OK, so maybe I was a little pre-emtive when I posted a post titled GFXMonk.com Launches! It's been over a week since then, but finally the gfxmonk.com domain is working and the site is no longer in a limbo "test" directory. Read the above link for details on the reasons behind the move and additions I've made to the site.

URLs should now be permanent, so please update any bookmarks or RSS feed subscribtions you may have had at the old site...

OK, so uni has started up again. Because I switched out of physics and one of my electives is a visual arts subject, I only have 18 hours per week, as opposed to last semester's 26 hours. Which is good. What is bad, however is what we are learning in those hours.

In the first week of semester, I have had two labs, three hours each (my other labs don't start till next week). And you know what I learn in those labs? Essentially we were shown how to use a computer.

Now, this isn't terribly advanced computing. All we we learnt was file management (ie how to create folders) and FTP (new for many, but really not that difficult). We learnt this in two seperate subjects. I suppose it's fair enough to learn this in my visual arts subject, as some people there don't actually have a computer. But the other subject is an Information Systems subject, which is like a sister-department to computer science. In this lab, we were given such golden tips as:

"This is the 'Windows Explorer' Program. On the left, you can see what's called a 'tree' of the folders on your computer. If you click on a folder, you can see all the files in that folder displayed on the right side of the window."

Come on, seriously. We're doing information systems, you think we've never seen this foreign object you call a computer?

As chance would have it, I'm pretty sure that I'll move out of that Information Systems subject anyways. I originally decided to do it because half the subject was about XML, but discovered today that I already know 90% of that stuff - the other 10% I could probably pick up in 20 minutes or so (yes, they really do go that slow). The other half of the course is management stuff, and we all know how much I love management :s

If there's anything that screams insane more than this DHTML version of the original Lemmings, I don't know what the hell it could be. The author, "crisp", must certainly have a lot of spare time on his hands. He has meticulously recreated the original Lemmings game in javascript, of all the stupid languages to use. Not that I have anything against javascript, it's just that, well, its probably the least appropriate language I could think of to do this in.

Stupid or not, this is nonetheless an incredibly ambitious project, and it's nearly flawless. He's recreated the exact gameplay and graphics, along with 40 levels. Ten points for dedication there...

As a recent first-time viewer of Donnie Darko, I was pleased to see the following link on Blogdex: "Everything you were afraid to ask about Donnie Darko". I thought to myself finally, I get to understand this damn film. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't really understand it even after multiple viewings, so I kinda got a bit fed up and dismissed it as vague and ambiguous for the sake of being "mysterious".

Well, the above link was definitely one worth reading (and worth the ad you have to sit through in order to get a one-day pass to their "premium content"). It offers fairly definitive explanations to most of the burning questions about the film, and a bit of light humor thrown into the mix.

My conclusion? Donnie Darko, as a movie, kinda sucks... It's practically impossible to understand the plot as intended by the director based on viewing the movie alone. In order to get the full story, it requires you to see the extended DVD as well as reading information on the Donnie Darko website (which requires some sort of hacking to even access, from the looks of it). If you're treating it not as a movie but instead as some sort of cross-medium message, then maybe it's acceptable. But the story itself still has many things wrong with it, and based on what I was expecting from all the hype, it was a pretty big letdown. Knowing the full story only enforces the fact that it's nothing particularly special...

Photoshop is great, am I right? Just take a look over at Worth 1000 to see some of the amazig stuff that creative people can forge together. But photo forging can have more serious consequences, escpecially if faked images are used in news reports and other "trustworthy" sources. Well, a couple students from Dartmouth University have created an algorithm that can detect whether a photo is original or has been tampered with. Of course this system isn't likely to be 100% accurate any time soon, and it wouldn't be able to distinguish between cosmetic/aesthetic editing and something more sinister.

But what also interests me personally is the potential to test computer generated artwork for "realness". Currently the state of 3D art is such that most people can tell between real and fake in even the most realistic of CG images. However, I would really like to see the results of this algorithm when it's run over some really good 3D work. Would the system see it as a natural photo because there are no pixel-level glitches or imperfections, or would it see it as too automated to be real?

This is a really great animation, by Paul Hargrave, from the Ringling School of Art and Design. It's been a while since I've had a look at 3d animation, but I'm really impressed with this one. Kinda makes me wanna try my hand at it again, so you never know...

You should also have a look at other pieces in the Portfolio section of the Ringling site, they're all pretty damn good.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". I'm sure you all know this sentence, it's by far the most common english pangram (a sentence that uses every letter in the alphabet at least once). On Windows, it is used to show an example of a font when you open it in the windows font viewer - or so I thought.

Recently I had a bit of a font download binge at DAFonts, and noticed something peculiar about many of the fonts: when I viewed them, they did not use the above pangram, but instead used "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." Now I'll admit it doesn't seem all that important, but dont you find it a bit strange that the font preview shows two different preview sentences, based on the font? (it's not random, each font previews with the same sentence every time)

I can't think why the preview would bother having two different sentences to use, and why font developers would favour one sentence over the other. So whats going on here? Explanatory comments would be greatly appreciated :D

The news feed resource site Feedster has just been updated with a host of new features. The search tool is great, in that it returns the latest results from any indexed feed. The link search is cool for vanity's sake, to see what people are saying about your site (or any site in particular). The "MyFeedster" is still quite lacking if you want to use it as your aggregator, but they admit to this and are working on it...

Today marks the launch of my new website, "GFX :: Monk" - replacing the old "Tim3d" site. I think the name is far cooler (and definitely unique), and since I don't do much 3D stuff anymore I figured it was time for a change.

All the existing content has been kept from Tim3D, but I've re-done all the backend systems to make things far easier to manage and update. The links page is far cooler now (it's got descriptions and newsfeed links where avaliable).

And of course, how could I change anything without doing an entire site redesign? ;)
I like the new design, it's not as flashy as the previous one but I think its a lot more professional looking and functional. The good news is that It's 100% valid XHTML (except for a few blogger bugs that are out of my control) and 99% valid CSS (the opacity effects on image links isnt standards-compliant). The look of the site is totally seperated from the content now, so in the future you'll be able to switch between multiple styles effortlessly.

Oh, one more thing I've added is blogger-powered comments. These are good because they integrate into the blog page instead of a seperate popup like there used to be, but unfortunately you have to be registered with blogger to have your nickname displayed. Oh well, just post as anonymous and tell us what your name is at the end of your comment :P

The problem with a lot of instant-messaging is the setup reqirements - software to download, registration, etc. A new site, Chatango tries to address these problems to enable ananymous chat via a flash movie within a html page. For example, I registered the name "gfxmonk". Now anyone can go to http://gfxmonk.chatango.com and just type into the litle box to chat to me without having to register.

On my side it's a little more complicated - I either have to have a webpage open all the time or I have a little notifier sitting in my system tray (which is the option I'm using at the moment). But all in all it's a great way to enable people to effortlessly contact you, without having to divulge their personal information such as their email address.

Quoted from McSweeney.

How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?
Bust an Additional Move
Seriously, Eileen, Come On
(Won't You Give Me A Ride Home From) Funkytown?
Remember When You Lit up My Life? That Was Great
I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie
The Morning That the Lights Came Back on in Georgia
Everybody Was Kung Fu Making Up
Achier Breakier Heart
Whoomp! There It Continues to Be
We Never Took It and Persist in Our Refusal to Take It

Showcasing the height of today's education in Australia, one student has posted a few of his english essays online.
My favourite part is in the first one:

In Peru, they have names for many things. One of the many things they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living. If we had a world for this kind of people that word would be "fisherman". But we don't.

Ahh, so true...

(shameful pun fully intended)

FOMS is an online comic in which the characters are rocks. Simple eh? Oh yeah, it's kinda, errr, funny, too. Which is good. Otherwise it would be fairly boring to be honest. I mean, rocks? Rocks are not usually all that exciting. But here they are, you see? So It's all good. Now go read, dammit.

Songs to wear Pants to - Send in your requests/ideas for songs and this guy may well make them. Some pretty cool songs are avaliable for download in the archive.

One of my faves is I Am The First 50 Digits Of Pi, in response to this request:

Please compose and record a song extolling the virtues of your Web site in which the lengths of the words can also be used as a mnemonic for at least the first 50 digits of pi. In other words, the first word has three letters, the second word one letter, the third word four letters, and so on.

[for your convenience, here are the first 50 digits]
3.
1415926
5358979
3238462
6433832
7950288
4197169
3993751

Now that's classy...

You know you wish you could play the piano with your balls...

It seems to me that the actual notes are faked (balls bouncing in different places seem to produce the same note), but I'm nonetheless quite impressed that he's essentially bounce-juggling 5 balls throughout a lot of the clip, which is a feat in itself...