DMINATORs BLOG

Happy new Year 2012

2011-12-31T23:52:00.001+02:00

The new year is just ahead, few minutes left.

And well I haven't posted much, but this might be the right time to do so.

It was busy, very busy year for me. Allot of things happening, so little time, but there is already a light at the end of the tunnel.

I finally have finished my studies and driving exams, so I will get my first driving license. It's been difficult to find a time and dedication, when I was working and studying at university at the same time, but I finished it, now the only problem, is finding a car :)

What about university, well it's been OK, but first month will be an exam session, so that's what I will focus on.

I hope I will have more time next year to deal with my hobbies and photography, so I will keep the blog updated more frequently.

Anyway, its a year of dragon, and here is the one that I have recently found :)

OSX Lion - the new King in town

2011-09-27T21:23:00.000+03:00

I have been a partial Mac user for about year, it was mostly a pleasant experience. I like the user interface, the simplicity, attention to details, the obvious and simple things that make your life easier, which Mac offers. I do have Windows 7 available through boot-camp or through parallels desktop, just to use Office, games and some other apps that I need for my university.

Now from Snow Leopard I went and got the new Lion.

Here are my first impressions.

Well, it is a Mac still, not many changes so far, just a few little additions here and there, but all are welcomed.

So what first, the new "Mission Control" and Fullscreen apps.

We had some fullscreen apps before, just take Aperture for example:

It was fullscreen app from the beginning, now this support is native and any app can take advantage. This gives a great new experience to reading PDF documents. Here is a windowed document:

And here is document in fullscreen:

Now when there are multiple fullscreen apps at the same time, it is very easy to switch between them, this is where "Mission Control" comes. Take a look at typical desktop mess:

Now with a single gesture on touchpad, all the documents are arranged (fullscreen apps on the top) windowed apps on the center. Just click the program and it will be selected. Easy.

There are some minor visual changes also. The new profile menu:

"About this mac" is also updated:

And interesting status report, about the disk usage:

I also like the new Finder changes. It shows a list of all the recently used documents, based on their type "picture", "music", "video", etc, great addition!

Another cool feature, that was added, is the ability to send files, between to Mac computers. It is as simple as drag & drop - "AirDrop":

No need to use flash USB drives, bluetooth, network servers, just have 2 Macs nearby and it works automatically!

Another major features, that I haven't tried as much, is the addition of versions.

Usually when you work on document, you constantly "Save" you work, so that if something bad might happen, you won't loose your work=, but guess what, Mac does this automatically for you, and it also stores different versions of your document, so you can go back, and undo any work you did before. Awesome ! Let's take a look, I created a simple text document "Version1":

I make a few changes...

And then my version is ready.

But hey, I think I liked the first version more, so I go back in time....

And select the version that I want.

I think this is the most impressive addition to any OS, in a long time. I am impressed, but let's see how it would work in the real life.

So far the Lion is amazing, it is a strong step forward for the OS, I am happy with it and enjoy using it.

Jon Stewart to the rescue...

2011-08-18T21:17:00.002+03:00

Ames Iowa Straw Poll is one of the most important and influential straw polls before the start of Republican presidential primary in 2012.

It is used mostly as a guide to show, who has the campaign, momentum and movement in order to win primaries later next year.

But here is the thing, this year winner Michele Bachmann who has been already expected to take the first place (the question was by what margin), "unexpectedly" won by only 150 votes from the next contender.

And as such received allot of media attention. But if I check the results here:

1 Michele Bachmann 4,823 28.6%
2 Ron Paul 4,671 27.7%
3 Tim Pawlenty 2,293 13.6%
4 Rick Santorum 1,657 9.8%
5 Herman Cain 1,456 8.6%
6 Rick Perry (write-in) 718 4.3%
7 Mitt Romney 567 3.4%

We can clearly see that the difference is less than one percent, between first and second place.

Now what about the other guy in the second place ? Who is that.. Ron Paul ?

Doesn't he deserve some attention, because clearly you can't ignore more than 4600 people that voted for him. But well, he got ignored, almost completely, not even a single mention in most news sources.

But why ?

Maybe Jon Stewart can explain:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

I have to give Jon Stewart a credit, well everyone already knows that, His show is the most reliable source of information on Mainstream media, jokes aside this is a joy to watch, and learn something that is not censored, ignored or manipulated.

There are plenty of thoughts, speculations, why this is happening, but I leave this for you to research yourself.

Amazing Lytro camera

2011-07-27T21:21:00.003+03:00

This year, Lytro will debut with the first light field camera for everyone.

This is a unique new type of camera that "simply" allow the user to select focus point after the picture has been taken !

The main idea behind it, is that the camera has light field sensor.

This sensor catches color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light.
(Traditional digital camera capture only color). But the main magic happens with software that translates this data and generates the final image.

Here are few very cool examples, just click on the area to focus on !

The quality of the image is poor and the size is also very small, but maybe with some advances in technology it will improve.

Got new Canon 5d Mark 2

2011-06-15T19:35:00.003+03:00

I haven't been posting for some time, as I was busy in finishing my second semester. It was generally successful and I am happy with result.

Finally I have some free time and can concentrate on full time job and my hobbies.

In may I have visited near by Helsinki, Finland and purchased new camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II. I had some cash on my hand so I decided to give it a try.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II is a 21.1 megapixel full frame CMOS digital single-lens reflex camera that is probably the best quality wise camera from Canon right now.

Because it is Full Frame sensor, then camera produces pictures with greater shallow depth and sharpness.

I am happy with a camera and already used for few of my clients.

Just for example here are few videos from previous photo sessions:

and

Sigma SD1 the magical device with magical price

2011-05-24T10:35:00.002+03:00

Finally after a long waiting time Sigma has announced the availability and price of its amazing SD1 Digital camera

Many people have been excited about this (amazing sensor, great weather-resistant body, improved LCD screen, new features...) and price near it's main rivals Canon 7D and maybe 5D Mark II,

,but what was the surprise to everyone, that actual price announced:

The Sigma SD1 will be available for the MSRP of $9,700 through select authorized Sigma dealers.

Yes this is more than 9 thousand dollars ! It is in the same price league as Canon 1Ds Mark III or Nikon D3x !

The funny thing I noticed in press-release:

"The SD1 will carve out a new category in the marketplaceby providing high-end photographers with an alternative to very expensive medium-format cameras and digital backs, while offering unrivaled image quality," said Mark Amir-Hamzeh, president of Sigma Corporation of America. "By embracing the SD1, serious photographers will also be able to take advantage of Sigma’s extensive lineup of affordable lenses, which are compatible with this new camera. The selections of lenses for medium-format cameras on the market are somewhat limited, so this will be a huge advantage for SD1 users. This is undoubtedly a very special camera, and we’re thrilled to share it with the photo community."

Well let's sum-up this statement. Basically Sigma is trying to sell a camera aimed as an alternative to high-end medium format photographers, and trying to provide affordable low-end lenses with it :) This is really some bitter joke in my mind.

I personally have used Sigma lenses, they are good (image quality-wise, there are even some better options than Canon right now, like excellent 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM), but their build-quality is poor, the wear-and-tear is very visible due to the outer case plastic. I wouldn't trade any of my Canon lenses for Sigma's.

In my mind, this is some joke or how some people say (total fail), you don't sell high-end equipment with low-end lenses.

There are many other points that I can bring up, but I guess Michael Reichmann said it really well, and I agree with him completelly

But let's wait and see, what I really would like to see is actual comparisons with
Canon 1Ds Mark III or Nikon D3x, then we can really say if this price tag is justified. But will it sell even if it beats D3x (which I think it can!) ? This is another question...

P.S. There is already a Dpreview.com preview, check it out

New office pictures

2011-05-21T22:13:00.004+03:00

I am so busy right now with school, didn't had a time to blog, though I have few things to say,

But to keep some updates going, here are few pictures from our Net Group office that I made a few weeks ago.

We only recently have extended to the floor below, so in order to give some life to empty walls, the competition was made to find the best photos among the workers. The best ones will be printed out.

And as you will see some of my photos have been lucky enough.

The excellent prints were made by ArtPrint guys.

Working at Net Group

2011-04-15T21:00:00.004+03:00

It's been a while, but I wanted to make a quick update.

I am now working at Net Group which is fairly large local company (but with ambision for expansion). My job position will be Senior Software Developer.

A little info about Net Group:

Net Group is a project management company, which develops customer friendly information technology solutions mainly in four categories:

business analytics,

infrastructure solutions,

software solutions,

consultation.

The purpose of all of these solutions is to help our customers achieve their business goals through information technology.

We assure the quality of the service through thoroughal communication with the customers and skilled project management, which we conduct by the principles of PMI (Project Management Institute).

Each project has a concrete project manager who coordinates the co-operation of different departments and involves specialists outside of Net Group’s team if necessary.

We value the customer’s and our time in our work and therefore we realize our projects in fixed term, in the budget limits and in the way the both parties are satisfied.

My first impressions are positive, so far I have been fairly impressed with level of organization and support. I hope I can bring additional experience and value to the company, learn something new and enjoy my time there.

My Super macro

2011-03-23T15:32:00.003+02:00

As I was doing presentation, for my university course, here it is, for your enjoyment :)

It explains tools that I use, when making my macro photos, and results that I get with it.

Leaving Fromdistance

2011-03-18T19:40:00.003+02:00

Today, was my last day of work at Fromdistance.

I have been working there for almost 2 years. It has been a wonderful experience and I got used to the team and people who work there.

I am proud of my work as developer of Mobile Device Management solutions for Android and BlackBerry. I put everything I can (my heart, my soul and dedication) to make it the best device management solution in the market.

It is really sad to leave, but I am proud to have worked with many different people and admire their skills and experience.

I am glad that I leaving on a positive note and many of my co-workers express their sympathy towards me and my work. It is really important for me, because I take my work very seriously and it is always the feedback from other people that I value the most and appreciate that.

Thank you guys, for wonderful journey, I think it is not the end, as I would probably meet you again some day!

Fullpage divs done relatively easy !

2011-01-28T22:11:00.007+02:00

This is one of the things that is pretty hard to find on the web, but it is possible to implement after all.

Few years ago making dynamical web pages (pages that change size depending on the browser screen size) requires using tables. Now they aren't used that much anymore and tableless design is used instead with CSS.

This makes it possible to create a separate css file that will define properties of the table elements.

It took me some time to search for the code that will work exactly the way I want it to work. I still need to figure out how to fix the top and bottom to pixel sizes instead of percentages but so far it looks ok.

  
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Test 100% height</title>

    <style type="text/css">
 
 html, body
 {
  height:100%;
  background-color: #000;
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
 }

    #main{
  background-color: #333; /* for middle column */
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  text-align:center;
  vertical-align: middle;
    }

 p {
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
 }


 #main_top {
  background-color: #666;
  height:10%;
 }
 
 #main_middle 
 {
  background-color: #999;
  height:70%; 
 }
 
 #main_bottom {
  background-color: #BBB;
  height:20%;
 }


    </style>
</head>

<!-- Main body -->
<body>
  <div id="main" class="gallery_main">
     <div id="main_top" class="main_top"><p>TOP</p></div>
  <div id="main_middle" class="main_middle"><p>MIDDLE</p></div>
     <div id="main_bottom" class="main_bottom"><p>BOTTOM</p></div>  
  </div>
</body>
</html>

As you can see there is one main div and 3 child divs. Each has percentage of the height it occupies specified. You can try to resize the window, and it will keep the div sizes also proportional.

New Estonian Euro coins

2011-01-09T18:43:00.003+02:00

Starting from January 2011, Estonia has a new currency = € Euro.

The Euro was a long-time dream of some people, however it is not so much popular, about 50% of the population are against euro (based on some reports).

For me, I don't think Euro is that much important, and probably won't make any difference. It will be easier for the tourists to visit this place, but I don't see any other benefits from it.

In any case I have decided to make a few sample photos of the new Euro coins.

A few years ago I made one of my first photos called '50 cents' :

but now time has changed, and I am going to give you new '50 euro cents':

From Euro Aperture

You can also check the full album:

Euro Aperture

Internet fraud 3 examples

2010-12-12T17:58:00.004+02:00

There are so many different version of Internet fraud, scams or schemes and there are plenty of materials on the web that explains this in detail.

Wikipedia has a good article here

I get plenty of those in my email every 2 weeks or so. Here is one for example:

One email I got. Well cool they know my family name from somewhere...

But hey who is this guy anyway. If we look at his email. it gets clear that he is not from a trusted source, and I don't know him either....

If we open the document up (I don't recommend opening any attached documents, especially from the source you don't know, even if it is from the source you know, be careful it may be infected with virus (run the anti-virus scan first)) I get this text in it:

Please forgive my using this means to reach you but I cant think of any other
way of letting you know the urgent matter at hand. I acted as personal attorney
to (late) Mr.E.Kuznetsov,who lived and worked here for more than twenty years
as a major contractor and businessman.

On the 1st of October 2006, he and his wife and only daughter were involved in
an automobile accident while visiting a neighboring country on vacation . They
were buried two weeks after and I have exhausted all means of reaching who may
have been related to them. This has been made more difficult because no mention
was made of any relative while he was alive.

To the best of my knowledge, before his death, he had an investment deposit
totalling more than Seven Million Five hundred thousand United States
Dollars(US$7.500.000.00)
with the major bank here and now they have asked me to
provide a next of kin if there is, or the estate will then revert to the
government and so it would be lost.

My proposal is that you allow to be presented for this role so that
documentation can be processed and payment made in your favour. This is a
project which will see us partner to realise. I would be willing for us to
discuss terms of participation in order to protect our various interests.
I want to assure you right away that I have positioned this deal to not last
for more that two weeks. I shall be willing to discuss futher on this if write
back or send to me your direct telephone number so we can discuss in the type of
confidential atmosphere which this matter requires.

Thanks for your prompt response.
Kindly Contact Me On My Private Email:barr.richardroberts01@hotmail.fr
For More Detail's
Barr.Richard Roberts
Principal Attorney

Which is of-course the typical scam, when the person tries to get my personal details.
I suggest, that you don't send any details and don't contact him from your email account. They may gather these email addresses to even further send spam or scam emails to you.

There is also one alarming scheme that was kinda widespread in Estonia some time ago.

Basically someone calls you to your phone number, and when you want to answer it, the call drops. You call back immediately but it drops again, again and again. Then you finally realize that you have been calling some strange number in another country. The real surprise is the next phone bill :)

Here are some reports of how people got calls from someone from Africa, the call back costs 60 EEK, not bad.
The good news is that usually Mobile Operators pay back any damages that customers have suffered. But still people should be careful enough.

The other widespread fraud was "PayPal Fraud", right now I am not getting it that much, maybe because it is not effective anymore. But the typical email that person gets, says something like This is PayPal, your account will be terminated due to some activity, please enter your account details to keep the account.

The email message looks valid, even the link when you click on looks like paypal website, the trick is that it looks similar, but it is not paypal website. it may have address something like http://paypal.details.account.ghz.cn in it, but with careful check it is obvious that it is opened on domain ghz.cn.

When user enters his details, he is redirected to original paypal website, like nothing happens, but the actual details are stored by the hijacker, who can use it to withdraw found from the real paypal account. There are hundreds of cases when it has happened.

So again, be careful with your data, and verify what you are doing.

Help-Portrait 2010

2010-12-06T20:21:00.003+02:00

Last Saturday 3 December 2010, I have participated in our local Help-Portrait event.

The idea of this event is simple, and can be outlined in few lines:

1. Find someone in need

2. Take their portrait

3. Print their portrait

4. And deliver them

The local event is organized first time in Estonia by our Portree.ee website.

It has gathered 39 photographers, 15 volunteers, 12 studios. 74 photo sessions were made with total of 170 people portraits!

The pictures are printed with the help from Artprint guys.

I am glad I did my part and was one of those photographers, and hope my work is worth the effort.

Comparison of two Free Open Source software from an application development perspective

2010-12-05T18:22:00.003+02:00

I have chosen two different free and open source projects, for comparison. I am going to analyze them from development perspective.

GIMP - GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

I have analyzed GIMP few months ago, and explained what is possible to achieve with this great tool. But let's look from a different perspective. How about analyzing the whole development process.

So how the GIMP is developed. GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers, because code is open it is fairly easy for everyone to develop for it (with programming skills of-course). GIMP is also participating in Google Summer of Code event every year.

Everyone can make changes by taking a bug from the buglist and submitting it later as patch. Here is an explanation about how to submit a patch.

There are few things that you need to know first:

Developers website - Main developers website. First place to go.
Bugs - As always there are bugs. Here is the list of all the current bugs, and explains how to use BugZilla system for navigating through the list

Source Code repository - Here is the place to get, or browse the source code.

FAQ for developers

Blender - Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

It is great tool. I have used it few times, but always get stuck with the user interface, but it might change once version 2.5 of Blender is finally released (with simplifier user interface). But the software has become really powerful, and is growing constantly, with more users and new features.

Just a sample, of what it can do:

And all is free!

But let's get started with comparison.

It seems to me that development process it the same as for GIMP. There is a bug list. After the bug is fixed, the developer can submit a patch request using this guide.
Blender is also participating in Google Summer of Code event every year.

Developers website - Main developers website. First place to go.

Bugtracker - The bugtracker for searching/adding new bug reports

Source code repository - Here is the place to get, or browse the source code.

It seems to me that development for these projects is done essentially in the same way. I really couldn't find any difference :)

A few thoughts about Hackers

2010-11-28T23:46:00.003+02:00

Now don't be scared :)

but I don't blame you, this word has many meanings, even you if you go to Wikipedia page you get different results.

I would like to talk about Hacker as a person who like to solve different computer problems in an elegant way. This is my definition, but there is a better one defined by Eric Steven Raymond

Let's take a look at his article.

Now I don't consider myself a hacker (maybe partially, because I share some passion towards computer, research and solving some problems), but I don't think I can wear such a title without some sort of established amount of work.

I been programming for many years (more than 10 years now), and always been excited by the way how you can make computer work. Playing with QBasic and Pascal on my old 486 DX was really cool thing at that time.

This is actually what Eric is writing about in his article. He explain who the hacker is and how you can become one. I guess being a hacker right now is "cool", it is, but only if you are doing something valuable with your skills.

Eric also explains what exactly you need to know and learn if you want to become a hacker: attitude, skills, experience and respect.

I suggest you check his article for more details: here

GPL License in more detail

2010-11-21T16:06:00.002+02:00

Today, I would like to take a look at GPL license, and explain in in more detail.

GPL stands for "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE"

You probably have seen this definition in one of the source code:

Copyright (C)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see .

GPL is usually applied to the source code and it is most widely used free software license. GPL uses copyleft term.

What does copyleft means ? Well copyleft is opposite of copyright, When copyright - restricts you how you can distribute or modify the application, the copyleft makes opposite - makes it free, this allows everyone to modify and change the application without any restrictions. There is only one catch, you need to release the modified version of the application under the same license - GPL !

The fact that copyleft is strict in a way how you can use/modify code, might have attributed to the popularity of this license. When you use someone else's work and modify it, you know that your own work, could be used for making even better software.

There are 3 GPL versions released so far:

Version 1 - released in January 1989

Version 2 - released in June 1991

Version 3 - released in June 29 2007

Each new version addresses changes and fixes loop-holes that were used by some manufacturers to bypass license restrictions.

There is a common misconception that GPL applications should be free. Well the answer is "there is no restriction" you can sell your GPL applications for a price ! GPL only applies to the license and freedom for the user to modify the code of the application, but the application itself can be sold for a price !

Here is a good quote from GPL FAQ

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

For more information there is an interesting article about Selling free software

And FSF position is very clear on this:

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

As a final note, I would like to bring one example when GPL license made a great impact on the developers around the world, and research that wouldn't have been possible without it.

I would take Quake 2 as an example. It is pretty old game right now, it was released on December 9, 1997.

It was extremely popular and sold more than 1 million copies.

The source code for Quake 2 was released under the terms of the GPL on December 21, 2001.

The amount of projects that came based on this source code is amazing. Here are few of the most interesting ones, they all were released based on the original code, with some modification from other developers:

Quake2Maxx

R1Q2

Quake 2 .NET - Quake 2 ported to .NET platform

Jake 2 - Quake 2 ported to Java

Quake 2 Android - Quake 2 ported to Android platform

and many more...

Copyright some thoughts

2010-11-14T19:57:00.004+02:00

I would like to share some thoughts about copyrights this time.

As an author myself this topic is important to me. When you create a piece of work yourself, using time, talent and money, you want to get a value out of it. For me this value is just a payment for the photo shoot. For other people and companies it may be a license to allow use of this work under certain conditions.

That's why it is important to have your work protected, so the author would get paid for the work that he deserves to get paid for.

There are different copyright laws in different countries. The copyright law has been active for many years and originally was implemented for licensing the terms for copying books, but eventually was extended to cover other original work: music, photographs, paintings and allot more.

The most important milestone in Copyright law, is the Berne Convention, it is international agreement that regulates copyright laws in most countries in the world. Basically original work, created in one country will be recognized in another and the same copyright protection laws will be applied.

There is also one thing worth noting, The copyright remains valid for the duration of the author life and some time after the death of the author. It can be 25,50 and even more years. After this time, the work will be moved to the Public domain and will be available for everyone for any use and free of charge.

Well it all sounds pretty good, but there is one exception. Sometimes when we are dealing with big money and huge corporations the laws can be influenced and changed by lobbyists.

One famous typical example is Mickey Mouse Protection Act

The Mickey Mouse was created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks and voiced by Walt Disney.

However with the introduction of Mickey Mouse Protection Act has ensured that works such as the early Mickey Mouse cartoons will remain under copyright until at least 2023. For example the original Copyright Act of 1790 extended this time to 14 years after the death of the author, but with the new law it was extended to 70 years !

There is no guarantee that it won't get extended even further, it is just so easy to buy the law these times !

The problem is that you cannot derive any works from the copyrighted work if you don't have a permission or rights. But what would have happened if people had a chance to use it in their works, maybe something great could come up from it !

Gimp the greatest!

2010-11-07T15:57:00.009+02:00

Today, I would like to share with you, some of my experience with Free Open Source image editing software: GIMP

What is GIMP ?

GIMP stands for "The GNU Image Manipulation Program"

I have been using this program for few years now, and it has been a very powerful image editing tool in my work.

Many images that I have made went through GIMP in order to fix some flaws or enhance image quality.

Just to give some examples.

Here is the original image. Now it looks ok, but there are some leaves on the right that take attention from the flower in the image center. I would like to remove them.

Here are the distracting areas, that I would like to remove from it.

I have used different tools: smudge, healing and Blur to remove the areas I don't like.

And here is the final result after the operation.

As you can see the distracting parts have been removed, and image looks much better.

GIMP can also be used to create all kind of manipulations with source image. For another example, here is original picture of our Russalka monument, that I have taken last year:

As you can see there is nothing special about it. But with some tweaking (straightening of the lamp post and adding colors) it is possible to get better results, which looks more like painted object than a real one:

But it looks great !

Another good example, is what exposure stacking can do to a very normal image. Take this image as an example, it was taken very early in the morning, you can barely see how the sky turns purple while sun is rising. But I want to bring the sky, while retaining details of the monument.

Now in reality the actual image looks better, but because digital cameras are limited to what they can see, it is called dynamic range, you don't get a full detail that human eye can capture. To give a better representation of the details that I want to get, I am using exposure stacking. I take the original image and make 2 copies, one underexposed:

This brings out the lost details in the background (the burning sky that I want to see).

The other image I overexpose:

Now this brings out the details of the monument, but the sky is almost gone.

But by using GIMP and combining two images together as separate layers, and erasing the areas of sky in overexposed image, I bring both details to the final image here:

The result is great image with sky in background and details of the monument.

And this is only scratching the surface of what GIMP can do. So I would advise you to check it out !

Android platform

2010-11-02T11:52:00.001+02:00

Another presentation that I did for my English classes.

This time I am taking a more closer look at Android platform. The advantages, history and future:

Second life first try

2010-10-31T19:07:00.006+02:00

I have been ignoring Second life phenomenon for some time now. But I decided to finally dive in into it.

Here are some of my thoughts.

First of all, one of the strangest things during the registration process, is that you specify the first name, and the registration wizard will give you last name automatically.

Now except that the registration process is quite easy. After you have verified your e-mail address, you can download a client or viewer, to start using second life.

When you start first time, you are teleported to the beginners island. There you are presented with a series of tutorials, that explain how you should navigate, interact with the world.

One interesting thing, that I noticed - there was a live broadcast from Blender community. Basically a video is displayed inside a virtual world, streaming live broadcast from a real-world session. Quite impressive actually !

There are all kind of shops, you can buy almost anything, here is one example where you can buy, shoes (virtual I guess). They all are user made, and it is possible to make something like this yourself.

Every person you see here is a living being, you can check their profile. To see their real life and virtual profile information.

There is however much more to research, because the world is so big, i have explored only a small portion. But for now I think this is too much information, so I am going to leave it here.

Folksonomy

2010-10-24T14:47:00.004+03:00

Today I would like to talk about Folksonomy.

Now this is a relatively new term, that was first introduced at the beginning of 20th century.

But what is Folksonomy ?

Basically it is a way for classifying information found on a web using tags or bookmarks. The whole point of this, is that the tags are visible for everyone else (this provides a social aspect) that way people can exchange information with everyone else.

For example when I create this post, I would add labels or tags to it, this means that it will be possible to search later all similar posts that have the same tags !

There are many different services that are working using this approach. The best example would probably be http://www.delicious.com/

As you can see from the website main page, there are news sources, description and tags.

So how about making 2 examples of using this Folksonomy in action.

Good example

- This example shows a reference to the site that highlights 50 time saving ways for web-designers. I think it makes it a good example of Folksonomy because it is labeled correctly, the information is relevant and it is useful

Not so good example

- It is pretty hard to find an example that doesn't work so well. I think this example might fall to this category. As you can see it is not so popular only 69 people shared this. I think the reason this example doesn't work, is because it wasn't shared correctly. The description here is hard to understand. What does "@font-face face off" mean ? I think what would work better is "Comparison of font libraries" for example, that way people would understand the idea behind this message

How to make wiki better ?

2010-10-17T15:37:00.004+03:00

Let's imaging a scenario, one day Jimbo Wales - the co-founder of Wikipedia, calls me, and asks:

"Hey Dmitri, what do you think, how we can make Wikipedia better ?"

That's a good question. Let's think about it for a minute, how we can make Wiki better ?

First of all, there isn't much wrong with Wikipedia, it is a great source of information. The amount of articles that it already contains is really impressive it has over 16 million articles (over 3.4 million in English)!

The first place people usually go for information these days, is Wiki. It is because it is convenient and easy. You can get information in a few seconds and use it right away.

The Wiki is not perfect however, like everything it has some flaws.

Vandalism - Due to the open nature, the articles are subject to vandalism. The Wiki now includes different methods of protecting articles, for example Protection policies, they are designed to protect some articles that are frequently attacked by vandals. In one case there was a deliberate vandalism about a biography of John Seigenthaler, and the wrong information was kept unchanged for many months, until it was finally noticed and fixed.

Copyright violations - All of the wikipedia content should be freely distributable by everyone. When someone posts a material, it is recommended that it will be licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 license. That way this work can be used and can be modified by anyone. Sometimes, however when the materials posted aren't in public domain (have some non-free license), they will be generally deleted. There are some exceptions though, but the license section is difficult to understand

Reliability - This is often a main source of criticism. The Wikipedia articles sometimes can be inaccurate or completely wrong. The problem is that you cannot be sure completely if it is accurate or not. There is no publisher or person that is responsible for this. It is a risk.

Quality - Because most of the articles aren't rewritten completely, but only small portions are changed, the overall structure of the article can suffer. Sometimes it can miss important parts, or focus more on less important ones./li>
Verifiability - This is one of the rules, that every information that is inserted, needs to have a reliable source where it was taken from. It doesn't mean that it is the truth, it means that it can be verified.

Financial support - The Wikipedia is free by the nature and relies on donations to be operational. The fact that it is not operated by governments, companies, make it neutral and free from people who want to control and use it for deception or lies (just like some of the TV, Paper news networks do)

So these are the main points that I have outlined so far. This doesn't mean that all of them are negatives. The Wikipedia does already a good job of self-fixing it. If there is something wrong it will get noticed quickly and will be removed. The disputed articles and the information in it are discussed in the talk page, until the consensus is made. If you take a look at published articles in books or magazines(they aren't going to be fixed this quickly for sure)

But how to improve it, is there something to improve actually ?

I don't have answer to that. There is nothing you can improve, there is nothing wrong with it. The Wikipedia is free by the nature, and the only way to remove the flaws is to restrict the freedom. For example making sure that every article is accepted by the editor, and only registered users can make changes. But by restricting this freedom, the flexibility and speed of the information will decrease.

What about the financial support, what if the government or the company would buy Wikipedia ? This will solve the problem right ? Yes it will solve the problem, but it will also force certain point of views that the company or government wants to promote, and the Wikipedia will not become so free and independent as it was.

So how to make it better ?

Let's take a look what 2006 Times magazine says:

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

And my answer is:

What makes Wikipedia so great = You !
What can make it even better = You !

So how to make it better ?

Just go to Wikipedia and contribute! Share your knowledge with a world, and make it better !

Google TV presentation

2010-10-15T22:28:00.002+03:00

Just want to share my latest presentation that I did for the university's English language course.

This time I made a presentation about a new and cool Google TV:

Google TV is an awesome new way to combine TV with Internet. It allows everyone to browse web, install Android applications, socialize with Facebook or Twitter and do many other cool things.

Check this out.

Motives for the Blogs

2010-10-10T14:18:00.002+03:00

This time I would like to analyze different blogs and the motives behind them.

With web right now, rich with graphics, videos and easy to use interfaces, blogs are becoming much more effective source of information than usual magazines or newspapers.

The diversity of blog topics is also amazing. I can be you can find blogs about everything you can imagine. As diverse as people are the blogs also inherit the thoughts and ideas of its writer.

I think I would take a look at some of the blogs that my blog links with, and make a short summary.

Game programming news for newbies by Roger This is one of the oldest blog-links I have. The blog is maintained by Roger who is very passionate about Game development as I am. The blog is mostly about game development: different libraries (Ogre, SDL), Graphic cards, etc. I have to give Roger a credit he writes post to the blog much more frequently than I am :)

.Info about Starbreeze This is another blog closely related to game development, but this time it is from Game development company Starbreeze. They are known for some of the awesome game titles, such as Darkness, The chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Its good to check how these guys are doing, and if more game titles are going to be released soon, consider me a fan.

The Brain Dump by Floh This is another game blog of a company named Radon labs. Unfortunately it is dead now, but like everything in the world the technology and experience always have a value and it will find a buyer. I hope they found a new place, and I hope the blog will also gets updated :)

Native Eye by Gil Rondan This is a blog of a photographer from New York. He usually posts photos of the city and the people, it is amazing how mixed the culture of the city is. It is also one of my first blog links I have added.

Social software criterias for Skype

2010-10-03T12:41:00.005+03:00

Today I have decided to take Skype apart, using some of the criterias defined by Matt Web

First of all what is social software ?

I think, it is software that you use to interact with other people, perform activities together not as individual but as a group of people.

But what about Skype ? Is it social software ?

I think yes!

To better understand this, here are some criterias that can be used to describe that:

Indentity -

In social environment, it is important to have your own unique identity. The Skype allows you to create an extensive profile: picture, location, birthday, contact information...
This information can be used by other skype users, to find you for example.

Presence -

With you and other people in your contacts list, the Skype keeps you informed, when somebody is online or offline. You can always change the status yourself, if you don't feel like you don't want to be disturbed for example.

Relationships -

This might be a core of any social sofware. You need to have a relationship with someone. For example you need to add a friend before you can start a conversation and see his presence (Online or Offline)

Conversations -

With Skype, every chat can be considered a conversation. When you start it, it never stops, because conversation can be continued later. Because you see history of the conversation, it helps you to remember the last place where it has ended, and hints where it can go further.

Groups -

Originally skype didn't had groups, but it was added later. Now you can create and add contacts to the group. This is more convenient to manage, and keep people together, related to the group purpose.

Reputation - This is probably one thing that Skype doesn't have. There is nothing that can be described as reputation. Some other social software has reputation system in place like AIM warning level, however eventually it was removed, due to the abuse.

Sharing -

Skype is taking sharing to a new level. Not only you can share files, you can also share (play) games even share you computer desktop screen. This is important part of any social software, that you can interact with people in this way.

Sources:
Matt Web - Social software
Stewart Butterfield's - devices in social software

New Comunity Networks analyze for dpreview.com

2010-09-26T19:15:00.002+03:00

Today, somewhat completely different topic I will be analyzing Internet community of dpreview.com website.

First of all what is community:

A community is a group of people united by the common objects of their love that incorporates three elements: shared values, unity, and intimacy.

-Ed Schwartz (1991)

What about ? dpreview.com - It is a photographic community of people, that are interested in photography. They share their experience, knowledge and work. It is one of the most popular websites in the world, for example on November 2008 alone, there were about 24 000 000 unique user sessions to this site!

So what makes it so special? This is what I will be analyzing today.

The dpreview.com was founded on November 2008 by Phil and Joanna Askey. From a simple website it has grown quite allot, adding new features, such as forums, galleries, challenges, database for cameras and accessories.

The fact that it keeps growing and changing depending on the new trends makes it always fresh and up-to-date, so the user always get the accurate information all the time.

So what the dpreview.com consists of:

1. Camera review site - this is what brings all the people here. Dpreview.com is famous for it's camera reviews. This is the first place where people go, before they are going to buy camera, just to check which one suits their style and taste the most. For example you can check this review of Sigma DP2. The review contains about 24 pages, they all are detailed and thorough.

2. Now, another part of the site that makes it even more interesting and so unique, is the forums. I will be discussing this in more detail, later on.

3. Challenges is another new feature that was added during the last year. This allows anyone to participate in a local competition, to show their work and see how it compares with someone else work.

4. Galleries allows any user of the site, to upload their pictures. This is useful for anyone who wants to show their picture either by linking it with a forum or to any other external website.

So what about the community and the forums, why it is so different and unique.

Size- This is probably the biggest photographic community on the web. As of now, there are 574740 unique users on the forums. It might be attributed to the fact that the site has been operational since 1998

Reach- With Internet nowadays, anyone can get access to the website (unless it isn't blocked by some countries) But the fact that dpreview.com is universally accessible from anywhere in the world, helps to bring different people together. The community here is international so there are no borders or limits.

Culture- Speaking about culture, it is surprising that this site brings people from different cultures together, you can see wedding photographer from Lithuania showing great photos from the last wedding that was made in Kaliningrad (Russia), or a series of photos from the South-West USA or even a set of pictures from a US soldier that served in Iraq

None-official- Another great point about this community is that it is not related to any official company and it is not controlled by any entity or forced to follow some company's strict rules. There are rules (mostly set-up to limit any abuse of forums (spam, advertisements, etc) there were some exceptions though, few users were accidentally banned but it was quickly resolved after an outcry of community has started. It shows that community is self-aware of what is right/wrong, and is trying to regulate itself even if Admin decisions aren't correct.

Cooperation - If you are starting out, this is a great place to be, because there are many experienced people that can answer any technical question, and even help with some work. For example there is a Software and retouch forum. People that need help can post their picture and get good suggestions about how to improve it. This flower photo might be a good example of how users can change and improve the results.

Virtual- The community is mostly virtual, most of the people are located in different countries, so people only meet on-line in the forums.

Technology- The dpreview.com is using and relying on modern technology. The server is running on ASP server page, Java scripts are used for animations and Flash is used for interactive comparison widgets. Because every camera and lens is stored in database, it is possible to compare them together at the same page easily and more convenient for the reader.

Virtual me- As a user of dpreview.com you can change your profile Address, contact information and location.

Timeless- There is no time in this community. Because people are coming from all places of the world and different timezones, there is no exact time, for one person it might be morning in Tokio Japan, for another it is already dawn in London UK.

Educational- Not only dpreview.com has a vast community that can help in educating people, the site itself has a list of articles that explain basics of photography and how it works with modern technology. You can always post a question in the forums, and be sure somebody knows an answer.

Free time- dpreview.com is a great place to spend your time (share photos, participate in challenges, etc) But many people also spend their work time there, it doesn't require anything except browser, and if the site is not banned by the work employer :)

This is just few of the points that I think might better characterize dpreview.com and the community. So go ahead and check it out: dpreview.com

Sources:

1. dpreview.com about

SD1 first sample videos

2010-09-24T21:15:00.004+03:00

Just a follow up from my recent post.

Here are some videos that were made to show print quality of the photos made by Sigma SD1. Now they all were shot with iPhone4 so there is no way to tell exactly how good they look. But judging from its size it should be good enough.

One thing that keeps me worried, is that they all were shot in a studio, I would like to see more outdoor examples, to see how well the new sensor works with higher ISO modes.

Check the original post: Amazing Sigma SD1 detail!

Sigma SD1 released !

2010-09-21T22:22:00.003+03:00

This has come to everyone's surprise, but the new Sigma SD1 was released today !

What makes this release so special, is that finally the famous Foveon sensor has been upgraded to the modern standards. The new SD1 comes with effective 15mpix, that produce much sharper and color rich images, than conventional DSLR cameras, even with higher megapixels count.

Other features include professional quality weather-resistant body from magnesium alloy, 3" LCD screen and 11 point AF system with twin cross centers.

Too bad there is no actual samples of the pictures it could produce, but many people are waiting for this, I can imagine the quality of the image would be spectacular.

There is no information about pricing and availability date, many people are afraid, that since it took Sigma SD15 to actually become available only a year after announcement, the SD1 could end up the same way. But let's keep our fingers crossed !

Just for example some of the pictures that were taken with Foveon sensor:

click

Check the special site that was created for this release. Here is a press release related to this announcement.

HTC Evo is now in europe as HTC Desire HD

2010-09-15T22:31:00.002+03:00

Finally it has reached Europe !

A few months ago I was writing about the new HTC Evo 4G that was exclusive for Americans to play with, but now HTC has granted us something better and sweeter, the HTC Desire HD is going to take the old Europe by storm, no doubt about it :)

Press release information

Specification:

Display 4.3 inches - Resolution: 480 x 800 WVGA

1 Ghz Snapdragon 8255

768 MB

8 megapixel color camera with dual flash

Android™ 2.2 (Froyo) with HTC Sense™

1230 mAh battery, stand by time GSM: Up to 420 hours

Here is a hands-on video from Engadget.com

I hope I can get my hands on that beast :)

Aleksandra - Old town

2010-09-13T20:54:00.003+03:00

Here are some pictures from the last year, this time it is beatiful Aleksandra.

All pictures were taken in Tallinn's old town part, it was a little dark already, as you can see the sun was starting to go down.

Tamron AF 90mm F/2.8 Di 1:1 Macro review

2010-08-31T10:03:00.002+03:00

Following my recent post about 3rd place winning entry for Tamron competition I have chose the lens from the award:

I picked Tamron AF 90mm F/2.8 Di 1:1 Macro. I think this lens will compliment my main macro lens Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro because MP-E 65 cannot focus till infinity and make a picture at lower than 1x magnification.

So how well does Tamron compares to one of the best Canon macro lens so far?

I went out to a try-out photo-shoot to our local park here in Tallinn - Kadriorg. There are plenty subjects that can be used for testing this lens performance (flowers, insects, leaves etc).

So here are some of the pictures I have taken with Tamron:

full album

My first impressions, when I was shooting, were that this lens was slow focusing. It was hard to get a focus, if the subject was really close, and the annoying sound of the motor is also a strong negative about this lens.

The strongest point though is the actual image quality. The colors and contrast that this lens produces is excellent, I don't think I have any lens that can beat it, even from my selection of canon L lenses that I have, including MP-E 65!

But how well does it compare with Canon MP-E 65 at 1x magnification ?

Here are few examples that I made:

Canon:

Link

Tamron:

Link

Canon:

Link

Tamron:

Link

Canon:

Link

Tamron:

Link

Both of these pictures are made with 1x magnification. Due to different focal lengths I had to move MP-E 65 closer to the subject. Comparing these pictures it is visible that MP-E 65 area of focus is smaller and area that is out of focus is much more pronounced. It was always a problem when shooting with MP-E 65 at 2.8 aperture, that not much was in focus so in order to increase the area in focus I had to increase the aperture.

Comparing sharpness, I can't find a difference when comparing pictures even when image is at 100% zoom.

So is the Tamron worth the purchase? I think yes, if you are OK with plastic build quality, noisy AF motor, waiting for the AF to lock on tricky subjects, which can take ages. But the image quality that you can get with this lens is a cheap bargain, even when compared to Canon MP-E 65. Having image stabilization would be a big plus, because there is always not enough light to shoot at 100 ISO.

Tamron macro photo contest - 3rd place

2010-07-20T19:57:00.006+03:00

Sometimes it happens, I guess for a reason, but I took a 3rd place in our local competition "Tamron makrofoto konkurs" that is organized by one of our local photo shops photopoint through a community photo portal snap.ee.

Here are the winning entries:

I place: "Jäälilled" by Riho Kaur
II place: "Asjade ilu peitub meeltes,mis neid hindavad (Hume)"
III koht: "Mikro maailm" by Dmitri Kuznetsov

People's favorite: "Disco pole oluline, punk on põhiline" by Liia Ans

For the contents I have used 2 of my most popular photos:

1. Ready to fly:

2. Mikro world "Mikro maailm" (This is the winning entry that took 3rd place):

The award for the contest winner is any Tamron lens of choice from photopoint shop. The budget for 3rd place is 10000 EEK (just a little less than 1000$)

The winning entry was selected by 3 judges: photography teacher Rain Tirul and photographers Aivar Pihelgas and Annika Metsla.

The 3 photos were selected among more than 2600 entries added for this competition, so it was pretty difficult work for the judges I guess. But after the first round only 60 pictures were selected by each judge, then 17 pictures were chosen that matched every judge decision. After that, final discussion took place and the 3 winning entries were selected.

For more information check this snap.ee blog post

P.S. I am happy with the results and I am glad that my work was appreciated, I also would like to mention that there were allot of well made and interesting photos in the competition that I personally like.

EFK 2010

2010-07-11T00:20:00.004+03:00

This year as usual the EFK event is going to take place.

The event would last 3 days. Different trainings, workshops and exhibitions with awards are all expected every year to take place. For every person excited in photography this is a must place to be.

As soon as I am back, I am going to show the photos from the event as usual.

HTC Evo 4G breaks records

2010-06-09T19:15:00.004+03:00

As I have previously mentioned here the new Sprint HTC EVO™ 4G has hit the stores, or should I say, left nothing behind :)

The original press-release by Sprint stated:

Total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined.

However the press release was corrected recently:

We inadvertently erred in the comparison. The total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was in line with the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined.

A small error, however the important part is that it is selling very well.

It is selling so good that even most of the phones are already sold according to this article

My personal opinion is that it was expected, too bad there is no plan yet to make this device available in Europe, I would really like to get my hands on it :)

New contact card

2010-05-10T23:02:00.004+03:00

I would like to share some of the designs of my new contact card, I will be using for promoting my services.

It took me some time from the initial design to the final print. The whole process of making prints and design is not that easy unless you have an experience in this field, but with some help the result is here:

This is front of the card:

Back:

Visit my photography related web-site for more information photo.dmitrikuznetsov.com

Beatiful Olga & Jelizaveta

2010-04-22T20:12:00.003+03:00

As another blog update. I would like to share some of the photos I did last year.

The two beautiful girls on the pictures are Olga and Jelizaveta. All of pictures were taken in Tallinn's old town and at Roterman center nearby.

Jelizaveta is my former colleague I have worked with before.

Enjoy.

For a full album visit here

Or check my website for more information:

Motorola Droid Battery dead bug

2010-04-12T19:14:00.006+03:00

Just wanted to share my experience with everyone regarding this problem...

I have used my Droid for about 3 months and this issue has appeared about 3 times or so, for no apparent reason.

What is happening is when the device is charged, suddenly the battery level drops to 5% and notification LED starts blinking rapidly. The device reports, and you can clearly see that battery is truly, almost dead:

Now when you turn off the device and restart it, then suddenly it changes back to original value:

I have an application that logs every change in battery level value, from the log you can see clearly a sudden drop and then rapid increase to the original value.

I have no idea what is causing this. Probably some bug in OS.

P.S. Looks like I found another problem :( These screen-shots were taken by Dalvik Debug Monitor and I only now have noticed that they are screwed up for some odd reason ! Guess I can't redo them any time soon :)

Apple releases iPhone OS 4.0 !

2010-04-10T21:59:00.004+03:00

Earlier this week Apple has released new Operating system update version 4.0 for iPhone, check this Press release for more information.

This release adds allot of new improvements and features but the most important one is the multitasking support.

The SDK can already be downloaded from Apple developers website, it is currently in beta stage and will be released to public somewhere in the summer this year.

I have a few thoughts about multitasking in iPhone. First of all it looks like multitasking is working only for the applications that manually request multitasking. For example when you start and then quit the application, the developer can ask the OS to move this application to the background (but only if OS supports multitasking, right now Only iPhone 3GS supports it).

Now when in the background the application can continue to perform some work. For example continue streaming music, record location information and so on. The Operating system however can kill the application any time if it is running low on resources.

The only thing that OS lacks right now, is the way to auto-start the application. If you have an app that would like to check emails or rss news for example, then you don't want to start it every time manually, but would prefer that application starts by itself and performs these tasks by its own. So far I haven't found any way how you can do that with iPhone. Some people say that this multitasking is not a real multitasking or whatever, and claim that Android has better multitasking...

Now let's compare this to Android. Basically the Android works the same way, however you have a Service class that is designed to work without any user interface, whenever it is called. This service can perform long running application, and although the OS can kill it when resources are low, there are few ways how to make it stay forever, like asking the service to go to background (that way the OS won't kill it).

The service can also be started on start-up automatically with BOOT event. So everything is straightforward and quite simple to implement.

There is one small problem with Android multitasking. If you have service running in a thread, let's say it iterates a counter every 10 seconds (Thread.Sleep(10000)) for example. In emulator you would see that everything is counted correctly, however if you do the same on a real device and lock the keyboard, the delay would be different from 10 seconds, maybe a minute or 2 or even 10 minutes !

I guess what the Operating system in Android does, is that it tries to turn the CPU off. This causes everything to stop on the device, except the wake events. When the wake event is called, any operation that is paused is resumed.

Just some of my thoughts...

HTC Evo - Most powerfull Android ever!

2010-03-28T13:27:00.003+03:00

Few days ago HTC has released a new phone HTC Evo (formerly known as HTC Supersonic)

This is probably the most powerful phone with Android OS, and the first with support for new 4G networks.

It has big and beautiful 4.3 inc screen, 8 Mpix camera capable of recording HD videos, powerful 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor and newest Android OS 2.1.

The only downside it that is selling only in US and exclusive by Sprint. There are no plans to sell it in Europe in the near future, but I hope it would come some day, it is probably the best Android phone so far.

Check Sprint official website

Here is a small review from CNet guys:

Diablo II Patch 1.13 ladder reset, Finally !

2010-03-23T18:56:00.004+02:00

After a long waiting time, well more than a year has passed since my first post here

The Diablo II Lader is finally going to be reset in a matter of few hours.

Here is the message from Bashiok on Battle.net forums page:

We will be resetting the Diablo II ladder on March 23 with the release of patch 1.13. We anticipate all Diablo II realms to be down for approximately six hours during the reset. More specific information on realm availability on the day of the reset will be posted in the Battle.net Status forum. When the ladder is reset, all existing ladder characters will be converted to non-ladder. All characters and items being converted to non-ladder will remain intact, but once converted these characters will no longer have access to ladder content such as creating ladder-only rune words. For more information on ladder characters please visit the Arreat Summit Realm Character Types page at http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/basics/charactertypes.shtml

I am not as excited as I was a year ago, so much has changed since last year, and I don't know if I would start another character again, 1.13 patch doesn't seem so exciting anymore.

Official website

2010-02-21T22:50:00.003+02:00

I haven't posted for a while, mainly because I was working on my personal website.

It is now ready and opened for everyone. The main purpose was to create a website to promote my photography services and other skills that may help me in my future career.

The official website can be found here: www.dmitrikuznetsov.com

And photography related section is here: photo.dmitrikuznetsov.com

So if you want to get great and beautiful pictures this is the first place to check :)

The website is also translated into different languages, choose the one that is more comfortable for you.

Motorola Droid (Milestone) Multimedia station hack

2010-01-26T20:14:00.004+02:00

A few weeks ago while playing with my new Motorola Droid, I have found a neat little trick, purely by accident.

Motorola sells separately a Multimedia station for Droid

Now it looks really cool, too bad the device itself doesn't have any way to enable it. But here is what I found:

If you have a leather case from BlackBerry Bold 9000 (the case has a small magnet inside that allows the phone to know when it is taken out of holster). Now using the same magnet with Motorola Droid it unlocks the Multimedia station, easy :)

Motorola Milestone (Droid) review

2010-01-22T19:03:00.017+02:00

I have recently got my hands on a new Motorola Milestone (Droid) - later in a text just Droid Played with it for a month or so, here is my opinion and the things I have noticed.

The phone specifications:

Android 2.0 Operating system

3.7-in.; WVGA (480 x 854 pixels); 16:9 wide screen Touchscreen

5 MP Camera

1400 mAh Li Ion battery

4 row QWERTY keyboard

Wi-Fi 802.11 b,g

So in other words it is everything you may possibly need.

Let's start with the design.

The phone is well build, feels solid, but the design itself is a little out of date in my mind, comparing to latest HTC models on the market for example, they all have much more pleasant sleek look.

Screen is large and highest quality. Operating with fingers is easy, no need to press with force just a little touch is enough. Touch keyboard is OK, I got quickly used to it, but still would prefer physical keyboard like BlackBerry devices have.

The sliding keyboard in my mind is poorly build, as you can see from the picture.
It is OK, but harder to use, when comparing it to my 5 row HTC Touch Pro for example:

The front panel has only 4 touch buttons. In my mind this is another flaw in the design. You might be lucky if you are trying to operate device with one hand to not press any of the keys. I have a small hands and when I am trying to reach an element on the top of the screen I occasionally press the touch buttons, just annoying.

The right side has 2 keys for configuring volume and another Camera button. The good news is that you have different volume levels. If you are in a call, you change the call level, if you are watching movie, then movie/sound volume. You can change also the notification volume, but I guess this can be done only from the setting page.

The left side has a Micro USB connection port. It can be used for either charging the device or connecting to PC to transfer files or pictures.

My device came with 8GB SD Card with Motonav application data on it (too bad I couldn't try it, because Estonia is not supported :( ) There is plenty of space on the card, but you can't install applications on it, only on the main memory, too bad again.

The top panel has a 3.5 mm Headset jack.

Camera

The camera is a poor one here. Even though you have 5 MP, they all are probably wasted. I couldn't find a way to turn off the shutter and focus confirmation sound.

Video is better in my mind. Overall it is usable, but don't expect anything special.

Sound

The sound is excellent. Speaker on the back of the device is large and very loud. Good if you are having problems hearing ringtone when somebody is calling and the phone is in your inner pocket.

Applications and features

The device is packed-up with all kind of cool stuff. First of all the Home screen, everyone familiar with Linux would notice the idea of multiple desktops right away. You can move through 3 desktops by sliding your finger. Good idea and helps you keep the icons separated.

For those that didn't know, Android uses Linux Kernel 2.6 for all the low level operations, the Dalvik virtual machine is using Linux Kernel for all the operations that require direct access to OS. Although it is not exactly Java Virtual machine, it looks similar and for most Java developers it is relatively easy to pickup. For more information check this link (What is Android)

The home screen can be customized with different background icons and widgets. I usually put calendar and weather forecast to the top.

On another screen I have Power Control widget which can be used to quickly turn on/off one of the power draining features.

One of the coolest screens (in Android they are called Activities) is the Battery use screen. Here you can see which application is making the most impact on the battery. Convenient, but this is just a fraction of the power the Android SDK and development platform provides. I am not going to focus on the development aspect right now too much.

Google marketplace

It is easy to install and manage applications. To install application on Android device, you can go to Google marketplace, though you need a Google account for this.

But it is a great place. Allot of different applications and games. Just pick any kind you like, click on it, and it is installed in a matter of seconds. However (due to bug?) sometimes the download never even starts, even if device is connected to fast WI-Fi access point. It just waits for some reason, but finishes about an hour later.

You can comment on application that you have installed, and rate it too. It is a useful feature because you can check user comments first before installing it.

The list of installed application can be viewed by going to Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications

If you check the filter option to show Running applications, then you can see which applications are currently in a sleep mode.

Comparing to other platforms there is a difference. The applications you see here aren't exactly running in a full sense of the word, they just are merely waiting for the user to continue from the last place it has stopped. This is useful for the user sometimes, when he doesn't want to continue from the start again.

However if the device is running low on the memory the sleeping application might get killed to give back some of the resources to the Operating System.

Browser

Android has an excellent browser pre-installed. It has worked flawlessly for all the pages I have visited. It works fast and supports multi-touch like iPhone for example.

You can use it in either landscape or portrait modes. Excellent overall!

Calendar

You have 2 different calendars, one for your Google Account and another for corporate (Exchange) account. I am using the first one. So far the Calendar was a disappointment to me.

I don't know why but I always get the Agenda view by default, I couldn't find a way how to change it. When I change the view to show the 7 week-day, I get a 31 December of 1969 to show-up ? Why shouldn't it show the current date for this ?

Because of this I need to click menu again, to get to the current date. And only then I can click on the time and day that I want to add new appointment.

Another problem, is that if you are browsing through the calendar, You can't see the events on the top or on the bottom of the day time, because they might be hidden from your viewed time selection, because of this you need to move the screen up-down all the time, or only use Agenda view. Disappointing for sure.

At least it syncs with Google Calendar, so this is the only positive point.

Contacts

The Contacts screen on the other hand is well made, it includes all the information that user may need, and allows the user to add all kind of custom information. Including different Instant messaging account names for example.

The contacts are also synced with Google account.

Email

There are 2 types of Email applications installed. Gmail and Email. I am using both. The Email requires some time to set-up, but works with most POP3 email accounts.

The Gmail doesn't require anything as long as you have a Google account already registered. It works well, most of the time. GMail is also synced with Google account.

You can register a notification message to be send when new email receives so you are always in touch.

Google maps

You do expect Google maps to work exactly the same way on Google powered device that it does on all other devices. But here is a big surprise that me and other people are really disappointed about.

The Google maps doesn't allow the user to save bookmarks. Again I have used all kinds of other devices, but I was always able to save bookmarks, but here you cannot do that. Strange, and again disappointing.

Everything else works fine, you can browse the map (no multi-touch zoom in/our however), make a path and directions suggestions, search for addresses and so on.

The solution to bookmarks problem is to install Google My Maps. This is another applications that allows users to create and edit their own maps. They can add pictures, bookmarks even lines to the map.

Don't forget to turn on GPS first :) Because it is disabled by default.

Unlock Pattern

There is another cool feature that I haven't found on other devices.
You can use or set the Unlock Pattern. Basically this is the pattern you draw with your finger in specific order. The device remembers it and uses it to unlock the device next time. It is fun and it works.

Be aware however that sometimes I wasn't able to unlock device, for example when Alarm was ringing or somebody called my number. For some strange reason the device didn't respond to my presses for a minute or so. So I have disabled it and am using the default unlock rotation screen now.

Don't play with it also :) I managed to get my home screen clock to froze up somehow. It wasn't updating the time anymore after I played with the unlock rotation and mute/un-mute button for a few minutes.

OpenGL ES

There are many things that I haven't touched yet. What I do like the most, is that device supports OpenGL ES. I think it will be a great development platform for developers, once the OS starts to mature.

There are some 3D games already on the market, and hopefully more will come.

Conclusion

So here is my short review of the Android device, I hope you have learned allot.

The biggest questions is, how I am rating the device?

Well with all the flaws in OS, glitches and missing features I think this is a very powerful device especially from developers point of view. The platform is build for developers in mind, its harder to get to know it first, but I think it is a good choice in the long run, so I am going to stick using it :)

Forest Camera new Season 2009-2010

2010-01-11T20:34:00.003+02:00

Hi.

Every year now, the Looduskalender.ee makes available direct live streaming from the Estonian woods. They show how different animals feed and well that's it.

I have written about it for the last year here.

So for the new season, they are using new Mobotix camerafor better image quality

Check this link for explanation how the Boar-TV camera works.

And finally click this link to see the camera in real-life (Opens Player in a new window)

You can also check the Forum, to discuss everything you like about the Boar-TV.

Enjoy :)

Kristina - photosession

2010-01-07T23:58:00.002+02:00

This time I would like to show another photosession.

This is Kristina. Photos were taken at Kadriorg part, enjoy:

Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM released.

2010-01-06T19:11:00.004+02:00

As it is clearly written in press release here

CANON MAKES THE BEST EVEN BETTER, WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE SECOND GENERATION EF 70-200MM f/2.8L IS II USM LENS

It is true, the 70-200 f2.8 is considered to be the best canon zoom lens by many pro photographers. I don't consider myself pro, but I have this lens in my arsenal, it is truly a remarkable lens.

Very sharp, fast and is capable of producing breath-taking pictures. I consider this my primary shooting lens for all the portraits I am making most of the time.

The new lens gets better optics, new hood. It is slightly larger and heavier by 20g. It has better maximum magnification ratio 0.21x and focusing distance was reduced to 1.2 meters. It is fitted with newest Image stabilization technology that allows to compensate movement up-to 4 stops ! An improvement by over 1 stop from the older model.

So this is the reason why I am so exciting about this, the best just became even better. I am not going to buy it any time soon, going to wait for the reports and field tests, till then I have my handy 70-200 f2.8 with me, doing most of the work and capturing masterpieces !

Happy new 2010

2009-12-31T17:12:00.003+02:00

Today is the last day of 2009.

This was a complex year for me, with allot of things changing all the time, I got into portrait photography, change a job company, I don't mention the economic crisis that has impacted Estonia much harder then any other country. I think next year will be much more stable, and I hope much more pleasant for me.

I do wish all of you a happy new year, let next year be much better than this one !

Here are some of my favorite winter photos I did a few weeks ago:

BlackBerry switch

2009-12-22T21:25:00.003+02:00

Recently I have switched to BlackBerry 9000:

Previously I had HTC Touch Pro and used it for about a year.

So what is the difference between these two great devices.

First of all I like the speed of BlackBerry, I don't think I had used device before that is so fast and responsive to the user input. Making calls, adding entry to calendar, changing basic settings, writing emails BlackBerry wins in these aspects hands down.

The problem with touch based only user interfaces is that they are slower to operate, because you need to use your fingers instead of faster trackball. Using trackball is easier and requires minimum energy and can be done with just one hand only conveniently.

But what about Touch Pro, I think the main advantage is much useful interface that HTC has created on top of Windows Mobile Platform. Where most of the frequently used applications can be started just by sliding finger over the screen. It taks a big portion of the complexity away. Newer devices likt HTC HD2 take the user experience even to the higher level. Too bad it leaves a fingerprint smudge all over the screen :)

Diablo II patch 1.13 PTR LIVE !

2009-12-12T17:03:00.004+02:00

Finally the Diablo patch 1.13 is now live !

Link to Battle.net post

Q: How do I begin testing on the PTR?

A: When you start Diablo II change your Battle.net gateway to “ClassicBeta”. When you log in the 1.13 patch will be applied to your game and you can begin testing the changes made in the patch. Since it's a new realm you'll need to create a new account.

Q: I don't see the ClassicBeta realm in my gateway list!

A: Log into one of the other gateways first, then back out and the classicbeta realm will appear.

Q: What if I want to play the normal game again?

A: Simply choose any of the other (non-PTR) gateways. Your game will be reverted to version 1.12 and you’ll be able to play on the live realms as normal.

Q: Where are my characters?

A: The PTR realm is separate from the live realms so your current characters aren’t carried over. You’ll need to create a new character to begin testing. But, cheats are enabled and you may use the following cheats by typing them into chat while in a game:
Gold # - Will provide the amount of gold specified
Level # - Will increase your level to the number specified
Waypoints 1 - Will activate all waypoints. You must still reach an act before that act’s waypoints will be unlocked with this cheat.

Q: What happens to my characters once the PTR testing period ends?

A: They remain on the PTR realm to be removed once the test ends. Characters on the PTR realm won’t transfer to the normal realms.

Q: How long with the PTR run for?

A: As long as we deem necessary to ensure the patch and changes are solid.

Q: Where can I give feedback and what kind of feedback do you want?

A: All 1.13 PTR feedback and bug reports should ONLY be posted in the Diablo II Test Realm Forum here: link

Q: What is the new "Mystery" mentioned in the patch notes?

A: It's related to the respec system implemented in the patch and can grant additional respecs beyond the three given for completing the Den of Evil quest in each difficulty. You'll have to play to find out how though.

List of changes:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Patch 1.13
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

A new Mystery has been revealed!

- Players of Hell Difficulty Realm games are hereby warned once again,
that a series of new and challenging tests await you! The answer lies
within Diablo's Bosses, which span across the world from the Den of Evil
to the Throne of Destruction...

Major Bugs

- Fixed an item dupe bug.
- Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater.

Minor Bugs

- Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal).
- The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the window loses and then regains focus.
- Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in windowed mode when it lost focus.
- Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn't center properly when it was created.

Specific changes/improvements

- Respecialization is now possible! Completing the 'Den of Evil' quest will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in Hell difficulty.
- Increased the drop rate of high runes.
- Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users).
- Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items required for Uber Tristam.
- Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level.
- Nightmare/Hell WilloWisps champions/uniques have had their damage greatly reduced.
- Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character.
- Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters.
- Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal's summoned minions no longer give experience.
- Removed Oblivion Knight's Iron Maiden curse.
- Hellfire Torch Firestorm proc rate has been reduced to 5%.
- Users can now toggle the display of text over the Health and Mana globes by clicking on the bottom area of each orb.
- Updated two Act 5 mercenary names to Klar and Tryneus.
- When creating a single player game, pressing the 'Enter' key now automatically creates a Hell difficulty game if possible.
- When creating a game, each difficulty button is now bound to a unique key: Normal 'R', Nightmare 'N', and Hell 'H'.
- The 'Enter Chat' Button in the battle.net waiting room is now bound to the 'Enter' key.
- Added the windows system buttons to the game window (MIN, MAX, CLOSE).
- Added new command line parameter '-nofixaspect' which allows users to not fix the aspect ratio to 4:3 when maximizing windowed mode. This lets the game 'stretch' to fill your monitor.
- Added support for '-sndbkg' command line switch. This enables sound in background.
- Added support for '-nosound', '-window', and '-windowed' command line options.

Revised Skill balance for Player Character classes

Amazon

-Immolation Arrow - Increased radius of Explosion effect by 33% and Immolation effect by 50%.
-Immolation Arrow - Explosion effect damage increased by 20%.
-Immolation Arrow - Increased base duration by 33%.

Assassin

-Shadow Master - Increased resistance range per point from 5-80 to 5-90.

Barbarian

-Whirlwind - Reduced initial mana cost by 50%.
-Masteries - Changed critical strike chance from 0-25 to 0-35.

Paladin

-Blessed Hammer - No longer ignores resistances of undead and demons.

Druid

-Werebear - Damage bonus increased by 15% across all ranks.
-Werebear - Increased health by 25% and armor by 1% per point.
-Shockwave - Synergy from Maul adds 5% damage per point.

Necromancer

-Blood Golem - Removed negative shared life effect (player no longer loses life when golem takes damage).
-Corpse Explosion - Increased base damage dealt from 60% - 100% to 70% - 120% of corpses health.
-Poison Nova - Increased base damage by 15%.

Sorceress

-Firewall - Synergy receives 1% damage per point of Inferno and Blaze and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Blaze - Synergy receives 2% damage per point of Firewall and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Hydra - Increased base damage by 15% per rank.
-Hydra - Increased base speed of Hydra projectile.
-Hydra - Reduced cooldown by 25%.
-Lightning Mastery - Reduced overall effect by 15%.

I am now downloading a patch and going to comment on the changes a little bit later, so stay tuned ! Have fun everyone :)

Fotoluks canon demo day

2009-12-05T17:40:00.003+02:00

Back in the august I have participated in a demo day of Canon lens products organized by Fotoluks

As usual in Estonia it was raining, and the lighting conditions were poor outside and very poor inside, so this was a very good opportunity to test the finest fast lenses Canon has in its arsenal.

I have taken some pictures, with different lenses. Most of the pictures were taken at ISO 400 and wide open.

Here are few photos:

EF 16-35mm 1:2,8L II USM

EF 85mm 1:1,2 L II USM

EF 24mm 1:1.4 L II USM

EF 70-300mm 1:4,0-5,6 IS USM

EF-S 17-85mm 1:4,0-5,6 IS USM

EF 85mm 1:1,8 USM

From all the lenses I have tried I liked EF 85mm 1:1,8 USM and EF 24mm 1:1.4 L II USM the most.

The EF 24mm 1:1.4 L II USM is very fast when focusing, accurate, very sharp wide open, probably the best medium wide lens for Canon.

EF 85mm 1:1,8 USM is also very good, nearly comparable to much more expensive EF 85mm 1:1,2 L II USM

Photosession Natalia Kadriorg 2009

2009-10-23T20:34:00.002+03:00

Hi. I would like to post another few photos from my next photo session with Natalia, I have put some photos of here before, you can check it here

This time the photos were taken at a beautiful Kadriorg garden.

Check the full album here

Case study by Nokia - Mobile device management in the Finnish Parliament

2009-10-07T19:45:00.003+03:00

One thing that I couldn't just write about...

Recently released document by Nokia the world's leading mobile device manufacturer case study shows that Fromdistance MDM helps to make device administration easier safer and more efficient.

Quote from the study:

Combined with BLC Wireless hosting, the Fromdistance MDM suite
provides an all-inclusive device management solution that can be
modified to suit the customer’s specific needs. Help Desk can
operate conveniently from a single point of remote administration,
taking care of necessary configurations, various security measures
and software installations and updates.

If an individual device needs replacement or maintenance, a
new one can be easily set up to meet the identical specifications.
The security features make it possible to lock a lost mobile device.
This can be done while deleting all the saved data so an
unauthorised person cannot make use of it.

The end users enjoy a greater level of satisfaction when installation
and support services, such as data backup, can be carried out
without their direct involvement.

For more information check the Nokia device management page

Mobile device management in the Finnish Parliament (PDF file, 228Kb)

Fromdistance MDM

A brief information about Fromdistance MDM:

Fromdistance MDM is a mobile device management suite for enterprises. It allows the managing of applications, collecting of detailed inventory and usage-statistic information, and offering end-user support for multiple platforms of devices. The product delivers increased security, centralized management, and lowered enterprise costs which integrates a mobile device into the Information Systems structure of an enterprise.

Fromdistance MDM can be integrated into an existing IT infrastructure or offered as a hosted turn-key solution.

To simplify everything in a few words. If you have a large enterprise with allot of mobile device that you need to manage, the Fromdistance MDM is the choice to use :)

First photosession - Natalia

2009-10-02T23:49:00.003+03:00

This was my first photo session during EFK 2009 event I have previously wrote about.
The model name is Natalia, She is not a professional model, still very beautiful girl , that does few photo sessions from time to time.

It was interesting for Me because I haven't made a photos for a single person that way. But there is always a first time for everything. Here are my results:

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset - Update 5

2009-10-01T22:45:00.002+03:00

Finally after an almost a month of silence the Blizzard has gave us an update, unfortunately nothing spectacular yet :(

Update - 9/30

The Diablo II 1.13 patch is on temporary hold while we investigate potential impact on the Battle.net service. As we moved closer to launching the patch concerns grew that an increase in the player stash size (a feature in the patch) could compromise the Diablo II Battle.net service. The hardware and configuration could potentially not handle the increased stash size gracefully under heavy load. Currently we’re investigating potential impact as it is one of the larger content features in the patch and we’re hoping it can remain a part of the release. If it does have to be removed it will require additional time to remove it, generate new patches, and test, which will add time before we can go live on the PTR.

We’re hoping to have our diagnostics and a final decision on how we’ll be moving forward decided by early next week and we’ll have an update for you at that time.

Read full post

So the good news is that they finally gave a correct deadline when they would give us new update - "early next week" . So let's keep waiting and hopefully we would have it working on the test servers "soon" :)

EFK 2009

2009-09-17T21:12:00.003+03:00

This is my second year when I visit Photographers gathering event.

Every year many Estonian photographers gather to meet to tell stories, exchange experience and to just have a fun time. The event is called "Eesti fotograafide kokkutulek"

EFK 2009

This year the event was at beautiful lands of Southern Estonia, the place is called Vastselinna. The event lasted 2,5 days. Many well known photographers showed their galleries and made lectures for different topics.

I took plenty of photos during this weekend. Presenting you some of my best ones:

Flying

Little snack :)

Screwed

Nailed

Roof texture

Gallery

Church at the evening

At the morning

Droplet

Mikro world

Tired photographer

Kristel Lukats and her little friend

Full album can be browser here

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset - Update 4

2009-09-06T13:07:00.005+03:00

Blizzard has finally updated us with information.

Looks like the work on Diablo patch was halted (so the guys could fix a high priority issue with Warcraft 3) But now after it was fixed, the work on Diablo II patch is restarted. As Bashiok writes, the Test Realm could be up and running "soon". Well you cannot take this "soon" very seriously, but who knows :)

Here is the full post

date for the patch yet, but we’re providing early warning as a reset could occur as early as the end of April. We’ll be providing updates with more certain dates once the patch is closer to release.

Please be aware that with a ladder reset all ladder characters are moved to non-ladder. This means that your characters will still be accessible but will no longer have access to ladder-only features and games. In order to play in the new ladder season after the reset you will need to make new ladder characters.

This thread will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

Update - 7/20

As stated in the "Myth" thread (http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=18031060417&sid=3000) we're still working toward releasing the Warcraft III patch currently in testing on our Westfall Public Test Realm. Testing is looking good on the Warcraft III patch though and once it's released focus will go to the Diablo II 1.13 patch.

The 1.13 patch is very far along so it should only be a limited amount of testing before it hits the Westfall PTR. Still, any number of issues could delay a release so any dates or estimates for release won't be made available.

A forum is now available for discussing the PTR and patch and will continue to be available for posting feedback and bug reports once the patch actually goes live. This is to ideally keep the other Diablo II forums dedicated to current game discussion. Any threads discussing the 1.13 patch/PTR/etc. will be moved to the Test Realm forum, or deleted.

http://forums.battle.net/board.html?forumId=20601702&sid=3000

Update - 8/5

The Warcraft III patch has been released but in order to resolve some persistent issues work is not yet moving to the Diablo II patch. Again this involves some very high priority issues that need to be resolved before work can continue on D2 1.13

We'll keep you updated as work progresses.

Update - 9/2

Work commences on patch 1.13. We won't be providing any information on when the patch will be available, except that we expect the PTR to be available "soon". We will provide some amount of warning very, very shortly before the PTRs become available. Please keep in mind that any number of factors could delay the start of the PTR and ultimate release of the patch. Thanks for being patient, we're getting close now.

Link to the thread Link

Update 5

The world's fastest browser has become even faster

2009-09-06T12:56:00.003+03:00

Opera 10 was released a few days ago.

I have been Opera user from my early Internet days, I have been using it ever since. It was the fastes and least demanding browser for System Resources I have ever used.

To my surprise Opera 10 has become even faster, and even less demanding for System Resources. It is even much more stable then ever ! This is my subjective opinion but for example Opera 9 was crashing almost every day, but Opera 10 didn't crash even once.

So I highly recommend everyone getting new Opera 10, it is fast, stable and safe!

Opera Browser

Trip to Berlin, photos

2009-08-30T14:26:00.004+03:00

As always I am really busy right now, but I have a few minutes, so I can show you some of my photos that I have taken during trip to Berlin last year:

Sony Center at the center of Berlin, state of the art technology:

Very impressive place, I have also went to 3D movie theater it was impressive.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:

The famous Brandenburgen gate "Brandenburger Tor" near by:

Everything that remains of Berlin wall today, just a path composed of bricks, so you can follow it if you like.

Not only people are very friendly, the birds are too :)

If you visit Berlin, make sure you visit the TV tower also, so you can check an awesome view of the city:

Madame Tussauds is also an interesting thing to check, recommended :)

Anyway I liked the trip, the city is clean easy to navigate, you don't even need a map most of the time.

WUI Skinning example 2

2009-07-12T23:10:00.003+03:00

I would like to show the latest version of the skinning by WUI:

As you can see right now the whole window is skinned. The resizing also works correctly. I am happy with a result. The buttons are still drawn by Operating System though.

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset - Update 3

2009-07-03T19:12:00.005+03:00

It was a long time, since I have posted, but it is a bout time.

Finally Blizzard has broken silence about the upcoming patch!

in this post Bashok tells us the reasons why the patch was suspended for some time !

mashed up in one easy-to-read location.

The Story -
Once upon a time our internal legacy development teams wanted to put some much needed love into Diablo II. Diablo II doesn't have tournaments with millions of dollars swirling about them, so it generally took a back seat to the patch development time of our other legacy titles. But one day the planets aligned, and it was finally time to give the old girl a new coat of paint and break a bottle of champagne over her bow with the release of a patch. This went well. Meetings were held, the community was involved and polled, and an extremely long list of ideas and changes was created. That list was then cut down to changes felt to be either necessary changes, or easily implemented to ensure development time was efficient. This also went well.

Not long after, the alarm bells sounded. The patch was progressing quickly, and the release was potentially imminent. Early on it was decided, and somewhat of a no-brainer, that a ladder reset with coincide with the patch release. With the patch progressing well, a potential release of two weeks was estimated, and as always this is the exact amount of forewarning given to players and the community before a ladder reset. An announcement was made quickly and immediately to ensure a full two week notice was given. There are many reasons for this standard two-week notice, not the least of which is that most players don't understand the meaning of ladder and non-ladder, and how a reset affects their characters. Following any reset our support departments are flooded with issues related to the change of their characters, so we attempt to inform beforehand and avoid any unnecessary confusion.

This was all well and good, the community was excited, and the developers were having fun and enjoying being able to work on Diablo II again. Then, as it tends to do, reality struck. (click) Work had to be swiftly and immediately realigned and has and continues to be focused on addressing issues for a different title to resolve a very serious issue.

The Now -
The Warcraft III patch is now on the Public Test Realm (PTR) and testing is progressing. Once that patch is released work can shift back to Diablo II and the 1.13 patch, and we'll be working to getting that patch up on its own PTR as soon as possible. This could be a matter of weeks. Once it's up and in a testing state for all of you, it's then going to be a matter of ensuring the features are good and it's a solid patch. The more people we have testing the patch and providing valid feedback, the better the patch will be, and hopefully the quicker it will be released. So that's my challenge to you. You've been waiting a long time, you want an awesome patch, you want a reset. To get all that, we need good solid testing and feedback, reproduction steps for bugs, detailed descriptions of issues or errors, etc. So once this goes live on the PTR, I expect some crazed-youruinedtheeconomy-testing.

So this is a very good news, that the testing stage has began. This means that the patch is in final stages !

So keep following and hopefuly we would have it soon :)

P.S. I hope they do something about these bots ! They are so nasty this year, the spam is unbelievable !

Update 4

Update 5

Working now at Fromdistance

2009-05-18T19:56:00.002+03:00

As I have previously mentioned, I have a new job I am now working for Fromdistance.

Fromdistance is an international software company which specializes in mobile applications for business. The flagship product is Fromdistance MDM which is a comprehensive suite intended for device management for enterprises. Fromdistance also offers a comprehensive mobile journalism tool for professional reporting and citizen journalism, and an express version of Fromdistance MDM.

Fromdistance's products and services are used all over the world in large enterprises, media companies, the public sector, and application development.

I will be working as a programmer, developing products for new platforms.

Wellmade user interface - Skinning example

2009-05-14T22:47:00.002+03:00

I am working in parallel on WUI - Wellmade user interface

It is a Win32 wrapper, designed to create simple to use Object Oriented structure for Windows platform.

Here is the most recent thing I have finished working on - Skinning support.
Right now only window skinning is supported. With double buffering the skin size is
changed flawlessly without any flickering:

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset - Update 2

2009-05-13T20:46:00.006+03:00

Another little update was posted today by Bashiok at Blizzard forums:

It's coming along. We're still in the process of refining and testing the changes going into the patch. Work is progressing, we haven't stopped working on it or anything like that.

As far as information of what's being changed in the patch, almost anything we're working on now could be removed. Testing could deem any change unworkable and we'd have to remove it. By releasing any information on possible changes we'd be raising expectations that the change is guaranteed to make it in, no matter how many disclaimers we place on it. That said, one change we're planning is to increase the stash size to 12x10. As I said it is in no way a guaranteed change. Any number of reasons could mean it will not make it into the final patch. But enjoy the breadcrumb maybe?

The increased stash size sounds great. Offcourse it may not happen, but I hope it will :)

Update 3

Update 4

Update 5

Goodbye Softronic Baltic

2009-05-06T20:10:00.003+03:00

I have to say that I am leaving Softronic Baltic AS.

I have worked for Softronic for about 3 years, and it was a long, but interesting period of my life. I have learned allot and found many new friends along the way.

It is a little bit sad to leave, but I must move on.

If there is one thing to remember from my work at Softronic, it is my co-workers. I have a great respect for you guys, that have worked by my side. Many talented, friendly and skilled people, shared their experience, and I guess we all got better after all.

As for me, there is a new set of challenges waiting ahead, and I am eager to confront them any time now :)

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset - Update

2009-05-02T13:01:00.007+03:00

A little update for Diablo II Patch 1.13

"Bashiok" - the Blizzard comunity spokeperson has responded with information regarding Diablo II patch 1.13 release date and more information here:

So yeah, we're still working on the patch. It's coming along really well. We're getting there. I can't give an estimate or date, we're expecting there to be a good amount of testing required due to the types of changes being made. We want to take our time and put out a solid patch, and that means we don't have a release date right now.

Some exciting news - and it also may be some comfort - due to the types of changes we're making we will be offering the Diablo II 1.13 patch for testing and feedback on a test realm before its release. We'll have more information about how you'll be able to help test it in the coming weeks.

Still there is no release date. However I can speculate that when he say that "we're expecting there to be a good amount of testing required due to the types of changes being made." it probably means that are many core changes that affect gameplay signfically and require allot of testing.

Maybe we can expect some really exciting things to come out from this patch.

Update 2

Update 3

Update 4

Update 5

Sugar on CD

2009-05-01T21:53:00.003+03:00

Here is one interesting experiment that I did with my super macro lens.

My dad suggested taking few pictures of a sugar crystal under high magnifications. It didn't turned out that interesting, so I decided to add some additional effects, and put sugar on a CD disc.

If flash heads are positioned correctly, it is possible to achieve a very interesting gradient color.

Here are results, that I got:

Diablo II patch v 1.13 and ladder reset

2009-04-24T20:20:00.010+03:00

A few weeks ago Blizzard representative asked Diablo II players for the #1 feature they would like to see in a new patch:

We’re in the process of working on Diablo II content patch 1.13, and we want to try to include the Diablo community’s most important changes in our production schedule. To achieve this we’re asking for your input on what you’d like to see in this patch. However, we’re making it a bit stricter than a full-blown wish list.

If you were to get an advance look at the patch notes for Diablo II 1.13, what is the one patch note you would want to see?

Our goal is to get an overall sense of the single most important request from every member of the community. We want as many posts as we can get for the largest cross section, so if you have friends who used to play Diablo II or just don’t frequent the forums as much as you do, let them know this is here so we can get their "#1 patch note" too.

Please be mindful that we’re not going to be able to make every change mentioned, but hopefully with your feedback we can prioritize and do our best to cover as much as possible.

Now the game is almost 9 years old, and Blizzard is still working on new patches, amazing. A few days ago they also have posted an early warning of a possible Ladder reset:

We’re preparing for a Diablo II ladder reset to coincide with the release of the 1.13 patch that’s currently in development. We don’t have a final release date for the patch yet, but we’re providing early warning as a reset could occur as early as the end of April. We’ll be providing updates with more certain dates once the patch is closer to release.

Please be aware that with a ladder reset all ladder characters are moved to non-ladder. This means that your characters will still be accessible but will no longer have access to ladder-only features and games. In order to play in the new ladder season after the reset you will need to make new ladder characters.

This thread will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

I have played Diablo II quite allot. Last year for example I played after new Patch came which didn't require to have CD all the time, I have got to level 93 on hell difficulty until I got bored.

I am eagerly waiting for the things that they are planning to add, and hope it is something cool :)

Update 1

Update 2

Update 3

Update 4

Update 5

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK : ASSAULT ON DARK ATHENA released in Europe

2009-04-23T22:10:00.002+03:00

Today Starbreeze Studios developers of a well known game "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay" have released a sequel "The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena".

Personally I really liked the Escape from Butcher Bay, this is really interesting FPS game, and I am a big fan of FPS style games. I liked the movie also.

There is one more thing that I was a bit surpised and greately dissapointed, in that the game includes a copy protection system DRM (Digital Rights Management) or how it is more accuratelly called (Digital Restrictions Management).

I completelly understand the idea behind restricting users who have pirated the game version, however the system has one big flaw, it is that it requires online servers for "figuring" out if the user has a valid license or not. This means that if the servers are down or no internet connection is available you aren't allowed to play a game that you have paid for !

Usually I don't buy games right away when they are available, because the prices are very high, I wait a few years until prices drop below 20$. I bought most of my games under this price including "Escape from Butcher Bay".

I am not however buying any games that require online authentication including this one, until then I am saving my money for something else, good job Atari !

I recommend everyone to visit Defective by design website and learn about DRM and restrictions that it applies to honest users

5D Mark II video - small bug part 2

2009-04-22T20:24:00.002+03:00

This is the last video from 5D Mark II series, that I would like to show.

This is the same bug, but from a different viewing position:

5D Mark II video - small bug

2009-04-18T00:28:00.003+03:00

Here is another video of the super macro series.

This time I would like to show a very small bug under 5x magnification. The actual size of this bug is smaller than needles head !

As always the quality is poor, and the aperture isn't possible to change when filming video with 5D Mark II (with conventional methods)

5D Mark II video - super macro

2009-04-14T22:50:00.002+03:00

Here is one interesting video.

It was made with my friends 5D Mark II camera, using my Canon MP E-65 lens at 5x magnification.

The lighting conditions are really bad, we have only used a small LED that was glued to the lens cover to lighten up scene, so noise levels are huge.

This video shows small leaf under 5x magnification. Enjoy :)

Material Manager Prototype - Material triggering and merging

2009-04-13T22:49:00.002+03:00

Here is another example of new Material Manager functionality.

This video shows Material Triggering and merging in action. When the user click 'T' button, the material is triggered and slowly merges from one material stage into another.

This is visible very well, if you look at the vertex deformation.

By the way, this is the first video I have uploaded in HD format. So you can really see it in every detail, well just click HD button.

Opera - lighting fast browser even faster !

2009-04-02T22:59:00.002+03:00

Just a small update.

I am a long time user of Opera browser, for as long as I have been on the web.

I was always impressed with a speed and very low system requirements of this browser. I am even more surprised today because the newest version of the Opera is even faster.

So go ahead and try it here.

Another picture from super macro world

2009-03-25T23:04:00.001+02:00

I haven't added a new photo for some time.

Here is one taken with Canon MPE-65 with magnification 5x.

Can you guess what it is?

GE2 MaterialManager Prototype Vertex modifiers

2009-03-21T20:43:00.002+02:00

Here is another example of the work I am doing on the new Material Manager system.

I would like to show another example video where vertex deformation modifier is applied to the mesh, this modifier can also be specified in the material properties.

Looks like some jelly to me :)

GE2 MaterialManager Prototype Texture modifiers

2009-03-15T22:31:00.002+02:00

The Material Manager prototype is progressing well enough.

This time I would like to show new texture rendering mode. It is similar to the old one, and allows texture to be modified dynamically.

In this video I am showing how texture can be rotated and stretched at the same time. The modifiers can be stacked any number of times:

wellmade user interface

2009-03-12T23:00:00.002+02:00

Wellmade User Interface or WUI

This is the new project, that I am working on separatelly. It is a wrapper library built on top of Win 32 API.

The goal of the library is to create a wrapper that would be easy to use for the developer and to intuitively support window skinning support. Right now the library is in the pre-alpha stage, so some features aren't yet available, but the basic concept is working well.

I would post some more detailes once more features are added.

GE2 MaterialManager Prototype Multipass rendering example

2009-03-03T22:22:00.003+02:00

Another little update.

This time I would like to show new multipass rendering.

The object that is rendered, consists of 2 states. One is GE2 logo another is just opaque texture. By rendering them with certain properties it is possible to achieve this effect:

GE2 MaterialManager Prototype first example

2009-02-25T22:55:00.002+02:00

I am still working on the new Material Manager. And to show the progress I am making, here is a video with the most simple example.

Not much for now, but parsing from a file and caching rendering data is working:

Life on Mars

2009-02-23T22:15:00.003+02:00

Her is an interesting picture taken with 5x magnification.
This is how life on Mars can look like, well let's imagine for a second :)

A little update

2009-02-17T00:05:00.004+02:00

Been working on new material system for some time.

Allot of work, but there is a progress. Today I have finished a parsing part of material manager. I had to add some new functionality into other parts of the engine (including TypeConstructor previously mentioned).

One of the new additions is the parsing of string arrays by ConfigReader.

For example in a config file you have :

<animated>
name = "test.png"
textures = { "text1.png", "text2.png" }
</animated>

The textures array can be parsed by calling:

DynamicArray<gestring> textures = block.GetArray("textures");

That's it, you have an array of strings:

textures[0] == "text1.png"
textures[1] == "text2.png"

Exactly the same code is used by AnimatedTexture loading code. Yes you can now load texture dynamically from a config file. The only exception is a customTexture. I haven't figured out how to implement it, so loading from a config is not supported for this texture type.

I am now Microsoft Certified Professional

2009-02-13T20:02:00.005+02:00

I have posted a few months ago about the application I have made that allows taking Microsoft Certification Exams on mobile phone here.

The reason for this was, that I have been studying towards obtaining my Microsoft certification and this program was just a tryout of my skills that I have learned during this process. It was also fun and interesting piece of work.

Well I did it, a few months ago. In November I took my first exam 70-536 and in December I took 70-526 exam.

The first exam gave me MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional ) status. Which is what everyone gets after they pass atleast one exam:

The last one actually gave me MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) .Net Framework Windows Applications certification:

Currently I am studying to get my next MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer) status, however I have so little time, I just don't know when I would be able to do that.

EnglishRussia.com

2009-02-09T00:43:00.006+02:00

I have been visiting site EnglishRussia.com for some time. I recommend everyone to visit it also if you want to get a laugh :)

This site shows the absurd of Russian life, and how Russians are living. Its worth checking out, so go ahead.

Here are some interesting posts, I have found:

Russian Flying Fortresses

What if?

Someone is selling Large Hadron Collider

Russian ice cream :)

and many many other things :)

Images are property of their authors or Copyright © 2009 English Russia

Live streaming TV from Estonia

2009-02-05T20:38:00.006+02:00

This winter the Live streaming from Estonia's woods is back. I think this year the streaming quality is much more better.

First of all this is all time favorite Wild Boar stream:

Click here

The other one is a Bird Feeder camera:

Click here

And eagle winter cams:

Click here

You can also visit the official site here.

The images included here are © looduskalender.ee 2006-2009

Type Constructor - dynamic class creation

2009-02-04T21:58:00.008+02:00

Type Constructor:

The new addition to the Galactic Engine 2 next version is going to
be Type constructor class.

Type constructor is a special generic class, that allows construction of inherited classes dynamically using only name of the class as a parameter.

Typical problem when programming C++ applications is that you cannot create a class without specifing its constructor type. You can allocate memery for this type, however when dealing with non POD data, you need to explicitly call the class constructor with operator new.

Operator new creates a class structure and virtual table if the class was derived and has virtual functions.

Most of the time, you don't think about that and create classes as usual,however there are times when you don't know what type you need to create.

For example, let's say, you have a base class Object and 2 classes that derive from it - Box , Sphere.

In code you can easily create new class by calling :

new Box()

or

new Sphere()

but what if you want to create a specific class based on the class name on runtime?
For example if you want user to pass a name like "Box" you want it to create a box.
But how to do this, the straightforward approach is to create constructors table:

if ( name == "Box" )
{
return new Box();
}
else
if( name == "Sphere")
{
return new Sphere():
}

Looks easy enough? Yes probably it is if you only need just 2 types. But what if you need allot more types than this? What if you want the user to define their own types?

This is where TypeConstructor would be useful.

TypeConstructor actually stores the delegates to the functions that would construct your object. Each delegate is linked to the unique string name. This is done with a hashtable hopefully this would allow for fast search time.

a typical declaration of type constructor:

TypeConstructor<object> constructor;

Here is the base class:

class Object
{
//this is used to find out the derived type
TypeConstructor<object>* _type;

public:
Object();
}

and here are derived classes:

class Box : public Object
{
public:
Box();

static Object* Create()
{
return new Box();
}

static TypeConstructorData<object> GetType()
{
//create type definition
TypeConstructorData<object> type;

type._name = "box";
type._constructor = Box::Create;
}
}

class Sphere : public Object
{
public:
Sphere();

static Object* Create()
{
return new Sphere();
}

static TypeConstructorData<object> GetType()
{
//create type definition
TypeConstructorData<object> type;

type._name = "sphere";
type._constructor = Sphere::Create;
}
}

As you can see the derived class defines binding type TypeConstructorData. This type holds the type name and delegate to the constructor. For the convinience both functions are static, so we don't need to create an instance of a class to construct objects.

In order to add this type to the TypeConstructor, we need to call:

constructor.Add( Box::GetType() );

now we can construct our object using only name of the type:

//find the type first:
TypeConstructorData<object>* data = constructor.GetValueRef( "box" );

//check if it was found
if( data != NULL )
{
//construct
Object* object = data->_constructor();

//set the type
object->_type = data;
}

Now the object is created and we could cast it to our Box type if we need:

Box* box = (Box)object;

You can also check if your object is of the type that you need,like this:

if( object->_type._name == "box" )
{
//yes it is a box!
}

The key to this functionalty is hashmap and fastdelegates. Fastdelegates are now used in many parts of the engine. They are fast, easy to use and allow binding to almost any function, static or virtual.

Delegates are also used to inform the developer if any new type has been added or removed. This way it allows developer to know if for example he needs to remove all instances of this type, if the type declaration has been removed.

//function that logs every type that was added
void Test(TypeConstructorData<materialmetadata>* data)
{
Log.Message("Added type %s!", data->_name.GetRawDataForPrint() );
}

it can be bound to the function like this:

constructor.OnItemAdded = &Test ;

Right now this TypeConstructor is still in testing, but I am already using it for constructing MaterialMetaData dynamically from the config file. There are also other places where I could use it. For example Material stage modifiers. It could be also possible to allow users to add their own modifiers.

My dad

2009-02-03T00:42:00.001+02:00

To continue with family theme. Here is a photo of my Dad. This picture was taken in Helsinki, Finland:

My mom

2009-01-29T23:03:00.002+02:00

I know, I haven't posted for some time. Was busy with my work and other projects I was working with. But here is an update.

I wanted to post for sometime a picture of my parents. Here is my Mom. This was one of my first tries with 70-200 telephoto lens I did a year ago, I was really impressed with the quality of the result:

MaterialManager new structure

2009-01-05T21:14:00.003+02:00

For the past few days, I have been working on rewriting MaterialManager.

The reason, is that I want to have flexible system for the Map structure. Right now the material system is based on Quake 3 material system, which is hard to manage and manipulate.

Here are some sample videos featuring current material system:

So I am planning to rewrite it, and add some new features. One of the new features is a MetaData concept. The idea is that any material can hold any amount of data stored. This data can be retrieved by engine or game, and used depending on the situation. A very good example is material with sound metadata. When bullet hits the material, this data is retrieved and played. Metadata can also store physical properties of the material.

In Quake 3 material system, this data was stored directly in material properties even if you never needed it.

Here is the brief structure, that I am planning to implement:

First photos 2009

2009-01-03T20:19:00.002+02:00

The new year has began.

Here are first photos, I took during the first minutes of the new year. In Estonia usually when new year starts, people go out to the streets and launch fireworks and celebrate.

Happy new year 2009!

2008-12-31T17:03:00.002+02:00

Happy new year everyone!

It is 31 december and year 2008 is almost finished.

What can I say about 2008, overall it wasn't as succesful year for me, as I wished it would. But I am more optimistic toward 2009, even though economic crysis is in full strength.

I wish to thank few people.

Denny - for still being there, even though I am always busy.
Roger - for keeping my blog alive, keep up the good work, and updates frequent :)
Ron Paul - for opening my eyes and soul.
and many others, who made this year great and fun.

See you all at the next Global.DateTime.Year++

Task manager bug

2008-12-30T21:57:00.003+02:00

Here is interesting bug.

I was browsing with Opera as usual, don't know what happened but everything started to work very slow. I couldn't open not even a start menu.

So I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL but it didn't work, I pressed again.

After I killed the opera process, it turned out that there were 2 Task manager windows. Which is something I haven't seen before.

Here is a video, that I have recorded :

Galactic Engine 2 Version 0.51 released

2008-12-26T23:52:00.006+02:00

I have released new version 0.51

This version brings major changes and additions to the engine system.

One of the major changes were made to the texture manager and it's system, it was rewritten to include libpng instead of DevIL library.

DevIL library was used for quite some time by the engine, however I couldn't find a way how to save texture without loading it first, so I had to rewrite png loading using pnglib instead. DevIL is still used, but only for texture resizing code.

New TextureManager (2 year old) API is mostly the same, only the internal structure was changed using the newest classes and engine features.

The other major addition to the engine is a new Testing framework.
I was thinking for some time about implementing somekind of testing system for the engine. There are many systems already available, however I wanted to create a system that would be closely integrated into engine or used by the engine itself.

So I had to write my own testing system for the engine.

Basically you want to test single class public methods that would be used by user. Each class corresponds to a single test suite. One or many similar functions correspond to sub test case (which contains many smaller test cases) which tests specified functions.

I have created few macros that are used for testing:

TEST_PASS()
TEST_FAIL()
TEST_EQUAL()
TEST_NOT_EQUAL()
TEST_RENDER()
TEST_PASS_UNSUPPORTED()
TEST_FAIL_UNSUPPORTED()

Here is example of how the macros are used from string test suite:

virtual void OperatorArray()
{
/*
Tested:
char& operator[](const int& position) const
*/

geString string;

//EMPTY:

TEST_EQUAL( string.GetIsEmpty() );

//cannot read string data if there is no string
TEST_FAIL( string[0] );
TEST_FAIL( string[1] );
TEST_FAIL( string[-1] );

//SET:
TEST_PASS( string = "test" );

TEST_EQUAL( string[0] == 't' );
TEST_EQUAL( string[1] == 'e' );
TEST_EQUAL( string[2] == 's' );
TEST_EQUAL( string[3] == 't' );
TEST_FAIL( string[4] == 0 ); //error because you can't get the end character this way!
TEST_FAIL( string[5] );
TEST_FAIL( string[-1] );

//CLEANUP:

TEST_PASS( string.Cleanup() );

TEST_FAIL( string[0] );
TEST_FAIL( string[1] );
TEST_FAIL( string[-1] );
}

The tester needs to write code to test correct and incorrect input aswell. The class under testing should respond the way as it is defined by the specifications. After all test cases are defined, the test manager is activated and it executes all the tests.

After this the report file is generated. Here is a portion of the tested result for this specific example:

operatorArray	string.GetIsEmpty()	Source	1618	PASS
operatorArray	string[0]	Source	1621	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[1]	Source	1622	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[-1]	Source	1623	XFAIL
operatorArray	string = "test"	Source	1626	PASS
operatorArray	string[0] == 't'	Source	1628	PASS
operatorArray	string[1] == 'e'	Source	1629	PASS
operatorArray	string[2] == 's'	Source	1630	PASS
operatorArray	string[3] == 't'	Source	1631	PASS
operatorArray	string[4] == 0	Source	1632	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[5]	Source	1633	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[-1]	Source	1634	XFAIL
operatorArray	string.Cleanup()	Source	1638	PASS
operatorArray	string[0]	Source	1640	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[1]	Source	1641	XFAIL
operatorArray	string[-1]	Source	1642	XFAIL

You can clearly see the expression and result of the expression evaluation.

Now the macros used here describe how the expression should be evaluated:

TEST_PASS()
- Checks that expression evaluates without any exceptions.
Returns PASS on sucess or FAIL on failure

TEST_FAIL()
- Check if expression fails.
Returns XFAIL if it fails, or XPASS if it unexpectedly passes.

TEST_EQUAL()
- Checks if expression evaluates to true. PASS if true, FALS if it doesn't. ERROR
if exception occurs during evaluation.

TEST_NOT_EQUAL()
- Checks if expression evaluates to fals. XFAIL if false, XPASS if true. ERROR
if exception occurs during evaluation.

TEST_PASS_UNSUPPORTED()
- Placeholder for future TEST_PASS expression. Doesn't evaluate anything.

TEST_FAIL_UNSUPPORTED()
- Placeholder for future TEST_FAIL expression. Doesn't evaluate to anything.

TEST_RENDER()
- This is probably the trickiest testing macro in the system by far.
It tests rendering output.

Let's imagine that we have a function that draws a cube. We want to make sure that no matter what changes are made to the engine, the cube is rendered exactly the same way.

This macro accomplishes that. It checks if reference template rendering is exactly the same as current rendering of this engine version. For example:

Drawcube() - renders a cube.

Now all we need to do is specify:

TEST_RENDER( Drawcube() );

The first time test manager is executed, there is no reference rendering template, so it renders this cube and saves it as a reference. At this point the tester needs to verify that rendering is correct. If it is correct, then reference rendering is left untouched. Next time the testing is made and DrawCube() is called the rendering is compared with previously saved reference rendering. If they are equal PASS result is saved, if not then FAIL result is saved.

Rendering is saved as png file (this was the reason why TextureManager had to be rewritten). Textures are compared byte by byte, so even slightest changes cause FAIL result to be saved.

As far as I know no 3d engines have this kind of testing system implemented. I am not sure if even the simpliest unit testing is used. This is probably due to huge and complicated structure of modern 3d engines. But because my engine is relatively small, only 40k lines, then implementing it wasn't that hard. Writing the actual tests is another task.

Some people claim that render testing doesn't solve the problem because on different hardware it would output different result. I agree that even simple changes in video card drivers can break testing results. But I think it actually does what it was exepected to do - test reference rendering with current one. And if changes in video card drivers break something, then you better notice this problem during testing, than when the product is already shipped to client.

Offcourse testing engine is one thing, testing the game itself is another thing. I don't have any solution for testing the game itself.

My first impressions after using the testing system are very positive. Currently geString and TextureManager related classes are fully tested. Here is current number of test cases for version 0.51:

Legend

Symbol	Description	Count
PASS	Test case was expected to pass, and it did	987
XFAIL	test case was expected to fail, and it did	460
UNSUPPORTED	this test case cannot be accomplished (not supported)	1
UNTESTED	placeholder for a test to be implemented	0
XPASS	test case was expected to fail, but passed	0
FAIL	test case was expected to pass, but failed	0
ERROR	unexpected error (internal engine error)	0

Here is a report file with full list of test cases.

Writing tests can be a time consuming task, but during this, I have found plenty problems that were normally invibisible, they are solved. I am more confident also that my engine would work correctly under most realistic circumstances.

As a final note, here I made a small video that shows both testing code and generated result file (watch it in high quality):

Microsoft Exams test on Mobile Phone

2008-11-29T21:14:00.006+02:00

I am studying currently towards microsoft certification (more info later).

Anyway to have some fun and practical experience, I decided to make application which would help me study when I am away from computer, by using mobile phone.

Most of the time I am reading a book, and then try practice tests which are included in a CD/DVD with a book. This application works well, but you can't take it with you. So this is where MobileExam application comes.

It was made using C# .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 in a about 3-4 hours. C# really makes mobile development easy and fast.

The application loads a file with exam practice tests. I am using tests that are included with training kit CD, they are located here on my computer:

The file should be renamed to exam.mup and added to the folder manually (I am not including the examination file with project source code due to copyright requirements)

Here is where the file is located in project options:

And here is the project source code (there is no binary file, it should be build manually) Source code

Here is a better demonstration, the application running through Visual Studio emulator (NOTE: emulator works slower than actual application):

What's up ?

2008-11-27T23:18:00.003+02:00

I guess this little fellow thinks, what I am doing with my camera :)

Автор: Dmitri - dminator.blogspot.com, альбом: макро

After storm

2008-11-24T21:13:00.004+02:00

We had a storm here in Tallinn.

Nothing very dangerous, but it was an unprecedented in some way. Strong winds with snow and temperatures below zero filled roads with unmovable mass.

Today when working day has started and thousands of people went to work, the roads became unpassable, where both public transport, trucks and cars were stuck in snow like in a quicksand. The whole town was parralized for some time, I got late to work by 1 hour, some people were late even more, or didn't go to work at all.

Here is one video I made to show how it looked like out there.

And just to get some more idea, here are some of the best photos courtesy of Delfi.ee

TextureManager rewrite

2008-11-19T23:58:00.006+02:00

I have made a few changes to the TextureManager.

TextureManager in current state was made at the beginning of the development on Galactic Engine 2. Although it worked good enough, it didn't had a solid structure designed, which made using it in MaterialManager impossible.

Here is a brief sample of original TextureManager structure:

The main reason for making the rewrite, was to make a single base class that would be used for loading normal textures from the file. But all the special types would be derived from it and extend it with additional functionality.

Here is a structure that I have came-up with:

As you can see, there is a base class called Texture. All other special types are derived from it. The Texture class itself acts as a wrapper, it only stores the pointer to STexture class which actually does all the work.

Here is a sample video that demonstrates a simple example of using new Texture wrappers:

A code source that was used to build this example can be found here.

Galactic Engine 2 Version 0.50 released

2008-10-28T20:37:00.004+02:00

Just another small update. Galactic Engine 2 version just got iterated++.

This version brings allot of changes (mainly because it took almost a year to get GUI into usable stage), so any other things that were made during this time, also were added.

Here is a partial list of changes:

The major addition to the version 0.50 is the addition of new GUI system (still in testing)

Additional changes:

New features:
-Added new StepInto command for the config. This allows to StepInto to next unstepped block.
-Added new Vertex2d reading for the config.
-Added Clone function for the list.
-Added new ReferenceList class. It uses external memory storage and doesn't allocate memory for object, just stores it (something like std::list).
-Added a function that returns config block name and function that generates config block debug data.
-Added new triangle table to the trig table list. It holds smooth interpolated values in ranges from 0..360 degrees.
-Added new String split function. It allows to split one string into array of strings by using a separator character as divider.
-List - added function to put element to the top (end of the list).
-Added new compare operator to the String class.
-Added new generic HashMap implementation.
-Added new FlexibleArray generic type prototype for the engine. It should allow to dynamically access parts of the array.
-Added new RenderData2 structure to the main project.
-Added new DebugManager. It adds additional ways to debug memory. Such as break point at the memory request place.
-Updated input manager . The mouse events now pass the button pressed as object.
-Added new StackWalker used to debug the program more easily. It was created by Jochen Kalmbach.
-String implementation is rewritten with additional documentation and contracts. A new feature includes ability to insert into any specific part of the string as well as to remove a portion from it.
-Added FastDelegates made by Don Clugston.

Fixed:
-Remade the event and stateManager system.
-Fixed config reading problems when it didn't show all the fields.
-The Config now returns list of fields for specific block. So they can be later easily iterated and read from.
-Fixed issues when Textures tried to free default texture, making it further crash or leak.
-BlockField now returns UV coordinates from the config group.
-String can now be generated from dynamic array of chars, or subString of existing string , also dynamic conversion to int or float is added.
-Fixed an issue when reading floats from config group. The floats with negative numbers caused application to hang.
-Fixed issues with DynamicArray. The initial dynamic array version used memcpy for cloning arrays.

And a screenshot for a reference:

My next goal, that I am working on right now is to finalize the engine API, implement all the prototypes that I have made so far, and make a few editors at the same time with new GUI system.

P.S. Here is a lines of code graph from the Ohloh.net
It shows the large spike of 150 new files added to the project:

Galactic Engine 2 sourceforge project

Blog design changed.

2008-10-26T21:13:00.003+02:00

How you like the new design ?

I have picked a new template from blogger and upgraded it to the new format. The new blogger template format allows the blog author to add gadgets.

For my new template I have added gadgets like
- links
- slideshow
- youtube videos
- blog list
- archive

Adding new gadgets is so easy, that you don't need to know any html ! Previously I had to manually add the same functionality by writing it to the HTML template file.

I have also made the template post area a little bit wider (200) pixels, so the photos, that I post sometimes would fit in it correctly. I had to change the HTML template manually and modify few images in order to achieve this.

For a header I am using this image (green as a my new blog color ):

Автор: Dmitri - dminator.blogspot.com, альбом: макро

GE2 GUI Prototype 1.9 - DialogWindow

2008-10-20T23:08:00.003+03:00

Here is another update in epic GE2 GUI battle. This time I am going to show new control - DialogWindow.

DialogWindow is another typical control that is present in almost any GUI systems. Its main purpose is to prompt user for a specific response.

For example DialogWindow can request user confirmation when file is going to be deleted or PC is going to be restarted.

Here is a simple example that demonstrates DialogWindow in action: