Colemak Result: Failure

I'm afraid I had to give up on colemak... I felt it decrease my working speed too much trying the "Cold-turkey" approach. And while frustration arose while programming, I felt I hade to fallback on good old qwerty...

But seeing that you can really feel that your finger movement across the keyboard decrease significantly while using colemak, I'm still going to try working towards it, but with a more subtle approach of training it at home.

But so far, the problem with learning colemak is not actually learn what has changed from qwerty, but to avoid using muscle memory while typing. So its when your trying to avoid thinking that you're typing colemak the problems arises.

Since I also wanted to keep my swedish qwerty for stuff like logging in, windows created some problems for me... Like the fact that it seems to be on an application-base that windows decides what keyboard layout you want to use, so att occations I would start writing colemak, and because the keyboard was set to qwerty, I'd had to restart which was sort of a pain in the butt..

Cyifmae : Saj 2 (Colemak Day 2)

I've done some half-ass attempts to try out Colemak earlier, but this time its with a "Cold turkey" approach.
So the deal is for me and another Tech-artist here to use colemak layout for 2 weeks(to start with). I don't know if it's placebo, but it really feels like you move you fingers much less using colemak! another advantage for us swedish programmers is the placement of the brackets on colemak, to achieve squiggly brackets(altGr + 7 or 0) on swedish keyboard, you'll need to be a circus star with your fingers!

The bad side of it all is that my writing efficiency will take some punish, but I hope to be up to speed asap!

C# + MotionBuilder?

My latest project is to try to get something familiar to what Francois Fruneau(noctua) achieved with Maya, using C# to create the UI with winforms and have it talking to motionbuilder thru Eventhandlers.

I've more or less worked to recreate noctua's code for motionbuilder. There are some small issues: I'm right now using Motionbuilder's FBTool class to initiate the C# UI, and the problem is that this class has to create an window for its own UI, so what I end up with is a small window like this:


I'll try looking into inheriting from another class to avoid this, but the good thing about the FBTool class is the fact that it registers the class to the ui to create a Menu item for it.
If my further tests are a success I will look into creating a good class to inherit that would heko ne to in the future set up similar configurations with Motionbuilder and C#.


If you'd like to recreate this, just check out the link i posted further up to find the code, with some info regarding Motionbuilders SDK (Open Reality) it's fairly simple.
Some notes:
 - When you've built your C# DLL, this shoud be place inside of motionbuilder's bin folder NOT the plugins folder.
- You'll need to change settings on individual cpp files in to complie with or without CLR support.

Time to continue my dive into the rabbit hole!

Tech art, unite!

Thanks to Rob Galanakis, he've collected a whole lot of tech art blogs in one place, making it to the ultimate blog out there!

Check it out!
http://tech-artists.org/blog/

Embedded GPS in Websites

Just the other day i stumbled into a website that had a some directions to find their shop.
Either they had a link to google maps, or plain GPS coords.

This struck an idea in my head that im thinking of fiddeling with, basically trying out if i can work with embedding GPS coord. information into a website's code, and with an App in my Android, quickly paste the company's website into and have a button to quickly get this information into the GPS app on the phone.

I think this would be great system for companies to make it easier to share their location with their customers: just surf onto their website and click "Get directions" and voila, your phone starts guiding you in the right direction.

Infra Shader

Right now I'm working on a shader solution in XNA that resembles how infrared cameras actually works, Looking at some games (mostly the splinter cell series) the heat camera you can use there doesnt really react like a normal camera would:

It uses a scale ramp that dynamically changes depending on what the hottest and coldest value on the screen is.
 here is an example from youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU_fkjEkLa8&feature=related

And here is my first WIP from the project.


infraShader WIP from erik larsson on Vimeo.


I'm Calculating the original frames luminance and then sample the image down to find the highest and lowest luminance in the picture, that then translate to heat, more white = hotter.

Right now there seem to be some issues with the sampling because the output pixel in the sampler doesnt always return the max value.

Update!

I've been pretty crappy at blogging, but I'm still here!
gonna try giving updates more frequently from now on.

I've updated my website with a new theme and also updated my CV to the latest info and trimmed away some old stuff.