soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

As usual, I write about great events with one day of delay (as I did with Jeff Barr's web services' speech past May). And the great event, in this case, was Pizza On Rails!

After two failed attempts, it was the first POR that I managed to attend, and it was really funny, although I almost failed to attend this one: I had written down the address of the venue, but I hadn't looked at the map - and it was a bit tricky. It was Leicester Square 1, but (I don't know why) most of the buildings didn't show the number in their door. So I went in circles by Leicester Square, until I realized it was "officially" in that street but the entrance was in another one. Obviously it was thanks to a very ordered and british queue in front of the entrance, plus a couple of "Pizza On Rails" posters.

I didn't know anyone at the queue but then a guy, Jason, which had been at past London's Ruby Users Group meeting appeared and said "Hello! I remember you! You let me go the wrong way on past LRUG meeting! I got lost in the building…". And I felt terribly embarrased, hehe. But well, there we went and up! It was the 6th floor so we had a very nice view of Central London (which was specially impressive, when a massive romantic storm appeared, with strong thunders and the lightnings drawing lines all across the sky, following the fireworks around Southwark).

Thanks to the sponsors (Cominded), beer was free (um, as in beer!), as was the pizza. There were vast amounts of both, and we had very nice conversations with a Dutch guy and another mate there (can't remember the names, sorry!)… After a while, it was extremely surprising/funny to find out that Gasman was there as well! Demoscene joins Rails! Wooh! I went to say hi! and ask him if he was preparing something for Sundown, and he is! So pay attention to Sundown06 releases :)

Some time later, a very nice portuguese couple appeared. She had a very good level of spanish! (I can't help but loving the spanish when spoken by portuguese people). They were considering about moving to Barcelona, and we had an interesting chat about salaries in Spain and Portugal and London. London's figures just looked so impressive! And then suddenly someone asked me if I was a developer. I was kind of … uh? which question is it? as the most common question there was "how much Rails do you know?", and it was assumed that you were a developer when asking it. But he was curious about how many women there were actually developers. I explained him my personal theories about the lack of female developers -which basically are summarised in one: until recently, it was uncool to know about computers or machines, but now it is normal and desirable, so this attitude helps a lot towards assuming that it's a profession like any other one-.

Then he revealed himself as being Martin, one of last.fm's developers! Ohhhhh! I couldn't believe it, I mean, it's a service I use almost daily and last thing I could expect from a Rails meeting is to find someone from last.fm (since, as far as I know, they just use Java and PHP). Even more, he came accompanied by two more mates, Julian and Hannah, from the design department. Impressive, I was face to face with the people which creates the interface we use daily :) And I presume that it must be very nice to work at last.fm if all of the staff is like them.

I finally joined them when they left the party (it was 21h already, if I remember correctly), and went with them to the tube station. So we said bye and I went lonely but happy on the south bound Piccadilly Line - as Hannah said: … but does anybody live in Victoria? Hehe, yes… me!
So all in all, a very cool party, I ended almost without voice (and had a very sore throat this morning, arggh), but it was worth it. I'd like to thank the organisers and sponsors for this cool event.

After some months dedicated to little and unimportant businesses, such as getting a fantastic tan which left as soon as it arrived, and finding a new job, I finally half-made my mind about the future of thisisnotanengine. For whoever which do not know what is it, it was our answer to the supercomplicated demosystems around there which are more focused in 3d stuff than in sequencing. It started simple, with a flash sequencer, but with the addition of blackpawn to the team it has grown big and powerful into a binary mega sequencer - but still simple and easy!

The main idea is very erm… simple… we have something similar to MIDI files but for sequencing a demo. The sequencer (the demo studio) helps you build the sequence, but you can also build it yourself, since it is an XML file. In fact, I did it like that for tube demo, but it's not something you would recommend to everybody. That XML contains a list of resources and a list of when the resources are used, along with usual things as modifiers, parameters, etc. And it can be read by any "engine", which does not neccessarily have to implement everything defined by the XML - it simply ignores what it does not understand. This allows you to sequence with a platform and produce a result for another platform. For example, Holy guadalupe! is a flash demo but it was sequenced with the demo editor which runs in windows.

While I was making "tube", trace and blackpawn were working on the demosystem, and they had to make certain changes to the definition of the XML file. I just decided to left the implementation of these changes in my version of the code "for later", since I knew they would take me quite a lot of time to implement.

Although the current version of my player is more decent than the first one (used for vslpx), it is still far from being clean. I just didn't feel like modifying the parser/loader in C++ again, so I decided it was a good moment to start experimenting with (tadaaaaa) python! (I don't know much python yet, though, but seems that its learning curve behaves quite well, one day you're writing 1+1 programs and next day you are writing the next big Web 3.0 project).

The main idea is to build a library in C++ which will implement the graphics and sound code, and leave the remaining to python, connecting everything with some kind of bindings like the ones provided by Boost.Python or SWIG. But keeping things simple. Even if I started using STL, some things still get horribly complicated in C++ but would be much easier with Python, and the inverse. And I tend to get paralysed when I see code which is excessively complicated (specially if it could be simpler), so that's not good.

Another goal of this is to stop depending on any IDE for compiling. That is, even if I'll use XCode for writing the code and all of that, I am trying to avoid using it for managing the project settings. My aim is to use Make for these tasks, since configuring a project with XCode's interface does not provide as much visibility as a makefile does. It could also help me with other goal, which is to get rid of Visual Studio in Windows. I want to investigate which free and modern compiler can be used, specially if it does not annoy me with false STL warnings. Also I presume that using the same or similar compiler (barring platform differences) would help me with the crossplatform development.

By the way, now that we have a fully working computer with decent graphic cards and ubuntu installed, I will probably try to get a linux version as well. From my experience it is relatively easy to get my code working in different systems, now that I have learnt not to use proprietary functions, so it shouldn't take too much time.

I am still in the research phase. I first started with Edwin Jakobs homepage (who is a very famous dutch scener), where he related his experiencies with C++ and Python in order to build pom pom, their scriptable engine. From there I began testing SWIG in order to get a simple test library which could be able to open a window with a certain background color (specified from python) and play a sound file (also specified from python). But I haven't managed to get to that yet… I'm running into lots of problems mainly because of my horrible ignorance of building anything else apart from a simple console application and the funky differences between usual GCC conventions and Apple's implementation of GCC - but I'll find out the solutions somehow!

More to follow… but meanwhile if you have any experience in building dynamic libraries for mac or in doing exactly what I am trying to achieve, I'll love to know about it!

I saw this funny display in Charing Cross - more exactly, it belongs to Saint Martins, the famous art school! I presume it's inspired in their fashion courses, and although the idea is quite simple (lay some layers of clothes as if it was a cake) it really caught my eye when I saw it.

Somehow, it reminds me of when I am preparing the suitcase for travelling. It just needs someone laying on top so as to press the clothes and make them use less space (thus being able to close the suitcase!).

I believe there were more thematic displays (related to the other specialties in the school), so if you are in London and want to take a look you'd better rush before they change the display - I have the feeling that they are meant for recruiting the attention of possible pupils, so they will probably change them quite early, once the school year begins.

Now that I think, does it mean that I am a potential Fashion student?

8-|

Update 12 september: I noticed this afternoon that they just removed them! So consider this post as the only testimonial EVER for the clothes display :-(

Although most probably no one of you is going to believe me, yesterday I ate sushi for the first time in my whole life! I had a weird, innate aversion to anything which involved eating raw fish, which produced me horrible visions of gastroenteritis episodes and what not, and made me reject systematically even the mere suggestion of a visit to japanese fast-food chains like Yo! Sushi. But I decided that it was stupid to act like that and that I needed to stop this non-sense about hypocondriacal hallucinations, so I kind of obliged myself to taste it. And now I'm addicted to all things sushi.

We went to a little japanese restaurant round the corner - we had spotted it past week but we decided to surround to a nachos feast instead (which left me thinking about nachos for the rest of the week, by the way). It was nice and cosy, with lots of small garnments and details here and there with japanese characters, which are quite different compared to your nearest chinese restaurant (namely a waterfall painting and a big fishtank). The japanese ones remind me a lot to all the movies which mr.doob watches, for example the characters of Spirited Away (original title is "千と千尋の神隠し, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi"), or simply Dragon Ball, to use a more popular example - there was a picture of a dragon like that one there.

I have always been attracted by the japanese culture, although not proactively enough, to describe it somehow. But since Shifter taught us how to create (korean) sushi rolls I became more curious about it all, and yesterday, after forcing myself to overcome my initial aversion to eat raw fish, I definitely decided that I have to learn more about sushi (that is, I want to cook sushi!).

Funnily enough, today a couple of office mates bought japanese food for lunch (which made me hate my humble sandwich for a while). And I realised there are two more japanese take-aways round my new office (apart from the one that I already spotted). Hmmm…
Next stop, the supreme japanese restaurant that trace knows - gotta fight round two versus the sticks! :)

(Picture titled "too pretty to eat" by celiece, taken from sxc.hu)

And it also seems they joined the latest enigmatic messages trend… Find out how to access the content in their website!