So yeah, this is pretty much what I've been up to for the past, oh, 3 months/1 quarter of school. These are a few of the projects I've done for my Computer Graphics 2 class (which I just got an A in, booyah!)

First up, the classic CG application, a ray tracer complete with phongphongphong shading, procedural shading on the floor, reflection, transmission, and even some tone reproduction.

Secondly, my quarter long personal project, a simple particle system/b-spline curve generator in XNA, dubbed Q-Blizzard. Turned out to be quite pretty, not exactly configurable though.

And finally, an image that won me a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate in the Pixar Renderman Shader contest. I won third place out of around 30 images! My roommate noted that I should have added an OM NOM NOM caption in for kicks.

Hopefully this will mark my return to regular blogging (going to try monday, wednesday, friday) for the summer and onward. Hell, if mittens can keep up his Daily GameDev.net postings for 2 months, I can do it too. Right? ...Right? (I seem to tell myself every few months or so...)

So yeah, this is pretty much what I've been up to for the past, oh, 3 months/1 quarter of school. These are a few of the projects I've done for my Computer Graphics 2 class (which I just got an A in, booyah!)

First up, the classic CG application, a ray tracer complete with phongphongphong shading, procedural shading on the floor, reflection, transmission, and even some tone reproduction.

Secondly, my quarter long personal project, a simple particle system/b-spline curve generator in XNA, dubbed Q-Blizzard. Turned out to be quite pretty, not exactly configurable though.

And finally, an image that won me a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate in the Pixar Renderman Shader contest. I won third place out of around 30 images! My roommate noted that I should have added an OM NOM NOM caption in for kicks.

Hopefully this will mark my return to regular blogging (going to try monday, wednesday, friday) for the summer and onward. Hell, if mittens can keep up his Daily GameDev.net postings for 2 months, I can do it too. Right? ...Right? (I seem to tell myself every few months or so...)

So yeah, this is pretty much what I've been up to for the past, oh, 3 months/1 quarter of school. These are a few of the projects I've done for my Computer Graphics 2 class (which I just got an A in, booyah!)

First up, the classic CG application, a ray tracer complete with phongphongphong shading, procedural shading on the floor, reflection, transmission, and even some tone reproduction.

Secondly, my quarter long personal project, a simple particle system/b-spline curve generator in XNA, dubbed Q-Blizzard. Turned out to be quite pretty, not exactly configurable though.

And finally, an image that won me a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate in the Pixar Renderman Shader contest. I won third place out of around 30 images! My roommate noted that I should have added an OM NOM NOM caption in for kicks.

Hopefully this will mark my return to regular blogging (going to try monday, wednesday, friday) for the summer and onward. Hell, if mittens can keep up his Daily GameDev.net postings for 2 months, I can do it too. Right? ...Right? (I seem to tell myself every few months or so...)

I've become quite a twitterholic the past few days. In fact, let's check the stats. Yeah, I've been pretty much addicted the past few days. Why? Well, there's a few things I love about Twitter:

1. Twitter is short, sweet, and easy to use.

The concept is simple: 140 characters to tell the world what you're doing. I don't think you can get more simple than that. No complex forms, no huge commitments, just a simple request, and your simple answer. It has a wonderful web interface, and the settings allow you completely customize your page's background along with colors for fonts. It's just a breeze to use and easy to look at, which is a welcome change compared to Facebook or MySpace.[more]

2. It's an awesome way to network with highly connected bloggers.

I think Scoble puts it best:

You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).

Twitter is becoming the heart of the Interblag. It's what bloggers are doing when they're NOT blogging. Obviously yes, we all have our jobs and commitments, but Twitter is a way to connect with those people between their blog, vlogs, or however they communicate with the internet at large. It's a way for those who are connected to quickly poll, grow, and comment with their audience. The value to bloggers to be active on Twitter is absolutely critical: these are the people who you WANT to be reading your blog. They're the people that will link your blog to others, they know where to share it and who to share it with. They're all here folks. Come and find them.

3. It's a great way to keep in touch with friends.

I think Twitter in Plain English hits the nail on head: Twitter is a way to converse with friends in a way that isn't that important to email them, but doesn't necessarily demands their instant attention. Of course now, you can use Jabber/XMPP to interface with Twitter. Anyway, I find it to be a neat way to keeping in touch with people I know in the real world online that isn't exactly bugging them over AIM or Facebook. Also, if you're concerned about random people like me following your every move, you can make your page private and only allow those you approve to watch your updates.

4. It's just fun to use!

What really gets me with this are the fantastic clients that seem to be populating the net. The Twitter API is readily accessible and easy to implement, and that's extremely important as it seems that most people use twitter through outside clients or through text messaging rather than their web interface. My personal favorite at the moment is Twhirl, which is an Adobe AIR client. It's got a neat, clean interface and colors are customizable, so I'm having fun with it. I rarely have to go to the website anymore, the API is so open that the majority of the functionality is accessible through outside clients.

So, why haven't you created a Twitter account yet? I guarantee you that it'll do nothing but help you get your blog known, and connect with others who are on the same quest. Feel free to follow me as well, I'll make sure to follow you.

Lately I’ve noticed that a few of my friends have been able to understand or even be aware of the Windows command line. I have a hard time myself pulling myself away from Explorer, but sometimes the command line is just quicker. However, it's a bit drab by default. Today I'm going to show you just how you can pimp yours out a bit.[more]

First up is a wonderful tool called Console2, which is an open source tabbed command line utility. It allows easy configuration of fonts, colors, the background colors, and even lets you do some really crazy things if you wanted such as adding a background image. The best feature by far though are its tabs, which I'm sure if you've ever used IE7+ or Firefox you know how useful they can be for multitasking. Another great feature is that you can set up plenty of keyboard shortcuts if you're into that sort of thing. Check it out here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

Console is great if you want to fire up a specific program all the time, but I'm used to slamming WinKey + R and typing cmd so much that it's basically embedded into my muscle memory. So, I was looking for configuring the default prompt instead of running another program. Pimping out my command prompt has taken me quite a while to find the perfect configuration that suits my needs, and it's constantly changing as I find new things to add. Here's what I've done to trick mine out:

I'm using Consolas as my font. I absolutely love Consolas and I find it much easier to read than Courier New or the default font that the command window has. Consolas is not available by default and requires a simple registry hack along with a reboot in order to work. I haven't had any issues with it thus far, and I highly recommend following Scott Hanselman's wonderful tutorial.

I'm not a Windows command line user at heart, I was raised during my Computer Science classes to poke around Linux machines. Sadly, certain commands like ls -la come much more naturally to me than dir /aMy solution to this is installing the CoreUtils for Windows package, which adds most of the core GNU utilities into the command line. This hack requires installing a package from SourceForge and adding to the PATH environment variable, which are covered in this blog post over at AskStudent.com.

Finally, I'm a huge fan of using the pushd/popd commands: push directory and pop directory. Basically it's a way to return to directories instead of having to overuse cd or even remember where you were. Luckily, there's an easy way to keep track of the amount of directories that have been pushed onto the stack by changing the PROMPT environment variable to

$p$_$+$g

Check out the AskStudent tutorial to see how to do get to the environment variables window if you don't know how. What this does is add + symbols to the command line window as shown in the screenshot. It's ridiculously useful, and now I just wish I could figure out how to automagically pushd and cd at the same time.

If you've got any questions regarding pimping out your command line or other great hacks I'm missing out on, let me know!

As always, I'm late to jump on the failboat, and this time I've decided to do some serious maintenance on my computer. I've had enough of having to rely on System Restore and worrying that I've lost all of my data, or that my computer is on the brink of death. So, I'm going to start maintaining my system more, and that's  starting with keeping my hard drive as tidy and speedy as possible. [more]

My buddy Island Dog pointed me towards a great tool called Defraggler, and this started my journey.  Essentially, it allows you to really control the defrag process from a drive and individual file level. It also includes the color graph that sadly, Vista removed. Obviously, this tool is pretty much only for power users, as I'm sure grandma doesn't even know the slightest about what a hard drive even is. Partly I'm glad that Vista streamlined the process of defragmentation, but I have a feeling normal users won't be doing it regularly until Windows does it for them or it's watered down to one huge button called "Drive Maintenence" that does Disk Cleanup, a defrag, and whatever else fun stuff Microsoft decides that your drive needs.  For users like me however, I like having a bit of control. Not too much though, I'm not a supervillian.

Anyway, Defraggler is a very neat app. It clearly presents the process, what files need to be moved around, and shows your data being moved around. It also allows you to switch the process priority from normal to background so I can actually use my computer during the process. This is nice for XP, while the visualization helps on Vista.  I find the color graph absolutely fascinating since I'm scared to death of low level stuff like this, but my mind does wonder how defragmentation works under the hood. Maybe someday I will be a supervillian after all...just definitely not using Linux to control my orbiting brain lasers.

I recently came across this post about a user who decided he had enough of the user-generated news community, Reddit. I've been a Reddit user for a quite some time now, and I've done my share of down voting Ron Paul stories as well submitting silly pictures that have made it onto the front page. Lately though, it's become more than a habit to check this site. [more]I have a very compulsive personality, and I tend to find some sort of deep and intensive joy in small, minute improvements and changes. I know this is the reason why over 70 days of my life were wasted on World of Warcraft, and I'm pretty sure it's the reason why I find programming so fun. Most people would be frustrated by missing a semi-colon and be absolutely stumped by the quest for perfection that compilers demand, but to me it's another challenge, another hurdle I know I can overcome. It's also the reason why some days I'd refresh Reddit every 5 to 10 minutes to see if my karma had changed.

Reddit has been sucking up way too much of my time during the day, and I've decided to put an end to it. All I did was block it through my hosts file to redirect to 127.0.0.1, which works out well since during my work time it directs me to the website that I'm developing.

So, I'm turning off the firehose. I will probably end up blocking Digg and Slashdot as well, and I need to set up Google Reader for my favorite blogs. Yeah, this means I'll sacrifice that information intake that my brain is used to, but I feel that time could be used to read the several books I have lying around my room, be it Code Complete or the Mythical Man-Month. My guitar is also gathering plenty of dust, and I have a few side projects that I could be working on as well. Here's to less distractions! Do you have distractions that you could probably do without?

I could say this about WPF as a whole, but when things actually work with WPF it's so damn smooth I can't help but feel somewhat accomplished. Nevertheless, I had a real pain trying to get an embedded flash player into my WPF app. Why Flash? Why not...dare I say, Silverlight? Well, I'm building a small app that plays YouTube videos, so obviously Flash makes sense. First, here's some lessons I learned while on this wonderfully frustrating journey:

1. For this instance, the WebBrowser control blows.
   My first attempt was to add an embed tag into a WebBrowser control, which is put inside of a WindowsFormsHost control, which is how .NET encapsulates pre-3.0 controls. This did not work in the long run because first of all, IE throws script errors when you try to play YouTube's .SWF files, and also when resizing the background flashes and looks like utter garbage. Don't get me wrong, it has its uses. Just not here.
2. Pre-packaged solutions also suck.
   There's a few flash solutions out there that I tried, either got working and had to pay ridiculous amounts for (oh look, $1000 off this month!), or plainly didn't work at all. Just don't use them.
3. Google is your only hope.
   Basically any problem I'd come across I'd have to google immediately, and answers were sparse. The solution I finally ended up with was embedded ActiveX objects, which I also had a lot of trouble with, hence this blog post.

So, here's an overview of what I did, and how you can get it working. A small note, I'm targeting .NET 3.0.

1. Reference Interop.ShockwaveFlashObjects and AxInterop.ShockwaveFlashObjects in your project. The latter assembly may only be the necessary one, but back in the 2.0 world the forms designer added both. These DLLs will be included in the download project, but you can usually find them in the COM tab of the Add Reference dialog.
2. For whatever UserControl or Window you want to show this on, set up a WindowsFormsHost object as well as a AxShockwaveFlash object. (Make sure to include a using AxShockwaveFlashObjects; as well)
3. In the Loaded event for your UserControl/Window, NOT the constructor, set up these objects and set the Child property of the WindowsFormsHost to the AxShockwaveFlash object you made. If you don't do it in this order, or do this in the constructor, ActiveX gets quite angry at you.
4. Make sure to add the WindowsFormsHost to the UserControl/Window...this is one of those gotchas that can save you some time.
5. Now you can set the Movie property of the flash player, and call Play() and it should work fine. If not, leave a comment and I'll help you out.

Here's an example project for you to get started with:

I could say this about WPF as a whole, but when things actually work with WPF it's so damn smooth I can't help but feel somewhat accomplished. Nevertheless, I had a real pain trying to get an embedded flash player into my WPF app. Why Flash? Why not...dare I say, Silverlight? Well, I'm building a small app that plays YouTube videos, so obviously Flash makes sense. First, here's some lessons I learned while on this wonderfully frustrating journey:

1. For this instance, the WebBrowser control blows.
   My first attempt was to add an embed tag into a WebBrowser control, which is put inside of a WindowsFormsHost control, which is how .NET encapsulates pre-3.0 controls. This did not work in the long run because first of all, IE throws script errors when you try to play YouTube's .SWF files, and also when resizing the background flashes and looks like utter garbage. Don't get me wrong, it has its uses. Just not here.
2. Pre-packaged solutions also suck.
   There's a few flash solutions out there that I tried, either got working and had to pay ridiculous amounts for (oh look, $1000 off this month!), or plainly didn't work at all. Just don't use them.
3. Google is your only hope.
   Basically any problem I'd come across I'd have to google immediately, and answers were sparse. The solution I finally ended up with was embedded ActiveX objects, which I also had a lot of trouble with, hence this blog post.

So, here's an overview of what I did, and how you can get it working. A small note, I'm targeting .NET 3.0.

1. Reference Interop.ShockwaveFlashObjects and AxInterop.ShockwaveFlashObjects in your project. The latter assembly may only be the necessary one, but back in the 2.0 world the forms designer added both. These DLLs will be included in the download project, but you can usually find them in the COM tab of the Add Reference dialog.
2. For whatever UserControl or Window you want to show this on, set up a WindowsFormsHost object as well as a AxShockwaveFlash object. (Make sure to include a using AxShockwaveFlashObjects; as well)
3. In the Loaded event for your UserControl/Window, NOT the constructor, set up these objects and set the Child property of the WindowsFormsHost to the AxShockwaveFlash object you made. If you don't do it in this order, or do this in the constructor, ActiveX gets quite angry at you.
4. Make sure to add the WindowsFormsHost to the UserControl/Window...this is one of those gotchas that can save you some time.
5. Now you can set the Movie property of the flash player, and call Play() and it should work fine. If not, leave a comment and I'll help you out.

Here's an example project for you to get started with: