Faster frames for student animators
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Pay-as-you-go computer power could soon be helping computer animators finish their films.
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The eagerly-awaited Ubuntu Studio has been released, adding another entry into the expanding list of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but interested readers can peruse some installation screenshots or check out the latest news and information on the Ubuntu Studio Wiki. I plan to review the distro in a future column, along with an update on the latest version of the venerable PlanetCCRMA, but in this entry I'm focused on another very exciting new release. Ardour 2.0 is now available for download. This version is a significant improvement over the 0.99 series (1.0 was never released), with many new features and enhancements to performance and stability. The following article profiles the new Ardour as I employed it for three projects, all involving the program in the processes of composition and arranging as well as the more typical tasks of recording and editing. I've described each project in some detail, and each description includes a link to the final audio output.
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Once developers sink their teeth into Core Animation, a powerful developer's toolkit embedded in the new Mac OS, we'll likely enter an advanced era of user interface design. Commentary by Leander Kahney.
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A GNOME 2 frontend for the Visual Boy Advance emulator.
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Bundle of professional video editing applications includes new Motion special-effects software.
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Arts & entertainment: Film-maker to animate centuries-old painting using 'Cinerama' technique
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TechWeb - With a peak performance of 460 giga floating point operations per second, a single BladeCenter chassis of QS21s can achieve 6.4 TeraFLOPS, IBM claims.
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Leon Chevalier has posted about a class he's developed (you can download it here) that can help to speed up the load times for your site.   There are 4 relatively easy ways by which you can speed up the time it takes a browser to download a page. Following on from my post on joining CSS and JavaScript files, I have written a PHP script which will automatically do all of the above.   He gives example code of the class in action and includes some screenshots of the benchmarks from the YSlow Firefox extension showing the improvements.
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In previous issues, I  kept the user experience somewhat spartan which allowed the application to be modified with a mimimum of effort. This time we add points, ellipses, bezier curves and look at a new application class called Control, which allows users to tell the Doodle application what shape they want to draw next. By Guyon Roche. 0404
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Kore Nordmann has written up some benchmarks of some of the more popular PHP image creation libraries testing their output times and results for generating the same image.   In my article series I showed several ways on how to create images with PHP, going into implementation details etc. Now I just want to provide a very rough overview on speed and quality of the extensions.   He ran them with some settings disabled to optimize things as they ran and came up with results pointing to Cairo being the fastest to generate and output the image. It also had the benefit of outputting an image with the highest quality of the five tested (Cairo, SVG, Flash and GD with and without supersampling). His benchmark code is also included.
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This is a cool little feature I've been wanting for a while now.  Every once in a while I'll develop some cool feature in some software that I'm writing and want to show off a screenshot.  The only problem is that without showing how it interacts with the user I can't demo the features raw power.  An animated screenshot would solve this but no existing screenshot tools support animated gif output.  It turns out that 'convert' from ImageMagick supports. Ksnapshot can be used to grab the screens and 'convert' can stitch them together.  Heres what you do:  - Startup ksnapshot and take a series of snaps from your application.  Each   snapshot should be an independent frame in the series.  - Save ...
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This week you'll learn about solid software design practices, many of them borrowed from working with Windows applications. The result is the development of a Web based drawing package. By Guyon Roche. 0802
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Gotuit debuts SceneMaker, a tool that lets users cut, tag and share portions of clips from popular video sharing sites. Next time you send a video to friends, you can just show them the good parts. In Monkey Bites.
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Adobe has announced Visual Communicator 3, which enables teachers, lecturers and students to easily create scripted, television-quality broadcasts. Designed for those new to video, the company says that the software is ideal for project-based learning, distance learning courses and campus-wide newscasts.
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Get started with video production, but keep your eyes open for sticky situations.
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Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:   Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks. Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page. Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.   Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.