Latest issue of the free online magazine BlenderArt is out…
ISSUE 23: Epic Fantasy
As excitement builds around the launch of the Durian Project, we decided to share in some of the fun and devote an issue to Epic Fantasy. This issue is filled with articles that are guaranteed to inspire you to start a few epics of your own.
Download here

I managed to spill hot chocolate on my netbook on Friday. That’s the first time, and hopefully the last time, I’ve done that.

Fortunately it only went on the mousepad and the keyboard. I managed to get the mousepad working this morning but have had to order a new keyboard for it from ebay.

In the meantime I can use a usb keyboard.

I’m a bit late with this but anyway… you can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #22, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Things that go bump in the night!”

There’s a lot of people out there posting their SpeedTest.Net results so here’s mine, courtesy of the Warwick University Campus Network!

The incredible Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge search engine has gone live today to the public. It has answers to pretty much anything you can think of, and although it may not be able to explain the meaning of life or what you ate this morning it can still tell you that the temperature in Antartica when Kennedy died was -38F. Make sure you visit as it is amazing!

Elsewhere on the internet I came across (via everyjoe.com) a webpage with a few really impressive images comparing the earth to the sun, the sun to some bigger star and then the bigger star to the REALLY bigger stars. Makes you feel small but it definitely worth a look. The world we live in is truely amazing!

Of course you can get some interesting facts on these things from Wolfram Alpha here…

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #21, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Look What I Can Do!”

Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

My application to upgrade my BCS membership from Student to Professional Member was accepted today so I am now a full member of the “leading body for those working in IT”…

On another note, I’m still working on the CAF+LAG player program. For those of you who haven’t fallen asleep after the double-barrelled  use of acronyms… …a CAF describes the data for a lesson and a LAG tells the computer how to display it… sort of. At the moment I’m working on turning a basic .lag file (like this one) into an XML representation (like this) for easy manipulation in the rest of the program.

I’m currently working through the examples on this page to make sure that I’m covering the syntax and grammer properly.

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #20, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Make It, Bake It, Fake It”

I’m working on a Java CAF + LAG viewer at the moment, and just getting back into programming in Java using Eclipse after a short break programming in python and visual basic.