Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Last week, at work, they decided that we need another site redesign for the DAAC Website.  The new frontpage is significantly smaller than before, so one idea early one was to incorporate a Flash Menu to scroll between different items.  That way we increase exposure of various things, without dedicating any more screen space.  It was a good idea, and pretty quickly we decided on something like the widget at www.steampowered.com and gamespot.com.  By "we" I mean that the group decided I needed to make it   So I broke down the requirements like so:

1. It should smoothly transition between 5 images, about once every 3 seconds.
2. Buttons across the bottom that indicate which of the 5 images is shown
3. When they click on a button, go directly to that image and disable the automatic transition
4. Each image should be accompanied by a small text Description
5. Clicking on the Image should go to a URL

Seemed simple enough, right?  Unfortunately, I’ve never done anything in Flash before, and we don’t have the Adobe Flash CS2 package in the office.  Being the proponent of Open-Source that I am (and having a deadline of "On the Website" within 4 weeks), I hit the net to see what I could find.  It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the SWFTools.
[tag:flash][tag:swftools][tag:swfc]

This weekend, Laura & I used some Regal Cinema giftcards (Thank you April & Nathan!) to go catch Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.  This movie picks up right after the 2nd one:  Dave Jones is gainfully employed by the East India Trading Company, Beckett has taken to slaughtering pirates (and anyone associated with them) en-masse, and Will & Elizabeth are working with Captain Barbossa to rescue Jack Sparrow from "Davy Jones Locker".

All that said, the movie is 2 hours and 48 minutes, and full of entertainment.  From the naval battles to the sword fighting, to the simply fantastic voyages of sailing to Davy Jones Locker and the improbable escape.  The special effects are, again, fantastic.  The acting is great and Jonny Depp pull of the "New and more-insane" Jack Sparrow perfectly.  My only complaint is the number of plot holes in the movie.  Such obvious ones as 1) 1 day ashore for 10 years at sea, What man in their right mind would agree to that? 2) Who is Calypso, and where did she go at the end of the movie?  3) What’s the deal with Beckett & Sparrow? 4) Why are Davy Jone’s crew half-fish (that becomes a question when you see the end of the movie).  There’s lots more, but it seems they almost generate more questions than answers.

Nonetheless, it’s a fun movie to watch, just like the first two.  If you go watch it, make sure you stay through all the credits.  There’s a short scene at the very end of the movie, a kinda "And they lived happily ever after" moment, although it fits in with #1 above.  I give it 4 of 5 stars.
[tag:pirates][tag:worldsend][tag:movie]

This weekend we celebrated Rhianna’s 4th birthday. Her birthday isn’t actually until later this week, but this weekend was more convenient for everyone.  We rented out a local Pizza Hut and invited some friends over, and had a great time.  Later than evening we went to the local Mexican restaurant and they let Rhi wear the big Sombrero while they sang Feliz Cumpleaños .  Seems this was the Barbie & Play-doh birthday as she racked up on both of them.  She had fun and we’re still (3 days later) opening presents that she hasn’t gotten to yet.  Laura & I got her a Trampoline for her birthday which seems to have been a big hit.  She calls it her own personal Bouncy House and makes it a point to go jump every day.

Trampolines have advanced alot since I was a kid.  This one has several improvements over the one my sisters and I destroyed:

• Springs connect to both the top & bottom of the outer frame, rather than just the top.
• The outer pad connects not only to the frame, but to the pad as well, eliminating those "accidents" where someone’s foot slips under the pad and through the springs.
• Outer Net – This one is a huge difference.  A giant 8-foot tall net surrounds the entire thing, stiched to the outer pad.

Alltogether it’s a much safer "toy" than when I was a kid, and Rhi sure seems to be enjoying it. 

Rhi also did one thing this weekend that really made me proud.  While I was at DOECGF in Colorado, NCAR SCD gave away these neat little pens with Blue LED’s on them, and a button to toggle between blinking, solid on, and off.  The pens don’t write for crap, but they look neat and therefore I grabbed a few and gave them to Rhi to play with.  She’s fascinated by the blinking and continues to play with them.  Anyway, she had one in the car playing with it as we drove back to the house and she said "I broke it, it doesn’t work anymore."  I took a look at it and sure enough the LED wouldn’t come on anymore.  I thought it odd that the battery would die so suddenly on something so small as a LED, so I took a closer look.  After some inspection I found that one of the batteries (it used 3 small button-cells) was in backward. Rhianna had disassembled the pen and in putting it back together accidentally got one of the batteries in backwards.  A little engineer in training.
[tag:birthday][tag:family]

About 2 months ago I mentioned that I had gotten Call of Duty 3 for the Wii.  I was really excited about trying one of my favorite franchises (I never get tired of shooting Nazi’s) with the Wii’s interesting control system.  I was looking forward to some good point-n-click gun-totin’ action in my living room, so I didn’t wait long before I dove in hard to try it out.

Unfortunately, I was initially pretty disappointed.  I could tell it was a mediocre port from the beginning when I brought up the first menu. Where every other Wii game I’ve played used the "Big White Finger" or a crosshair (Zelda) that were motion tracked so you literally could "point-and-click" on all the menus.  Not so in COD3, you have to use the directional pad to move around all the menus in the game.  This includes not only starting the game, but entering your savegame names, setting options, everything.   That was something I could live with, if not for the fumbled control scheme.  I had expected something like Twilight Princess, where the nunchuck controller is used for movement and turning, and the Wiimote is treated like the barrel of the gun.  Unfortunately, I was only half right.  The nunchuck controls forward/backward and Strafing, but turning is accomplished by moving the Wiimote crosshair towards the edge of the screen.  This sounds good in theory, but the implementation is an invitation to motion sickness to a whole new generation. 

In case you don’t understand, let me post this in-game scenario to you:  You walk up to a half-wall and come under fire.  You quickly duck down and wait for a break in the fire.  As soon as they stop, you pop up over the wall and look for a target.  The problem is that as you move the targeting cursor away from the center of the screen, you immediate start turning.  So when you see a head pop up to your left, you aim over there and immediately start turning left, which makes your target move to the right requiring you to "chase" them toward the center of the screen with the wiimote.  For the first few days I could only play for an hour at a time, then I needed an extensive break.  The nausea was unbearable.

Fortunately, I eventually adjusted to it and now it’s almost normal.  With that hurdle out of the way, the game has started to live up to my expectations.  It’s classic Call of Duty, with the innovative wiimote features added.  A few special motion tracking features:

• Driving – One scene you spend driving a jeep while your 2 comrades fire out around you.  You hold the nunchuck and Wiimote in front of you at 3 & 9 o’clock and pretend it’s two sides of the steering wheel, using the buttons for Gas & Brake.
• Detonators – One mission has you placing charges on Anti-aircraft flak guns.  When you walk up to the gun you play a short minigame where you have to use the nunchuck to mimic the motions of placing the charge, screwing in the detonator, and pulling the pin.
• Boating – One mission has a scene where your squad rows a small boat across a river.  You hold the Wiimote & nunchuck together like a boat oar and have to paddle the boat across.
• Hand-to-Hand combat – A few times I’ve cut a corner to find myself face-to-face with a German (Scripted, unavoidable).  What ensues next is a Wii Sports Boxing-like scene where you both wrestle for control of the gun you’re carrying, and if you’re successful then you complete a "finishing move" to either stab him or clock him with the butt of the gun.

So what started as a rather dismal port of a classic game franchise is turning into a simply fantastic game.  I’m having alot of fun with it, and I’m still working on it.  My only other complaint is that so much of the game is Audio-based (Squad Leaders barking orders to you), and they don’t seem to offer subtitles on any of it.  That means i have to have the volume up to hear what’s going on, meaning I can’t play it at night or risk waking everyone in the house up with loud explosions and gunshots.  So I only get to play it in short bursts, mostly on the weekend.  Nonetheless, it’s proven to be a fun game.  Give this one a 4 of 5.
[tag:callofduty][tag:game][tag:wii]

Even as much as the Altitude Sickness has messed me up, I can’t help but be amazed at the scenery around here.  The huge mountains, running creeks and rivers, ponds, trees, and remnants of the snowy winter make the place simply beautiful.  I would love to take some pictures and throw them up here for everyone to enjoy, but I didn’t take a camera (Mental Note: Take one next time).

Even tho, I do have my little RAZR phone with it’s integrated 640×480 camera.  I thought about taking some pictures but figured the resolution wouldn’t even come close to representing the scenery around here.  Then I remembered some of the work I did long ago with Panoramic Stiching.   A few minutes later I had Hugin, Autopano, and Enblend all setup and running on the laptop, and took off to snap some pics. 

I started small with only 3 source images in each panoram.  The results were surprisingly good, but didn’t really give enough vertical display to be interesting.  I slowly worked my way up until I finally generated a big 41-image Panoram of one of the more impressive scenes.  The results were surprisingly good, but I did have some setbacks:

1. The RAZR Camera is poorly documented.  For anyone else trying this, the RAZR’s Field of View seems to be 45 degrees (Hugin automatically computed the Focal Length at around 42mm from that). 
2. The RAZR Camera is pretty bad.  I was unable to find any way to disable the camera’s automatic adjustment for light levels.  Because of this, the scenes of the horizon (right over the trees) are hideously overexposed, creating overly bright skies and siloette trees. 
3. There’s just not enough resolution.  While the resulting pictures are interesting, I could have gotten a higher-resolution (pixel-wise) image with a single shot of a regular digital camera.  I do get a wider field-of-view through the stiching, but the lack of resolution adds alot of registration errors that accumulate to give wide pictures a strange "bend".

Nonetheless, I thought the images worth posting online in the new Peaceful Valley Panoram gallery.  I might venture out again today and snap some more pics, but I doubt I’ll get any significantly better results.  It’s still a fun hobby though, one I might try to spend more time with in the future.  And Hugin + Autopano + EnBlend make a great (free!) combination of tools to make generating these panorams extremely simple.  The 3-shot images I generated in just a few seconds a piece, with the 41-piece one taking about an hour.  It was initialy done in about 5 minutes, but I spent alot of time tweaking the individual images and removing a few of them that actually made the resulting image worse.

Update :
I’ve put 2 new panorams up, including one that I’m particularly proud of : The Large Pond Panoram.  The other one didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped.  But in all this, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons about creating panoramic images:

1. Take way more images than you think you need.  You can never have too many.
2. Take images at angles you don’t expect, most notably: Down on the ground.
3. Parallax is not your friend. Make sure you don’t have any objects in the near field that will cause problems in the final stitching (Especially evident in the latest image I posted)
4. Try not to move the camera much between shots.  Rotation is ok, but Translation causes discontinuities.

But I’m looking forward to trying some more.  I’m pretty sick and tired of using my Razr for this, so I’m looking forward to using a better camera.  Now I’ve just gotta find something to shoot. [tag:hugin][tag:panoram][tag:picture][tag:photo]