Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" and Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" for processing and rendering graphical data.

Quartz Composer uses OpenGL (including GLSL), Core Image, Core Video, JavaScript, and other technologies to build an API and a developer tool around a simple visual programming paradigm. Apple has embedded Quartz technologies deeply into the operating system. Compositions created in Quartz Composer can be played standalone in any QuickTime-aware application^[1] (although only on Mac OS X 10.4 and later), as a system Screen Saver^[2], from inside the Quartz Composer application, or can be embedded into a Cocoa or Carbon application via supplied user interface widgets. Because Quartz Composer makes extensive use of hardware acceleration and pixel shaders, it is recommended to have a recent graphics card with at least 32MB of VRAM^[3].

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The "ideas" or "cognitions" in question may include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one's behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.^[1] Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology

Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people's ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they are categorized as irrelevant to each other and do not lead to dissonance.

A powerful cause of dissonance is when an idea conflicts with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as "I am a good person" or "I made the right decision." This can lead to rationalization when a person is presented with evidence of a bad choice. It can also lead to confirmation bias, the denial of disconfirming evidence, and other ego defense mechanisms.

Introduction

SvnMerge enables you to track which changes on another branch have been merged into your current working branch. This means that you won’t accidentally merge the same change twice. SvnMerge isn’t a trivial tool to use, so we’ll need to discuss how we are using it, and define some terminology.

Feature Branch: A branch that you are merging changes FROM. There can be more than one Feature Branch, gathering up features from multiple developers.

Target Branch: The branch that you are merging changes TO. There is generally only ONE Target Branch.

In this article, we are going to discuss how to use SvnMerge to track changes on one or more Feature Branches, into a single Target Branch. It is also possible to merge your Target ...

As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software.  (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.)  At the 2008 ECCC this past Saturday, a vendor wanted to offload his entire PC stock on me for $5, which I happily accepted since there was at least one title in there (Martian Memorandum) worth that much.  When I got home, however, I found two additional Avantage (Accolade’s budget publishing title) titles that have not yet been released “into the wild”.  This means there are no copies of these games floating around on Abandonware sites.  For me, this was like finding actual gold nuggets in a collection of Pyrite.

The two games I got were Mental Blocks and ...

In the situationist thought, a Dérive is a concept meaning an aimless walk, most often through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment. It is usually translated as a drift.

French writer and Situationist Guy Debord used this idea to try and convince readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. Rather than being prisoners to their daily route and routine, living in a complex city but treading the same path every day, he urged people to follow their emotions and to look at urban situations in a radical new way. This led to the notion that most of our cities were so thoroughly unpleasant because they were designed in a way that either ignored their emotional impact on people, or indeed tried to control people through their very design. The basic premise of the idea is for people to explore their environment ("psychogeography") without preconceptions, to understand their location, and therefore their existence.