Knee of the Curve

"No Romaja" Userscript for KoreanClass101

2009-07-13T07:57:00.005-05:00

I'm a paying member at KoreanClass101.com. It's a pretty good site for learning Korean, save for the unfortunate amount of romanization they use. One of the worst instances is in vocabulary lists, where a romanization sits directly next to the proper Hangul text for a word. A native-english brain prefers the romanization, which discourages learning vocabulary in actual Korean.

If you'd like that Romanization column to disappear, you can try out my userscript. Simply install Greasekit/Greasemonkey (instructions are here for Safari and here for Firefox) then head over to the page for my script and install it!

After that, your vocab lists should change from this:

To this!

MySoju Plex Plugin Update

2009-07-07T22:38:00.006-05:00

Not a lot going on with the MySoju plugin for Plex, but I have added the ability to detect broken episodes, and to see what video site a certain episode is hosted at. Screenshots incoming!

Something Wrong With This Picture

2009-06-25T14:20:00.003-05:00

Come on, Apple, shouldn't there be SOMETHING about Cocoa in your Apple-specific dictionary?

A MySoju Plugin for Plex Media Server

2009-06-15T00:56:00.004-05:00

It would be awesome if Plex, the Mac media centre software, had support for the CJK drama website MySoju. Fortunately, Plex has a relatively easy plugin architecture, so I've started working on such a feature!

So far, the plugin can browse all dramas, movies, staff picks and rankings. As for actually viewing the videos, if they are hosted on MSN Soapbox, they will work. Over the next week I will be adding support for as many of MySoju's sources as I can. I'm a bit worried about how hard supporting Dailymotion will be, since they're breaking the MySoju site right now. Time will tell.

Anyway, the plugin is progressing nicely, so if you want to see some screenshots, just click the thumbnails below!

Coming Soon: BT's Video Game Theme Song

2009-06-09T22:29:00.005-05:00

Electronic musician extraordinaire BT has really been forging ahead with this newfangled Internet thing. From being quite involved on his Twitter account to releasing 12-second preview clips of his upcoming album, dude knows how to keep his fans pumped up. He also made some cool announcements at a Ustream interview he conducted this evening.

Coming soon, the Beatport music store (which has BT's new single available DRM-free) will be offering up a version of said single hacked up and ready for remixing in a contest. The winner will see their remix available for sale on Beatport. Pretty cool.

Of particular interest to me was BT's response to questions about his work with video games. BT has had his music appear in games, the most noteworthy of which (to me) is the playable version of Kimosabe on Harmonix's PS2 title Amplitude. He let slip that he has composed the theme song to an upcoming (but unnamed!) video game, describing it as "big, orchestral" and "dubstep" and more. He followed up by saying:

...being a gamer myself, I've found that a lot of people that support my music and what I do are gamers too, and so I'd like to write a lot more music for video games.

Good to hear, Mr. BT! Please bring-it-up bring-it-up bring-it-up, and thanks for engaging your fans like this!

That Which Apple Stands to Democratize

2009-06-04T22:33:00.003-05:00

Normally, iPhone rumors get a :rolleyes: and a "Bah!" from yours truly, but TUAW has a couple of pretty interesting ones posted that, together, shape an interesting vision of what Apple could do to make the third-gen iPhone stick out from its newly-emboldened competitors.

First off, TUAW has gleaned from possible pre-release AT&T support docs that the new iPhone may be called the iPhone video. Also, some supposed pics of the new iPhone show a front-facing green LED, the Apple standard for an integrated iSight camera.

iPhone possesses a mass-market appeal and mindshare that is rare among its competitors. When the next iPhone launches, customers will be in huge, snaking lines to buy it, the kind of lines that Palm, RIM et cetera only see in dreams. With such an appealing brand, Apple is in a rare position to embrace an as-yet-unpopular technology and make it indispensable.

Imagine if Apple were to market a video-call-capable phone, that mythical telecom product that companies like AT&T, Motorola and Intel have failed to make popular. The hype-machine and HCI prowess that Apple possesses could turn it from a quirky technology that only early-adopting geeks would use into the must-have killer app for the next two or three years.

Enter the Kotaku-posted rumor that the third-gen iPhone will possess a significantly more powerful graphics processor than its predecessors. In the App Store context, this would have the undesirable side-effect of splintering the iPhone platform. But, with greater graphical chops come greater UI possibilities, and a 3- or 4-way video-conference over a cell network would definitely be a new, leading-edge innovation in the American mobile industry.

I have no clue as to the likelihood of such a technology being announced at the Philnote next week...but I have my fingers crossed. We need a novel use of this bandwidth we keep adding to our cell networks, and video calls/conferences would be an amazing step forward for all involved parties.

I Like The Way Gizmodo Thinks

2009-05-25T16:41:00.004-05:00

Too bad it ain't gonna happen, but a geek can dream.

"Flowchart"

2009-05-02T22:50:00.002-05:00

The other night, I was playing Street Fighter 4 and got creamed by some guy who was playing as (shock!) Ken Masters. Later, I got a message from him, consisting of one simple assertion:

haha flowchart

What did he mean? Clearly he was insulting me. Am I so bad that he could beat me with simple flowchart-style Ken? Or was I playing too simplistic of a game?

Whatever it was, there's only one flowchart you'll ever need for SF4.

$60 Games and The Mid-Range

2009-03-04T00:54:00.005-06:00

It's amazing how well Twitter keeps my thoughts flowing. Enough to keep me from needing to post here! SO ANYWAY--

I just got done reading Kotaku's review of THQ's new 50 Cent game. The review is relatively positive, commending it for being accessible and (somewhat) replayable. Then comes the recommendation on whether to buy or rent/borrow it:

While it may be hard to recommend Blood On The Sand to gamers who are itching for a more tepid Gears Of War-The Club hybrid—especially since both can be had for less than the price (combined) of the game under review—it's difficult to recommend against playing the game. It's bizarre and capable enough to make the ride fun.

I've always been a critic of the price-of-entry into the world of video games, and this generation's the worst yet. There are many recent releases I'm anxious to try out, but at $60 a pop I'm in no rush to own them. A generation ago, I was making less money than I am now, and still I had no problem shelling out $50 for a new release, and $35-40 recent releases with good reviews were insta-buys.

So, you're a 50 Cent fan with no console. You'll have to buy:

A game console (cheapest is 360 Arcade, $200).

The game itself ($60).

Another game controller for the co-op (360 Wireless costs $50).

Got that? $310 for the latest 50 Cent production. If he made a movie, you'd pay ~$15 to see it with your girlfriend/buddies. (Or you'd pay upwards of around $250 for a Blu-ray player and the movie disc.) If all 40 tracks from the game's OST were released as a 3-disc set, you would reasonably expect to pay at most $40-45 for such a compilation.

Food for thought, IMHO.

AU Box Shows What Apple Could Do (And Probably Won't)

2009-01-03T13:18:00.004-06:00

Check out the simply-named box from AU by KDDI. Connect it to your mobile or fiber-optic Internet connections, and it accesses a slew of AU/KDDI/Internet services, making them available on both your mobile phone and your home entertainment system.

While I was watching the introductory video, I could only think about one thing: How cool would it be if there was an iPhone dock on the Apple TV? Use a 3G or wired connection, download your shows to both components, and never have to connect to iTunes itself.

Unfortunately I have a feeling we're not going to see anything like that anytime soon. If the history of the iPod has told us one thing about Apple's technical design aesthetic, it's that the Mac/PC is the hub from which one manages one's content. Pushing/downloading content to a computer from a more special-purpose device is a special case, one that Apple's products are designed to reduce in occurrence.

After the rescinded approval of the iPhone data-tethering app, the release (finally!) of a phone running Android, and novel mobile applications like AU box, an optimistic geek might be led to believe that there's simply too much pressure on Apple to maintain the iPhone's "closed platform" nature.

It's certainly not impossible, but I wouldn't hold my breath on a sea change in Apple's broad platform strategy. The fact that Apple TV and iPhone both run OS X is a matter of convenience, not a sign that either platform is destined for Mac-level openness. If you want free reign over your Apple device, to make it do precisely what you want, and run the applications you want, Apple's design intentions be damned, you're better off getting a Mac than an iPhone or Apple TV.

The State of the Industry, in Three Images

2008-12-11T22:20:00.003-06:00

Dunno if I like Kotaku's new look yet, but they certainly haven't lost their gift for perfect imagery alongside their news:

Have a look.

YouTube Vids of Older Stuff

2008-11-24T01:00:00.003-06:00

Took me long enough, but I've finally gotten around to uploading some video of Melody's Musette and Rabbit-Proof Fencing, two projects that comprised the majority of my work back at ETC-Adelaide.

Melody's Musette is a game whose core concept is synchronicity, tying the music and gameplay events together. Rabbit-Proof Fencing is a humorous look at introduced species in Australia. Puns abound.

Both of these games were made with Panda3D.

I've embedded them below, or you can simply head to my YouTube channel to check them out.

Melody's Musette Stage Two Gameplay

Melody's Musette Stage Three Gameplay

Rabbit-Proof Fencing, Full Game

Panda3D Macintosh Install Script

2008-11-02T11:37:00.004-06:00

Nutshell: Click here to download a Python script to install Panda3D from scratch. Read on for more deets.

Panda3D is a great game engine, especially for rapid-prototyping, but for Mac users it can be a bit frustrating being a second-class citizen. While independent developers are creating very useful distributions (like Hypnos's awesome p3dapp) there are no official builds, and installing from source is no easy task.

Edalytical's very helpful guide, Building Panda3D in OS X Leopard, has fallen out of date. Using it as a base, I've created a Python script that will install Panda3D from source, and can even download and install Panda3D's two major dependencies, MacPorts and the Cg Toolkit. Its only dependency is Leopard Developer Tools (you know, Xcode and the like).

Simply download the script from the Game Sketching project's downloads page. By default, it will download/compile/install Panda3D. You can add the options +macports and +cg to download/install those dependencies. See the source or read below for the usage info:

pandaAutoInstall.py [noex] [(+|-)option] option is one of 'uninstall', 'download', 'compile', 'remove', 'test', 'macports', 'cg', 'announce' To install everything: pandaAutoInstall.py +all To just install Panda3D: pandaAutoInstall.py To uninstall: pandaAutoInstall.py +uninstall

Bug reports, positive/negative feedback and success/failure stories are welcome!

Yahoo Nukes Everyone's Profile

2008-10-19T00:19:00.002-05:00

Oh now this is cool, Yahoo! has seen fit to reformat everyone's profiles, but in the transition has reset every last one of them to totally, unabashedly blank.

What really impresses me is that Yahoo's statement about the botched transition acknowledges that they could retrieve your data, but politely decline to do so unless you force it by going through their general tech support gauntlet.

Not much else to say here. Basically, if you want an example of how not to transition your user base to a new version of your platform, check out the new Yahoo.

The Order of the Day

2008-10-12T16:03:00.005-05:00

Spinaci e Formaggio Cheddar in Carrozza

3 Eggs
Four large slices of bread
Four slices of horseradish cheddar
Baby spinach, washed
Spicy, dry sausage (sopressata works well)
Extras: butter, salt, turbinado, garlic powder

Beat three eggs, combining with a dash of salt and teaspoon of both turbinado and garlic powder. Pour into a wide, shallow dish. Heat a large skillet to medium heat, and add butter.

Soak both sides of the bread slices in the egg wash, then place in the skillet. Flip the bread only once the underside is golden brown; don't regularly flip them.

As the other side cooks, lay horseradish cheddar onto the cooked bread. Once the other side of the bread is cooked, remove from skillet, and add sopressata and spinach to taste. Place one slice of bread onto the other, in what is commonly known as a "sandwich" formation.

Makes two sandwiches.

iPhone SDK 2.1 Doesn't Include iPod touch 2.1 Firmware

2008-09-16T00:02:00.003-05:00

If you, like me, have gotten an iPod touch and anxiously installed the new iPhone SDK to scratch your iPhone development itch, you may be disappointed when you start up Xcode and get the unhelpful message:

Unable to locate a suitable developer disk image. Reinstall the iPhone SDK.

And, maybe you do reinstall it, but the message persists. Aaand, when you compile your software, you get a CodeSign error:

No certificate found in keychain for code signing identity 'iPhone Developer'

The problem is that the huuuuuge iPhone SDK 2.1 installer doesn't come with the iPod touch 2.1 firmware image. Suck. Fear not, though: All you have to do is force iTunes to do a firmware restore, which will download the appropriate image. On next launch, Xcode will find it and everything will work great.

Swype's Cool Touchscreen Typing System

2008-09-11T13:00:00.003-05:00

Check out this video of startup Swype demoing their new touchscreen typing system. Point at the first letter, and "connect the dots" to each subsequent letter.

The glorious moment in this video is when the guy effortlessly spells "Mississippi" in the space of one second.

Apparently this guy is the/a developer of T9 input as well. The guy knows his stuff, I'd say. The sooner this is present on touchscreen devices, the better.

In Memory of Randy Pausch

2008-07-25T09:03:00.002-05:00

Not having met the man, there's not a lot I can say. But Carnegie Mellon ETC co-founder Randy Pausch passed away today. He's had a long, spirited fight with pancreatic cancer, and gave a rather rousing "last lecture" at CMU last year.

You'll find nary a soul that didn't view Randy as a charismatic, intelligent, cheerful guy. Rest in peace, Randy. As Brian Transeau says, see you on the other side.

Here are some good related links.
Randy's Wikipedia page
The Last Lecture

Using Flip Ultra Video Without Bundled Software

2008-07-06T01:15:00.002-05:00

Macworld has a review of what seems to be a pretty cool little digital camcorder, the Flip Ultra. Small, point-and-shoot, USB. Very easy to grok. One caveat is that it encodes its videos with the 3ivx encoder, so you "need" to install the software that comes with it.

If you'd rather just use your QuickTime-enabled software (like, say, iMovie) to edit your Flip Ultra software without ever installing some OEM piece of software, check out Perian. As you can see here at their supported formats page, it rolls an open-source 3ivx encoder into Quicktime. No fuss at all.

Of course, Macworld didn't seem to have any problems with the built-in software, but why install yet another transient video program when you can just keep Perian up-to-date and support all of those formats at once?

Great Design Alongside Batman Hopes

2008-07-04T11:51:00.003-05:00

Oh hai. Happy Independence Day, fellow Yanks.

I just got done reading Scenes from a Franchise, a piece on the upcoming Batman sequel, The Dark Knight. Includes fun excerpts from NY Times reviews of old Batman movies, as well as a hopeful wish that Batman Begins won't be the only good Batman movie.

More striking than the writing itself, however, is the design of the site. It looks like a tax form, or a technical manual, but I just can't stop exploring it. This site is a dream to navigate, with nothing more than succinct, monochrome precision. Very cool.

Projects I'm Working On

2008-06-25T18:35:00.003-05:00

Well, now that I'm off of school for the summer, I should be updating more. Even so, the projects I'm working on aren't showing a lot of progress, so there's not much to report on that front. And since I don't want to write one of "those blogs" that just regurgitates the latest from Engadget/Ars/Slashdot, posts just aren't going to be coming as regularly as I want them to.

I will, however, talk a bit right now about what I'm working on. Currently, I've got three projects in the works, all of which I hope to release before starting my new job in late July. First on the agenda is a redesign of Khakionion.com, my long-outdated website. I'll be getting rid of all that nasty table-based layout and creating a nice, clean, sensible website that will make getting my productions much easier.

Next is MTPCopy, an Automator action that will make copying music files to your non-iPod device in OS X a snap. I'm not one for those jukebox-style solutions like XNJB. I hope my approach will be much simpler.

Last, I'm hoping to allocate my Panda3D experience towards a 2D platformer, which I'm working on with my quite-talented sister, who's responsible for the art and character design.

That's what's up, hopefully you'll be seeing some fresh productivity out of me soon!

HTTP Codes for More Efficient Whining

2008-05-30T20:24:00.006-05:00

Someone on Facebook posted an article by The Beijinger about a rock festival being cancelled by the Chinese government. I was entertained when I got a unique 403 by following the Facebook link:

We have identified that you have been refered here by a known or supposed spammer.

Yeah, something tells me they didn't work very hard on the supposing part. It also shows up when following it from my site.

If you are actually doing referer spam, please note that this website/b2evolution no longer records and publishes referers. Not even legitimate ones! While we understand it was fun for you guys while it lasted, please understand our servers cannot take the load of all this cumulated spam any longer... Thank you.

Seems like quite the over-emotional IT staff. Anyway, like the plea for attention said, publishing your referers enables link spam. So...don't. or use rel="nofollow" on your referral links. But don't abuse the 403 error codes to complain about how you had to disable spam.

Google/Address Book Syncing--Just iPhone Advertisement

2008-05-28T20:16:00.002-05:00

So, over at the Google Mac blog, they've announced the ability to sync Google contacts. With what? Well with Address Book, of course. Yes, Address Book, that system-wide service/application with iCal, Safari and Mail.app integration. It's an important piece of software to many Mac users, so you can see why it'd be useful to sync with your Google contacts.

Oh, did I mention it only works if you have an iPhone?

See that bottom checkbox? "Synchronize with Google?" The feature works like a charm, or so I'm told. I wouldn't know, because that simple little checkbox (which surely doesn't require any sort of iPhone software to work properly) just flat out does not appear unless that Mac has been synced in the past with an iPhone.

Quoth the Google Mac blog entry: "We hope this helps you keep a little more of your information organized and easy to find, at any place and time you need it." Sorry, guys, you fail it.

Update: Looks like you need an iPod of some sort, not just an iPod. See this Lifehacker post for details and info on how to get around this mind-numbingly stupid restriction.

Nihongo Benkyou: Kanji Invaders

2008-05-10T11:11:00.002-05:00

Over the past few weeks I've been throwing together some JavaScript to make myself a Japanese language study-game. If you've ever played Letter Invaders-type games, you'll catch onto this one pretty fast.

It's (unimaginatively) called Kanji Invaders, and is a JavaScript application which runs on IE 6.0+, Firefox and Safari. The objective is to type the readings for randomly-selected falling Japanese words before they reach the bottom of the screen. If you can't read Kanji, all words convert themselves to Hiragana as they fall. When you successfully type a word, the definition is given down at the bottom. You can even specify which particular words you want to see; for now, the only types I have are JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) classifications.

To play, simply type the romaji for each falling word! I initially chose this method because I had problems with Firefox recognizing Japanese input methods. Since then, though, I've come to the realization that most keyboards (even in Japan) are being used Romaji style, so I've stuck with it. By supporting romaji exclusively, Kanji Invaders works on virtually all Japanese and English computers.

Current feature ideas: An online scoreboard. Better intensity rise/fall. Automagically-downloadable version without an advert (though it's already pretty easy to download). More graphical special effects. Music/SFX.

Currently known issues: sometimes typing a word that has appeared twice will cause both instances to go away. I've fixed it and will upload a new version soon.

Since Kanji Invaders' Japanese input processing is home-brewed, let me know if a particular romaji-ism that you use doesn't work on Kanji Invaders. Other bug reports/feature ideas are very welcome. The code is free for you to take and do what you like with, but I'd appreciate attribution if you simply make a Kanji Invaders fork. I'm regularly improving this app, and will keep the latest version available at http://kanji.khakionion.com for your perusal.

Have fun studying, and ganbatte!

Command-Line Panda3D

2008-04-24T02:34:00.003-05:00

Here's a neat tip worth pointing out: because Panda3D works in Python, and Python has a relatively robust command-line mode, you have a powerful realtime debugging tool in the form of command-line Panda. It's not really hard, you just may not realize it's possible. Open up a Python prompt, then run these lines:

from pandac.PandaModules import *
from direct.showbase.DirectObject import DirectObject
import direct.directbase.DirectStart

That should be enough to get a window up and running. As you test more and more things out, remember you'll probably have to call the run() function every now and then to get tasks to run, do some extended interaction or that sort of thing. While Panda3D is actually "running," you won't have the command-line available.

When you want to pause the system and do more debugging, simply raise a KeyboardInterrupt exception, and Panda3D will freeze and return control to the command-line. You may want to write a module that does all of this for you, like, say:

from pandac.PandaModules import * from direct.showbase.DirectObject import DirectObject import direct.directbase.DirectStart class debugObj(DirectObject): def __init__(self): self.accept("space",self.interruptPanda) #any unused event, really def interruptPanda(self): raise KeyboardInterrupt()

Woohoo, now you can load modules and run Panda3D stuff to your heart's content, with the ability to freeze execution and evaluate variables at any moment.