HKTrip12: Day 5 - Last Day in HK

After a bit of a long hiatus, here are the remaining few episodes from my trip to Hong Kong in late November 2012.

This ninth installment covers the last day spent in Hong Kong. It includes ramblings about the Airport Express Service, Times Square, Cyberport, and visiting ancestors at the cemetery.

Driver Debugging Tools

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on various tools and tweaks to make it a bit easier to track down problems with drivers. I'll start with the latest and most visible addition, before showing off some of the less visible things...

1) Driver Value Indicators
In r.55489, I've just committed a way of showing the relationship between the "driver value" (i.e. result of the stuff in NKEY panel) and the values applied to properties being driven (i.e. sliders). This is shown in the screenshot below:

Interesting papers (with links)

Over the past two years of so, I've read quite a fair number of research papers (somewhere in the vicinity of 300+). Although many (~150) were directly related to my honours project work and ended up being concerned with all the various visualisation schemes developed for navigating and presenting large datasets (TL;DR commentary - there is a lot of stuff out there already. They've tried practically every idea you could think of, the next few which immediately come to mind leading on from those, and on a few side tangents). There are also a number of other interesting results I've come across which you might find interesting too...

The Little Manual of API Design

While flipping through some of the blogs on my reading list this evening, I came across a link to "The Little Manual of API Design" by Jasmin Blanchette. If you're a software developer reading this, I strongly encourage you to read, absorb, and internalise the lessons presented here. Furthermore, as the article I found this link from argues, if you're a user interface designer, you probably also want to read and understand this, since API's (Application Programming Interfaces) are still a form of interface for communication between humans, computers, and other humans, so the concepts presented here do carry over.

Without further ado, here is the link (from Blanchette's website):

http://www4.in.tum.de/~blanchet/api-design.pdf

The Power of Open Source - Visual Keying Bugfix

While checking my email this morning I was reminded of the power of open source...

Lantern Festival

Christchurch hosts a "Lantern Festival" every year around (usually a few weeks after the start of) Chinese New Year celebrations. Here are some of the highlights of the event:

Feb 22 - 2nd Anniversary

12:51pm - The second anniversary of the Feb 22 Christchurch Earthquake 2011.

(* a minute's silence *)

An unwanted anniversary that the earth thrust upon us, on a day much like today; slightly chilly, overcast, and right as the new university year had barely kicked off. Let us remember the 185 who died, the months of hardship and uncertainty which followed, and the forever face of the city I grew up in which no longer exists as it once did in many parts.

Blender 2.66 Released!

Unless you missed the news, Blender 2.66 has now been released, with a quite a few high profile goodies for you to play with!

Quick Tip - Join/Split Curves

While working with Blender curves the other day, there were two operations which I wanted to perform at the time, but couldn't find any way to do so. In theory, they were quite simple to implement, and pretty darn useful in certain cases; yet, they were nowhere to be found! A few days later, I finally had some time to look into how to implement them...

Happy Year of the Snake

A slightly belated (yes, the first day of the Chinese New Year celebrations was a few days ago on Monday) Happy Chinese New Year greeting to all.

Obscure Blender Features: Skeleton Sketching

While looking into a bug report this afternoon, I came across a feature which I've rarely used or heard of being used which some of you may find interesting.

Image: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/File:Doc26-boneSketch-strokes.png

The Skeleton Sketching (or "Etch-A-Ton" tool, as it used to be called) allows you to draw your armatures using a combination of freehand (click-drag) and straight-line-segment ("click, move, click" - a la 'Poly' mode in Grease Pencil) strokes.

Bullet Rigidbody Integration in Trunk

Nearly a year to the day when I released a cleaned up (and updated) codebase for the Bullet Rigidbody Integration from my GSoC 2010 work, it's finally now in trunk (commits 54019 - 54026) !

Cheers to Sergej for finishing this off as part of his GSoC 2012 project. Enjoy!