Been mostly working on projects that are under wraps, but I think i'm onto something pretty cool using augmented reality. I've decided to take the bokeh_gl stuff I've been workin on and turn it into a full fledged Nuke node and I'm excited to make the conversion of it into something immediately usefull.

A week or so ago I got a chance to look into processing, a java library that pretty much overlay's on top of OpenGL that simplifies the callbacks for use in art etc. I modified someone elses piece to play around with some animation, and shaders that are synced to beats in music or an input stream. Their piece also used a kinect for data input to interact with the display. Really cool to get an opportunity to play around with fun graphics tools!

A friend started doing some web development earlier this week in a python based environment and asked about how to organize javascript so its not super lame. I got really swept up into this and ended up coding up an example that's a translation of an example that the library he is using had on their site.

It's a lightweight script based framework to compile a sanely organized coffeescript javascript asset pipe and minify it without using Node.js or Ruby etc. Check it out at the git page I used this project to read up and impliment some github markdown, github-sites which were fun to play around with!

I also got a lesson in what life is like at 80... :P. In college I realized early on that if I was going to be a coder and keep a healthy body without aches I needed to excersize regularly and joined crew to get that going. This was partly because I was suffering from a lot of back pain. This summer due to being put out by a concussion, then a knee injury, my back started to hurt again, and the back pain got so bad that i couldn't excersize anymore, it was an endless cycle of bad. Long story short it was overcome by hot water, sleeping on the floor, replacing a chair with a excersize ball and extremely painful excersize getting done anyway. Hopefully this comes in handy to a coder reading this with back problems, :)

Well, that was a lengthy post, if your still reading, I'd suggest a beer, if it's late, nah I'd still suggest a beer.

Well, I moved back to the bay from Portland and am happy to be back!

I have been pretty busy with moving but I Did some Augmented Reality work with RT-Slam with Luma pictures to help them resolve some bugs they were encountering with the library as well as taken some interest in the library myself.

In other news I FINALLY made some progress on the bokeh_gl work I've been talking about for a while as well as have started work helping a friend out with a distributed work Job Queue in python for Visual Effects houses that emphasizes ease of use, flexibility, reliability, and keeps track of changes made to the current Job list.

I've also recently been distracted with articles on advancements recently in Neural Networks, and been looking into QLearning to apply to some game ideas.

I've managed to upload a lot of my projects to Github and am slowly cleaning up the code base and adding more useful descriptors, but there are still some that are not fixed up yet, I figured having them out there and sloppy was better than having them cooped up in my projects section.

I've also done some work on the portfolio site. I'm still reluctant to update it to the modern web world with HTML 5, ajax, CSS 3, haml, sass, Social Links, Commenting, and an excess of jQuery based effects because my host does not support rails >= 3.1 and I want to wait until I can use the asset and some newer gems. (I got spoiled from working on projects on Heroku where compatibility is not an issue). I did manage to get some time to fix the contact form and update the resume.

Here's to reaching out to some VFX Houses and Gaming Studios around the Bay in the next coming weeks! :)

Well, recently I went on a functional programming binge. I learned haskell and then went over some methods for Functional Reactive Programming and then briefly went over the differences between haskell and ocaml.

Really cool stuff! I'm now back on the OpenGL 4.0 Bokeh Blur Shader but after that I'm going to take my currently slightly buggy iterative ik approach and use Haskell along with FRP to translate it. Should be a fun challenge.

On other note, I got into the D&D 5.0 playtest, which they actually changed to D&D-Next... More on that later. Overall it seems like its a good change for those that prefer storytelling but bad for those that like to game the game of D&D. They took out a lot of cumbersome rules and left thing intentionally vague and up to the DM. This results in gross simplification of the specifics but a more easily explorable base set of rules that you could very well build upon and create the same complex interactions 3.5-ers are used to.

Now.. the rant about D&D "Next". What is that supposed to be? It's like OSX Lion vs OSX Snow Leopard. Please cut the @#$% with versioning systems that tell us absolutely nothing useful about the product in relation to similar products. Its a retardation of a useful practical naming convention in favor of a more marketable product and I hope we don't stand for it for long. I still get headache's trying to find out weather Snow Leapord > Lion or Lion > Snow Leapord. Are these major updates, bug fixes, minor updates, did they change the whole schema? Could we please stick with the simple 3 point system. Major.Minor.Bugfix-Revision? It really is usefull...

Just a notice, sorry for the downtime on the site.

Dreamhost is messing around with their server hardware and software configuration which is resulting in frequent breakages for rails users. So if the site is not loading with a rack or passenger error, if you refresh it should work on second request. I've contacted them about this issue and am going to switch over to a new host asap but that might not be for quite a while.

Recently been playing with Node.js and Haskell. Node more to see what all the hype is about. I dont really see it. Its non-blocking, its functional. But it's still limited to a single thread and at the end of the day, javascript is a horrible language, fast, but horrible. I can code in it just as well as any other, but I would be hesitant to choose it.