Category: Blog
Excel Dates Incompatible from PC to Mac?
I discovered an amazing “bug” in excel tonight. I needed to create a copy of part of a spreadsheet into a new sheet. See if you can spot the difference between the original on the left and the new spreadsheet on the right: You’ll notice that the dates are off by exactly 4 years and…
Force an email through
Every once in a while, emails get stuck in my webserver’s mail queue behind a backlog of spam. Here are a few useful commands from this article to push the legit mails that are hanging out in /var/spool/mqueue/:
CPU Benchmarks circa 1997
About 10 years ago we were curious to see how our SGI’s stacked up against other processors in terms of rendering power. We chose a “highly complicated” scene to render with PovRay since it was available for many systems and collected the results. We just recently re-ran the benchmark on a modern computer and you’ll…
The Ebb and Flow
The NY Times prepared an interesting graph showing movie grosses for the last 10+ years. Interesting to see the shapes of gross earnings over time.
Quicktime Quality
For some reason, Quicktime will choose the lowest quality stream when viewing video (by default.) This is particularly noticeable when you are watching DV footage since DV encoded avi’s have both a high quality and a low quality stream. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch the low quality stream on any modern…
Annie Award Wins
Congratulations to our two Annie award winners for Surf’s Up. Deborah Carlson won the category of “Best Individual Achievement in Animated Effects” for her wave work and John Clark took the award for “Best Animation Production Artist” for his wave animation contributions. Well deserved!
VES Sneak Peek
Tomorrow, Saturday, February 9 from 2-5pm, the Visual Effects Society will offer a sneak peek at some of this year’s nominated work. I’ll be involved in the Surf’s Up presentation. Come join some of our Nominees as they present their submissions and answer questions. The categories presented include Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series,…
A couple of Variety mentions
Surf’s Up got a couple of nice mentions in Variety today. In the article “CGI Lighting get transformed“, David Cohen speaks to our documentary lighting look while highlighting the Academy award nominated Transformers. Thomas Mclean talks about our animated water in his article, “Digital water sends vfx sparks flying.”
Multithreading & Gpgpu, A quick tour
I just read a great post by Mark Alexander on the current state of Multithreading and GpGPU work. Mark gave me permission to re-posted it here. Opinions stated within are Mark’s own, not his employer.
