Pek Pongpaet

There are tons of other really cool martial arts films, but if I had to pick the Top 10 for me, these would be it.

10. Once Upon A Time In China 2

Asian audiences have known Jet Li well before his Lethal Weapon 4 western debut. In fact Jet Li is arguably was famous throughout Asia for his role as the legendary folk hero Wong Fei Hong. In OUATC 2 he squares off with another famous martial artist Donnie Yen. It will be years later before the 2 would ever meet again on film in the movie Hero.

9. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Although purists would argue that CTHD wasn’t THAT good of a martial arts movie, we cannot discount it’s importance. It successfully introduced the genre of wuxia to Western audiences weaving high quality production, good script, great special effects, and some amazing wire-fu.

8. Ong Bak

When people think martial arts flicks, Thailand doesn’t come to mind as a hub of action movies, but it’s slowly becoming one. Martial arts idols of the 90′s and 2000s like Jet Li and Jackie Chan were getting old and the audience was ready for a hero. As people were becoming tired of wire-fu, Ong Bak came out of nowhere show casing no-nonsense down and dirty Muay Boran (a predecessor of Muay Thai). Fighting wasn’t something beautiful and balletic, but as effective simple and deadly. Not only were the fights brutal, but the movie also advertised no wires, all stunts done for real by Tony Jaa. Overnight, he became a celebrity and people were hungry for more.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I just started learning Ruby On Rails. Since I like to be on the bleeding edge, I decided to go 2.0. What I found was that although there were a lot of tutorials on Rails 1.2, there was hardly anything on 2.0. To make matters worse, just enough had changed to make the tutorials on the web not very helpful to me. Fortunately my good friend Josh Kahn helped walk me through the basics and so I decided to take notes. (Note: this is for a Windows installation.) Yeah, I know, I said I was a Mac guy, but this is for work.

Curt Hibbs has already wrote a good intro to Ruby on Rails and some of the prerequisites to installing Rails, so I won’t rewrite that. Following his lead, I installed:

Installation

1. Install Ruby using the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows. (Version 1.8.6-26 as of April 28, 2008).
2. Install Rails. The Windows installer comes with RubyGems package manager which lets you install the latest version of Rails. Go into the command prompt and run the command
   gem install rails –remote

   Answer ‘y’ to each question.

3. Install MySQL using the Windows Essentials version. (Version 4.1.22 as of April 28, 2008). Go through the configuration wizard and accept all the settings till you get to Security Settings. Uncheck “Modify Security Settings.”
4. Install a MySQL front end. I used HeidiSQL, a free open-source one, but there’s no reason you can’t use something else.

The Fun Stuff

This being the web and all, I’m not gonna regurgitate what someone else wrote. I found this pretty easy to follow tutorial by the guy who wrote the ONLamp Ruby on Rails tutorial, but for 2.02. Here’s the Cliff’s notes version for those lazy people like me along with some extra steps that were essential but not covered in the tutorial.

1. Create a new Rails application called bookstore. In the command prompt, type:
   rails bookstore
2. Create a scaffold for the bookstore. For this simple example, the bookstore has books with properties title and description. In the command prompt, type:
   ruby script/generate scaffold Book title:string description:text
3. Configure your database. In your bookstore/config folder, open database.yaml. Your development configuration should look like this:
   development:
     adapter: mysql
     database: bookstore
     host: localhost
     username: root
     password:
     timeout: 5000
4. Run the database migration script. Now that you’ve configured the database properly, go to the command prompt and type:
   rake db:migrate

   This will create the necessary tables.

5. Start the server. In your command prompt, navigate to the bookstore directory and type:
   ruby script/server

That’s it. In your browser, navigate to http://127.0.0.1:3000/books/ and you should see your first Ruby On Rails 2.0 app. If you found this post useful, leave a comment. Feedback is appreciated as well.

Popularity: 10% [?]

*Updated October 14, 2008*

Every once in a while I’m asked by Midway Home Entertainment to perform motion capture for the Mortal Kombat games due to my martial arts experience. Today was one such day, and I thought it would be interesting to some of my readers to know what that entails.

When I arrive at the office in the morning, I usually head straight to the motion capture studio. If I am early, I might drop in on some of my friends and chat a bit. Once in the studio, I suit up while the motion capture team set up and calibrate the system.

For those not familiar with motion capture, according to wikipedia

Motion capture, motion tracking, or mocap is a technique of digitally recording movements for entertainment, sports, and medical applications. In the context of filmmaking (where it is sometimes called performance capture), it refers to the technique of recording the actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 3D animation.

The motion capture talent is suited up in a tight black outfit with many small reflective markers velcro-ed onto them. Cameras or sensors around the room pick up the position of these markers and record the data into the motion capture software. By recording human movement this way and applying them to 3D models, you can get much better and more natural movement for much cheaper than you could if you were to use key framing.

Once I suit up, I help one of the guys put all the reflective markers on me. You might think that the markers go on joints but in actuality, placing them on joints makes the data less meaningful because you can’t detect joint rotation as well. So the markers generally go between joints like forearms, biceps, shins, etc. I’ll start warming up by doing some wushu basics, jogging, and some stretching.

When we’re ready to begin, they’ll do a “range of motion” test. I stand in the middle of the capture space and do things like lift my arms up, bend my elbows, bend my knees, swing my arms around, kick, bend my neck, and move around. I’ll talk with the team and try to understand what they want us to do. Usually there’s 2 or 3 motion capture artists at any one shoot. Today it was Carlos, Ray Wu, and I. Once I get what they want me to do, if it’s a cinematic intro, we’ll come up with a sequence on the spot given the direction and rehearse it a couple of times before we shoot. We’ll shoot until lunch at which point some of the people I know might drop in the capture studio to chat while we eat. After lunch we resume shooting until end of day.

On this particular day, Ray did a flash kick as part of a move. Mostly we shot some in-game moves. One thing to note is that for each sequence, we start in a T-pose and end in it. A T-pose helps map our motion capture skeleton to the 3D character they’ll map to. Motion capture is a fun and cool experience. It’s neat to see your moves mapped to a stick figure in real-time during the capture session and also to see it in the actual game.

* Sachin Agarwal, CEO of Dawdle.com has a good write up of another one of my motion capture sessions at Midway Games over at the Dawdle blog.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I caught a sneak screening of the movie ’21′ when I was at SXSW in Austin Texas. The movie is about a group of MIT card counters known as the MIT Black Jack Team, who take Las Vegas by storm. During the week, they’re regular nerds in Boston. On weekends, they fly to Vegas, take on new identities and clean out the casinos all the while living the high roller life. The team are lead by a charismatic but shady professor and ex card counter known as Micky Rosa who is played by Kevin Spacey. The movie is based on a best seller called ‘Bringing Down the House’ by Ben Mezrich.

The movie was very fun. It had interesting characters, an interesting plot. The fact that it was based on a real story made it even better. The movie had exciting moments, funny moments, and the end was satisfying.

One thing that did irk me was the fact that the main character, who was really Asian is portrayed by a white guy. In fact, the MIT Black Jack Team in the book was composed of mostly mixed Asians. In the movie, they added a blond card counter to play opposite the protagonist as his love interest. Have we not progressed at all that we can’t have an Asian male lead?

What was great about this experience was that there was a Q&A after the show. The director, the author, the lead character, and the person whose story the movie was based on were all there to talk about their experiences and answer questions. I liked the movie so much, I took my wife to see it in the theaters when it finally came out.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Japanese company Cyberdyne is developing a robotic exoskeleton. It’s able to augment the wearer’s strength 10-fold. They’ll crank out 500 of these robotic suits by October. I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool.” Until I realized, “Wasn’t the company in the Terminator movies also called Cyberdyne?” Why the heck would you name your company Cyberdyne if you were developing robots. Talk about foreshadowing. I guess now we’ll have to go through all the Sarah Connors in the phone book and protect them before Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill her. Or we could just blow up Cyberdyne right now and save humanity. LOL

Popularity: 6% [?]