Writing Code in Three Dimensions

A funny post on BoingBoing regarding yet another thing Hollywood consistently gets wrong – writing computer code. I agree with most of the original post, and always laugh at how programming is portrayed in such “great” films as The Net, Hackers, and Swordfish, but there is one point on which I disagree:

“4. Code is not three dimensional
Remember in “hackers” when the gibson is depicted as a three dimensional city that the hackers must navigate through? Bullshit! We may use a dash of color in our shell to make things a bit clearer, but last I checked my terminal app doesn’t require OpenGL. I’m working here, bitches – I’m not playing quake.”

Obviously, this guy hasn’t been programming inside of Second Life. It truly is a new experience to be writing object-oriented code that is actually interacting with three-dimensional rendered objects. It is definitely not “playing quake”, but the skills I honed during my youth playing FPS games have definitely come in handy.

In Your Sim Writing Some Code

You can learn more about writing code “hollywood style” for virtual words through the Second Life Scripting page.

Lessig on "Who Owns Culture?"

This talk is almost a year old, but Lawrence Lessig has just put out a video, with his voice synchronized to visuals of his slides. Not only is the content important, but his presentation format is compelling and effective.

Oh, and the video is being distributed using the YouTube-like YouAre.tv (see player below), which includes Creative Commons licensing in its upload process. Blip.tv has had this feature for awhile now, and its something we’re including in Openomic, as well.

It is also available as Torrent.

Sites that Help Video Producers Make Money

Scott Kirsner, editor of Cinematech has published a free excerpt from his book, The Future of Web Video.

fwv

“New revenue opportunities are emerging with the recent boom in video viewing on the Web. On this chart, I’ve tried to list all of the Web sites that enable independent video producers to make money from their work. I’ve ranked the sites subjectively, based on how much traffic and buzz they’ve been attracting, and also how likely it seems that a video producer would actually manage to earn a significant return by posting a video to them.”


Even though we are still in beta, Cruxy has been included in this list, along with many other great sites – some competitors and others with different approaches to making money. View the full chart and buy the book on Scott’s website. (Thanks, Scott!)

Open your Apple TV to more content…

Mux, the video conversion service we released last month, can provide owners of the new Apple TV a way to access video not supported by the device natively. This includes Flash video (YouTube, DailyMotion), Windows Media, AVI, and more.

Each Mux user is provided a personalized RSS 2.0 with enclosures “podcast” feed of all the videos they transcode using the service. This feed can be added into iTunes through a single click on the “iTunes podcast” link, available after you submit a video to mux using the form on the site or through the browser button.

muxsubscribe.jpg

All videos transcoded using Mux for the specified email address will appear in this feed and be automatically downloaded. You may need to “refresh” your podcast feeds in iTunes first to make the new video appear. Also, make sure to select MPEG-4, MOV, or M4V as your output format to produce mux’d videos which are compatible with iTunes, iPods, and Apple TV.

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Once a video is downloaded, it can be played in iTunes, synced to an iPod, or watched on a television set through Apple TV. Read this detailed support article for instructions on configuring a podcast to be viewed on an Apple TV.

appletv.jpg

If anyone out there has any modifications or clarifications to this process, please let us know by leaving a comment on this blog.

We’ll also be discussing the Apple TV and other home media devices here more in the coming weeks, and how they can be used to watch DRM-free media purchased online from Cruxy in your living room.