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The Fall (2006), Tarsem Singh

Published by Silveira on 2011-10-08

Cinema is about the ancient art of telling stories. Is about breaking the chains that hold our minds. Entertainment is good but is not good enough. We can do more and we can do better. The Fall (2006), from Tarsem Singh, is a movie that knows this. This is my kind of movie.

Roy Walker (Lee Pace) and Alexandria (Catinca Untaru)

The plot is about Alexandria, a injured girl recovering in the hospital when she meets another patient, Roy Walker, and he tells her fantasy histories. The difference of age between them creates a language gap that is very interesting and well explored in the movie as it uses a lot of symbolism. Going deeper in the language issue some dialogues between them were improvised and had an impact in the original history giving a layer of authenticity to the movie.

In terms of photography, every frame of the movie is a piece of art by itself. Here are some of them:

This is what I’m talking about

Faceless evil soldiers.

Colors and composition.

A perfectly good excuse for filming a elephant swimming.

Subtle tribute to Godfather. One of many tributes in the movie.

This scene reminded me of the Balinese monkey chant from Baraka (1992). Bonus: Avatar (2009) also did it.

A stop motion scene.

Almost every scene is breathtaking and probably was really hard to film.

Seems that they used …

… a lot of blue ink.

One of the many amazing scenes that lasted less than 1 second!

Wide shot.

In summary, it have all the ingredients to make a movie that I love:

  • Amazing photography.
  • A non-trivial plot. Doesn’t need to be really complex (though I like complex). In this case was a plot inside the plot.
  • Language and symbolism.
  • The struggle for (pick as many as you want): life, identity, purpose, love, and freedom.
  • Do not underestimate the mind and the imagination,
  • Good actors, good interpretation and when possible some improvisation.
  • Subtle references as an icing on the cake.

Cinema!

Go see this movie.

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Heroku on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Published by Silveira on 2011-09-28

As root execute:

apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential ruby rails rubygems1.8
apt-get install ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby

Chance PATH at /etc/environment:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin"

Update your current environment:

source /etc/environment

Install the Heroku gem:

sudo gem install heroku

Run Heroku authentication configuration:

heroku auth:login

Enter the credentials for your Heroku account.

Done!

Memory Card Zoo SD Test

Published by Silveira on 2011-09-14

Adam Ulivi from Memory Card Zoo sent me a Samsung 8Gb micro SDHC class 4.

Memory Card Zoo

Seems like a regular SD card but they claim to be water proof, shock proof and magnet proof.

Memory Card Zoo

I ran a few tests using SD Tools for Android to compare it against the others cards I have around. The result:

The general raw output data collected from SD Tools:

Write Speed (Mb/s) Read speed (Mb/s)
SanDisk Class 4, 8Gb 4.1 11.7
Samsung Class 4, 8Gb 5.5 17.9
Patriot Class 10, 16Gb 8.1 20.1

I use the SanDisk in my Android and Patriot on my camera. It would be a good combo have a waterproof card on my waterproof camera but this sd card can not beat a class 10 card. I may change my cellphone’s memory card for this Samsung.
If you want to try to yourselft this or others models of Micro SD card visit their store. Thank you Adam!

OpenPixels: simple sprite sheet with Processing

Published by Silveira on 2011-08-22 

/**
 * Openpixels example in Processing.
 * This simple example of how to get a sprite 
 * from a sprite sheet.
 */

PImage bg;
PImage sprite_sheet;
PImage player;

void setup() { 
  // load images
  bg = loadImage("kitchen.png");
  sprite_sheet = loadImage("guy.png");
  
  /* The sprite size is 32x49.
     Look guy.png, the "stand position" is at (36,102). */
  
  player = createImage(32, 49, ARGB);
  player.copy(sprite_sheet, 36, 102, 32, 49, 0, 0, 32, 49);

  // set screen size and background
  size(bg.width, bg.height);  
  background(bg);
  
  frameRate(30);
}

void draw() { 
  background(bg);
  image(player, 100, 50);
}

See more at OpenPixels.

Getting Openpixels

Published by Silveira on 2011-08-20

Openpixels is a project of mine to create a free and open source artistic framework for game projects in any language or platform. It is going pretty well.

You can just download a zip or tar.gz of the latest version.

You may want fork it or get a git working copy of it to later make your own contributions to the project. In this case:

apt-get install git-core
cd ~
git clone git://github.com/silveira/openpixels.git

You will see something like this:

Cloning into openpixels...
remote: Counting objects: 129, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (126/126), done.
remote: Total 129 (delta 17), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (129/129), 784.52 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (17/17), done.

And now you have a repository clone at ~/openpixels and you can start hacking.

Atiaia early releases

Published by Silveira on 2011-07-23

This was a project that me and Marco Diego created during our graduation for the Computer Graphics course. It is a ray tracing engine build from scratch in C. It was great exercise of experimentation on how implement object-oriented design patterns in ANSI C. Later Marco continued it in his master’s degree thesis implementing more features.

Parts of the sources were lost during a disk failure in the forge we hosted the project. I found some early releases and packed them here for future use. It can be useful for someone studying C or how to implement a ray tracer.

Download: atiaia_sources_by_2006.zip

Enjoy it.

ps: with this project we won the 1st place project of class and maximum grade. 😉

LG Optimus V 3G connection problem

Published by Silveira on 2011-07-11

When I came back from my last travel my 3G connection stopped working and seems that a lot of people already had the same problem. It was after I reactivated my plan when I came back to the US. Apparently they forgot to activate my data plan I’m paying for.

How to solve

I tried different things but finally I tried to simply activate the phone again using the Activate application (probably the first application on the list). After a few tries It worked and I got my 3G connection back.

Improve your battery life

One interesting thing is that during my days without 3G my battery life was quite better. So when you want to save battery, in travels for example, you can manually activate/deactivate your data plan on the Setting -> Wireless & networks settings -> Mobile Networks -> Data Enabled option.

HTML5: CSS Sprites

Published by Silveira on 2011-06-04

See the demo.


 
 
 
	 
 
	 
	
	 
	CSS Sprites + JavaScript  
 
 
 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	
— We are not gifs!

Credits and notes: