Kat

Here's Kat, mellowing out by the sofa.

First Comment Spam

Irking. Thanksfully, WordPress has a bunch of comment spam controls built-in, and I've turned it on. Am also starting to look at the various spam control plugin filters, like Three Strikes and You're Out.

Sox Win!

And the Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918. Whoop! Tomorrow is going to be a de-facto holiday.

What a difference a few years makes in Boston sports.

Abby!

Kind of a funny picture of Lao & Harlan's cat Abby, sometime in 2001 I think.

Allergy Free Cats in 2007!

Seen on Slashdot: Allegedly, ALLERCA will be producing genetically engineered, hypoallergenic cats. So if you're allergic to the regular kind of cat, these cats won't induce sneezing and swelling.

Weird!

Audrey

Audrey was not very trusting of Uncle Dave when they first met :-)

James

Today's cat picture is of James chillin' out in my room, around 1999. The lighting is a little weird because it's such a low-level light image to start with, and the color balancing didn't quite work out.

Russian Groceries

I visited Siberia, a Russian grocery store in downtown Nashua that I've driven by dozens of times. Earlier in the week, an acquaintance had mentioned something about Russian cakes, and since I was nearby I thought I would check out the Russian pastry scene.

It was a small store, but packed with all sorts of boxes, bottles, and cans with Russian writing all over them. I saw jars of eggplant spread, a collection of museum-quality dried whole fishes, and lots of candy. Some older people browsed the isles, speaking amongst themselves in quiet (I assume) Russian. This is probaby the first time I've heard it spoken natively, and I was struck by what an interesting sound it has...kind of brusque with a lyrical edge to it.

I got some of the bulk candy, at $4.99/lb, for Halloween. As I was checking out, the proprietor heartily approved of my selection, and in broken English directed me to some cookies I should try next time I came back. American cookies, she gestured, just did not have the right smell. She also pointed out some of her favorite candies. It was utterly charming. Most of the candies were pretty good...they were a little dusty tasting, but were generally really good. Nothing really bizarre, except for the one that tasted like a chocolate-covered omelette. I have yet to try the pie with writing on it...I half expect to find it's something that pregnant and nursing women eat. Or given to babies on their first birthday. Or that it's filled with a hearty blend of minced herring, cabbage, and beets. I can't tell from the way it smells what's inside.

I especially want to try some of the Kvass, which I'm told is a kind of sasparilla / root beer. My sister also mentioned that the sausages are probably really good too.

Siberia
259 Main Street, Nashua, NH
also
100 Willow St, Manchester, NH

Flash Player 8 Video Demo

I was watching the video on Colin Moock's site to get a sense of what improvements have been made to Flash Player 8, aka 8ball. [oops, this 8ball = Flash 8, not the same as the player!] He already sumarizes it quite well, but I wanted to make some notes for myself here.

• The speed improvements are very cool. Two demos shown were of a bunch of alpha-blended objects that were tanking framerate in a major way in Player 7. In Player 8, there was a huge increase in speed. Alpha blending tends to be expensive in terms of CPU (particularly in software-based rendering), so there are some definite improvements there.

• Saffron, the next text engine, looked beautiful. The kerning wasn't quite perfect, but it's a damn sight better than what you're used to. You don't realize how ugly most computer type is unless you've looked at type set by people who care, but that's a rant for another day. They made a comparison between Microsoft's ClearType technology and Saffron, and Saffron was noticeably better in terms of eveness of textual tone. On the other hand, I'm not sure ClearType really is about improving the kerning engine as it is fudging the way subpixels are drawn. Still, the text engine looks great.

  A lot of the issues with on-screen type, though, is related to the interletter kerning pairs embedded in the fonts... this is the job of the font designer, not the rendering engine. The reason why the Microsoft fonts such as Arial, etc, look so good is because they've been heavily tweaked to look good at specific sizes, not unlike Flash Fonts I suppose. Will Safron require special font processing, or will it toss font hints out the window altogether? Or perhaps it actually looks at the font's embedded kerning hints, unlike many other applications like, say, Windows Freehand MX (yeah, I'm as surprised about that as anyone).

• The new effects: automatic dropshadowing with alpha blurring, glowing, masked knockouts, etc, look pretty cool. Works even with interactivity!

• Video Alpha: Looked cool. I can see a lot of nifty innovations come from that. On the downside, we may see the return of the Video Adventure Game CD-ROM. Such games will become very easy to do.

Some pure speculation:

The new effects and video alpha give me a hint on what architectural changes they might have made to the player: I'm guessing that it now that each SWF timeline has its own offscreen rendering buffer with alpha channel, and that every time a SWF changes, this buffer gets updated. I'm not sure how Player 7 works, but it might merely issue its draw commands immediately into a single buffer that gets rendered to the screen.

The advantages to having each SWF with its own buffer would be that you then can use pure bitmap compositing to do your alpha effects very very fast, particularly on today's systems. If the buffer doesn't change (say, for a static PNG with alpha transparency), then on each frame all you need to do is recomposite the bitmap data as far as drawing goes. You could theoretically take advantage of any low-level hardware acceleration in the system to speed things up even more, though I would imagine that Macromedia would want to keep most of it in software to ensure that players render the same on every platform.

You can also, with individual buffers, apply the bitmap effects without messing up other graphics on the screen because the engine would just composites them together. Video alpha is just another version of the offscreen buffer, fed from a video source.

The downside is that memory usage with a new player would go up. For more control over this, we might see some kind of "cache" property for individual movieclips. Also, if a SWF dynamically draws on every frame (e.g. the bitmap needs to be recreated), the speed increase would be largely lost.

Again, irresponsible speculation on my part. :-)

Flash Speed Bumps

Two Threads Collide:

• I randomly came across a reference to Flash Player 8, which promises to be focused on designers as opposed to developers (i.e. more speed), and then on FLOG I saw a reference to a video demo of the player alleging speed increases of 145%. That's cool! I am wondering if they're finally integrating video hardware features into the players. I'd like to see something compile into native code as well. Flash Desktop, anyone?

• I've also heard of processing, the artistic programming language, in the past. It's a graphics programming library based on (and in fact written in) Java. I took a browse through its [core functions]. It has 3d primitives built in, with lighting, and that's an interesting plus over Flash. Speed, it's noted, should be comparable if not better than Flash Player 7.

The only thing that keeps me from looking at Processing is sheer obstinance... I'm not a big fan of Java development if only because the IDEs haven't been very cool. Like the painter who enjoys the smell of turpentine, I'm the sort of computer user who loves a solid GUI. Bad interfaces grate on me, and as a result I tend not to use new tools unless the benefit clearly outweighs the mental anguish :-)

On the other hand, it's been a few years since I've looked at Java, computers are faster now, so it may be worth looking at again for me. If i were to choose a programming language now (and actually, I am), it would probably be Windows C++ or C#.