marcus welz

Shelley Lake Panorama

A panorama shot of Shelley Lake in Raleigh, NC. The full size image (not available here) is 150 megapixel. The eight individual images were taken with a Canon 7D and a Tokina 11-16mm, unfortunately without the lens hood as evident by the visible flare in the center.

HTML5 Scrollable Map test

So a few things have happened. I've made a larger, scrollable map. And it seemed I ran into some performance issues when it came time to scroll. Running fullscreen at 1680 x 1050, and having 16×16 pixel tiles covering the screen means nearly 7000 tiles. It's a lot, and it wasn't happy.

So my next thing was to try to build patches. On the client. Seems to work. The level is also no longer randomly generated. It's fed by a JavaScript array.

My New Power Juicer

I've ordered it over a month ago, and today it finally showed up. My new Power Juice Elite. I've previously had the basic model and really liked it. There were a few shortcomings, though, and the Elite model sounded rather appealing. Plus, it looks quite nice.

On their website they're advertising it for $150 + S&H, and if you pay it all at once (why wouldn't you?), they throw in a free base and a few other gadgets.

Once I had the unit assembled, I plugged it in, turned it on, and panicked. It didn't do a thing. Just sat there. I tried the on and off switch a couple of times. Nothing. I plugged it into another outlet. I look at it fearing the worst and it just stares back at me silently. I turned on the lights, to make sure I had power. Microwave has the time. Oven has the time. Lights are on. Flip the switch…, and nothing.

My heart sunk, As I'm flipping through the manual I'm already thinking about the agonizing RMA process I might have to go through, and how long it would all take. Turns out that there's a new feature: If the pulp container doesn't lock in fully, a tiny little micro switch isn't activated. I gave the container a shove, it clicked into place, and the blade starts firing up. Alright!

For some reason, however, this thing is a bit louder than the previous version I had. Apparently the cutting blade isn't perfectly centered and gives off some vibration. That's a bit disappointing considering the price, the "Elite" label, and the whole marketing spiel they're giving you on their website. It's not enough to be a deal breaker, but a little bit more engineering and QA effort would have been appreciated.

A side effect of these vibrations is that the whole juicer, sitting on top of its base, is slowly vibrating across my kitchen counter. I turned it off and checked underneath the base. No rubber feet. Really? Come on, now. It wouldn't have killed you to include some rubber feet to keep this beast in place. It's the little things that count.

Overall, I dig it, though. It works well, and cleaning it is easy as long it's done right away after use.

Cheers!

New Years' Resolution: Blog More

I've had a neglected blog for as long as I can remember. It's always been my intention to post something insightful about whatever it is I am doing. For some reason, though, they end up very much like most of my pet projects; I end up writing a few drafts, don't finish them (thinking I'll do that later), and two months later I have very little desire to polish and publish them. It's unfortunate, because eventually I'll read through some of those drafts and think, dang, that was pretty cool stuff, I should publish that. I will, later.

Maybe it is the perfectionist in me, but I can honestly say that publishing random thoughts out of context just isn't as appealing to me as showing off something that's been brainstormed, designed, prototyped, implemented, and gone through refactoring iterations. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often because apparently one of my congenital birth defects is the Scope Creeping Syndrome.

In some cases it's also because some of my interests are all over the place. One week I'm playing with new Zend Framework components in PHP to do Twitter Oauth, the next I'm dusting off my keyboard and try to wrap my head around Ableton Live. While doing so my mind is already all over Steering Behavior and I'm waiting for the arrival of that game programming AI book I just ordered. I've barely got the flocking behavior implemented in Erlang, and now I'm trying to visualize that in Flex using Papervision 3D. There, I stumble across shortcomings (No UDP sockets) and research RTMFP with little success after reading through bits of streaming server open source code. Where was I? Something about Twitter?

Besides, if I'm blogging about something, I'm not researching or learning anything. Not entirely true, of course, since presenting a subject requires a certain level of proficiency thereof. Otherwise I'm not just wasting my time, but yours as well.

And then there's this constant feeling of coming across as too narcissistic. "Hey, check me out, look what cool stuff I'm doing." My parents raised me to be considerate, resourceful, and humble, and to this day my pet peeve is hearing people talk about "me and you" rather than "you and me". But marketing yourself in today's social media sphere is well accepted, as long as it's done with class. It takes some effort to generate the right amount of signal tuned to your target audience instead of just noise.

And, since I'm already just ranting here, therein lies the next problem; who is my target audience? This isn't really a pure technology blog with a narrow focus. And I'm generally not too keen on pouring out my personal thoughts. But I suppose that's okay. I'll let Google sort it out.

The Logic behind naming roads

I-440 wraps around Raleigh

I currently live in the triangle area in North Carolina. This morning, actually, just a few minutes ago, I overheard the announcer on the NBC17 news say that I440, the circular interstate that wraps around Raleigh, will be renamed.

At the moment the naming convention is "the inner beltline" for the lane that moves clockwise, and "the outer beltline" for the lane that moves counter-clockwise. It makes sense logically, because there's no real distinct north. east, south, or west.

But apparently this convention is confusing people and so the road names will change to be I440 east and I440 west, a modification that'll apparently cost around 40 million dollars.

Although it makes sense, it'll be strange being on the southern half of I440 east which is actually moving west and vice versa.