Kurt Grandis

ALT Summit Debrief

May 29, 2008 – 11:11 pm
The North Carolina Advanced Learning Technologies Association (NC ALTA) did a great job organizing the first Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) Summit, which aimed to bring industry and though leaders together to discuss the state and future of advanced learning technologies. Some time has passed now, but I wanted to mention the summit and some of the highlights. Something Big is a Brewing I think NC ALTA has really started a powerful ball rolling by creating a common focus on which a number of industries and research disciplines are beginning to converge. To demonstrate this let me list areas represented by the some of the people I encountered at the conference: Game engine developers Serious game developers Developers of virtual worlds including frameworks like Second Life or Croquet. This also includes the corporate facet aimed at facilitating remote work and collaboration via a virtualized workplace. Researchers dealing with immersive visualizations and virtual experiences. This includes some of ...

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Fair Well Gentoo…

April 9, 2008 – 11:20 pm
I get the feeling I am bit late to the party. It looks like the Gentoo exodus probably began sometime after Daniel Robbins stepped down as chief architect and things slowly began to crumble. I stuck it out over the years hoping that things would get better and the distro would return to its glory days. My Gentoo boxes slowly started getting less and less attention due to fears that an upgrade might break something. In its prime Gentoo's portage system was awesome: it picked up sprawling webs of dependencies and cleaned up after itself like a champ. And the packages were optimized for my hardware; I know I squeezed every last drop of compute power out of those machines. I experienced XEyes as it was meant to be run. Need to upgrade KDE? just emerge it and take a walk trip. Want to upgrade KDE and use your processor for ...

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DGXPO 2008: Game Developers’ Conference in the Triangle

April 2, 2008 – 11:14 pm
The Triangle has a big presence in the game development industry. According to Wake County we have over 30 video game companies in the area. That count includes the three big developers of game engines: Epic (Unreal Engine), Vicious Cycle (Vicious Engine), and Emergent Game Technologies (Gamebryo). You have heavy-weights in the area of serious games and simulations like Virtual Heroes. So, why not a game conference? The Digital Game Expo (DGXPO) is a local game development conference hosted by Wake Tech. This is not a massive industry conference with a convention center filled with vendors and game dev shops passing out tsatskes. One of DGXPO's goals is to give aspiring developers and developers from other industries a peek into the game industry. Registration for the expo just opened this week over at http://www.dgxpo.com . It doesn't look like the sessions are posted yet, but there is a list of speakers. Student Work The ...

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