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Color at the End of this Tunnel

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:53:00 +0000

fireworks, anyone?

I started this game several years ago. It got interrupted by several things, such as work, moving, getting licensed, finishing another game started previously, moving again, new job, moving again ... You get the picture.

So it's down to the music. I could still refine the UI experience a hundred more times, but I think I just need to get this project done while the time (and winter) is here. And nothing but the music stands in my way. Too bad my piano's 4,000 miles away. Where are you, Live? Actually, I've already started to to take samples and clips from inudge and assemble them in Live with some midi instruments and effects. So far, so good.

A 2012 release appears likely. Heh.

Photography Poster

Adam Gimpert — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:28:00 +0000

Infographics

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:02:00 +0000

Skills

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:54:00 +0000

Just got this in my inbox:

Am I playing The Sims? Some sort of RPG? When did real life become a character sheet stat builder?

Privacy

Adam Gimpert — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:31:00 +0000

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I've been trying to pay more attention to the app permission requests now flooding phones and laptops. For example, I was going to install Amazon's Wishlist Browser Button, but was informed by Chrome that it needs permission to access all my "data on all websites."

What scares me (besides the fact that Google knows everything about me) is the horde of people out there installing these sorts of apps, giving full legal permission to a company like Amazon to look over their shoulder as they read their bank statements and compose personal emails.

Meanwhile, phone carriers actively monitor their user's keystrokes. Okay, so there may be not "threat" to security or privacy there, but I'm sure there's certain concern brewing.

I'm a huge fan of Pandora (sadly not available outside the US), but raised an eyebrow when their app wanted access to all of my contacts. On one hand, playing radio does not require knowing who my friends are. On the other hand, this is probably a large part of why Pandora is still free to use because they can sell this info to third parties, which they certainly do.

So here I am, questioning my new friends, Google, Amazon, and probably a slew of nameless demographic analytics companies ("Consumer Recreation Services," heh). They likely know more about me than my closest friends and relatives. It's scary, but I'm an optimist that this will make my life more enjoyable. Someday. I just need to get over the paranoia and install that wishlist button...

Right Triangles && Integers

Adam Gimpert — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:34:00 +0000

Now that I'm in the world of creating exams, I find that it is helpful to keep as many integers involved as possible so that students don't get hung up on significant figures and rounding. In the end, more integers means easier grading.

Also, the problems (it's a statics class at the moment ... stupid pun) involve lots of right triangles, and one can use a 3-4-5 triangle only so many times before it becomes passé.

A little ruby spits out leg dimensions of uniquely proportioned right triangles with integer legs:

http://codepad.org/O43BQ0H0

(lookUp marks legs that are a multiple)

Output:

4 x 3
12 x 5
15 x 8
21 x 20
35 x 12
40 x 9
45 x 28
55 x 48
60 x 11
72 x 65
80 x 39
91 x 60
99 x 20
105 x 88
112 x 15
132 x 85      ***
140 x 51      ***
165 x 52
168 x 95
180 x 19
195 x 28

Lightroom Backups

Adam Gimpert — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 07:21:00 +0000

I've been using Adobe's Lightroom 3 for a few months now, and due to my limited laptop hard drive space, I need to start seriously learning backup options. I'm working with JPG / NEF pairs ("side cars" if I have my LR terminology down). A few things I've learned:

Lightroom keeps all edits and metadata changes in its own catalog stashed somewhere out of sight
You can choose "Save Metadata" on a folder in LR, which will output in the same folder an XMP file with all the metadata of all images

Note: this does not save the metadata to the originals in order to avoid file corruptions
So it's really just a means to move / copy / apply metadata to files via LR's catalog

There are a series of "Publish" options for sending images to Facebook, Flickr, hard drives, etc. But this feels more like, well, a publishing feature and not a backup feature.

Because I want to backup a folder with edits, metadata, and original files, the proper choice seems to be "Export this Folder as Catalog..." This creates a new folder that contains copies of all the above: edits, metadata, and original files. Once this is done, I send these exported folders for typical backup.

Stormy Chicago Night

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 06:11:00 +0000

Over this past summer we had a wild storm roll over Chicago. It hit while I was on the train, and I realized that it would be leaving just as I arrived home. Upon arrival I ran inside, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed up to the roof.

Lesson learned: long exposures are very difficult with gusty winds. In the end, I did not capture as much lightning as I had wanted, but a composite still looks cool:

American Prosperity

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:19:00 +0000

Unicode + PHP = Headaches

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:45:00 +0000

After plenty of googling, I have managed to get my company's web server to throw out properly-encoded Chinese characters from our database.

First, we're using MS SQL Server 2005 to store our information, so the text field(s) to be holding Unicode characters need to have a "N" (national) data type. For this case, I used "ntext". (As an aside, I believe MS is/has deprecated this data type and now wants nvarchar(max) or something equivalent.)

This allowed the front end client to enter Chinese characters into the database.

Then back to serving pages, I immediately ran into problems retrieving the selection set through PHP:

Warning: mssql_query() [function.mssql-query]: message: Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier. (severity 16) in...

I determined that our web server was using a FreeTDS library and updated freetds.conf to use tds version 8.0 instead of 4.2 for global settings. (The file on our system was located in /etc/freetds/)

With that done, I could at least get the text out of the database, but PHP was still treating / serving it as single-byte encoded. The final settings tweak was to set the mssql character set. Before establishing any connection. I do this, so:

ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8');

This finally establishes a flow of characters from database to browser that are Unicode encoded.

EVO 4G: Speed Tweak

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:12:00 +0000

I came across this thread, which suggested some changes on a rooted EVO 4G to increase typical 3G speeds. Here are my quick results:

I was testing from my work desk, which is nested in a massive concrete warehouse building located on the west side of River North in Chicago. Said another way, I was testing from a bad location for signal and speed. (Yeah, that screen shot was not from my phone...)

I also restarted the phone for each series of tests. Each series was a run of 15 download / upload tests via speedtest.net's app, which automatically chose a close server ( sadly, I don't remember if it grabbed a Chicago server or not ).

Also, in addition to resetting the HTTP settings, I also did the same for the RTSP settings. I couldn't say whether this affects the speed tests.

Naturally, you can see, this is anything but scientific:

So, the tweak resulted in a suggested 41% increase in download speed, but a 30% decrease in upload. Meanwhile, the down / up standard deviation decreased by 32% and 40% respectively.

It seems that my phone will now download a lot faster with much more consistency, but will upload slower with the same consistency. Ultimately, better downs with overall more consistent connections sounds great to me!

Random Numbers

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:46:00 +0000

I never took a statistics class, but this just occurred to me:

If R is a random number between 0 and 1, then the average value of R taken to the power of N is the inverse of N+1;

EVO 4G: First Impressions

Adam Gimpert — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:45:00 +0000

Having been an iPhone user for 2+ years, many of my comments will occasionally refer to that new iPhone thinger that all the cool kids are sporting. Kids, like the guys over at Engadget who seem to keep a decent perspective with the insane pace of the phone industry. In order to help my own perspective, I have read their articles, specifically: a review of the EVO 4G, and a comparison between the EVO 4G and the iPhone 4, which confoundedly ends with "follow your heart." Maybe I should be more emotionally attached to my electronics...

With all that said, here are my first impressions of the EVO 4G:

Beautiful screen, and considering I'll be staring at this, like, all the time, it's a good thing.
A bit heavier and obviously bigger than my iPhone 3G, but not in a bad way.
Won't that protruding camera lens get scratched up?
The power button is a bit difficult to press because of the way the phone's edge profile is shaped with respect to the button.
The UI is slightly more sluggish than I was hoping, but I'd still label it "very fast."
After a quick login to Google, everything was automagically synced: contacts, gmail, calendars (even the shared ones). Could not ask for more.

My Hungover iPhone

Adam Gimpert — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:47:00 +0000

It's actually not me that's hungover. It's my phone. Here's my theory: Apple released iOS v3 and it was so splendiferously good that my phone secretly went on a drinking binge. By the time iOS 4 came out, the phone had had enough with the bottle and simply fell into a nasty hangover.

Search speeds, browsing speeds, even navigating the freaking settings was slow. The phone that had once been so snappy was now a sluggish beast that could barely manage playing an mp3 whilst placing a "Q" tile on the board in Words with Friends.

And I'm not even going to bitch about AT&T's network "service."

My point here is to provide a little back-story to why I want to move away from my current phone. AT&T is less than admirable (text costs), their connections are spotty and drain my battery quickly in Chicago, Apple has bloated my iPhone 3G and provides me no way to make it lean and mean again, and I have a slight desire to do more phone-tweaking (read: root).

And a switch to Sprint's EVO 4G = cheaper monthly cost (we'll see about that) + a phone with more features + allegedly a faster network. Oh, and they offered a 30-day return policy. I was sold, and so the testing begins.

Reward: EVO 4G

Adam Gimpert — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:24:00 +0000

I wrapped up taking (again) the SE II exam here in Illinois on Saturday. Naturally, one must reward oneself for such a thing, so I went and did what any respectable geek should do in such a situation: buy an EVO 4G. You know, that one phone that is the first to make sliced bread, the wheel, and will babysit your kids:

I searched high and low for a decent EVO 4G review for Chicago, and barely one was found. So, granted it's late to the show, I plan to leave a few remarks, comments, and maybe even a video over the next 28 days as I "test drive" the phone (before I need to return it, if so decided).

The EVO Test Drive continues...

Thoughts, In-Out

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:37:00 +0000

in: afternoon coffee
out: morning coffee

in: capitalizing sentences
Out: "definitely", "literally"

In: "presume"
Out: "assume"

In: Dominion
Out: MtG

In: Revit
Out: AutoCAD

In: mortgage rates under 5%
Out: rates over 5%

Y'another iPhone (or a Bit on Hi-Res Displays)

Adam Gimpert — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:13:00 +0000

Thank you, Apple, for still making impressive improvements on your devices and software. Meanwhile, back here in reality, we'll all continue suffering through AT&T's contemptible service.

With that out of my system, I wanted to blab a bit about Apple's "retina display." Besides being a brow-raising brand, it does embody what's so awesome behind the display. At 326 pixels per inch, it opens the doors for unique human/computer interaction. Magazines, brochures, and just about anything that's printed and viewed from one's hands uses a printing resolution of around 300 dots per inch. One can deduct that Apple's new display thus offers a viewing experience on par with the printed world.

What's so cool about this? Digital ink, as they call it. I know Steve thinks any sort of interface between a human and computer that uses a "stylus" equals failure. (He may want to reconnect with Apple's huge following of creative professionals.) To this day I would never have suggested that digital pens would make a good input device, solely because of our displays' resolutions. Digital ink fails from the start if a person can differentiate the pixels. But with a display at Apple's RD's 326 ppi, we can draw digital lines and curves, and paint with brushes and colors at arm's length without the distraction of zooming, pixels, or resolution. A wall is being torn down between creative professionals and being productive.

Of course, the iPhone is still just a 3.5" screen, so that in itself is a barrier. But it won't be long before Apple will offer these displays at workable sizes.

I come from a heavy architectural background, which stemmed into my current occupation as a structural engineer. We work daily with line drawings. Back in the printed world, line drawings need to be kept vector to be printed well. Rasterized, such drawings need to hit 600 or higher dpi to keep the human eye happy with what it sees printed. However, we continually need to convey information to the rest of a design team: the architects, the structural engineers, the mechanical engineers, the contractors, the owners, the developers, and the multitude of sub-consultants for a project. This industry has been slow to acclimate to a digital world when it comes to coordination and sharing information. One of the barriers here has been the process of marking up drawings. For several reasons, it's still usually best to print a drawing, mark it up with good ol' real-life pens and pencils, scan the thing back in, then email it away. With a display at 326 ppi matching at least a letter-sized page (8.5" x 11"), the process of sharing information on drawings could be drastically more efficient, clearer, and faster. Give me a display hitting 11"x17", and we're getting gold.

So, Apple: When can we see your spiffy Retina Display at something larger than pocket-sized?

styles, publishing

Adam Gimpert — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:59:00 +0000

I've been doing more and more InDesign layouts at work for our architect clients. We often assemble these for the same architects, who do send us "templates." Unfortunately, these templates have formatting styles spottily applied and often existing with overrides, so on the last project, I spent a decent chunk of time to define my own cleaned up, reliable styles.

I won't claim to be an InDesign expert, so I ran into a new task today: grabbing the styles from the last document. It being an Adobe product, I believed it might be a simple copy-paste job similar to Photoshop layer styles, but it's a bit different in InDesign. You essentially have to "import" the styles from the other doc. From either of styles palette menus, clicking on "Load Character/Paragraph Styles..." lets you do this. It's quite straight forward from there on out.

Now this got me thinking about WYSIWYG editors and how the latest version of Word has made Styles a much more obvious tool to users. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the majority of people still have no idea how to use them properly. I would suggest that part of the problem is that the separation between content and styling doesn't fit the mold of a wysiwyg editor, and is better understood through a typesetting software such as LaTeX. But writing in that looks like scary code...

These are just random thoughts of the moment. I've heard rumor that I might be sharing my InDesign knowledge within my office, a scary thought; teaching InDesign to engineers... I wonder if an approach focusing on the separation of styles and content might be of interest to such an audience.

javascript back

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Another little note to myself in the future: despite what w3schools says, history.back() is not the same as history.go(-1). Now, I don't know what the standards say, but the behavior of these two is different in the following way (at least in IE at the moment).

history.back() seems to return the previous page, but adds it as a 'new' page to the history. This means, that if every page on a site has a link for history.back(), the user will simply bounce between two pages, never actually going back through the history.

history.go(-1) seems to behave just like the back button of the browser: it moves the pointer of the current page back one in the history.

giving aid to Haiti

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:41:00 +0000

Food for thought:

And there's more to this data. And the full image.

hexcelle: 100k plays

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:58:00 +0000

Heh, who'd've known? My little Flash game, Hexcelle, hit 100,000 plays today on Kongregate. I just might have to follow it up with a sequel...

Loaders

Adam Gimpert — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:51:00 +0000

I wanted to make a note to myself for the next time I pull my hair out for too long hunting down this ... bug?

In short, after a Loader object has completed loading, references to its DisplayObject content as well as its LoaderInfo content are not reliable. I found that occasionally simply using the Loader class as the DisplayObject to add to the display list was inconsistent, too.

For now, I'm finding that saving references to the Complete Event's currentTarget.content is the most reliable choice for accessing the loaded content.

finding the farm

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:10:00 +0000

I've been playing with Adobe's Flickr library (link), and have been stumped in locating how to pull a pic's static farm id from a person's public photos list.

After too much time googling, searching, and reading documentation, I finally weeded thru the source to discover the library simply fails to record the farm id retrieved from flickr. Oops.

I have updated two of the Actionscript files to correct this:
http://adam.gimpert.com/docs/farmfix.zip

Two things needed to be added:
1. The Photo class needed a new property (farm), and
2. The parsePagedPhotoList method in MethodGroupHelper needed to record the farm id from each photo's xml.

Now I can build photos' static urls. Yay.

Lollapalooza 2009 Thoughts

Adam Gimpert — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:28:00 +0000

Before I completely forget the fest...

Ben Folds - Still wonderfully talented, great tongue-in-cheek, funny, nerdy, rocks a piano. What's there not to love?

Thievery Corporation - Groovy music, good group deal goin on, and a dude jamming on a sitar. Good fun.

Of Montreal - Strange, bizarre, a bit disturbing stage acting, yet the music was thumping. Worth seeing and dancing.

Depeche Mode - Classic, but their music is showing its age. I wish they had more anthems. And what was with the boring sphere visuals? I can't help but feel they could do better.

Gomez - Great jams. Good listening.

Arctic Monkeys - I have a soft spot for these guys. The show was a lot of fun, but I think they could up the stage presence.

Santigold - Only listened because my legs were failing me at this point. This is a fresh sound, and was totally welcome.

TV on the Radio - From where I was in the crowd, these guys sounded like a high school garage band playing thru a rubber tube. I later heard that the sound on my side of the crowd was "bad" due to breaking speakers... I haven't given up on these guys, yet.

Tool - Still amazing. They rock their formula with expert precision. But I kinda wish their formula was a bit broader. The visuals are always a treat.

Bat for Lashes - Another fresh sound, and how can you not dig a female drummer? Oh, and the leotard was kickass.

Kaiser Chiefs - Probably my biggest surprise of the weekend. These guys know how to rock a live show, and their songs are great and lasting.

Vampire Weekend - Yep. Just what I was expecting: preppy boys riding a big-ass popularity wave. I hope they have the chops to churn out another great album.

Snoop Dogg - Digested the first few songs. That was sufficient. I was a bit surprised how his/their songs have lost all original context. It's a new generation, I guess.

Silversun Pickups - A bit too whiny. I would have a hard time listening to a lot of these guys. But in small doses, it's worth every aural second.

The Killers - So many great songs. I didn't know the singer was such a pretty boy. They actually made me want to seek out the albums I don't already have. The crowd was so pumped, lots of dancing, all energy was spent. It was a perfect way to end the weekend.

hexcelle and looking ahead

Adam Gimpert — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:46:00 +0000

I was inspired by a game on Kongregate called Bubbletanks 2. I found it to be very simple, fun, and full of potential, but it fell short and remained a dumbed game. However, it's still one of my favorites on the gaming site.

So I set off early this spring to experiment with some cell evolution simulations in Flash. This evolved into a little demo, which developed into a small addiction that I needed to complete by the 1st of August. A week ago today, on the 30th of July, I posted the results of this project here. Hexcelle (short for hexagon cell evolution) is an online 2d flash shooter / builder.

In a week's time, I've been surprised that the game was so well received. As of this writing, it's been played over 35,000 times and even gets a decent rating despite all the lurking bugs. I am more than satisfied.

Looking ahead, I now focus on two exams: the first is the Fundamentals of Engineering, which I'll take in October. This is an "easy" exam that most engineering students take in college. However, I -- with a relatively untechnical background in architecture -- am at a disadvantage. I get to spend the next several weeks reviewing calculus, limits, electronics, physics, chemistry, and who-knows-what-else. The second exam will be in April, and that shall be for licensure as a Structural Engineer in Illinois. I plan to take a review course for that one over the winter.

And that's a quick update on me. Lollapalooza is this weekend - should be awesome.

And here's a crazy video someone took of Hexcelle's gameplay: