I was in Florida for the Agile Development Practices Conference. The conference was good and I learn a lot about Agile development. The last day of the conference there was a shuttle launch. Several of us, (Mickey, Dimitri, and Vidus) took the hour drive there. Mickey had friends, Mart and Linda, in the area. We met them at a park on the water and watched the launch.
The launch was fun but the 4 hour drive back to the hotel was a killer.
I just purchased the Samsung SPF-83V 8-Inch Wireless Digital Photo Frame for my parents.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YA1Z14
Pros:
Cons:
I decided to go with a third party RSS feed provider, Frame Channel (http://www.framechannel.com/),
They specialize in providing feeds to internet picture frames.
Pros:
Cons:
They’ve only had it one week but they are VERY happy with it. We were out on the lake on their boat and I snapped a shot of my boys with the iphone and mailed it to the picture frames address. When we got back to their house an hour later we saw the picture on the frame. It actually look pretty good for a camera phone photo.
We all worked very hard on BOLT and are VERY proud of it. You should really check out the new BOLT trailers on Apple. If you have the bandwidth check out the 1080p HD version of the chase trailer. BOLT will be released in the new Disney 3D and is worth seeing at the theater. Don’t think of the old red/blue glasses 3D. This uses the dark lens circular polarization glasses. It looks very good, you gotta see it.
I am loving on Ubuntu right now so I figure I would get a number.
If you want your own number click on the image. I am using virtualbox to run ubuntu under XP. I just don’t like developing under XP. I do all my pythoscope work there.
I had an idea a while ago about a program to automatically create unit tests for Python code. I talked it over with Titus Brown from the SoCal Python Interest Group and we both agreed it was a good idea. We also both agreed it would be a lot of work and neither of us had the time. I got the idea of getting of asking Disney to hire and intern to take a crack at it. We looked for a while and then Titus posted the opening on the Testing in Python mailing list. Michal Kwaitkowski responded with interest.  Getting him here from Poland was a bit of a hassle but well worth it. The first week he was here we got http://pythoscope.org up and running.
Here is the logo we had a Disney artist draw for it.
It’s of Michal using pythoscope on a legacy python. 
Last week we hit a milestone.  We released 0.3 that includes dynamic as well as static analysis of the code before creating unit tests. Michal presented pythoscope to the SoCal Python Interest Group that I hosted at Disney. To thank him Disney provided a cake with the pythoscope logo for dessert.
I love bubbles. Last Fathers Day they got me a Chauvet B-550 Bubble King. It was our 4th bubble machine. We tried the cheaper plastic ones but they kept breaking and didn’t put out very many bubbles. We are still experimenting with different bubble solutions but whatever we try this machine puts out a ton of bubbles.So after playing with it for a while I had an idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make bubbles with smoke in them? I asked at work if anyone had a smoke machine I could borrow and sure enough Bruce had one in his office. First thing I gathered all the materials.
Here are my partners in crime.
Our first test we tried to make smoke in bubbles with Dry Ice. It didn’t turn out very good. The smoke from Dry Ice dissipated too quickly. It was then we thought of trying the smoke machine. After I borrowed the smoke machine from Bruce I tried it out in my house. Sure enough my smoke detector works. No more testing inside. Hence you see our outdoor setup.I started testing by making sure the Bubble King would work with the new cheap bubble solution I am trying.
It works but the bubbles are a little smaller than the last solution I tried. The video is of the smoke machine blowing into the bubble machine to make smoke bubbles.
Later I tried to make large bubble with small bubbles inside them. Here is a picture of that.
I then went on to try to feed the smoke though the bubble machine and make a large smoke bubble with bubbles inside of it.
The large smoke bubbles are cool because when they pop you are left in a large cloud of smoke. As show by Jordan from next door. The smoke is vanilla scented so it’s not a bad thing to be in a cloud of it.
I need to clean up how I am doing video links on the blog but all in all I am happy with the bubble experiment.
Stan Lee came to Disney and gave a lunch time lecture. He is amazing. He’s 85 now and starting a new company, POW entertainment. 
He talked about his starting in the business. He said that he almost felt bad after he was in if for a while. There were all these people that live around him that did real things such as plumbers and doctors and all he did was make comic books. It then hit him that people spend a large portion of their money on entertainment. It must be important to them. He WAS doing something that was important to people. I found this inspiring especially working in the entertainment industry.
This picture is him sitting at the signing table after his talk.
He has an amazing amount of energy and makes fun of how popular he has become. He thought all the movies that people are making about the character he created are great. Basically a bunch of talented people make cool movies and he get credit and gets a cameo in the movie. He said it’s a lot of fun to go on set and be treated like a star.
I took the day off Tuesday and drove down to San Diego to see the exhibits at Siggraph 2007. It wasn’t as big as it has been in the past but still a decent size. The Disney Animation booth 
was very well done with a few demo stations out front so the people staffing the booth could show off the art and technology of Meet the Robinsons. They also had a small 3D theater in the booth to show off the nice job the MTR team did on the 3D look.
Laika had a nice booth there and I talked with them for a while. Coraline project looks good. I talked to Michael Kuehn and he said the studio just bought 30 aches to build on. We talked for while and he is really loving Portland. His house has a river on one side and a vineyard on the other. He said the quality of life was though the roof.
I also went though the Emerging Technologies area. The two high points for me were seeing the a water fountain that you could play like a piano. The neat thing is that it’s actually in production and they are selling it to water parks. The company is Funtain. Sure I want one for my backyard but they are not cheap. The guys said about the cost of a nice piano.
The other thing of note was the OLPC or I guess it’s called the XO now. 
Very little computer. I did stress little? Check out my hand next to the keyboard. 
I know it’s for kids but I thought that i might be able to use it too. The keys were soo close together it was very hard to type. Still though if they made it available I would buy one from my son.
Just saw it. I took the wife but left the kids with friends. It’s a shame more people didn’t do that. I liked it. I think they did a good job making the book into a movie. Everytime I saw them change something from the book I thought… hey that makes sense I can see why they had to do it and it was a good choice. My cheif complaints were the kids behind me the teenager in front of me that kept checking his text messages (with a bright phone screen) and the damage to the movie screen. There was a shiny spot on the screen that jumped out when hit with a lot of light. I was able to tune most of them out but it would be really nice if I didn’t have to do it. I can see why people are turning to home theaters.
I just finished The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Very enjoyable. It’s like the Matrix but written on 1909. It’s only a little over an hour long so it’s not a big time investment. I wish it was longer or had a follow up.
