Auto Save script FTW...

After losing a few hours worth of work thanks to my totally forgetting to save my work and my PC suddenly deciding to switch off for a nap, I decided to find a script that would implement that oh so basic but lacking function in Maya: autosave.

So, I found a little script that's really worth it and adds a few options and also integrates well with Maya's incremental saves. It's the one called, wait for it, "Auto Save". The Download button is on the top-right part of the inner-window.

http://n.pastrana.free.fr/mel/

Saving often sounds like basic stuff, but still... one sometimes forgets...

UPDATE: The download link on the author's website doesn't work but you can still grab the updated script HighEnd3D.

TIP: Wacom Intuos right-click not working

I reinstalled my Vista PC a few days ago and today tried to use my Wacom Intuos3 tablet in Maya. Long story short, I was unable to assign the right-click function to the lower pen button and had to search the web in order to find a solution. And it ends up being very simple.

In the Device Manager/Human Interface Devices, you need to disable the "Wacom Virtual Hid Driver". After a restart (welcome to the future...), you should be good to go and able to assign any function to the pen's buttons. I'm not sure what the "Wacom Virtual Hid Driver" does but it doesn't seem to affect my use of the tablet.

Draisine or Draisienne?

I love words. Don't you?

I love learning new ones, even when it's probable that I will never actually use them in a conversation or even in writing. Furthermore, I love learning words in many languages: as a polyglot, I find it pleasurable to just bask in the glory of expanding one's toolset. Today's word for me is "draisine". It is a vehicle invented by a German aristocrat, Baron Karl Christian Ludwig Drais von Sauerbronn, in 1817. Drais actually called his invention the "Laufmaschine" (the "Running machine"). I first heard of it through an article in Wired.

The draisine is considered a precursor of what we today call the bicycle or the motorcycle. It consisted of two wheels, a seat (or not) and a steering stick. There were no pedals or chain or anything that would have, as modern bikes do, multiplied the rider's effort in order to propel him to higher speeds. It was actually a velocipede: a foot-powered vehicle....

The curious thing about the translation of the word in other languages though is that draisine, as it's called in English, exclusively points to the rail-road muscle-powered vehicle in French. The proto-bike is actually called a draisienne in French (and a "Dandy horse" in English). Confusing, isn't it?

I find the word fascinating and it's still used for those muscle-powered vehicles used on rail-roads (although it does conjure images of jail fugitives lost in the desert during the Gold Rush if you ask me).

Cheers,

Charles

The O and the U

Come on people!
Yesterday, I was watching an episode of Chuck and in the teaser scene at the beginning of the episode, the title card proudly stated "Bogotá, Columbia, 2005". Yeah, right. Kudoz for using the accent/tilde on the "a" but come on: can't you get the country's name right? Is it that hard? Almost everyday I see the words Columbia and Colombia mixed up. Everyone seems to have a hard time remembering that one is the name of a Latin-American Country and the other, a name used in many places around the US and Canada.
Colombia is a South-American Country and Columbia is a name given to many places, rivers and even the District where the United States' Capital is located. Both originate in Christopher Columbus' name of course, whose name is spelled Colombo, Colón, Corombo, Colomb, etc. according to the language you say the name in...

Su, see yo everybudy

Ask her to leave...

I'm not sure who this "Guru" of the ad is but I think he's talking to us from the past...

The IT crowd Anti-Piracy Ad

Well, if you don't know The IT Crowd, you should definitely check this series out. I discovered it when I stumbled upon the following fake-ad and I've been hooked since then. There aren't many episodes and both Season 1and Season 2only amount to 12 episodes but they're really worth a watch (although the end of season 2 is slightly less funny). Highly recommended!

European medal count at the olympics

I find it ridiculous that the European Union doesn't appear as a separate entity in the medal counts. Sure, the EU is not a country (yet) but the 27 share and enjoy a very big interconnectedness on so many levels that it would make sense for the results of the Olympics (and everything else actually) to be summed up. That would allow to credit both the winning countries as well as our continent as whole.Wouldn't hurt a bit.

Here at least, the results for the EU are indicated separately. When you actually compare with other nations with populations of, say, 1.3 billion, 300 million or 140 million people... the results are quite impressive, don't you think?

Metaphoric Ode to European Joy

Here's a little something that really made me laugh. It's silly and one could simply watch it as a funny video but this rendition of the 9th symphony's Ode to Joy (by Ludwig Van Beethoven, later adopted as the European Union's anthem) is somehow a good metaphor for the EU itself. That's how I saw it. And that's why it made me laugh.



By the way, today, 888 is the new 666. Ancient Greece is officially dead and buried.

Cheers

I read a résumé with a certain "je ne sais quoi" in a café with a beautiful façade

Did you read the title of this post? Did you know that many languages use accents or "additional symbols" on their letters in order to enrich the sometimes somewhat limited Latin alphabet? That's totally opposite to the English language that doesn't need it. I mean I would be quite naïve to think that the English language, brought to new heights as the über-language of communication, would need to bother with those vulgar details. English has become a piñata of foreign words, a smörgåsbord of imports, the El Niño of linguistic storms that has swiped the whole world with its non-accented simplified alphabet. The résumé of the English language is quite impressive. You can not sit down in a trendy café, be it on the Champs-Élysées or in Montréal (Québec), without hearing it spoken by some trendy youngsters over a caffè or an apéritif, a hors d'œuvre of pâté or some dessert with crème brûlée or a crêpe or an éclair.

No, the English language is plain and flat, without any of those overly complicated diacritical signs. This is the raison d'être of the success of English language.

Writing with accents, umlauts, tildes and cedillas? Now, that's pure vulgarité!

À la revoyure,

Charles

Martyrman?

Hi there,

Well, yesterday night, I had the opportunity to watch "The Dark Knight", the sequel to the 2005 "blockbuster" Batman Begins. By the way, how idiotic this movie title was... Superman shops? Spiderman jumps? Batman coughs? What happened to the "Subject-Verb-Complement" structure? Batmans Begins... what? A game of scrabble? Cooking? To get on my nerves? Anywho.

My first reaction when "The Dark Knight" finished was to say: "How pompous and how pretentious!". Yeah, I know: why not say, "Pretentious, moi?" like Mr. Johnson in "Fawlty Towers" I suppose. But the fact is, the movie reeked of self-importance and pretentiousness. Batman, with his completely ridiculous voice (it's actually a voice I used to do years ago when clowning around), is by far the least interesting character in the whole movie. I won't go into the story and the million twists and turns of it but at the end of the day, it's like Bruce Wayne/Batman is actually the idiot with a lot of money who makes a lot of mistakes, is able to fight off military/police-trained officers without blinking but can't cope with a frickin' dog. I mean, the guy is a one-man-army, but he's scared of dogs. Give me a break. The movie was long but entertaining however thanks in a huge part to Heath Ledger's Joker interpretation. He really is (or was) something else. Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent was also pretty good until he actually becomes his alter-ego. His alter ego reminded far too much of Tim Burton’s Martians in Mars Attacks!… That was kind of hard to be “scared” by this character after that if you know what I mean. Christopher Nolan is supposedly a great director because he did “Memento” (which was a good movie, no doubts about it) but then, after reading this article in Wired, I thought: “OK, this guy really thinks his shit doesn’t smell”. As a student of animation, I can only feel that this dude really didn't get what animation and special effects are about.

Also, I'm starting to get tired of the comic book franchise "reboots". It seems now that having your "superhero" steeped in a realistic environment is actually something desirable. As if it were good. Well, to me, that's a very bad idea. A guy that dresses like a bat, a spider, wears his underwear outside his costume or goes by the name Captain Afghanistan (or something in this vein) is, in itself, pretty ridiculous. So, how do you adapt this for the moving pictures? By remaining in the realm of altered comic book reality particular to each character. Don't make them or at least try to make them real. It's like mixing Greek mythology (say... mmh... Hercules) and bringing them to a modern day setting (say... mmh... New York). What's the result of that? Yep, Hercules in New York. It did launch a brilliant political career (sort of) but it doesn't work. That's what happened to that Superdude movie from a couple of years ago. Or was it "SuperChrist" or "SuperMartyr" or "SuperPeepingTom"? I mean, why did they need to "reboot" Superman (as if art and creation were a computer program that you can reboot by activating some sort of program or algorithm... I demand my second break)? The first and second Superman movies from the seventies were very well done; there was humor in it, great visual effects, solid acting, a fantastic score, etc. So what was the point? If you're going to make a movie about a messianic figure who suffers for the rest of the world (blah, blah, blah), please adapt the Bible, the Talmud, etc. or any other of those thoroughly optimistic books.

Spider-Man (at least the first two ones) managed the perfect balance of pseudo-realism and altered comic-book reality but kept that sense of humor that is completely indispensable when playing with this kind of characters. The movie "The Incredible Hulk" that I saw a few weeks ago had the same problem as "Batman 2: K9 fear", it tried too seriously to be... uh... serious. Compare that to "Hancock" for instance (that I also saw a few weeks ago). The premise of a drunk and mean superman lends itself perfectly to comedy and despite some mixed critics and a somewhat muddled final third act managed to stay fresh and humorous. That made it enjoyable to watch.

I’m out now.

Charles