TAGENIGMA LLC

“Contest begins March 5th, 2007. Registration Forms must be received by July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Community judging to determine finalists will begin July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007 and run until August 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Executables of finalists must be received by August 15th, 3:00pm PST 2007. Winners will be announced at Austin Game Developer Conference on September 5th, 2007, and published on the contest website the same day.”

Visit the [2007 Official Rules ].

Using GREYCstoration_win32.exe -iter 100 -interp 2 -restore img.jpg, noise can be removed. This is the result after 100 iterations.

The original image:

I had a chance to document the process that I used to perform [Hardware Occlusion Queries] on the Ogre Wiki.

Slashdot posted an article [ Open Source Image De-Noising]. This is an important program to remove the graininess from photos. From the demo pictures it looks like this algorithm works very well.

It’s amazing how well this tool works.

Source Image:

Denoised Image:

This is what happens if you try to take a picture of a star without a tripod. This is a 30 second exposure aimed at a star while I tried to keep still.

This shot is a little hard to capture for an amature photographer. The sun came out this afternoon and then the blue sky started pelting us with snow.

The snow started pouring down at 9am.

This weekend I plan on creating a [BSP file]. BSP files are commonly used for map arenas in games like Quake and Unreal Tournament.

Microsoft just released service packs #1 for [express] and [TSE] for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft also released a new [DirectX for February 2007].

Tim and Linae have been playing a little of the game "City of Villains".

This is Tim’s Villain, a Matermind named Dread Command:

“Alright!” I took of a video with the camera while sledding the big hill. Watch [the video].

It was a bit of a technical feat to make this video. The camera records a MOV file. So I imported into QuickTime and exported as a AVI. I used Windows Movie Maker to put all the AVI videos together into a single video and output as a WMV file. I used the Divx Converter to convert from the WMV format to a DIVX file. And then I used Flash 8 to convert from a DIVX to a Flash FLV file that plays in the Flash movie.

Early previews indicate the top games of 2007 will be [Bio Shock], [Crysis] and [Portal].

We had a nice storm Thursday which knocked out power to one million people. Unfortunately, this outage also took my Comcast High Speed Internet connection with it. And there’s been so much news that I missed in such a short while.

1. Top news: Microsoft posted the December 2006 DirectX update which includes a peak at [DirectX 10].
2. Microsoft is hosting an XBox Live Arcade [programming contest].
3. If you want to compete in the contest, it would be handy to have an XBox Live Arcade compiler. You may find the [Express XBLA compiler] that Microsoft just released useful.
4. If you don’t know how to program the console that is ok too. Microsoft just released about how to program the XNA.
5. Microsoft released their [Robotics Studio]. Robotics Studio gives the programmer a handy library to do embedded system programming.

Usually people harp on Microsoft, but this week we can see some good news.

I had registered the domain name: [TGraupmann] a while back to host my portfolio and to do some website experiments. I decided to experiment with [SimpleViewer].

SimpleViewer takes an XML gallery file, so I wrote a handy Perl script to auto generate the gallery file:

#perl

print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "n";
print '<simpleviewerGallery maxImageWidth="4096"
maxImageHeight="4096" textColor="0xFFFFFF"
frameColor="0xffffff" frameWidth="20" stagePadding="40"
thumbnailColumns="3" thumbnailRows="3" navPosition="left"
title="SimpleViewer Title" enableRightClickOpen="true"
backgroundImagePath="" imagePath="" thumbPath="">' . "n";

while (<images/*.jpg>)
{
   $_ =~ s/images///;
   print '   <image>' . "n";
   print '      <filename>' . $_ . '</filename>' . "n";
   print '      <caption>' . $_ . '</caption>' . "n";
   print '   </image>' . "n";
}

print '</simpleviewerGallery>' . "n";

I killed about 3000 spam comments on my stories with a single SQL statement. Beware any spammer from considering spamming me again.
delete FROM `gl_comments` WHERE 1
delete FROM `gl_storysubmission` WHERE 1
UPDATE `gl_stories` SET comments = 0 WHERE 1
DELETE FROM `gl_users` WHERE uid > 50


Also disabling comments worked wonders.