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FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

The covers for Top Cow‘s Darkness Volume II. Most are illustrated by artist extraordinaire, Dale Keown of Full Bleed Studios. (Some issues and crossover covers are illustrated by Eric Basaldua, Keu Cha and Tyler Kirkham)

DC and Marvel, though also producing some fully painted covers these days, still have some catching up to do in terms of firing up kick-arse covers, eh?

Yes… programmers don’t read boring manuals, PDFs and CHMs all the time.

Click for full view.

After months of searching, I finally found it.

That’s Top Cow‘s Witchblade 71. What I’m really after is Keu Cha’s painted cover. Keu Cha produces some of the best Witchblade covers along with the original artist, Michael Turner.

Top Cow years ago deviated from the ‘regular’ superhero comics to delve into the supernatural world, which makes things more interesting. (But don’t get me wrong, DC currently is doing well with its Infinite Crisis event and has been ‘humanizing’ their superheroes (producing even one of the best comic-to-screen-humanize-the-superhero-movie… Batman Begins)).

But back to Top Cow… their take on the supernatural, sci-fi and conspiracy theories is what interests me most (and as of late qs is also reading them). PLUS of course their dedication to quality artwork on every panel.

If you haven’t checked out Witchblade yet, or have left it when Michael Turner wasn’t the regular penciller anymore or if you’ve feeling it has become a T&A book years ago, do return and pickup a copy… Ron Marz and Mike Choi are doing a great job, delving into the police/detective/job side of Sara while still continuing its supernatural direction.

Since Ron Marz handled things, it is receiving great reviews and even awards from various comic-related sites (which probably explains the reason why I’m having a hard time grabbing a copy of Witchblade 92).

Ron Marz gives ‘real’ stories… not just stories that serves as an excuse or a reason for Sara’s clothes to be shredded or to fall off.

Ah yes… T&A stands for ‘ti– and asses’, a term commonly used in the comics community.

For more than a year, my screen background is a plain blue wallpaper sans the image. Pretty ironic, I know, for someone who has maintained a wallpaper site for six years now.

But when I saw this image inside the filtered Renderosity.com Galleries, I just couldn’t help but click the ‘Set as wallpaper’ option.

‘Silent Spring’ is the title of the artwork created by an artist that goes by the czarnyrobert handle. You can view more of his artworks in this Renderosity Gallery and his official site.

Now I know I have been talking a little too much about aliens in this blog, but I am very much aware that this one is digitally rendered.

I am tempted though, to post ‘real’ pictures of aliens (besides the photos you have seen here) but these 412EP and 430-like helicopters hovering above my bunker is preventing me from uploading matters of sensitive content.

Besides, the world is not yet ready for these pictures.

Not yet.

Programmers or developers or any human in the problem solving workforce, tend to have difficulty solving the problem if their minds are clouded beforehand with buffered and imagined scenarios that they think will cause complications to occur.

Anticipating problems which may possibly occur in the future is a good programmer virtue, yet sometimes, it can serve as a hindrance itself to attaining solutions.

It is always good to have a Plan B, but always keep in mind why you need that alternative. Forgetting the real reason of having conceived a plan B in the first place can sometimes mislead you.

I have this Plan B in case Plan A will not work considering I’m using an A-10 approach and Factor A-9 exists.

Enumerate first the real possible causes that prevent A-10 approach from working before jumping to Plan B, which most of the time is a lazy way out.

Never blame Factor A-9 too.

Sometimes we do have this set of possible causes which blind us.

And blind us big time, it does.

Validate those variables first. Sometimes the most efficient solutions are aligned with the most simple and obvious answers.

Last week, I decided to include a TreeView control in one of my newly converted VFP8-to-VFP9 projects. During the development phase, my mind was already clouded with the possible DLL-Hell related stuff, possible VFP9-libraries-on-site compatibility issues, the well-behaved Windows 98SE machines in my clients site, green alien abductions and countless possible shenanigans that might occur.

And so it goes, after two failed installation attempts, DependencyWalker tinkering, InstallShield version upgrades (and even downgrades), CD archive searching, three CPU testings, OLE/DLL manual gathering and regsvr32-in’, compilations and recompilations, VFP5 Developer’s Guide skimming, screaming, punching, calling the gods of Asgard… and countless other efforts, I still… was unsuccessful.

Only to find out that the real cause of the problem lies in my code itself.

You might blame my alien-related paranoia for not detecting the problem right away, but… the main reason is that my mind was already clouded with too many factors that prejudiced/poisoned/muddled the problem solving process.

Free the mind, human.

Even the most complex problems are dealt with with an array of systematic step by step simple solutions that work.

You don’t need to study rocket science to be able to do that.

(And go back to the pen and paper approach if needed. (Papers rock!))

Restart now… restart later.

The existence of these two buttons have been talked about in countless blogs online.

Mostly rants.

Some of them even strongly believe that a good OS should not require a restart everytime an update has been done, or a new software has been installed.

(I disagree though. That’s why new OSes/applications require higher and faster specs… so you can reboot faster.)

Personally I don’t have anything against these two command buttons. The problem lies when they appear too often. There’s no problem seeing them once after a certain installation, but having them pop up every five minutes or so is a different story.

An entirely different story.

Why not add that checkbox that says ‘Do not notify me again for five Earth years.’?

I don’t have problems when I’m encoding documents or spreadsheets… no problems even if it interrupts my comic babes surfin‘… or when I’m coding.

I can’t imagine a programmer’s world with no interruptions, no phone rings, no distracting sounds, cubicles near your playing love songs or any form of interruptions.

That’s a boring world. It will lead to a robotic atmosphere creating bug-less softwares. (Bug-less?! The software industry would probably mature at the age of 2 and end at the age of 5 (Bugs are what keep us alive.))

Restart now. Restart later.

It is when I am fighting swarms of alien invasions, kicking some chimeran-ceramic-coated alien butts about to initialize some wormhole coordinates and jumpgate sequences in an undisclosed sector, that I don’t need those two buttons interrupting my quest to save the world.

It’s my human arse that gets kicked every time I pause just to click ‘Restart later.’

And these are intelligent lifeforms we are dealing with here. After a couple of interruptions, they can calculate already the amount of time in between pauses and initiate their attack process in that window.

So please, for the good of humanity… drop the timer or include that ‘Do not notify me again in five Earth years’ checkbox.

Thanks.

Ballistic Publishing releases Exotique. WHOO… be sure to check out the PAGE GALLERY section.

Next to Luis Royo artbooks, these titles from Ballistic Publishing are some things I’m drooling over.

King Kong Post Production Diary – 14 Weeks To Go (via CGSociety.org)

Can’t wait for the sequel: KING KONG versus Apple’s Ipod Nano.

Pixelwarp: DAZ Galleries – September 2005.

And the PIXELWARP feature comes to this side of cyberspace.

Philweavers.net 3.0 went live a couple of days ago. An old interview/feature of The PixelCatalyst was re-uploaded in this new version.

This is an old feature already… some links discussed are non existent anymore… some views are not as ‘cool’ as they were, but still, some things never change.

There’s no more pixelcatalyst.com by the way, I decided a couple years back to stick with the http://pixelcatalyst.plastiqueweb.com url.

Take your time out of the coding screen and have your eyes feast on this.

Got hooked with the stuff produced from this for the past few days.

RenderTEST.8042-009. Click the image on the left for a larger 498×1370 resolution. Having posted those lines above, I would like to tell you that this post has nothing to do with the image. Besides I don’t think I’ll make any sense in this post. It is 2:30AM and the discussion on education-related problems on TV ended just minutes ago. One problem probably, which was not mentioned, is… we have so much TV shows/news items discussing education related problems more than concrete solutions. Even in that TV discussion, I can’t seem to find even one convincing solution that perhaps could eradicate the problems mentioned.

Excuses… I see plenty. Solutions… I think one was mentioned. If… I’ll even consider that a solution.

I for one, cannot think of a concrete solution at this time of day.

Perhaps because the solution is beyond the weave of problems that govern the educational system.

Perhaps it lies on the attitude of the ‘problem solvers’ themselves. If one really exists.

I see corruption, I see humans that rant too much, I see passive individuals, I see tons of the-hell-I-care students and I see a lot of people yammerin’-there-yammerin’-here about these things.

I see blogs.

But I’m not sure I’m making sense too. That render distracts me every now and then.

Perhaps we’ll just let George Boole educate us all on this matter.

Take it away, George.

Yeah… I’ve been playing around with Poser for the past few days and haven’t been coding that much. Poser has improved so much since the last time I was taking my lunch with it (and even skipping office work just to play with it). Even the online Poser community increased by folds, not only by number of sites, but by number of cool freebies as well. In a nutshell (for those who haven’t heard of Poser yet), it is one of those so easy to use click-here-click-there 3D applications where, given a default set of figures, you can add some props, dress them up, add some lights, change their expressions and pose them to your heart’s (and libido’s) desire.

You can download tons of characters, props, poses, or if you have some extra cash, you can even buy some cool 3D figures from sites such as Daz3D and Renderosity.

(The model used above is a freebie MDP F202 model downloaded from this link. I’m still thinking of what name to give her.)

Of course you can delve deeper, morph objects and faces (imported from jpegs), create meshes, ‘clothify’ and create Python scripts.

Yes… applying even simple random generating algorithms on vertices produces cool abstract stuff. But then, involving algorithms in this easy click and pose application defeats my purpose of just having fun and easing the stress produced by software development.

I don’t like things to sound this way:

Q: What do you do for work..?
A: Create database programs and algorithms.
Q: What do you do when you’re not working..?
A: Create algorithms/scripts in Poser.

I will, post more thoughts about Poser and link to some cool Poser produced images in the days to come.

Who knows, I might even post some of my Poser-renders of the day.

Germinate42. Before I’ll forget, I did take some time last weekend to update my digital art site, pixelcatalyst.lair. It will be turning 6 years old this May. Just a new splash cover for now… but hopefully I could do something GFX/HTML-related before summer ends. The 1600×1200 wallpaper version of this artwork, which was previously released for Depthcore, can be also be downloaded in that site.

Here’s a quick adobe photoshop tip: Take some time tinkering with the Image . Adjustments . Channel Mixer feature. That is how this blue colored splash cover was derived from the brownish wallpaper version.

You’ll be satisfied with the results.

You don’t need the latest CS version to do some great things in Photoshop, so tone down that insatiable thirst of yours for version upgrades. It doesn’t hurt though to anticipate the coming Adobe CS2 release.

Photoshop, is one of those reasons I’m sticking with Windows while pining for a Mac.

Sorry Linux friends… GIMP is just mega light years away from PS. (Desktop-wise of course, server-wise I am aware of those linux-powered machines used in render farms.)

It has been quite some time since I’ve blogged something about work in here. In fact it’s quite a while since I posted consistently in this site (or any other sites for that matter).

I won’t even mention the ‘b-sy’ word since I think that has been used so so many times already by so so many humans in this world.

Let me just give you a recap of the things that occurred in the past week (which hopefully can be an excuse for not updating (of course you can always opt to a. work b. sleep c. count ants instead of reading blogs)).

April 01 started with that previous blog you’ve read which was created around 3AM after a 7-hour visit from client-001 the previous day (which is a 2-hour drive from here).

After that blog, the rest of the day was spent tweaking and coding some modules of the database projects for client-002, client-003 and client-004 visits for the next day.

(I will discuss the nature of these database projects in a different blog.)

Code, tweaks and code until 3AM Saturday and in the morning, because of some emergency related matters on the part of the client-002 I wasn’t able to meet them but had to proceed to client-003 which was just a block away from client-002. I installed the database/project updates, had a snack and LAN-to-spiritual-stuff discussion with them.

In the afternoon, qs and I proceeded to client-004, installed updates and discussed more features. Along with a couple of creamy chocolates on the table, we delved into the bloody details on how to finalize and tweak the database system that we are doing for them.

(We also meet someone in there who asked us if we were free for a web design-related project.)

After that visit, I purchased an eight port hub, a lan card, a brand new logitech internet keyboard and a mouse (I change keyboards and mouses (mice?) every three months), lan cables and RJ45s.

This was for the network at home which I’ve been planning to install. (Details on this one will also be posted in a different blog.)

The next day, Sunday… we had to meet a possible new client-A on client-005‘s place.

Nice meeting someone, who even being the head of a certain school, was still very nice and down to earth. The visit to their place was set on Thursday (which was, if you’re reading this on a Friday… yesterday).

We were already heading home when client-005 sms-ed that she’s also talking to a possible new client-B who’s also interested in a database-related project we are creating.

So Monday started with qs and I preparing papers, proposals, program tweaks, installers and all for this weekday series of client visits (client-006, new client-A, client-004 and client-007 (who was our first client since we started ‘free lancing’ here in Manila)).

By mid-day I have to re-arrange the schedule since client-005 called and requested a meeting with the possible new-client-B the next day. I had to move the meeting client-006 from Tuesday to Wednesday.

I spent the last few hours before midnight printing stuff, coding in between, reviewing program flows and installing the home network.

Tuesday, we had to fetch client-005 who was so kind enough to assist us with possible new client-B. An hour later we met with possible new client-B but I won’t delve into the details on this part for now… : ]

Went home around 5PM to tweak the network installation and prepare another batch of proposals, sample prints and program tweaks for the next day visit with client-006.

A two hour bus ride, lunch, a four hour installation/discussion with client-006 and a two hour bus ride home marked Wednesday.

I had prepared most stuff for possible new client-A visit the next day, so I slept early…

… but had a to wake up around 3AM since Thursday’s visit to possible new client-A is a three hour drive which could easily become a five hour or more one if we’ll be caught in the traffic or worse, if we get lost.

It was quite a long ride (and it was also our first visit so the anticipation factor (think of donkey’s ‘Are we there yet?’ lines), played its part. We even have to stop a couple of times to ask for directions.

It was quite funny that when we were talking with possible new client-A when we were already there, she asked us what road we took, and we described the long route we had, and she was like… ‘Oh you took the short cut!’

We arrived at possible new client-A around 10AM… qs handled the installation and the program demonstration, we had lunch… a very nice lunch with the two heads of the school (one of them we had met last Sunday) and around 1:30AM started our drive home.

‘Possible new client-A’ becomes ‘client-A’ before the end of the day.

Now it is evening already and after a couple of hours catching up on sleep and applying tweaks to that Integrated Media Center System (Library System, AVR-related database system, LARS and SASM etc.), it is already 11PM as I’m blogging this (though it will be posted tomorrow I guess (since I no longer have an internet connection at home)) and I don’t think I can visit client-001 tomorrow though I have yet to finalize the meeting for this week.

But I still have to prepare for a visit with client-004, client-008 and client-002 this Saturday if time and neurons permit.

We’ll deviate from the regular fox-related/programming-related stuff for a while to link you to the Ladies of London. Amazing 2D artworks from Linda Bergkvist (aka ENAYLA).