Stuff and Junk

When I buy a car I think of it as the starting point, then I need to visual what it would look like when I have made the changes I want, hoping it will look they way I imagine it.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into a dealer, say I want a Chevy Camaro, let’s make it black, the bonnet to have two nostrils, no make it one. Spoiler to look like…etc. The dealer gives the specs to a CGI guy, he produces this video;

And then the dealer laser cuts the body components to the CGI references.

It’s doable!!

When you post a link in Facebook, FB looks for three elements for the display of the link. Title, description and an image.

The title comes from the <title>This is my Link</title> tag.

The description similarly comes from the META tag <meta name=”description” content=”The Description” />

The image basically looks at all the images on the page over 100 px, and then sorts it by the largest image first, and then position. The image can also have a style display of none so that it is hidden from the browser, but visible to FB.

Sexy Mitsubishi EVO spot ad from BBDO in Adelaide, looks very neat. More here: http://www.resin.com.au/Proj_mitsu_lancer.shtml

Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution – Defy Physics from Resin on Vimeo.

Finally got my Matrox triple screen running right with Fallout 3 and this is the result;

Victorian law is being pushed through now to make ESC electronic stability control compulsory in all new cars from 2011, obviously the idea is the make loosing control of your car a much harder process. What I really don’t get with this is we keep adding all these things to cars that just make the driver even more detached from driving.

You think about what it was like 20, maybe 30 years ago and the cars were harder to drive, you didn’t have all these helping hands that took the responsibility away from the driver.

Take traction control for example, in a car without traction control you quickly realise if you push your throttle to the floor, you loose traction. So how do you react? You use less throttle and you learnt a little physics along the way, too much power means less control. Take a car from today, it has twice the power but a little button that controls the throttle for you. So how do you react instead, full throttle and the computer will handle the rest. We’ve learnt nothing

about how a car really reacts and nothing about the physics involved in making a tonne and half of metal move.

So all those 18 year old, mummy and daddy bought me a new car types couldn’t give a stuff of course, but these are the ones that I’m scared of! You apply the same lesson of physics to braking and handle, hence ABS and ESC and what do you have? People who have never driven a car without these helping hands, pretend driving technical advancements and they then have no understanding in what it really takes to handle a car correctly.

And what’s the result of that? Tailgating, wreak less driving and not learning the lesson until they really get into trouble when they realise just how hard it is to stop over a tonne of metal.

How do you fix it? Every new licence holder must pass a advanced driving course, teach actual driver control before they are allowed on the roads. And no, tax payers shouldn’t have to pay for it. You don’t want to invest a couple of hundred bucks into learning to drive properly, then get off the road. Catch a bus.

LFS has been around for years and I have been using it since June 2004, and I have never found a better driving simulator. In fact, I have never experienced one that was even close!

I have recently tested out Need For Speed Shift and although it is very good, and it is also aimed at more the driving experience rather than the arcade style game, but I would certainly still class it as a game. Where as Live For Speed is most certainly a simulator rather than a game.

LFS is that good that you can feel an individual wheel locking through the steering wheel feedback if your using a G25 or G27. Even beyond that, LFS has released news that the new version to some has a whole new tyre physics model, how many simulators/games out there have a tyre physics model, let alone one that complicated.

If you want the real feel of racing, away from the track, get yourself a Logitech G27 or even a second hand G25 and get into LFS!!

More details on the Rockingham update.

bin bokeh, originally uploaded by Vern Norrgard.

This is my first real Bokeh test and this stuff is seriously hard to setup. The Bokeh blocks the outside of the lens so it then displays the effect on anything that is out of focus.

The hard part is the get the subject in focus, while getting the background out of focus right to define the pattern properly.

There are many different ways you can produce content within a Facebook page and there are just as many motives. Here are a few I came up with.

Event based

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hey-Hey-Its-Saturday/39974319048?ref=nf

Using Facebook to create enthusiasm for an event by regularly updating fans and reminding them of the event.

Product updates

http://www.facebook.com/zazz.com.au

Companies that have a continually changing product base can update they’re content daily and then posting new content to Facebook/Twitter.

Brand Awareness

http://www.facebook.com/JimBeamRacing

Using SMO to build brand awareness by continually updating fans and followers with information on their interest, which is particularly supportive of entities that do not have a physical product, like sporting teams for example.

Link Grabbing

http://www.facebook.com/machinima

News websites rely on content that creates interest and in this case it’s gaming. This website features gaming news to build readership, then with readership you can sell advertising. To increase their readership they post links with content previews to Facebook and Twitter and effectively making SMO a portal to their website.

Campaign

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thredbo-Snow-Resort/18304011581?ref=ts

Campaign based SMO is used to generate noise around the campaign.

This example was from back in the Clem’s days where we created a campaign for Thredbo cantered around “The Big Dump”. We created dynamic banners showing snow depth, Facebook page and Facebook application also showing snow depth in anticipation of the big snow down fall.

User registered on the website thebigdump.com.au to win a free lift pass when the big dump hit. Because there were a limited number of tickets, we built a Flash game which picked a winner with the highest score every 5 minutes for a day.

Google Anaytics as a website stats tool is of course very good, but don’t take the totals as absolute truth. Analytics can’t count, it misses quite a large amount of traffic because it is relies on JavaScript to run on every page load. There are numerious places where this can fail and hits are lost.

For example if your Anaytics code is at the end of the page and another JavaScript code fails it can stop Anaytics from loading. If a browser has disabled JavaScript, which is not as likley these days, but JavaScript is a client side code and is run within the browser of the viewing computer, and there are some dodgy computers out there!

Logfile statistics on the other hand read from the log files generated by the website engine, in this case IIS and include every hit on the website. These stats programs such as SmarterStats read the log files and process them into similar reports to Analytics.

As an example, my motorsport site nmd.com.au had the following stats for August;

Visits
Google Analytics: 4,765
SmarterStats:  26,965

Google Analytics only recorded 17.6% of the visits.

Page Views
Google Analytics: 9,116
SmartStats: 69, 710

Again Google Analytics only recorded 13% of the page views.

Google Analytics is still a great tool and should certainly be used to look for trends and percentages, but refer to logfiles when you look at totals!

Google Analytics cannot count