Carl's Notes

Recently I purchased a digital camera so I could take pictures wherever I am and get them onto my computer at a moments notice.
It's a Polaroid t737 with 7 megapixels and 3x analogue zoom.
(the most important features, you know)

Quality seems pretty good (though it's refurbished model, and is missing one screw from the side of the case), and the pictures are pretty sharp if you scale them down by about half.

I've taken a few pictures with it so far, so here are some flowers I found at my aunt's house:

A bee on some flowers:


Flowers:






I'll need to get a harder case for the camera than I have right now, as something seems to be rapidly pressing the power button, which seems to cause the lens cover to open and the lens to extend a bit.

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I've been thinking about my Ani-Midi project again, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to rewrite it in C++ for performance reasons (Java just isn't fast enough).
Also, it needs to be a complete rewrite instead of just a port from Java to C++, as I hadn't focussed on the most important part of the software first (importing music).

Currently, I'm assuming I'll support the MIDI file format, as that's what I knew about first, but apparently that's not the only note-based music format.
According to Wikipedia, there are quite a number of note-based music formats, some of which are derivatives of the original Standard MIDI Format.
As I'll have my own internal music format, I'll just need to write import routines (and see if I can make a plugin system) so supporting a new format should be simpler.

I haven't quite decided how the instrument assemblies should be defined, as how I define it will determine if I can build the files by hand or have to write a script or program for it.
(I may just use an XML file and a bunch of Wavefront Object files, all zipped up to keep things small)

On the whole, the features I'm hoping to support will be something like this:

• Support for MIDI music files (the more important format, but will probably include more formats later)
• After reading the music file, it will offer the user options for where to put each instrument, and how each instrument is arranged.
• The software will analyse how the instruments are played to figure out which instruments are played together to get an idea of sane defaults for where each instrument should go (instruments played together should be closer to each other)
• The above-mentioned information will also be used to create some paths for the camera to follow during playback.
• Scenery and props to make sure it doesn't look like a bunch of floating, moving stuff (appropriately positioned, of course)
• Export of the settings used to create a video to some popular format so you can render it in an external rendering program for high-quality movies

I'm sure I have more features to list around here somewhere, but I've stopped loading Tomboy Notes on startup due to its insistence for showing its main window right after launch...