Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Darrin Cardani's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Monday, June 27th, 2005
8:06 pm	Depth Cue 1.1 Released We've released version 1.1 of our Depth Cue set of 3D plug-ins for After Effects. It includes 2 new plugins: Camera Mapper - Allows you to turn 2D footage into a 3D scene within After Effects by projecting portions of the 2D footage onto 3D solids. Flipside - Allows you to map one layer onto the back of another 3D layer without causing any occlusion problems or leaving a gap between the layers. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005
10:39 am	New Phone Scam I got a scam phone call yesterday. Someone called claiming to be from local Chicago rock stationQ101 and said that I had won $100,000. The conversation went something like this: Them: Hey! This is Q101! You just won $100,000! Me: (Sounding really unimpressed)Really? Them: Yeah! How are you going to spend it? Me: Uh... (trying to think of something witty to say) I'll probably buy more computers. Them: (Sounding a little confused)Really? Me: Yeah. I really like computers. Them: OK. Well we just need your address and social security number. Me: Yeah, right. Then I hung up on them and called the police. I filed a report and the police officer suggested I call the station to let them know that someone's trying to pull this scam, so I did. The radio station seemed appreciative that I called. So just be aware that this is going on if you get any "too good to be true" phone calls. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
6:39 am	iPod Ad Why try to immitate the iPod Ad look, when you can actually live it? (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 29th, 2005
3:21 pm	Sharing iTunes Over a Specific Network? Does anyone know how to make iTunes share its music over a specific network? I have 2 networks in my house - a wired network and a wireless network. As described previously, I'm sharing my G5's wired network connection over the wireless network. I'd like to run iTunes on a server which happens to be on both networks, but I'd like it to share it's music over the wireless rather than wired network. Is there a setting anywhere to tell it which network you want it to share over? (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 12th, 2005
7:26 pm	Connecting Your TiVo to Your Mac via Internet Sharing It's my birthday today, and my lovely renaki bought me a wireless ethernet adapter for my TiVo. I had a little trouble getting it connected to my network, so I thought I'd share the secrets I learned along the way. All of the documentation I could find, including notes from users in various user forums, discussed how to get your TiVo connected to your Airport Base Station. However, I'm not using an Airport Base Station. I have a tower that's connected to the internet, so I just turn on Internet Sharing. This seemed to be the crux of the problem. I found I could connect to the network if I turned off encryption, but that's not an option for everyday use. As soon as I turned encryption back on, whether 40-bit or128-bit WEP, the TiVo couldn't connect to the network anymore. It turns out that you need to set the Airport's password using a hex value rather than an alpha-numeric value. (I tried just converting the password to hex, but that didn't work.) With a base station, you can simply run the AirPort Admin Utility that ships with OS X, connect to your base station, and click on the "Password" button to get the hex version of the password. But if you try that with a machine running Internet Sharing, you can't connect to it with the admin utility in the first place. It turns out that when you're setting up Internet Sharing, you need to enter the password starting with a dollar sign and using only numbers and letters a-f (hex digits, in otherwords). Your password must be exactly 26 hex digits long (for 128-bit encryption). Here are the steps: Open the System Preferences and click on the "Sharing" icon. Click on the "Internet" tab. If Internet Sharing is on, turn it off by clicking on the "Stop" button. In the list of network cards, click on "AirPort." This should cause the "AirPort Options..." button to become active. Click on the "AirPort Options..." button. This will display a sheet for setting the AirPort options. Check "Enable encryption (using WEP)". Set the "WEP Key Length" popup to 128-bit. Enter a password following the above guidelines - it must start with a dollar sign ($) and be followed by exactly 26 hex digits. In the "Confirm Password" edit field, enter it again exactly as in the previous step. Click "OK". Click "Start" to start sharing. Then follow the directions on the TiVo, and when prompted, choose to enter the password as hex digits rather than alpha-numerically. (Apparently the "alpha-numeric" option only works with LinkSys routers.) You won't need the dollar sign when entering the password on your TiVo. Now that the TiVo is online it can connect to tivo.com, but I can't seem to get it to see my music and photos. I have the TiVo Desktop application for Mac OS X installed (and I'm still running Panther, so it works), but when I try to connect to it, the TiVo insists that there's no server running at the specified address. I'll post here if I figure out the problem. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, May 9th, 2005
8:01 pm	Perforce Releases Graphical Plugin Beta Here at Buena Software, we use Perforce for our source code control. I'm the kind of perverse weirdo who also puts our entire website, including all the QuickTime movies under source control. Well the developers at Perforce have created a plugin for Maya, 3ds Max, and Photoshop that allows you to directly put your various 2D and 3D media under source control. Now if only they'd add support for After Effects and Final Cut Pro, I could check in my test files for testing our plugins, as well. (I could do it now by hand, but it's so much less convenient than doing it from within the app.) (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 1st, 2005
9:43 am	Happy Birthday, Buena Software! Today is the 5th anniversary of the date that Buena Software, Inc. was officially incorporated. They say that something like 80% of businesses fail in the first 2 years, and most of the rest fail in the first 5 years. So I’m happy to have made it this far. It’s been a tough, fun, exhausting, thrilling 5 years. I’d like to thank Bruce Gee of GeeThree.com in particular, because without his support I never would have made it this far. In addition to supplying us with an endless amount of work (and hence, income), he’s also supplied me with housing, airfare, food, clothing, and lots of kind words. And of course, I’d like to thank all of the customers who bought our products and use them in production every day, as well as all of our contract customers who call on us to help them write, port, and improve their products. We have thoroughly enjoyed doing this work for all of you. Thanks for helping us make it possible! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 26th, 2005
12:31 pm	Cool Thomas Dolby Story Thomas Dolby has an interesting story on his web site about how he got into the business. It also shows some of the absurdity of the music industry. For example: It turned out to be the best-selling Mini LP of all time...It sold about 500,000 copies in a few months, earning me precisely $0.00 because Mini LP's were defined in my Capitol contract as a Promotional Item. Welcome to the Music Business! I knew there was a reason I got out of the music biz. Current Music: Pour Le Piano \ Prelude-Arthur Rubinstein-The Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 80 Recital for Israel - Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn (Comment on this)
Friday, April 22nd, 2005
10:37 pm	Back from NAB and Thanks! I made it back from NAB in one piece. It was a wild, fun, exhausting time. I especially enjoyed meeting various customers and editors I know from email but had never actually met in person before now. While there, I ran into Richard Harrington (of "Photoshop CS for Nonlinear Editors" fame), who mentioned a recent interview he gave for Apple's pro site where he was kind enough to mention our Effect Essentials product. So thanks Richard! I really appreciate it, and am thrilled that people are finding our products useful for real work! (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 16th, 2005
10:35 am	Depth Cue 1.0 Released! Well, I was going to wait until Monday, but I'll be at NAB, and I don't know what kind of connectivity I'll have at the hotel. So I'm pleased to announce that we have completed Depth Cue 1.0. It's a set of 3D effects for After Effects 6.0 and later. It includes: 3D Composite - allows 2D footage with a depth channel to interact with AE's 3D layers Depth - displays the depth of every pixel in a 3D layer in grayscale Falloff Lighting - Supplies realistic lights that illuminate a layer less as the get farther away from it, unlike After Effects' built-in lights. Fog - Enshrouds your 3D layers in fog Rack Focus - Supplies realistic depth of field and focus pull effects. It even simulates lens effects like boke and anamorphic lens breathing If you stop the Plugin Pavilion at booth SL760H, we'll also have special pricing on all of our products. Enjoy! (Comment on this)
Friday, April 15th, 2005
12:28 pm	Aw crap! It seems that Metrowerks has discontinued the sale of their x86 compilers. They have been an absolute joy to use compared to the horrible horrible interface of Microsoft's developer tools. Plus, buying them meant I didn't have to give money to Microsoft and that I could do my Windows development on the Mac. I have CodeWarrior 9, so I'll be fine for the next year or so, but after that I'll probably need to find something else. Hopefully by then, all After Effects plugin hosts will be able to use Mach-O plugins, and I can switch to XCode (which doesn't have a very good UI in my opinion, though still light years ahead of Developer Studio), and maybe get it to cross-compile for x86. Of course, that doesn't cover the cross-platform debugger. I wonder if something like that exists for GCC and more importantly if XCode could use it? Oh well. I guess I should just expect this to happen every few years. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 14th, 2005
9:12 am	After Effects Wiki Started Jeff Patterson has started an After Effects Wiki. It needs content at this point, but looks very promising. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 10th, 2005
4:57 pm	Nice Review of Dissolve Factory Steve Douglas has posted a review of our Dissolve Factory plugin on Ken Stone's Final Cut Pro web site. He does bring up the very good point that there should be a tutorial on using it. Hopefully, after NAB, I'll have a chance to put together some more tutorials for all of our products, including Dissolve Factory. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005
7:42 pm	Au Naturel Updated We've released version 1.1.1 of Au Naturel. This version adds support for Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows, and improves the demo experience. We'll be demoing it along with our other products at NAB in the Plugin Pavilion at booth SL760H. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 2nd, 2005
6:15 pm	Mainframe used to name cola Snopes.com, the urban legend site, has the moderately interesting story of how Coca-Cola used an IBM mainframe to come up with the name of their diet soda TaB in the 1960s. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
8:41 pm	Performance Tuning I'm preparing a product for release at NAB. I'd like to spend some time optimizing it before then. On the Mac, I just profile it using the free developer tool Shark from Apple's CHUD tools, and get extensive information about where the slowdowns are and even advice on how to fix them. I'd like the same thing for Windows, so I've been checking out various performance tools on that side of the fence. As usual, what a nightmare! I had looked at Intel's VTune sometime in the last year, and while I wanted to evaluate it, I didn't feel like filling out a long form describing various aspects of my business's purchasing habits, and I didn't feel like getting some high pressure sales call from them. It was implied that was the only way to get the demo version to try out. So I asked on Apple's performance optimization mailing list if anybody had found any tools like Shark for Windows. Chris Cox from Adobe pointed me to Glow Code, saying the UI wasn't great, but that it worked. I downloaded the demo and found it to be absolutely horrible. First, like with VTune, you have to give them your email address to even try it out. I opted for using a Mailinator address instead. Using Glow Code was a step backwards in time to the horrible days of incomprehensible Windows 3.1 style interfaces. But even if I could get past that, it turns out that it only works with executables that have .pbd files built with them. I don't see an option to create one of those in CodeWarrior 8.x, and haven't yet installed my copy of 9.x. (I'll probably install 9.x in the next week, anyway.) Needless to say, it turned out to be completely useless for me. So I ventured back to Intel's site to see if their download policy on VTune had changed at all. It had! You can now download the demo and just give them a temp address to get your serial number rather than filling out a long form with a bunch of unnecessary information. I downloaded a Flash demo and watched it, and it looks a lot like Shark. So I gave them the same fake email address I gave GlowCode and started the download of the product. It's 242 Megs! GlowCode was around 5 Megs. All of CHUD (which includes Shark) is 27 Megs uncompressed. I can't imagine what the download includes that makes it 242 Megs. (I also wasn't thrilled that if I decided to purchase it, I would have to pay $700, when it appears that I get the same functionality for free on the Mac.) But I gave it a try anyway. After downloading almost a quarter of a gigabyte of data, I ran the installer which immediately said it wanted to install something in C:\DOCUM~\USERSOME~\TEMP\abc.xyz\VTune\somethingerother.... Why the heck is it trying to install something in a random temp directory? But I know better than to install a Windows app anywhere other than the default directory. They usually won't work if you do, so I click "OK," and it installs the installer file there and launches it. Apparently what I downloaded wasn't the installer, but the installer installer. Why does everything on Windows have to be so fucking complicated? So the real installer finally runs only to tell me, after waiting a half hour for the damn thing to download, that my AMD processor isn't supported by Intel's profiler. I supposed I should have figured it wouldn't be before starting. That would just be too damn convenient, wouldn't it? So does anyone have any suggestions for a usable profiler for x86 compatible CPUs that doesn't require having Microsoft's tools installed? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
1:15 pm	Swatch Buckler Updated We've updated Swatch Buckler, our color palette for After Effects, to version 1.0.1. This release fixes a bug that caused the eyedropper tool to sometimes pick an incorrect color. It also improves the demo experience, especially for Windows users who have a browser other than Internet Explorer as their default browser. As with Au Naturel, you can get a 1-day serial number each day and try it out for as long as you'd like. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 28th, 2005
9:01 am	Crowded House Drummer Paul Hester Passes Away Crowded House has long been one of my favorite bands, so I was saddened to read this morning that Crowded House/Split Enz drummer Paul Hester was found dead today, apparently from suicide. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 25th, 2005
11:26 am	Oops! My wife was working the Chicago Home and Garden Show out at Navy Pier last month, so I went online to get driving directions. I went to Google and searched for "Navy Pier" and this is what came up: This is why you still have to worry about browser that have JavaScript turned off. It's not just paranoid freaks that think they're being tracked by black helicopters that turn off JavaScript. Most search spiders don't use it either, as it would only slow them down. Of course, Navy Pier easily gets a million visitors per month. I wonder how many of them never find the web site to get more info because they pass right over its listing because of the stupid title their braindead web designers put in there? Is it 1,000 people? 10,000? More? (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
8:42 pm	Worst Logo Ever Seen on the After Effects User's list, the worst logo ever: http://www.williamsburgcivicassociation.org/ArlingtonPediatricCenter.html (1 Comment |Comment on this)