Two friends and I joined financial forces to purchase a Wacom Tablet recently. Combined with thrifty shopping, this only put us out $125 each! Not even used items on ebay could beat the retailer’s prices.
After a (brief) backorder delay, it arrived and I set it up. Insert disc, click next a bunch of times, plug in the USB cable, and we’re in business.
So far we’ve been meeting huge success with our practice cartooning sessions in Illustrator, and we’re going to be diving into Flash soon as well. Some reason Photoshop is crashing for me, but I’m not too worried about that right now. I’ll probably have to reinstall eventually.
I had previously owned a Wacom Graphire3 4×6 tablet. Apart from the unusable size of the old tablet, it was awesome in feel and definitely influenced this recent purchase decision. At 9×12, and with additional features such as tilt sensitivity, the Intuos3 is an industrial-grade solution, breathing life into our visions of our future. The sizes might not look drastically larger, but when you look at the surface area, it’s a little clearer (24sq.in. vs. 108sq.in.) Lets not forget about the assignable hotkeys, and the outstanding configuration utility — definitely worlds better than my past experience.
If you’re interested in getting into illustration for cartoons, or logo design (also an interest, obviously), then you can’t be without one of these. Just a word of caution… these are deceptively huge! I joke that mine should have come with legs, so I could have used it as my desk… it’s a few inches larger than the old laptop to which it’s attached. Perhaps I’ll post some pictures and/or some artwork in the near future. Also look for some original artistic madness from Tom Kijak, who is a partner in this venture.
If Scanner Darkly has taught us anything, remember:
It’s not the spring, it’s the linkage from the pedal to the carb.
Tonight on his broadcast, “The only thing more frustrating than partisan politics is Democrat and Republican partisan politics.”
Where do I change my registration, Lou?
I just saw this article informing me that now I can watch unlimited movies online via NetFlix.
Yay.
I spent more time paging through the list of movies than I actually spent watching them. For the most part, it’s a heaping mound of crap.
How about offering some movies that received more than one star, and are not as old as I am. Thanks in advanced.
I’m going to be liquidating some of my music equipment in order to purchase other items that I have been swooning over. For sale are:
- Alesis QS6.2 + Classical QCard (guaranteed excellent condition)
- Yamaha SY77 (sounds, plays, and looks great, but unable to test disk drive; selling as is)
- Roland MC-505 + Flight Case (guaranteed excellent condition)
- TEAC-33 aka Tascam (needs work; bought on ebay, ended up never using it; includes 2 Quantegy Archival tapes, more than a $70 value)
- Behringer V-AMP 2 (good as new, includes original box, medal)
* All items include original or equivalent power supplies.
These items will be listed on eBay with the right to cancel the auction if they are sold locally first. Please let me know if you are interested.
For those who care, I plan on buying a later-generation (CBS) Rhodes Stage piano when the market and availability are right.
Due to a request by the other party involved, this post has been removed.
So I took the time to do some further designing and build a testbed application for doing trial runs of concepts allowing for better interaction between C# and PHP. Getting C# on the client to talk to PHP on the server (via an integrated web browser component) is fairly simple. You just format the URL string and make the request. The problem of going the other direction is considerably more complicated, due to obvious security restrictions.
I’m not quite sure when the idea struck me, but it dawned on me that this situation was an ideal case for using a custom URL protocol handler! Some googling and it becomes evident that the only thing needed to implement this is a simple modification to the registry. So, I’ll have my program do this when it’s launched if it detects that my custom URL handler hasn’t been implemented already Lets say, it’s… andy:// I believe the slashes are optional, because another common URL handler (for AIM) does not use them.
So, now from an intranet web page, I can provide a link like… andy://SomeModule/?SomeVariable=SomeValue
Windows will consult the registry, and upon finding an application registered to handle the “andy:” protocol, it will launch that application with the entire URL as the first command line parameter. With some creative coding to ensure that only one instance of my application is ever running at once, and some means for passing the command line value into the subordinate instance to the dominant instance as an event, my mission is accomplished.
In fact, this is extremely smooth as it is both simple to implement and familiar to end users. As an added bonus, you can even make bookmarks and shortcuts to this new URL type and they will work flawlessly.
Granted this is only on the Windows OS currently, but I’m OK with that for right now. My target audience consists of greater than 90% Windows PCs. For the others, there’s still PHP and myriad other options.
Part 1
So this dates the last time I read my email, but I was contacted by a fellow music enthusiast who had this to say:
Hey Andy. Just thought I’d drop you a line to thank you for your FaderPort fix instructions. Had the same problems and was pulling out my hair until I read your fix. It worked like a charm.
Thanks
Leon
Wow, that’s AWESOME! Glad I was able to help out. When I wrote that, I was hoping I would be able to spare just one person the headache I was dealing with. Cheers!
Here’s the original post:
Presonus FaderPort excitement, problems, happy ending!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I designed and implemented a PHP-based application development framework that my company has worked on top of for the past 5-6 years or so. Between PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, graphics, and various linux shell applications, it has been just about everything we could have ever dreamed of from a flexibility standpoint. Also, the opensource-ness of it all ensures that despite our documentary ineptitudes, the code still manages to serve as automatic documentation.
Since we decided to commit to this direction, the climate has changed. We were bought by a much bigger company, and now have a different pool of resources at our disposal. Microsoft’s .NET platform has a lot of support among this talent pool, and we too see benefits in moving in that direction. Unfortunately for this proposition, we’re sitting atop perhaps hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP that is actively used on a daily basis, and we’re not in any hurry to unnecessarily re-develop this. We’re also not too thrilled about the idea of adding yet another separate system into the works.
So the quest I’m setting out on is how to create a light weight .NET client that can validate trusted authentication information against the Active Directory, dynamically load streamed modules over the network, and integrate a web browser component so that native modules can link to web modules without having to pull up a different window. In order for this to come off in the best way possible, I’m going to need to figure out a way to hook into some of the deeper inner-workings of the Internet Explorer component so that I have a means of passing data back from the webpage to the native module.
Oddly enough, some personal projects recently have demanded similar requirements, namely the ability to dynamically load classes into the .NET runtime. Reflection and Runtime interaction are no new concepts to me: I cut my teeth on Java programming starting around the time it was first released to the public. This will just be the first time I do it on any sort of enterprise level.
It should be an interesting experience.
I know I’m a little late to post this, but it’s just too damned cool to let it slip by…
I saw a link a week or so ago to this video where a Wiimote is exploited for its infrared camera and DSP capabilities to reproduce a user interaction experience akin to what was showcased in the Tom Cruise future sci-fi thriller Minority Report. This is combined with a home brew glove sporting various LEDs on the fingertips to provide multi-touch at-a-distance. From what I recall reading before, the Wiimote is capable of tracking up to 4 LEDs at once, so he makes use of that ability on four fingertips.
I recently bought a Tablet PC and insist this is the way of the (near) future. This stuff using Wiimotes will eventually be integrated into professional packages with even more features, in the mid-term future. It’s going to be exciting, because if this stuff is already being done with $40 worth of commodity hardware and simple opensource and homegrown software, imagine what a company with an R&D budget come up with.
There are currently a lot of new GUI philosophies in the works when you consider the features of the ReacTable and Microsoft’s knockoff with Bluetooth features, as well as the “real physics” of BumpTop. Other input devices appear to be gaining some ground (like pen tablets and trackballs), but don’t offer to change the status quo. Pair an inertial-aware or multi-touch at-a-distance input interface with the proper execution and performance, and we may be witnessing a revolution.
© 2007 Andrew Moyer. All rights reserved.