Play Halo – Save a Life

October 16th, 2007

Can’t convince your significant other you need to be playing more Halo 3? How about a Halo tournament to end breast cancer!

The Cave Girls are hosting their 2nd Annual “Fight Like a Girl” Halo tournament. Proceeds from the tournament benefit the Susan G. Komen For a Cure breast cancer foundation. Tournament founder Kari Toyama explains how it all started in this interview at United for Pink.

They asked me, “Kari, would you like to participate in a bake sale?” I said, “Um, no.” So they asked, “Is there anything you are involved in that could potentially raise money?” I thought, “Hey, I love to play ‘Halo.'”

Get the full tournament details from the Cave Girls. Even if you don’t play, you can still donate!

What is Source Code?

October 16th, 2007

Source code is a computer file that contains a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do.

Source code is written in one of many “computer languages”. A computer language is an artificial language that allows people to write instructions in a way that they can understand, yet still easily convert the instructions to “machine code” that the computer can understand. A special kind of program that converts source code to machine code is called a “compiler”. Some languages convert source code to an intermediate form and execute it a little bit at a time, instead of converting the entire source code file in advance. A special kind of program that does this instead is called an “interpreter”.

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Which Way is Up?

October 14th, 2007

New to 3D? Make sure you know which axis is “up” with this primer on 3D coordinate systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Gallery: Daniel Radcliffe

October 12th, 2007


Click for larger view, or download the high-res image.Did this the other day, just practicing some sketching myself! This image was painted in Corel PhotoPaint with a Wacom tablet. Unlike most of my work, it does not have any 3D elements–I’m trying to improve my skills at drawing people, especially trouble-points like mouths and noses, so this is a purely a 2D work. For some real fun, watch the time-lapse video of the creation of this image. I really love UNDO. 🙂

Bringing New Meaning to “Next Generation E-mail”

October 11th, 2007

For longer than I can remember, I have been on a quest for a good e-mail client. I need something fast, reliable and–this is where everything falls apart–able to handle at least 10,000 e-mails in a single folder quickly with complex automatic filtering. Some of my support mailboxes receive many thousands of messages in a single day. Ideally I’d also like an integrated calendar, to-do list and a pretty UI.

I was beginning to suspect that I had tried every known e-mail client on planet earth, when today I ran across one I hadn’t tried before. Without really reading what it was other than “e-mail client I haven’t tried” I eagerly downloaded it. To my surprise, this is what I saw when I ran it:


Yes, the readme did say “LCARS interface” before I downloaded it, but somehow I didn’t put two-and-two together.

Now that wasn’t what I was expecting! Unfortunately, it doesn’t support IMAP. 🙂