James Lockman's Blog

My oldest son, Arthur, is participating on the programming team, and I have become the rules maven. I get to read and interpret the rules for the team. The rules have revisions as a result of inquiries from teams after the rules are released, so I get to keep on top of these as they become available.

The competition isn't just about building a robot, though. It's about working together to solve a technical problem, then taking that solution to the competition. During the competition, the team must now solve the competitive problem through cooperation with other teams, an idea I find fascinating. Founder Dean Kamen has made it clear that competition and cooperation are fundamental to success in this program. Having some life experience behind me, I can say that this ideal is used in business on a daily basis. Traditional sports often celebrate individual achievement. In First Robotics, a competent robot that isn't a team player will be left behind very quickly.

Teams must form alliances that capitalize on the strengths of each robot. Robots are designed with specific functions in mind: they could be defenders, scoring assistants, or scoring specialists. They can also be generalists that can play anywhere on the field, but, as in real industrial design, that kind of robot is often difficult to build.

The arena is divided into three areas separated by a carpeted hump. The humps have tunnels in them, though, that short robots can pass through. The game involves putting balls into goals, much like soccer. The balls, once scored, must be returned to the playing field by a human player. During the game, balls must move from the area furthest from the goal to the goal, and must travel across the humps. Carrying isn't allowed, so the robots must kick!

There are also big targets over the goals, and the robots have "eyes," in the form of video cameras that interface with the control software. AJ, on the software team, is learning a lot about control systems and also about pattern recognition. Another interesting part of the competition is that during the first 15 seconds of each match, the robots must operate without human drivers. The software team has some pretty interesting challenges, between vision processing, automated operation, and controlling the rest of the normal motion, kicking, and other tasks.

Take a look at the game concept video provided by First for a better idea of how the game works.

I can't say what strategy Northern Force will take this year, as I haven't been to any of the design sessions. I do know, though, that they have been hard at work on this year's challenge.

I do not find it hard to believe that everyone needs a copy of Bridge, and I've been asking for it since it first got detached from the Photoshop File Browser. Bridge SHOULD be available as a standalone product. I do not believe that it should be free, however. Perhaps it should be included with the solo point products, or perhaps as a standalone for $49 or $99 or $199; that's for smarter people than me to decide! Now, Bridge is available with Photoshop Elements, so savvy folks will agree that Adobe would be hard pressed to set a price above $99, the list price for Photoshop Elements.

Unfortunately, we, the consultants on the ground and sales folks I support, have a hard enough time getting customers to stay within two versions of current with Creative Suite. Ask the InDesign Secrets folks how many classes they still run for CS2 to CS3 migration, or how many classes they run for InDesign CS! I frequently get requests for help in old, deprecated versions of CS apps.

I have customers in many verticals, but let's look at the ad agency space. Believe it or not, every agency isn't particularly flush with cash. That having been said, I am asked to work within a mixture of Creative Suite versions and also a mishmash of point products. Also, I find that many agencies are part of larger holding companies that have no standardization for their graphics tools, but they do have standardization for operating systems and Office apps. This means that although ABC agency may have K4, and XYZ agency may have Bridge, and JKL agency may have XINET, they are all owned by QRS holding company which holds the purse strings for all of them. Now, another thing to know about agencies is that they are often representing competing brands. In Pharma, one holding company may represent competing smoking cessation drugs, and the two product teams are not allowed to interact. The business firewalls that exist between the agencies also extend to workflows. Also, tool and workflows are often dictated by the client. If a client is using InDesign CS or even QuarkXPress 4 to create and edit collateral, there's no chance that CS4 is making its way to the agency, despite how much better it is for productivity and product quality.

Bridge, though, is a tool that can work across versions and across platforms, and introduce customers to some of the efficiencies of the latest version of CS. If Bridge were installed, for instance, it will allow files to be opened easily in the apps we want, not the ones the OS demands. It will provide an interface to XMP, and super-duper image and file previews, image comp PDF sheet generation, photobook web site creation, and more. Editors and copywriters need to add metadata to photos and other files, but they don't want to browse to a CMS/DMS web site, login to the site, search for images, and then tag them. They need add story tags, content id numbers, cost centers, and a whole host of other contextual information to these assets. Bridge simplifies this whole process and makes it accessible to everyone.

Depending on a CMS/DMS to take up the slack in XMP/EXIF workflows is not practical, since these systems aren't even close universally deployed. I work for some very large agencies with very, very large customers, and many of them rely on basic folder structures on a shared file system for content management. Naming convention is the version control method, and duplicate files per project is the norm. Enabling Bridge outside of the creative department would expose more people within those companies to the power of XMP, and perhaps allow the creative departments more flexibility to upgrade. If XMP is important to Adobe, and the Omniture acquisition tells me that metadata and activities around metadata are very, very high on Adobe's list right now, then universal Bridge deployment should be just as high. Waiting for operating systems to catch up (at least Vista and Wondows 7 can interact with XMP and MacOS can display EXIF info) will be counterproductive to this goal.

The utility of Bridge should be seen as the teaser to get folks to deploy the latest version of Creative Suite rather than a benefit of the latest version of Creative Suite. Universal Bridge deployment would increase adoption of Creative Suite and, by extension, improve Adobe's bottom line.

Also, on a Windows XP virtual machine, Parallels Tools won't install if I allow the VM to have access to both cores on the laptop, so I have to set the number of CPUs to 1 in order to install Parallels Tools on the Windows XP VM, then set it back to 2. Not as bad as the MacOS VM, though.

An update was released on the 15th of January, which I installed. Unfortunately, the Parallels Tools install issue isn't resolved for either VM.

Installation is easy; simply create a new virtual machine and insert the MacOSX Server install disk. Parallels 5 detects the OS, configures the VM appropriately, and boots into the Server Installer. After installing and configuring the Server OS, I installed the Parallels tools and ran Software Update a couple of times to bring the Server OS up to 10.5.8.

The only thing that's disconcerting is that Parallels believed that Parallels Tools hadn't been installed on the Guest OS. I ran the Parallels Tools installer one more time after all of the OS updates had been applied, and it seems to have "stuck."

Thanks again, Parallels, for making it easier to do more with less.

Citing a declining market (that means that the number of print shops around the world is dwindling) and increasing overhead costs, Adobe is recommending that members join PIA or a local PIA affiliate, where they can enjoy some of the benefits of the Adobe program, but not the direct line to technical support, which was a huge benefit for many companies. My companies have been members of the Adobe program for 10 years or more, and I am sorry to see it go.

If the oil in the Temple could burn 8 days, why can't mine burn two?