I am big fan of Super Mario Bros and it's themes. They are as emblematic as the Star Wars theme, or the Pink Panther one. There was an alternative jazz band that uses some of the Nintendo tunes in their songs, which I tried to search the other night. I couldn't remember the name of the jazz band, but I found an interesting site that posted 40 of the best Super Mario performances on youtube. Check it out here:
You can skip the first ones as they are somewhat stupid. I especially like the beatboxer with the flute and the clasical orchestra at the end performing in Stockholm. The Tesla coils and the wireless car with the bottles are also fun.
I spent several hours today to find what's the "bug" with a plugin I am writing just to find out there is no bug at all. It implements both classes MPxConstraint and MPxConstraintCommand to create custom constraint in Maya. When you load plugins the "i" button on the Plug -in Manager right to the plugin you are loading says what nodes, commands, contexts , shaders, etc. the plugin implements. In my case I am implementing one node and one command. When I load the plugin the info says there is only one node loaded and no command at all. After several hours trying to see if there is a bug in my code I realized that the MPxConstraintCommand is never shown in the PlugIn Info. Only MPxCommand classes are shown. These two classes are relatively new in the Maya API and I couldn't find any info at all about them in the internet. So if you start thinking why your command doesn't show, like the rest of the plugins do, that's the case. The command is actually implemented but never shown in the info.
I got a sandbox account for Google Wave some days ago and I am playing with it ever since! First impressions from it:
Pros:
The realtime typing is so fun to watch! There was a wave edited by 10 people simultaneously and it was very impressive.
I tried to embed an hmtl page with a wave I created. The problem is only people with sandbox account can see it now, but if you have one definitely check it here: http://scroll-lock.eu/testWave.html I already waved with some friends in it, embeded a google maps application inside it and watched it move realtime in my wave inbox when my friends try to manipulate with it within the page. The fact that the wave can be accessed from so many places at the same time impresses me also.
It is open source! The wave protocol is open source! That means anybody can make their own wave server, wave applications , wave robots, etc.. etc..the possibilities are endless. You can read more about the wave protocol here: http://www.waveprotocol.org/
Wave API is available! It is still very "alpha" but it already enables you to make extensions (robots) and embeded waves in the sites.
Cons:
It is still very buggy. There is a black "refresh" button that appears almost every 10 minutes when I play with the incoming waves.
There is a user discussion group for all the testers at the moment and when someone sends a wave to that group it comes into your inbox. There is no way to delete it. I receive more than 20 waves in a minute. That buggs me a lot!
There is huge difference in the behavior of the waves inside different browsers and OS. The best performance I tested was with Firefox 3.5 and Windwos XP. On my Linux Fedora 8 core machine with Firefox 2.X it behaved extremely slowly. I upgraded the FF to 3.5.1and now it behaves ok. I haven't tested it with Chrome , or IE , but people on the wave group say it's fast with Chrome too. I managed to test it on my Safari iPhone (there is obviously an alpha version for the iPhone) and it works somewhat... but again very very slowly.
There are already some extremely annoying bots being developed that are actually a spambots. They come to your wave and spam the hell out of it :) At least some "good" robots are also being developed that can kick, ban, etc the "bad" ones :)
I am big fan of DC shoes and this movie is just amazingly shot, well driven and shivering. Simply Ken Block.
And here is a piece of Top Gear movie , where James May drives in Ken Block's Subaru and later Ricky Carmichael joins the race. There is one fantastic shot at the end of the movie!
Very often I deal with linear algebra of some kind in Python. There is no standard library for that. I wrote a little class for vectors, which I accidentally lost. Yesterday I found just what I needed for that type of things. The module is called euclid. It has vector, matrix and quaternion classes for use with 2D and 3D games and graphics applications. And it is compatible with Pygame.
I noticed I never wrote anything about one of my hobbies. This is the aquariums. And not every aquarium types, but the ones from the Great African Lakes - Malawi and Tanganyika. Mine is a Malawi biotope. I started with this hobby five years ago. I made the aquarium myself - from the gluing of the glasses , to finding a ground substrate, sand and rocks to the very end of making the composition and lighting perfect for the inhabitants in this little piece of the lake Malawi.
Here are little videos I found on youtube showing the Malawi cichlids in their natural environment. You can see how fascinating , colorful and interesting they are. And their behaviour is what I admire most. How they like to dig the sand, how the mothers protect the brood in their mouth, how the males fight against each other.
And here is my attempt at making a piece of that lake in my living room:
This is my last setup from a month ago. I changed it drastically over the years but finally I like it the way it is. Some day I`ll find every picture I made of my tank from his birth to this day and show you how different it was in the beginning :) Cheers.
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