Girl Meets Geekdom

Now with Pixar’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter running the show at Disney, one must wonder what will happen to the future of Disney? Pixar is a studio attempting to hit a one-film a year production rate. Disney makes a lot more movies…some of questionable merit. Rumor has it that production on Toy Story 3 has already halted. What about Rapunzel Unbraided, Pinocchio 2000, and that Snow White remake? What will happen to those films? I heard Ed Catmull give a talk on the production crisis of Toy Story 2. They were not happy with the story, production halted, and they did a frantic rewrite. Frankly, every Pixar film has gone through a similar crisis, or so I hear. Can they impose that on the 3 production Disney has in the works? After all, Pixar has something like 3 or 4 shows either in development or production as we speak. Will they start to neglect their own productions? Will Disney become the studio that produces the crappier secondary features made to compete with PDI Dreamwork’s winter features? One thing’s for sure, Dreamwork just lost their edge with numbers. In the future, I’m sure we will see as many Disney/Pixar films as PDI Dreamworks.

Yes, yes, after months of rumors, it is finally official: Disney has bought Pixar. The price tag on Pixar ultimately closed at $7.4 billion. This is probably the most surprising piece of news since the Autodesk/Alias buyout. A few weeks ago I would’ve put money on the deal falling through. Pixar just seemed so independent, so we-don’t-need-Disney. It wasn’t just a Steve Jobs farce to raise the value, I heard it two years ago from Ed Catmull in a lecture he gave at my school. I guess they really had me convinced that Pixar really was going out on their own. Granted the deal is greatly in Pixar’s favor…and now Ed Catmull is the president of both company’s animation studios, so he really has nothing to complain about. Jobs is the biggest Disney shareholder and is probably the biggest winner of all. Interestingly enough, years back he actually tried to sell of Pixar to Microsoft and HP. Good thing for him, neither of them went for it.

Well what can I say? All the computer graphics businesses are assimilating.

Yes, I?’ve been absent for a month. I took winter break as an opportunity to pursue some random projects which I will post as I finish up. For my first post-hiatus post, I was going to write something totally relevant about the game industry or computer graphics or something, but I figured I’d scrap all that and, in honor of my new “off-topic” section, write about something completely and utterly random: body wash and loofahs.

After a conversation with my roommate’s semi-boyfriend today, it has been brought to my attention that guys are more “soap” people and tend not to go for the body wash-loofah combination. For those enlightened male individuals out there who have figured out the inferiority of bar soap, I applaud you. As for the rest of you, read on.

Forget the gentle moisturizing components of bodywash that attract the female audiences. Body wash is just more practical than bar soap. It comes conveniently bottled so its contents don’t contact the shower water, and you can bring it with you to the gym, or pour it into a smaller container for travel purposes. But most importantly it saves time. I mean, think about what you have to do to clean yourself with bar soap. First you apply the soap, which is slipping around in your hand, over the part of your body that you are cleaning. Then you have to put the soap down to work up the lather, and you have to pick up the soap again to clean another part of your body. Very often, the soap will be slippery and fall to the bottom of the shower and you have to pick it up. Of course every time you do this, the soap is getting smaller from sitting in the water. It’s completely wasteful! You can never use ALL of a bar soap. With body wash, you pour just a little into a loofah and very shortly after the loofah contacts your skin, you get a lather. Plus the lather does not go away until you are ready to rinse you loofah. Think of the efficiency. Bar soap is like washing dishes with detergent and no sponge! Why would you still use bar soap? It’s ridiculously inefficient!

As for the concern that it’s girly, pretty much every brand of bar soap has a bodywash equivalent. And sure, while you can buy very fancy scented body wash, the normal body wash that sit next to the bar soap on store shelves smell like soap. And if you still think that something as efficient as bodywash is girly, maybe it just goes to prove that women are smarter.

Anyway, I promise, next post will be on video games or something.

The games are out. (Actually they have been for a week now)

I’m technically a TA for the course that produced this, so I probably should not play favorites, but semester’s over, and I can’t resist. My favorites for the semester - Elsia and Penguin Adventure, two projects from the CIS 300: Intro to Computer Game Design class.

Penguin Adventure is a cute, quick paced 2D platformer that puts you in the shoes of Tooks the Penguin. The game features amazing artwork and fun music. Unlike most games you would typically get from the game design class, Penguin Adventure has a lot of content, featuring a total of 20 levels, with high replay value.

Elsia is a highly unique cooperative platformer featuring Spike and his sidekick Friday. The cooperative element puts two players on the same machine with one controlling Friday with the mouse and the other controlling Spike with the keyboard. It’s surprisingly fun!

These games were the work of a handful of random Cornell University students in a single semester’s time (14 weeks). Both games were made using the GameX engine, much like GameMaker but requires a ton more programming.

Today I got all excited about Gravatars and downloaded a fancy plugin from the WP Plugins DB and proceeded to activate my plugin hoping to soon see pretty little pictures next to the comments in my posts. To my dismay, this did not happen. It was not some magical plug in as I had hoped. I had to go to the downloader’s site to insert a massive if statement in the foreach loop of my comment block.

So, I figured, fine, I’m not afraid of code. So I inserted it, edited my stylesheet and even created a little icon for those “gravatarless” individuals. To my dismay, this resulted in everyone being “gravatarless.” Needless to say, I was frustrated. In order to install this fancy plugin, I had to drop in a gravatar folder containing default images as well as a rather large .php file. I opened it up to find that there was actually a lot of code in there and automatically assumed that it’s probably not something I could dissect in a few hours. So I proceeded to the Gravatar website to figure out if they had any solutions.

What I found there was shocking. So this thing that apparently required a plug in consisting of a folder and a .php file with a LOT of functions is really something that can be done in as many lines of code as I had to add to my comments.php file. Even LESS if I wanted the gravatars to always link back to the gravatar website. No plugins required.

So for those of you who use WordPress and are too lazy to install the plugin here’s the simplest form of the code:


<img src=" http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=
  <?php echo md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default); ?>” alt=”" />


That code displays just the image. Of course I use a much more complicated code to generate the links and default image:


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) :
$default=””;
if (” != get_comment_author_url()) {
   echo “<a href=’$comment->comment_author_url’
title=’Visit $comment->comment_author’>”;
} else {
   echo “<a href=’http://www.gravatar.com’
title=’Create your own gravatar at gravatar.com!’>”;
}
echo “<img src=’”;
if (” == $comment->comment_type) {
  echo “http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”
  .md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default);
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) ||
  (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
  echo gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
}
echo “‘ alt=” class=’gravatar’ width=’80′ height=’80′ /></a>”; ?>


Just enter in the full path of your default image where it says $default = “” and replace the


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) ?>


Anyway…I figured if you can accomplish it in the same amount of code in your .php file, why the hell do you need a plugin with a lot of functions to do it for you?