitely an intriguing idea worth keeping an eye on.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in free software for freedom, technology, hacktivism, software engineering, linux | Comments (2)

Edgy

October 28, 2006 – 2:46 am

A lazy Friday night with nothing special to do provided me with the perfect opportunity to go ahead and install the latest Ubuntu spawn. Upgrading from Dapper Drake was as hard as typing:

sudo update-manager -c

in a console, wait around for about an hour and then reboot the computer.

It was that easy. Man, I miss the good old days when men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri*, when installing a new Linux distro meant fumbling for a couple of hours in front of a console screen typing arcane commands.

Edgy doesn’t seem to pack as many new features as Dapper did, but the upgrades to Firefox 2.0, Gaim 2.0, Gnome 2.16 and Evo(lution) 2.8 make the upgrade worthwhile.

I still have to poke around a bit to see why the 686 kernel won’t boot; and to install all the new Beryl eye candy to check if it stopped breaking OpenGL apps, but so far it seems to be a very solid release. Congratulations to Canonical and all the Ubuntu community.

* - Obligatory obscure Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in fresh meat, news, linux | Comments (1)

Games2006 day 5: Awards Gala

October 21, 2006 – 1:36 am

Last day of Games2006, not much to do or see except for the Pixelboy Awards gala. The crew got up early to have time to pack our stuff and clean up the place we lodged in for the week, leaving time for a quick lunch before the event.

During the conference, Joseph Olin had talked about the importance awards have in driving recognition for the games industry. In Portugal, the Pixelboy Awards were the first of it’s kind and the Arts and Congresses Centre in downtown Portalegre was packed.

We waited around for a bit, while the organization was preparing the last details for the ceremony, having fun trying to identify from all the people present who actually knew what Games2006 was and what the event was about. You see, there were two kinds of people there: people in confortable clothes with looks of sleep deprivation and conference wear and tear, and people who looked like they were going to the opera. I have nothing against it, but the contrast and the way these two “factions” looked at each other was hilarious.

Anyway, the show finally started and it was actually quite good, and it was really nice to see the people that are trying to make games by themselves in Portugal get some well deserved recognition. My congratulations to all of them. You can check the award results in the APROJE website.

In the end of the ceremony, just before we headed back to Oporto we had the chance to talk for a while with Alexander L. Fernandez, CEO of Streamline Studios, who had the time and patience to give us a veritable crash course on the ins and outs of the game industry and open our eyes to lots of potential pitfalls. Alex is a great communicator with a lot of industry experience and if you missed his talk during the conference you really missed out big time.

I hope the conference organizers put the videos of the conference talks up somewhere, because I saw some people filming the whole conference.

And that was it. I still have some notes about the talks and workshops I’d like to post and reflect on, like Leonard Paul’s workshop on audio prototyping or Chris Crawford’s talk on why the industry is doomed versus Jason de la Rocca’s talk about the positive evolution signs in the industry, but I’ll leave these to another time.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, gatherings, news, games | Comments (0)

Reset

October 21, 2006 – 12:51 am

Only now have I noticed that I missed putting up the post about the last day of Games2006 and that it’s been in the draft queue for over two weeks. Shame on me.

This latest blogging hiatus has been caused mainly by the fact that moving to the new workplace and adapting to the new work hours has totally messed up my natural rythms, which includes my net reading and writing habits, as I now only have time for a quick browse of my RSS feeds before dinner and the need for sleep takes me away from the screen.

This lack of energy bugs me somewhat because there’s so many things I’d like to write about but just can’t. Lets see how next week goes.

Oh and by the way, this is my 100th post in this blog. Yay.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, news | Comments (0)

Games2006 day 4: Storytron

October 4, 2006 – 12:51 am

Day 4 of Games2006 and although everyone is tired from four days of conference activities, the art crew heads to the character animation workshop presented by Jeffrey and Pina, two very talented guys from Seed Studios, while I manage to almost fall asleep in the first conference of the day. Two expresso shots later and it’s time for what will be if not the best at least the most controversial talk of the entire conference. Veteran game designer Chris Crawford came to Portalegre not to bestow his knowledge to the masses but to provoke thought among the audience.

His talk about paradigm shifts and the games industry started off with a wink to epistemology (the philosophy of science) and a reference to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in science and how it seems to apply to the games industry nowadays. His main point was that games are exhausted as a medium and that a revolution is necessary, which according to him had to have something to do with interactive storytelling.

Chris is a brilliant presenter, almost theatrical in his style, and manages to make his point across very effectively, my only gripe with it being that when the questions time came he was unable to defend his point so effectively, especially when confronted with some very spot-on remarks made by none other than Jason de La Rocca, who had given a talk in the previous day pointing to signs of hope for the game industry.

At lunch we met the Ignite Games crew once again and this time, somewhat fueled by Chris Crawford’s talk, we spent the lunch talking about games, game design and interactive storytelling.

Back from lunch I went to Joseph Olin’s talk on the state of the game industry from a business, cultural and market perspective while everyone else was fighting for a seat at Chris Crawford’d Storytron workshop.

After the talk, while waiting for the PS3 and COLLADA talk by Rémi Arnaud I met Bruno Ribeiro from Seed Studios who had been hosting a workshop on creating technology and tools for videogames that had a very low attendance due to the Chris Crawford talk and workshop that day, which is sad because Bruno is a very talented programmer and he had been working hard on the workshop materials for the last few days. Fortunately he has posted online his presentation slides (in portuguese) for those that couldn’t attend the workshop.

Rémi Arnaud’s talk was very interesting for me since I’m implementing COLLADA as an asset standard within doubleMV but especially because it lifted the veil on the design of the PlayStation 3 graphics libraries.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in game design, life, gatherings, news, games | Comments (1)

Games2006 day 3: Inercia

September 28, 2006 – 8:35 pm

Day 3 of the conference was mostly spent watching the open keynotes, of which I’ll probably post about later when I’m back at Oporto reviewing my conference notes.

At lunch we met the nice guys from Ignite Games with whom we shared some thoughts about balancing academic research work with pratical development work and the need for some Barcamp goodness for portuguese game developers.

Now we are back at the Inércia demo hall watching the PC Demoshow laden with classics like the Byterapers’ “Hyperventilation” (one of my favorites, which extracted some applause from the audience) while we wait for dinner and a much needed rest.

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, gatherings, news, games | Comments (0)

Games2006 day 2: Business as usual

September 28, 2006 – 8:20 pm

Day 2 of Games2006 was devoted mainly to business related talks and round tables. Especially worthy of note were the “Business strategies for videogames” round table and the “From Stores to Steam, Bringing Your Game to Market” talk by Tom Hunter of Compass Rose Games.

The art department spent the day at the “Graphics for Casual Games” workshop, while I and Bruno wandered around the talks.

Later on, we went a bit to the Inércia demo party hall and tried (but failed) to grab some wired internet while seeing the C64 and Amiga demo show.

As a side note, does anyone know why Ubuntu Dapper can’t logon to any sort of WPA wireless network using the ipw2200 driver? It worked fine in Breezy…

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, gatherings, news, games | Comments (2)

Games2006 day 0: Terras de Baco

September 26, 2006 – 11:14 pm

Yesterday the doubleMV crew gathered early in the morning to finish setting up some promotional materials to take to the Games2006 Conference and after a quick trip to the nearest print shop and some lunch we were off to Portalegre.

The trip over to the Alentejo (the hottest part of Portugal) was painless due to the nice Autumn weather and the beautiful scenery of deep blue skies, sprawling plains and saturated red-barked trees. Many have protested the location of the conference in an area far away from the main cities in the country, but the change of sight was a really welcome change for me.

The feeling of a road trip was intensified by the arrival around sunset time to our first destination, our sleeping lodgings in the beautiful village of Cabeço de Vide, right in the middle of those beautiful plains I had been gawking at earlier.

After unpacking our gear we proceeded to the city of Portalegre, to meet a friend of Bel whose working as a 3D artist in one of the companies that has already moved to the future Game City, and after a quick tour of the town’s historic center we settled on the first floor terrace of a restaurant located in the head office of a local soccer club, overlooking a quiet nearby square.

The dinner was great, combining great food, some good laughs and some nice Alentejo wine whose name graces the title of this post.

All in all it was a great way to charge the batteries to a conference that, from what I’ve seen today will be very fulfilling.

But I’ll leave today’s daily report over to Bruno (he’s just finishing up the post, I’ll put the link up tomorrow night).

By Pedro Ângelo | Posted in life, gatherings, news, games | Comments (0)