Screen 13 » Hubris

Indiana Jones meets Marty McFly?

skyostil — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:11:32 +0000

Apologies in advance: the following is not even remotely on-topic, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Having just seen the latest installment in the Indiana Jones series I couldn’t help but notice that a certain part of the film felt awfully familiar. In the segment, Indy climbs inside a lead-lined fridge to escape an imminent nuclear explosion. The bomb goes off, throwing the fridge into a dizzying spin. After the dust settles, Jones climbs out of the scorched refrigerator relatively unscathed.

Surely no other action epic has used such an extravagant plot device before? Well, not quite, but almost. You see, the original script draft for the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future called for a time machine built out of — you guessed it — a Philco refrigerator. Operating the time machine required quite a lot of power — 4200 rads to be exact — and the only thing producing that much radiation back in 1949 was a nuclear explosion. To get back to his own time, Marty takes the fridge/time machine to a Nevada nuclear test site and climbs inside. The bomb goes off, throwing the fridge back to the future, and moments later Marty climbs out of the melted Philco with hardly a scratch.

Well, I’m glad that Back to the Future didn’t end up like this. There’s no denying that a Delorean is way cooler than some crummy refrigerator. Still, you have to wonder how a very similar plot sequence ended up in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Winter

skyostil — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:41:33 +0000

Epic Graduation

skyostil — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 13:37:53 +0000

My master’s thesis just got accepted, making me a graduate of the Degree Program on Information Engineering at the University of Oulu. The work, titled A Mobile Vector Graphics Quality Analysis Toolkit, deals with solving inefficiencies and other problems found in mobile applications that use vector graphics such as OpenGL ES and OpenVG.

CMake and Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express

skyostil — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:17:19 +0000

This is just a reminder to myself and maybe others as well of how to get CMake and Visual C++ 2005 Express playing together nicely. Namely, how to get past the following error when trying initialize a project using CMake:

  LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'user32.lib'

The problem is that you’re missing the Windows Platform SDK. But just installing it is not enough. Microsoft has the details, but in short you have to:

Install the Platform SDK.
In VC++, add the following paths to the Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions | VC++ Directories page. Be sure to click the checkmark button to verify the paths.
- Executable files: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Bin
- Include files: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Include
- Library files: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Lib

With that, the linker error should go away.

I blog therefore I am

skyostil — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:07:57 +0000

Well, I started a weblog. I’m not really all that sure what I’m going to write about, but I still feel like I need some place to record all the sporadic ideas and other developments that come up.

I’ve also uploaded most of the stuff from the old website to this new one. If you notice something that doesn’t look right, please let me know.

1337 points to those who figure out what the name refers to.