In Nomine – The Lotus Land

Went to see Avatar in 3D tonight. Typical story, but the animation was amazing. The 3D was also better than what has been out there. But darn, for the past 4 hours after exiting the theatre I have been having my vision still be in stereoscopic mode or something. I see everything beyond 1-2 meters as blurry, as if watching the movie without glasses. Hope a good night’s rest will cure that.

A friend of mine pointed me to this article about James Cameron and his latest film “Avatar”. I am personally much inspired by such things and I hope I share at least some minor part of this kind of zeal in delivering perfectionist accomplishments. I love how he hired experts from different areas of expertise to work on the language, flora, or other parts of his fantasy world, all in all to make the world more consistent. This is the bread and butter of making an experience fully immersive. Sure, it might be wasted on the audience who just goes to watch the movie, but people like myself appreciate this. I am not sure how many experience this, but whenever I play a game where I notice that some design has been reused, watch or read something where I notice the consistency is off I feel kind of let down. I guess it is hard for me to understand why other people would not go the extra mile to avoid such problems.

This weekend I had the time to watch House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏) again. I think the first time I saw it was when I was in Japan (日本). Of course, the problem at that point was that my Japanese (日本語) was definitely not good enough to understand the entire story. Although I could make good sense of it though.

In Japan the movie is known as Lovers.

Went to see the Fantastic Four on Saturday. A pretty good movie to be honest, very funny. Seeing Jessica Alba as Susan Richards (with appropriately dyed blonde hair) was actually enjoyable, of which I had my doubts before going to see it.

In other news, Mozilla/Firefox released Deer Park Alpha 2 is now released.

These are interesting tidbits from the release notes:

• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs
• Improvements to popup blocking

Been working on some ideas for my labs@tendra project. This will focus heavily on languages, especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and probably Hindi.

In a blaze of insane reasoning we now see that using or embedding GPL’d fonts with/in documents can/might/will make that document GPL’d as well.

http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-April/010319.html discusses some of the finer points with regard to this issue.

On the FSF site we can find a mention of how fonts apparently are a difficult thing with the GPL.

Personally I am getting sick of licenses to the marrow of my bone.

A typical font license is quite similar to what Adobe says on their “What about fonts?” page.

To quote:

“You may embed typefaces into documents only under certain circumstances. Adobe permits embedding certain typefaces into documents for the explicit purpose of viewing and printing only.”

An interesting article on the issue Font Licensing and Protection Details.

On the art side I totally fell in love with Ryan Church’s work especially after seeing some of his concept artwork as laid out in my copy of The Making of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

Something that always gets me kind of grouchy is the fact that so-called criticts of movies call a movie trash just because it doesn’t appeal to their ’sophisticated’ level.

Hey pal, here’s something for you: I don’t care!

Some movies are just meant to be pure entertainment and if I want to see Alien versus Predator I will!
Not every movie has to be built upon an epos like The Lord of the Rings and subsequently worked out with due dilligence for a number of years. If every trance musician was a conservatorium graduated person I doubt the current club scene would look like it does right now.

I just don’t understand why something has to be ‘artistically innovative’ to be appreciated by the critics. Guess they’re just trying to uphold their own jobs by keeping up appearances (which is not unlike any other job niche, mind you).

Over the last couple of days I have been busy updating a lot of support within DragonFly, think of firewire support, ATA/SATA, AC’97, bridges, PCI definitions, and so on.
Lovely stuff.

Now if only my AMD Athlon/Asus A7N8X box would boot. Something is wrong with the nexus attachment.

At the moment de-OSSGing my TenDRA sources. If you’re doing whitespace changes run md5 on the resulting object file before and after the changes. They should match.

chak de chak de chak de // Cast it off…
chak de saare gam // cast off every sorrow.
chak de chak de chak de // Cast it off…
tere sang hain hum // I’m by your side!

Chak de, from the Indian movie Hum Tum…