Cordinc Blog

Available on iTunes and OU Podcasts

Another of the numerous Open University podcasts, this series of videos gives an overview of the town of Paestum, located in Campania. The town was originally called Poseidonia when founded by Greek colonists in the 7th century BC. There are 4 videos totalling just over 20 minutes in length. They are available in iPod or a larger (640×360) format. There are also transcripts. The visuals are of the modern ruins or of artefacts recovered from the town.

Modern day Paestum is dominated by three big temples built by the Greek founders. The first video spends some time on these temples and the time in which they were built. Unfortunately, the site was excavated in haste in the last century and damaged in the process. Despite this there is evidence of variations from established Greek culture. There are 24 flutes on the temples' columns rather than the traditional 20. The second video shows paintings from an archaic Greek tomb. In the 5th century BC Poseidonia was conquered by a nearby tribe - the Lucanians. The third video focuses on some funeral paintings from this period. Despite the Lucanians' reputation as barbarians, there is little physical evidence of disruption from this period in the city, and they must have been largely Hellenised. There was a large discontinuity to the city when it became Roman in 273BC and renamed Paestum. Much of the city was rebuilt in the Roman style although the temples remained intact. The fourth video deals with this period.

An interesting, but very short and narrowly focused, series.

Some friends of mine are getting married this September 11th. Apparently that was the only date available when they booked locations. It seems people want to avoid that date for the obvious reasons. On September 11th 2001 I was in the US staying with friends in the town of Frederick, Maryland. I was halfway through an round-the-world holiday, and the next day I was scheduled to go to New York to stay with another set of friends.

Having recently scanned all my old film photos onto my computer, I thought some of them could go on Flickr. In January 2003 I went on a two week tour of Egypt (partially to avoid the English winter). The best photos are now a set on Flickr, available here.

Once the mech model is rigged as in the previous tutorial, the bones can be used to help animate the mech. Here we will create a simple walk cycle for the rigged mech. This is the last tutorial in this series on using Blender to create a mech model. The final result of this tutorial, and thus the entire series, is shown in the video below.

The continuation of this post is a set by step tutorial detailing my methodology.

Some time ago I wrote a post describing a Java Multi-channel Asynchronous Throttler I had written. At the time, I stated it would preserve the order of calls, but as Asa commented on that blog post, this was not always the case. Here is a new version that does preserve order, and passes Asa's test. As part of this work I also extracted common code into new classes and created a ChannelThrottler interface. It works by placing incoming tasks on an internal queue. All the code detailed in this post (and the other throttler post) is available here.

After creating and texturing a mech model, the next step towards animating it is rigging. This is the process of setting up bones in the model such that when the bone is moved, the mech mesh deforms in an expected manner. The final set of bones to animate a walk cycle is shown in the image below. Once this step is complete, the model will be ready to animate.

The continuation of this post is a set by step tutorial detailing my methodology.

Available at the course website.

Finding podcasts on ancient history which do not focus on Mediterranean civilisations is very hard. The only one I have found so far is UCLA's History 9A - History of India course. This is a recording of the lectures given as part of the university course by Vinay Lal at the end of 2009. However, the course encompasses far more than the ancient history for which I was searching. Starting with the first civilisations, it races through history to end with Indian Independence and Partition.

This course is not available on iTunes but there is a course website with the lectures in both MP3 audio-only and video in real player format. Unfortunately, two of the lectures were not recorded. The 27 recorded lectures are around 50 minutes in length and 24MB (for the MP3s, I didn't watch the videos). As is normal with recorded lectures there is some class discussion taking up the first few minutes of each podcast. The course reading is also available from the class website. Professor Lal occasionally mentions visual aids, but video is available. Production quality is otherwise fine and the material is presented in an interesting manner.

The podcasts start with the Indus Valley Civilisation (in what is modern Pakistan), one of the three early human civilisations along with Egypt and Mesopotamia). These people were replaced by the Aryans (no relation to the Nazi Aryans) in some disputed manner. From there the course quickly skips to Hindu religion and culture, telling Indian history through Hindu texts. I imagine a similar history of Europe could be told through early Christian texts, but it would miss much. In Europe, there were many non-religious texts; the lectures suggest that in comparison, Hindu texts are the main primary sources for ancient Indian history.

In any case the lectures on Hinduism are quite interesting if you don't already know much about the religion. The course covers the content of the main Hindu texts from the Vedas, Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas and a little on the Bhakti poets. It is intriguing to see how some Hindu concepts such as Karma or Yoga have been transformed in western culture. Yoga is a much larger concept then physical exercise and describes many methods of achieving the goals of life. The Hindu gods also have many avatars - incarnations or personifications of aspects of the god. One of the avatars of the main god Vishnu is Buddha - this avatar appeared at a time when Buddhism was expanding in India. The lectures also detail the basic beliefs of Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism (including a discussion on its disappearance from India) - all of which have their origins in India.

After the arrival of Islam towards the end of the first millennium AD, the course returns to a more traditional history format. As there is still a thousand years to the present day, the coverage of events can be succinct. Starting with the Delhi Sultanate, Muslim rule of India continued with the Mughal Empire, which succumbed to the East India Company. It seems strange to have a country ruled by a foreign company and Professor Lal spends some time detailing how this occurred. The subsequent rule (and sometimes, misrule) of the British Empire is covered, with the final lecture detailing Gandhi and his policy of nonviolent civil disobedience leading to independence.

Not knowing much about Indian history other than the basics, I can't say I learnt a huge amount more through this podcast, although there are occasional worthwhile tidbits. However, I did learn a huge amount about Hinduism. It covers all Indian history in an introductory sweep.

Possible Spoilers Below

Last night I watched Hurt Locker for the first time. I was looking forward to it. I had heard so many reviews and it had won 6 Oscars. However, to put it politely, I didn't like it. I consider it well below average. Both the major and minor characters are unbelievable and fit neatly into standard movie stereotypes ("he's a maverick, doing dangerous things - but he gets results!"). The scenarios in which the characters find themselves seem unlikely. One character carjacks a local and travels across Baghdad, then runs back to the base. At another point, 3 characters search for enemy bombers in the backstreets by themselves and unknown to their support. Coming to a three-way junction, they split up! The script is often heavy-handed, letting the audience know exactly what they are supposed to be thinking. For instance, when confronted with a possibly involuntary suicide bomber, the interpreter repeatedly reminds us "he's a good guy". Once is required, maybe twice to stress the point. However, the many repetitions beyond that are just clunky. At once crucial point we are told "he has 4 children". Are we perhaps supposed to empathise with him?

The plot is quite episodic. This got me thinking. It might be that the story's ambition was neutered by making it a movie in the first place. The story has potential and maybe many of its problems (heavy handedness, stock characters) could be solved by taking longer to tell it - much longer. It is very hard to fit a complete interesting story with detailed real characters into the 2 hour timeframe of a film. I doubt even extending the running length to 3 hours, the extreme end of theatrical releases, would give enough room to properly tell Hurt Locker's story. Perhaps it should be a TV series.

I remember a time not long ago when the 4 or 6 hours of a mini-series were the longest storylines around. Now there have been quite a few TV series with continuous storylines. Babylon 5 was the first I remember, but since then there have been the excellent The Wire and The Sopranos among many others. Generation Kill told a similar story to Hurt Locker more successfully over 7 hours. After watching these, other TV shows with their "everything resolved in 40 minutes" episodes seem inferior (Dr Who is suffering from this at the moment). I am not suggesting film is inferior in general, just that it has its limits and most of the best films don't try to do too much. For great characters and great stories the extra time afforded by TV pays great dividends.

Having crated a basic low-poly mecha model in a previous tutorial, it is now time to liven up the model by texturing it. The application of materials and textures is the hardest part of modelling for me, and I'm not entirely happy with the result. My artistic abilities need some work. However, the general technique is still worth noting. The tutorial will show how the mech model was made to look as below. Later tutorials will show how to rig the model and animate a walk cycle.

The continuation of this post is a set by step tutorial detailing my methodology.

I decided to move away from historical models for this tutorial. I chose a mecha, a walking robot, as an exercise in texturing, rigging and animation. The idea is to first create a low-poly model so that most of the visual detail is in the textures applied. Then a walk cycle will be animated using bone rigging to aid further animations. The result will be the sort of model that could be used in a simple game. As there are quite a few steps in achieving all of this, the tutorial has been split into four parts. This first part creates the base model. Following posts will cover texturing, rigging and animating.

The continuation of this post is a set by step tutorial detailing my methodology.