Some Updates for the Holidays
Posted on December 19, 2003
I will be leaving Indianapolis tomorrow for Colorado, where I will spend the next couple of weeks with family. So right now I’m procrastinating on packing by installing Linux Mandrake on my ancient IBM PII 300Mhz notebook. Earlier today, I realized that I usually do some projects (mainly to do with the website) over the Christmas break. Since I will be out of town, away from my PC, and probably away from any computer, I decided to bring my laptop with me so I can do some work, although it ay have more to do with the new Blender, and less to do with the website.
Yesterday, I created a tutorial on creating a simple armature in Blender. An armature is one of the ways to make things move in Blender, but figuring out how to set one up was a bit of a pain, so I created the tutorial to remind me how to do it if I forget, and help others who might have a similar problem.
Speaking of Blender, they have a new version out 2.31a, which includes a raytracing renderer. One of Blender’s shortcomings was the lack of the ability to realistically render transparent objects, like water or glass. This new feature takes care of that. It also adds to Blender’s ability to render reflections. Previously, reflections required creating a “reflection map” for an object. The raytracing does it automatically. The downside is that using the raytracer adds quite a bit to the render time. In the article announcing the raytracing feature, Ton Roosendal (Blender’s creator) said this, “The algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that’s fourty times faster than in the early 1990′s and raytracing is almost usable.” When Mandrake is finished installing on my laptop, I plan on installing it, even though the processor is the flower of 1997 (?) technology. I did create a very simple image on my PC to test it out, and was somewhat impressed. I just did a glass sphere over a marble plane. Nothing fancy, but the plane did reflect off of the sphere.
Well, Mandrake is about done istaling, so I guess that is my cue to get off my ass and start packing.
More changes
Posted on December 14, 2003
As I said here, the site is undergoing some changes. The gallery, downloads, and forums are all back, and in subdomain format.I have most of the site the way I want it, but I will be working on “unified” look of sorts, so I still have to do some work on making the gallery, etc look like they are integrated into the site, not just add ons. I did make some cool icons for use in the forums, but I haven’t set them up yet.
One of the things that was frustrating me to no end in setting up the look for the site was the tables. WordPress, like b2 before it, had a layout that just didn’t work for me. So I set up tables on the pages. While trying to get the site XHTML compliant, I ran it through a validator and got some useful tips, but I don’t think I will ever get it 100% compliant, so I decided not to worry about it. Part of it has to do with the PHP, while part of it has to do with the validator wanting stuff done with CSS.
For example, on tables, the WIDTH tag is deprecated. Width is now supposed to be done with CSS. Digging a little deeper, I found out CSS2 supports table creation. I thought that was cool. I Googled around for CSS2 coding stuff and found out how to do tables. As an experiment, I tried it on a few pages on this site. The strange thing was if I did the same thing to two pages, I would be able to get it to work on one page and not the other. The formatting would be all screwed up. You can’t (at least I couldn’t) specify the width and height of an individual cell, with out affecting all of the other cells in the same row or column. So I went back to using the semi-old way and used the DIV tag and stopped worrying about XHTML validity. While it is certainly less stressful, and the site looks nice in Mozilla Firebird and IE, it looks jacked up in Konqueror. Oh well, the work never stops, I guess :-P
Lemme tell ya about shoes
Posted on December 7, 2003
While I might not be an expert on everything relating to shoes, I am more likely than the average person to wear out my shoes. You see, I walk…a lot. I don’t own a car, so I walk everywhere. I walk to go shopping. I walk to work. Through rain, sleet, and snow, nothing will keep me from walking if I have the need to go somewhere. It’s this last part that told me I needed to buy some new shoes.
I was walking to work the other day, when it was raining. The rain wasn’t bad, but the ground was fairly wet. On the way in, I felt my right foot slowly getting damp. I had tried to stay out of the puddles, but that didn’t stop it from getting wet. The left foot was fine. I get to work, and I looked at the sole of the right shoes, and sure enough, there was a small gash about where I felt my foot first start to get wet. I had been debating on getting new work shoes for about a month now, this just sealed the idea for me. I try to buy shoes that have thick rubber soles, and they usually last about 6 – 9 months. I bought the Doc Marten’s I had been wearing last March, after a snowstorm. I had been browsing online, debating the merits of buying shoes online, but in the end I decided to go to the Nordstrom’s in the Circle Center Mall. Surprisingly, I found a pair of shoes that I had seen online. They are made by Kenneth Cole Reaction, which I guess is supposed to be a more hip and trendy version of the regular Kenneth Cole line. The shoes I bought cost $120, which is typical for when I buy shoes for work. There was a pair of similar looking shoes in the regular Kenneth Cole lineup, and they were on sale for $100, but the tread pattern on the soles wasn’t very aggressive, which is something I need since, you know…I walk a lot.
I had the guy at the store get rid of my old shoes, and walked right out with a new set of shoes on my feet. Overall, they feel pretty good. Every time I buy new shoes, there is a few weeks to over a month where it takes my feet to get used to the new shoes. Inevitably, I end up getting blisters and callouses in new and different places. This is because every pair of shoes fits a bit differently. They grab hold of the foot in diffrent places, and they also chafe in different places. Today, I went to the coffee shop wearing my new shoes, and now I have a new pair of blisters on my Achilles heel to match the new pair of shoes. A few more weeks and I won’t notice them.
Welcome to WordPress
Posted on December 6, 2003
It’s a start anyway…
Gottahavacuppamocha is now officially running on WordPress version 0.7.2. There is still a long way to go, but to use a cliche – every journey begins with a single step.
Alright, enough chit-chat. Back to work.
——————————————–
Time for an update before I hit the sack:
I have a new logo that just sits in the corner above the menu. The menu itself has moved to the left hand side, plus it got a lot shorter thanks to making things like archives, etc go on their own pages. The overall look is pretty much confined to the front page for the moment. I still have to apply the basic template to the other pages, but I wanted to get it setup right on the homepage first (well, I did a little work on the login page). I still have to setup the downloads and the gallery, but those will wait til tomorrow/today – after I wake up.
Updated Gallery
Posted on December 6, 2003
I just updated the Gallery software after having some problems with the configuration of the old one. I did run into some problems, however. I would be at the main gallery page, and when I tried to go into an individual album, it would give me a 404 error. Luckily, a quick perusal of the Gallery FAQ led me to the right spot…just changing the configuration setting from 1 to 0 on mod_rewrite, or something like that. Now the Gallery works.
The new version has skins that come with it. It is nice that they are thre, but the ones they have are horrible :-P I will probably take the time this weekend to update the site, which is something I have been meaning to do for a few months. B2 is more or less no more, so I plan on moving to WordPress, which is the successor. If the site is down (like anyone will notice), that will probably be the reason.
UPDATE: The cleaning has begun. I have started going through the website and archiving all of the old stuff, and started work on the “renovation”. With any luck, I will be able to keep the site up with very little interruption. It will start with the main page and work on over to the different parts of the site. In addition to downloads, gallery, etc, I am also considering stats, forums, and a calendar. At any rate, keep checking back.
The Epiphany with Sodipodi
Posted on December 4, 2003
Okay, Sodipodi isn’t actually a 3d program, as the story category might suggest, but the image I created below was based on an idea I had for Blender/MakeHuman…and it has the Blender logo.
I have this idea for a surfer girl, and since I want to make it in Blender, I figured I would give her bathing suit the appropriate logo. Now in the past, when I designed clothes (I have a bachelor’s degree in Apparel Design and Production), I would create the technical drawing with the Adobe Illustrator 7 Academic Edition. Now that I am out of school, and running Linux, I can’t use this because Adobe is for Windows only (I believe they stopped making Mac versions) and even if they had it for linux, I doubt I could afford it.
There are a few programs out vector-based drawing programs out there for Linux, and in my experience, most of them are fairly lacking. While I don’t necessarily expect an Open Source program to have the functionality of Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw (vector-based drawing programs for Windows), I do a certain amount of functionality. I have tried xfig, Kontour (a/k/a KIllustrator), Figurine, and Sodipodi. All of them have given me a large amount of frustration, but I kept in mind that I had a long hard battle learning Adobe Illustrator as well. In keeping with the idea of coming up with technical drawings for garments in a vector-based program (I can’t fathom trying to do it in the GiMP), I decided to give Sodipodi another try.
I don’t know what happened, but last night it all more or less clicked into place. I was able to make the drawing in a few hours. It wasn’t without problems, but the ones that arose, I was able to work through fairly well. One of the things Sodipodi has going for it is that uses the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format, which is an international standard like JPG. It will also export to the raster-based PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format, which is also an international standard. The image above is the PNG file, which can also handle transparency, as above.
Of course, Sodipodi has some faults, too. I am using Sodipodi 0.32, so maybe some newer versions will have more functionality. Anyway, one thing that I find a minor annoyance is that it can only export to PNG, and not JPG. I like PNG, but JPG is more common (though lacking some functionality). Today, I just tried to print this image out, and it popped up a little window asking if I wanted to print by pixel or by page, and then Sodipodi crashed and died. At first I thought I maybe hit the wrong selection, or the wrong button, but I tried it a few times with the same result. I ended up using the GiMP to print it out (note: use the “Line Art” setting, not the “Photo” setting). Another shortcoming IMHO, is the lack of a layer control tool. You can move selections to the front, to the back, etc, so it acts as if layers are there, but there is no separate window to lock certain layers or hide them from view. This is something I used fairly often in Illustrator, and I still use in the GiMP, and even Blender. Another thing, that I can’t remember if it was an issue in Illustrator or not, is the eyedropper tool doesn’t seem to want to work when objects are “grouped” together. What I did for the image above was just memorize the RGB settings for each color. More complex images though, might require writing down the settings. All of these problems are more annoyances than anything. I can work through them at the moment, but it is still nice not to be bothered by them.
Overall, I think I am going to like Sodipodi. It was nice to be able to do some designing again, and I know I will end up doing more. It might be nice to put a new section in the gallery/porfolio section of my website. Maybe I’ll convert some of those old sketches from school and put them in the portfolio. We’ll see. I would put this image up, but at the moment, Gallery is giving me fits, saying it can’t find ImageMagick on the server, which is needed to turn the huge images into thumbnails. I’ll play around with it a bit to see if I can get it working.
