Saturday, July 29, 2006

God Loves You

I shot this on the Old Town Square, where group of energetic young Christians used pre-recorded music to tell you that (their) God loves you, much to the irritation of people who tried to listen to the live band just behind them.



It also seems that, according to their message, God dances like shit and carries dangerous wooden sticks.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Life is Life

You are probably familiar with Conway's Game of Life, one of the first computer simulations / games / screensavers ever. I am not sure if that's still true today but when I began programming, Life was something EVERYONE played with during their first stages of computer literacy.



It's nice to see that Life enthusiasts are still thriving and coming up with new algorithms that allow them to generate thousands of generations of thousands of Life cells on infinite playfield with lightning speed. This is something very different from running Life on 20x20 grid and it allows you to discover all kinds of beautiful stuff you never knew existed in Life. Download Golly multiplatform Life simulator to try it out.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

As I wrote before, I don't like the current trend of trying to make videogame characters looking more and more "lifelike" (i.e. more and more like plastic mannequins). That's why I found this screenshot from Team Fortress 2 very refreshing. Not that I ever played Team Fortress, but I find this approach far more aesthetically pleasing than striving for realism. And it's easier to design and animate, too...

Friday, July 14, 2006

FFTempl = K.I.S.S.

In keeping up with the "Keep it simple, stupid" school of thought, and to learn programming in Lua, I created this super simple system for generating dynamic webpages on my server.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Albert the Hunter

As I documented before, Kryspin already killed two innocent animals. Now it's Albert's turn...

Monday, July 03, 2006

Free sound effects for your computer

I installed XChat IRC client and it dawned to me that I need some sound effects to hear notifications when someone types a messages etc... I wanted some unique sounds (distinguishable from the effects already used by Ubuntu desktop, GAIM etc). That's why I created short sound effects of various style and length myself. You can get them here and do whatever you want with them.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

David Hasselhoff: Still Being God

As long as there is Hasselhoff, there is hope for the human race. Please, jump in his car!

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Helping Superman to return

Oops, not updated for several days... I got a new computer and made a new home router/server from the old one. I must say Linux still has problems with WiFi suport and it was a real chore. Now, everything is running and I can get back to work: Translating Superman Returns.

I created my own subtitling application (screenshot here) in Ruby, to help me with subtitles. I just write them as standard text and this application is formatting the subtitles (according to rather complex rules). It also allows me to pause and rewind the video without leaving the text editor. It's very crude but it was rather simple to create, just connecting various free components together.

However, it seems, my language of choice is currently Lua. Not only for C embedding (of which I had just scratched the surface) but also as general scripting language. I like its philosphy of providing just bare basics and letting you extend it for a specific project VERY QUICKLY and easily (e.g. creating custom object-oriented framework in about 60 seconds) - it somehow reminds me of Forth. It's lightning fast and it can easily interface with any Linux command / script. If I knew it sooner, I'd probably use Lua instead of Ruby and WXLua instead of Ruby-Gnome2. I already used Lua to write a library to check/update my Google Calendar (without any network library, just calling "curl") and the Czech film release schedule.