Ben Henry

New Year’s Resolution Update – Part 2

Here are the additional Criterion Collection movies I’ve seen since my last post:

16. I Fidanzati (195) (Criterion Collection link)
17. The Marriage of Maria Braun (204) (Criterion Collection link)
18. Hiroshima Mon Amour (196) (Criterion Collection link)
19. Night and Fog (197) (Criterion Collection link)
20. Ali – Fear Eats the Soul (198) (Criterion Collection link)
21. Schizopolis (199) (Criterion Collection link)
22. Veronika Voss (205) (Criterion Collection link)
23. Umberto D. (201) (Criterion Collection link)
24. Jimi Plays Monterey/Shake! Otis at Monterey (169) (Criterion Collection link)
25. Lola (206) (Criterion Collection link)
26. The Pornographers (207) (Criterion Collection link)
27. Knife in the Water (215) (Criterion Collection link)
28. Through a Glass Darkly (209) (Criterion Collection link)
29. Winter Light (210) (Criterion Collection link)
30. The Silence (211) (Criterion Collection link)
31. Richard III (213) (Criterion Collection link)

The last five are by far my favorites out of this group. “The Marriage of Maria Braun” is also an exceptional film. Of course, “Night and Fog” as well as “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” has extreme historical importance and “Schizopolis” is just wacky Soderbergh…which is valuable for being unique.

I’ve decided to move in with my girlfriend. So we purchased a 46″ LED television and a new entertainment center. Once we get a new A/V receiver, the visual and auditory experience I’ll have with each of these movies will be a little bit better. I’m excited about all of these things. I plan to continue the 1 Criterion movie per week contract with myself.

Since the company I worked for was acquired, I haven’t been able to go to the gym as much. This issue is multiplied by the fact that my back is still giving me problem and I’ve have a strange issue with my shoulder for the last 2 months. Regardless, I’ve dropped 5 pounds since my last writing, which is still not meeting my target, but I have aspirations to start running when I can and doing weights whenever I can get into the gym. That will help with the 1 pound per month contract.

My job

The company I work for, MOTO Development Group, was acquired by Cisco this week. The entire team has been waiting for their offer letters before we really make any conclusions, but this is going to be detrimental to the cohesion of the existing team. Already, there are about 10 people who will not be joining us at Cisco(CSCO) either by choice or by redundancy. Some of them were ready to retire, so it was a great opportunity to get out ahead.
Personally, I’m extremely excited about this opportunity. If it means everything they say it means, then I have no problems. I cannot get into what our role is going to be there, but it’s assumed to be an important one.
Does anyone have experience with mergers from my point of view? How did it go? What would you’ve done differently if you had to do it again?

New Year’s Resolutions update

I have had the same New Year’s resolutions for the most recent two years:

1. Watch 1 Criterion Collection film per week, starting with spine number 1.
2. Lose 1 lb. of weight per month.

In 2009, I lost 1 lb. per month and watched 51 films from the Criterion Collection. This year I started tracking my progress as I was going along, so that I could catch up in the middle of the year rather than at the end.

Here is a list of Criterion movies I’ve seen thus far in 2010:

1. Straw Dogs (182)
2. I Am Curious … (Blue)
   (181)
3. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
   (183)
4. Indiscretion of an American Wife/Terminal Station
   (202)
5. By Brakhage – Anthology
   (184)
6. Stolen Kisses
   (186)
7. The Honeymoon Killers
   (200)
8. The White Sheik
   (189)
9. Bed and Board
   (187)
10. Love on the Run
    (188)
11. Throne of Blood
    (190)
12. Jubilee
    (191)
13. Le Coup de Grace
    (192)
14. Quai des Orfevres
    (193)
15. Il Posto
    (194)

Since this is the 15th week of the year, I’m one film behind so far. I Fidanzati is at my house ready to be watched.

I’ll start posting reviews of these movies as I watch them to keep a better record. I’d like to be able to write full essays of each movie as I see it. I’ll get to that point eventually. Let’s start with just a grade and some information about what I found interesting about it.

As for losing weight, I had been going to the gym three days a week. One of those days I was dead lifting 50 reps of 275 lbs, and got somewhere near in the middle when my back gave out and I dropped the weight. I had a hard time untying my shoes afterward. After doing some research, all signs point to herniated disc. So I’m out of weightlifting commission for the near future.  I wasn’t really on track anyway. I started this year off 12 lbs less than I was in January 2009. That means I was at 252. I should be at 248 now, but am really at around 250 pretty consistently. It looks like there’s some hard work in my near future.

By the way, here are my long term (meta) weightlifting goals:

1. Clean and Jerk body weight (by either losing weight or gaining power/strength/technique)
2. 50 pull-ups without touching the ground (can change grip)

I’m up to 7 pull ups (from 0 one year ago) and I can power clean and jerk 185 lbs.

Write up on Website-in-a-weekend.net

Hi everyone! My friend, David, just had me write a guest post to his blog. It was quite an honor to be the gadget expert and provide some initial feedback upon the announcement of the Apple iPad device.

Honey Harvest

My friend, Anders and I raised bees this season.  We previously extracted about 4 lbs. of honey.  Last weekend, we had a full box of capped honey and extracted 2.5 gallons, or about 30lbs of honey.  That’s 40 1/2 pints of honey.  Christmas Presents = check.

Check out a couple pictures Anders took here.

Using DirectFB Part I – Prerequisites

DirectFB is an open source lower level graphics framework that most likely lives below the graphics library you use in Linux (e.g. Cairo, GTK, etc). DirectFB has opened my eyes to the world of graphics programming and peaked my interest in how to apply my knowledge from other fields.
Prerequisites
1. Surface – Conceptually a piece of memory (RAM) which represents what is sent to the display for viewing. This means that every pixel in the width X height of the output is represented by a piece of memory related to how the color and alpha is encoded. By default, each pixel is 24 bits of color (8 red, 8 green and 8 blue) and 8 bits of alpha. The surface can be double buffered. This means that for every pixel shown on the display, there are two areas in RAM that are used to show that. This is a fun concept, actually. Picture a two sided chalk board, with one side facing a classroom full of people and you on the other side. While the class is looking at what you drew, you’re drawing something new. When you’re done, you flip it over and start over again. Double buffered surfaces work just like this.
2. Alpha blending – From Wikipedia: “In computer graphics, alpha [blending] is the process of combining an image with a background to create the appearance of partial transparency.” This is done at it’s most basic level by reading the pixel data behind the pixel that is about to drawn and then running it through this equation: a(color_front) + (1 – a)(color_back), where “a” is alpha value from 0->1.
3. Display Layer – A layer is highly dependent on the hardware being used. The easiest example I can give for layers is to have you picture CNN or a similar channel. The live television feed is on a layer that is behind the ticker bar, time and information at the bottom of the screen. This could easily be done with two layers, but there may be more necessary (e.g. picture in picture video).
4. Window – A window is a sub-surface (not a full screen surface) which has attributes that are necessary in more than one subsurface. This can be as simple as a button, where all of the interactions are the same, the image(s) is the same but the text is different. Windows also make it easy to optimize. By blitting everything into one window, the window only has to blit onto the surface, rather than all of the items in the window. Windows are also easy to hide, send behind other windows and move around the layer.
5. Blit – This should have been listed first, but I felt other appealing background information is necessary first. A “Bit Blit” or Bit Block Transfer is the framework around moving one piece of “surface” memory to another. This can be as simple as a blit of a colored shape, which was pre-blitted into a sub-surface, to the primary surface shown on the display. Blits are very expensive operations and most graphics hardware has advanced algorithms to accelerate blitting to get the fastest frame rate possible.
6. Flip – The concept of a flip has already been mentioned. There are a couple parameters which are important to flipping. One is when to flip, the other is how much to flip. When to flip is easily answered: Do you want to flip the surface going out to the display or not? If so, wait for a vertical sync from the display. This is a signal from the display telling the hardware “I’m about to refresh, do you have anything new you’d like to show?” We would usually say yes because we want to show as much as we can at the frame rate of the display. Specifying how much is called “clipping”.

Graphics Programming

It’s amazing how much history there is in computer graphics programming.  At a software design meeting a few weeks ago, I was able to talk about 2-D graphic algorithm design with some engineers who were around in the early 80s at companies that were developing windowing environments.  This completely blew me away and led to my fascination with the subject.

I immediately purchased the top three most recommended books based on recommendations from Amazon as well as the user experience team I work with. The apparent “Bible” of graphics programming (so says the UX wiz at work) is Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C (2nd Edition) (affiliate link), non-affiliate link.

The book focuses mainly on 3-D graphics algorithms, but the basics are described in 2-D. This is important in my journey using DirectFB. After taking a stab at algorithm design, it’s nice to know that I was mostly right in my assumptions. However, there is a lot for me to learn. Which leads to my excitement and writing about it.