Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird, that a company that makes a good deal of money by selling software for creating web stuff, seems to have no clue on how to maintain their own pages? I mean, we all know that it’s a colorful patchwork of thrown together sub-systems and most of us by now probably have accepted the slowness of the forums, the dysfunctionalities of the knowledge base (I truly do understand the frustration of users there when moderating their comments; it’s just a bloody mess) and even the ugliness of the store, but now even their blogs don’t work properly anymore. Maybe switching to the bitch that is WordPress wasn’t that good an idea, after all? At least the main landing page hasn’t updated properly for several days now. *yikes* That is one of the reasons, why I’m posting that little bit of info here or else you probably wouldn’t find it: Head master of all things After Effects doc, Todd Kopriva, has updated the foreign language versions of the online help to reflect some of the CS5 goodness that English users already have. And really, Adobe, when you can spend 185 millions on gobbling up another web company, clearly you must have those few thousand bucks to hire a WordPress expert to keep your blogs straight, don’t you?

Mmh, this second day doesn’t really offer any exciting news, but I’ve got to write something, so let’s see what we have. First, SideFX now officially presented Houdini 11. Considering that they had an announcement already almost 2 months ago, the Wow-factor isn’t that great. I also wasn’t particularly convinced by their sample videos, but then again those may have been rushed and not show the full potential.

Another, perhaps more relevant news (for the future at least) is the release of some specs for Alembic. Could be interesting, if it really can replace the various deformation, particle and point caching methods and formats used in different 3D apps, but that may be a while. At least they seem to have some good ideas on how to avoid point/ vertex list bottlenecks (the inefficiency of relevant sorting algorithms being a major reason, why many 3D apps eventually will still be slow as molasses when those lists need to be reorganized).