Futurama Returns

It's taken a while but Futurama will finally be returning to a TV screen near you. Amazon has product information listed for [Futurama the Movie – Bender's Big Score][1], with a release date November 27th. I can't wait! [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UZDO62?ie=UTF8&tag=chrisnortonso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000UZDO62

Rendering Games with Raytracing

PC Perspective has an excellent article entitled Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics that goes through some of the progress made on real-time ray tracing engines and what the future might hold, at least according to Intel. If you don't know what ray tracing is, the Wikipedia has the dirt as usual. Ray tracing has always been interesting to me. For one thing it's how "real" rendering works so whenever you render something in Maya or 3D Studio MAX you're most likely seeing ray tracing at work. Read On →

Tabs vs Spaces

The debate about using tabs or spaces for indenting code. Which to use? Tabs. This is, after all, pretty much what tabs were invented for. On top of that using spaces have the following problems: They require too many for decent indentation. As in, at least 2 spaces per indentation level. They make it harder to change the level of indentation. Indenting and outdenting is slower. They add unnecessary bulk to the character count. Read On →

YUI Compressor 2.2 Released

There is a new 2.2 release of Julien Lecomte's fantastic YUI Compressor for minifying JavaScript. This version has some modified command line parameters and has further improved support for safely minifying JavaScript code. Download here

The Elements of JavaScript Style

Coding in JavaScript? I suggest you check out Douglas Crockford's The Elements of JavaScript Style – Part 1 and Part 2.

Robert Jordan Dies

Robert Jordan, the pen name of author James Oliver Rigney, Jr., [died earlier today]1. I read many of the books of the Wheel of Time series and it saddens me to hear of the author's passing. My condolences to his friends and family. While I wasn't a real fan of the aforementioned series I did enjoy reading about the mythology of the world Robert Jordan created and liked to "check in" with the progress of the plot. Read On →

Manifest 07: Day 3

Well, here it is, the final part of my report on Manifest 2007. As you might be able to tell this is for the third and final day of the event. The third day started a bit later than I would have liked but I still managed to get to the campus around 10:30am. So I missed the screening of Nagasarete Airantou but that didn't matter too much since I've seen most of the series already. Read On →

Manifest 07: Day 2

My second day at Manifest started out far more smoothly since I already had a pass and didn't need to queue up to get one. Surprisingly, there was still a huge queue to pick up passes! With a day full of events there was plenty to do and I feel that Saturday is the real start of the festival. The first thing I did for the day was check out the fan traders as they were again placed just outside the main events theatre. Read On →

Manifest 07: Day 1

Today was the opening day of Manifest for 2007. There's usually not much to do on the Friday apart from picking up tickets and watching some anime screenings and this year was no exception. What the first day is really good for is whetting your appetite for the next two days! The day officially starts at 2pm for the general public – I'm sure the organisers and host of volunteers started a lot earlier than that. Read On →

Rant: 5 Annoying Aspects of DVDs

I've been catching up on some DVD watching recently and I feel the need to convey my annoyance at some of the things I've found on DVDs. Not letting the viewer skip or fast forward things Especially if those things are useless copyright information (mostly in other languages) or titles for the publisher. I'm trying to decide which I hate more: a 40 second copyright screen or a 2 minute "pirating DVDs is bad" video. Read On →