| ricardocabellov5.0b | alter-egos trace mr.doob r08028 |
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| New iPod Shuffle! Oh noo! 12.09.2006 |
 ARGH!! Why?!!?!? Fernando!! Shit! crap!! !!! 2;lk34j;2l3k4!!!
Oh well, I'm impressed with the fact that Apple didn't realised that one of the best points of the iPod Shuffle was that it was also a pendrive. With the good qualities of a pendrive: 1) It didn't need a special cable to connect to a computer. 2) It didn't need a special cable/adaptor to charge itself. Seriously! My iPod shuffle never stopped playing when I was listening to it on the bus/walking, because I connected it to my laptop or to some computer to copy some data that I was moving around. With the new version you need more cables... Oh god! We're surrounded by cables in this world, I always try to look for wifi gadgets to get rid of all the cables I've at home. It's like going back.  Very well Apple, you did it smaller, and now what?! You lost my interest for the product (and I'm sure that like me there are more people!). |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 19:29 |
1 comment| byebye: the solution 07.09.2006 |
| Hehehe, this thingie end up being quite fun! Didn't expected it to be that dificult for everyone!! First of all, a bit of theory... The GIF format was the shit years ago. 256 colours (8bits)! You could do a lot with that!! Unfortunatelly, gfxzone is down now so I cannot show a lot of graphics done with Deluxe Paint pixel per pixel (no wacoms!). So yeah, as I said, using a GIF you can have up to 256 colours, and, now listen carefully, 2 colours of those 256 could be the same, you can customise the palette however you want, in fact, with good old programs you could even move the colours in the palette. Quite a lot of games used the trick of using the first colour in the palette as transparent colour, so the graphician had to setuop the palette of the graphic like that. So yeah, the trick was that 2 colours (even 3) where black (I added a transparent one because a "bug" with irfanview). So, in order to show the text, you have to change one of those colours to any other colour :D That trick was very used by graphicians long time ago, they used to add hidden text (greetings to other graphicians) in the empty parts of their graphics. Isn't it cool?! So, here you have the steps:  Select the first colour:  Change it to white, and that's it!  Now you should see this:  |
| posted by mr.doob at 15:49 |
| byebye 06.09.2006 |
I sent an email (by mistake, as I was going to do it on Friday) to the Spring designers with this image, well, it wasn't actually a file called "byebye" without extension. So they had to figure out that it was a GIF, then they had to learn a bit about the format and find the text inside it and ready it. It's a message for them. One of them saw the text but was because a Irfanview bug (?). I've amended the image so irfanview doesn't show it. By now, nobody was able to read the text, even the Dev guys :/ I guess some of the readers of this blog already know what it is, as it's an old pixelling scene trick :D |
| posted by mr.doob at 14:31 |
| First screenshots of Windows Vista RC1! 02.09.2006 |
 Let's face it! do you think that there is any REAL improvement? Is still the same window-based enviroment, with the same Start button, single and static desktop. Evolution? Where?! Can you believe there are almost 15 years of difference between the screenshot above and the screenshot below?  Let's talk about real evolution!  |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 16:21 |
| Human Computation 02.09.2006 |
| Today Madgoblin sent me a link to a video of Luis Von Ahn Speech at Google engEDU. The speech is quite interesting, it shows how sometimes you can solve big technical problems using bored humans minds (which there are billions!). He explains the concept of all of his games: ESP game, PeekaBoom, ... And hey, what a clever guy! Now I can't stop my mind trying to see how to apply this concept to other areas. Also, looks like Google liked the concept and 'ripped' the ESP game for his brand new Google Image Labeler. Hmm... |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 15:50 |
| Article for .NET Magazine 23.08.2006 |
 .Net Manazine has a section called "Makeover" where people running some business can sent to the magazine a brief and the magazine contact different web design agencies to offer them do to the brief. Free creative project where everyone ends up getting something. Also a clever idea for .Net guys as it's some free content that they don't have to write. So they chosed Spring Digital, and they wanted me to do it. So my part on this project was to redesign the clients website, and well to be honest I'm not too proud of the result. I don' think the colours are the good ones, and well, as usual however had to do make the section didn't really cared about some bits. We sent them a .PNG and you can see JPEG artifacts very easily on the laptop screen, and also I said that I could expand the background so they could fit it properly on the laptop screen, even they could do it, even add a browser or something. Well, they didn't bother and they just put the image on the top of the laptop image, greeeat. Also, the text this time are not my words, coworkers at Spring did all of it. But again, whoever built the article on the magazine selected the most gay sentence in all the article: "A design started to form in my mind of a simple home page, well-designed, but with clear navigation elements" Eu... Oh dear.. Well let's be positive!! Atleast they spelt my name properly this time! ;) Check out (or something) the article here. |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 21:13 |
| Post PlayboyMansion Party'06 21.08.2006 |
| Oh god... Last Wednesday I slept 3hours, on Thursday 3hours more, Friday 5 hours, Saturday 3hours and yesterday (Sunday) 1hour on the plane and 5hours more.. In addition, the nights of Friday and Saturday were on a crappy airmattress with the extra addition of people talking and a fucking fly going around. So yeah.. I'm completelly naked now. However, now I have a little lunch break, so I'll try to expose my opinions about how the party was and what needs to be improved for the next edition (tho there were some rumours about having another edition or not, but I guess that happens always in any party). Sleep? The fact that now I'm naked makes me think that the idea of having the sleeping room on the other side of the dance floor wasn't really a good one! Sleeping with people dancing around you (sunday morning), with people chatting (sunday morning again!)... Well, it makes you think if you're enjoying the party or not. So, definitelly there were some bad decissions there. Weather The weather didn't help at all either. Having a very warm summer produced the creation of a LOT of bees and flys that were VERY annoying if you wanted to chill or eat. Even talking with the people you had the bees trying to foots! But that would be alright if atleast the day were hot and sunny enough just to go inside the pool and play with your scenepals (Which was the main point of latest edition of pmp imho). So this time having that -special- fun wasn't able because uncontrollable issues :_( Fucking weather! Inside or Outsite? Also, having the djs an visuals outside was much cooler last year, probably we moved inside the house because we probably fucked up the grass the last year... but being inside the house was very claustrophobic and having the people smoking there and ovbiosly having the sleep room on the other side, was simply nasty. Sorry :( Demoscene - productivity Oh well.. This time we had only 1prod. It was an xplsv+dust inc collaboration. I was going to do fast prod for atleast having xplsv releasing a prod, but as I saw that Shine already did that I decided to chill. What's going on!? Why nobody else did anything? Demoscene - international Again, I don't think there is too much you can do. But I'm sure that Shifter, PS and Melwyn didn't have the great time that the other international sceners had the last year. This time I think we were even more closed, and Shifter appeared to be quite a lot of times very irritated because the language issue. Demoscene - killing it or what? As a proud member ot TDSB (The demoscene savers brigade) I've to say that the fact that some new sceners were not invited to the party, even some ones that did more for the demoscene that people attending the party makes me sad. Is this a sect or what? If it will keep being like that the only thing that will happen is that the ones that get tired of it just don't go and we're going to be less people and less people. It will end up like a madrid friends house party with some music on there. I wonder if people like... slack, merlucin, madgoblin, silenci, stage7, bixo guys, nocturns guys... were 'invited'. Conga DJ sesion Great concept, but I'm from another generation I guess. Those musics were not that great to me, so I guess it was fun for 25-35 people. During that event I prefered to go to my 'bed' and read a tutorial done by kile ;) THAT guy The guy that was wearing that blue tshirt really pissed me off. It was being very annoying with everyone. Screaming in the VJs face ISN'T funny. Jumping to the DJ stage ISN'T funny. Moving the projectors ISN'T funny. Saying that the VJ is doing crap after telling him to don't touch the projectors ISN'T funny. Pushing you ISN'T funny. Talking crap ISN'T funny. Who the hell was that guy anyway? A new scener? And.. what kind of mushrooms did he ate? VJing Melwyn had a really good idea for his VJsession. However the implementation wasn't that great imho. That showed us that VJing is not just a 3dscene with a layer on the top. We all need to work on that. Threepixels visuals were nice, but guys, fix your tool! ;) Schranz It was quite funny to see that now the people -kind of likes- all that music that I've been listening for years :D That means thar r08028 and r08080 are going to be cool now? ;) I guess it's just a trend. Obviously, there are a lot of good things there, like the food, drinks, sound system and all that, sushi (kind of) provided by limp ninja+xplsv and good vibes, but I think we should think a bit about what are we doing. |
| posted by trace at 12:40 |
| It's official... I'm leaving Spring! 17.08.2006 |
| I'll certainly miss working in the offices, I decided to leave a couple of weeks ago as I had some ideas in mind that I wanted to develop and to do that I need to be fulltime working on them. Also, a break in your life is always needed. After all I've been working there for 3 years now, (full time since 2'5 years). When I started we were more or less 3 guys, and now we're 25+ now... So I can say that I've learnt as much as the company has. In my case I've learnt a lot about managing clients, design process, some softwares, AS, English, slang (hello Mike!), accents, and even culture :D So, after deciding it, I went to see the big guys, said the news and they got it quite well, so I'll still do freelance stuff when needed for them and some extra things which sound quite interesting... I'll like to see how it works out. So, after informing the big guys it took 1 week to let the rest know. It has been a very hard week, because anytime anyone were saying somthing like "and you will have to do that later on...", I was like.. eu.. uhm.. yeah! And it's kind of hard situation really. The pain is over and the new was spread today... And well, it was quite emotional, I've never felt that needed/loved in a company, looks like everyone was shocked (some of them extremely more than others :P). I better don't mention how hypocritical was on the other Spanish companies I work for. Oh well.. I'll miss all that. So well, my last day is September 8th, but I already want to thank to all the Spring'ers for all the help and the support they gave me, and just for staying there and be as they're! (that sounds really gay!). I'll see you every wednesday that the weather let us play football anyway ;) The good news for whoever reads this blogs are that I'll probably write more, about cool projects that I may work on, i'll probably improve much more/faster xplsv.tv, and do some new sites I got in mind. And for the other companies/individuals is that from now on I'm again available for doing freelance jobs. So if you think I could help in anything, just drop me a line. |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 19:05 |
| iBook powered! 16.08.2006 |
 Believe it or not, yeah, i own a iBook now. As now the airports doesn't let you go in the plane with a big-size laptop, I had to buy this one just for PMP... just kidding... I'm not really a fan of the OS, but I like the size of the machine and I also like the machine technology-wise. I was waiting for a intel one, but looks like Apple will still take a bit of time to release a 12" one with a proper 3dgfx card. So by now i'll play with this one and see what can I do with it. Got to see how, Photoshop, Flash8, Reason and Traktor runs on it... :) |
| posted by ricardo cabello at 10:06 |
| Why did I "thumb down" 1995? 11.08.2006 |
 For the ones that doesn't know, I'm talking about 1995 by Kewlers & MFX. If you go to the profile in pouet, you'll find that 154 users liked this production and even 5 of them think is one of the best prods ever. Ok, first of all, I think there is a lot of hype here, A LOT! But that's not what made me to thumb down the prod. Kewlers is one ot the demoscene groups that has been innovating in style in almost every prod they were trying. MFX also tried to innovate, and after his awesome last prod Deitie the last thing you will expect is having abstract objects rotating while moving in a tunel or something. Homage to the oldschool art?! Well, the style of the website doesn't remind me at all the oldschool style, really. Also, apart from the kind of raytraced balls that are done by particles and then explode, there is nothing else new in the demo. Anyway, if the demoscene needs something now is start moving to new visual styles. Right now, if you see a new demo, you may feel a deja vu. They design demos to look like other demos, and that's something that doesn't work anymore (atleast for me). There are always exceptions (like Aesterozoa) which is still one abstract object on the middle of the screen, but everything creates such a great experience, mood, that in a way the the concept makes sense. Luckilly the guys at Fairlight now this, and they always try to do demos that doesn't look like demos everytime (getting some inspiration from xplsv.tv if needed ;D) Do you want an example? Check out Track One by Fairlight! |
| posted by trace at 01:10 |
traditional id: Ricardo Cabello Miguel
based in: London, UK
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