Photos. Galleries.

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

Behind the curve…as usual

Last year, mainstream media was all abuzz about Second Life (kinda like how they’re all on the Twitter bandwagon now). I looked at it a bit, but wasn’t overly impressed and didn’t join. The hype made it sound like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” however, Second Life’s graphics didn’t match the Metaverse as it appeared in my imagination. Still, the social, economic, and cultural aspect of Second life is similar.

Technology is as prone to fads as anything else, maybe even more so. There are the early adopters, usually a motley crew of people who put up with higher prices and/or poor service because they are part of something special. Then inevitably, word gets out. The number of users climbs, the media catches on, and rapid growth ensues. Good for businesses, though it may put off the early adopters (remembering the legions of AOL users unleashed on the web.) Then comes the plateau. Anyone who thought it was worthwhile, already staked their claim, and there are few if any new users to be had. Bad for businesses that expected astronomical growth, but things more or less stabilize. Sooner or later the cycle declines. The test of a fad is how quickly and deeply something declines after the plateau. A good business can keep the plateau going for a long time, or can stem the decline so it doesn’t fall too far. Many people have studied this phenomenon. Some companies, like Apple, exploit it by offering new products when old ones near the end of the cycle.

Taking classes for the MA, I’ve been more-and-more interested in using technology as a teaching tool. Using computers, projectors, and PowerPoint is interesting, but it’s just an evolution of the classroom. It may have changed how teachers prepare for lectures, but lectures are still lectures. However, the net changed things.

The past few weeks, I’ve been reading journal articles on teaching writing online. That is, using the net as a classroom to teach people how to write. Someone else in class came up with articles that looked at virtual classrooms in Second Life, so I decided to take another look at it.

Since I haven’t been on Second Life before, there’s a learning curve. I’ve figured out what a slurl is, even if I don’t know how to set one up (don’t need to use it at the moment). The default avatars are low-resolution, but this probably saves bandwidth and processing time. Wandering around in SL initially, I was amazed by some of the architecture. Sure, they’re clunky looking, too, but people obviously spent a lot of time on some of the buildings. However, the most amazing thing is Second Life was virtually deserted. I think some places are probably more popular than others, but I went to some places that were vacant. I went to one place that had a miniature-train that avatars could drive or ride, so I drove it around a nicely laid out course and only saw one other avatar, and that one appeared to be reading a book. I went into stores that were empty, except for goods (freebies are nice, BTW). My main impression of SL is that it’s a digital ghost town. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for having an amusement park to yourself ;-)

At the moment, I still have a lot to learn about Second Life, so I don’t know if it’s worthwhile or not. The plan is to learn a bit more about it and some of the places therein. Before long, I’ll try to do some 3D work and upload something, mainly because the default avatar makes me out to be a n00b. I want to give my avatar a Hawaiian shirt, some khakis, and a receding hairline. At some point, I may check out other classrooms or schools and see what they do and how they do it.

I put up a new category for Second Life, because I anticipate blogging about SL and related issues (3D, education, OpenSim, OSgrid) as I learn more about them.

I is a prfessinal

A few years ago, I posted some 3D models of mine to TurboSquid. While they take a cut, they pay every so often. However, my stuff has sold so infrequently I never got paid, because it was the amount was too small to make it worthwhile cutting a check. On Friday, I got my first check from TurboSquid.

For sales going back to 2006, I got paid a whopping $26.50. I get to set the price of my models, which aren’t that expensive, but it since the selection I have to offer is fairly small, it takes awhile to sell stuff. However, now that I’ve been paid, I guess that makes me a professional 3D modeller.

Coincidentally, perhaps serendipitously, a week ago I bought a Cintiq. I bought a regular tablet a month ago, and after I bought it I started reading about the Cintiq, which I had never heard of before. After a lot of thought back and forth, I broke down and bought one. Started doing some basic work with it this weekend, and was amazed at how good it works. Drawing with it in Photoshop worked great, though I probably didn’t tax Photoshop’s capabilities. However, zooming in or out a few times led to a delayed refresh, so it took the screen a few seconds to catch up with where I was. I’ll be working with t some more this week, between studying, work, and classes.

Time keeps on slipping

I need to study more. Today we had an oral exam in French, while we had a regular exam last week. While we were on break in class this week the teacher handed out our graded exams from last week, and I am a bit disappointed in myself. I got a 79. Since I missed a week where we started a new chapter, I missed some information, but I thought I had it covered by reading the pages that were covered. To my thinking the grade is a high C or a low B, but it reminds me that I should have spent more time studying.

This week was probably slightly better. For one part we just had to read/record a short poem in French and we were given the text we had to read. For the next section, we had were paired up with another student and we had to have a short conversation in French. We were given English instructions for what the conversation was supposed to cover, e.g. “Find out the last time he/she went out.” One student asked questions while the other student answered. We can write out our questions and answers ahead of time, but we cannot have them in front of us when we are doing the recording (it’s a computerized language lab). Though it’s not too surprising, I had a hard time remembering what I came up with, and I also suck at spontaneous conversation in French. I do okay writing it out, as long as I have a book in front of me so I can check my work, but speaking French spontaneously is something I have to work on.

In Second Language Acquisition last semester, there was a lengthy discussion (that kept popping up throughout) about using the L1 in the L2 classroom. At early levels it is needed, but at some point it becomes a crutch for the student. In the second semester of Beginning French we are to the point where we should be able to have some simple conversations, but have problems expressing ourselves because we still don’t have a large vocabulary and don’t know all of the rules of grammar. I need to hit the books a bit harder.

Also, since I got Poser last week, it has proven to be big time waster. I was never very interested in gaming, but I think this is a similar situation. To create props, clothes, morphs, etc for Poser, you have to export the model from Poser as a generic file (I used .obj) and import it in a different 3D editing program. I used Blender in this case. Surprisingly, even for a speedy computer like my Mac, Blender takes a long time to import .obj files – like 1/2 hour or more. Once it is imported, I save the file as a .blend file so it will load quicker next time.

After the post about battery life, I found myself making sticky notes with the time I unplugged the laptops to see how long it takes for the error messages to pop up. I also started doing that with Blender importing .obj files. I thought it was strange that I did that, because it seems a bit anal in retrospect. Although if I actually compiled the data in a spreadsheet and graphed the data, that would be a bit too much, so I guess I’m okay for now.

Apple tart

I’ve had the MacBook Pro for over a month now and since I have more experience with it, it’s probably ime for a progress report or something. As an aside, I keep wanting to call it a Powerbook because it reminds me of the Apple G4-era Powerbooks from a few years ago.

Typing still sucks. I’m not sure why, but I must hit some keys lighter then others when typing and the letters don’t show up. On other computers I get a lot of typos from pressing the adjacent keys, but with the MacBook the problem is random letters are missing because I didn’t press a given key hard enough. Also, Apple advertised it as having a full-sized keyboard, but they probably meant a full-sized laptop keyboard. I’ll talk about that more in a bit.

Horsepower. For most of the past month I’ve used the computer mainly for listening to music and watching DVDs. Hardly taxing for a capable machine, so I decided to put the CPU to use and installed the BOINC client for SETI. A few years ago SETI had the SETI@home project which harnessed the collective CPU power of the machines with clients installed. It was a well-known example of distributed computing. However, some people felt the idea of looking for aliens was idiotic and came up with their own distributed computing clients that worked at protein folding or gene mapping, with the hope of finding a cure for some disease. Eventually BOINC came about as a standardized client for these projects, so a person only needs to install the BOINC client, then they can choose between dozens of different projects for their computers to work on. Since I work with a lot of computers that often it idle, I installed clients on them too, but the MacBook is second fastest of them, following a quad-core Xeon server.

Sound and video are great. For a laptop, the speakers are surprisingly good, while the screen has higher resolution than my Linux PC at home. The screens at work aren’t worth mentioning. The screen is capable of HD, but the DVD will only play regular DVDs, not HD-DVD or Blu-ray. I don’t know if they can be bought as external peripherals.

The battery life doesn’t seem that good. I have Dell D630 laptop at work that was bought in September. The Dell has a smaller screen, but it also has a Centrino Duo CPU as opposed to the Core2 Duo in the Apple. Overall, they are about the same though, with only minor differences, IMHO. With both of the fully charged, I unplugged both at the same time. The Dell lasted 56 minutes before the warning LED came on and an error message popped up. The MacBook lasted 71 minutes before an error message popped up. To be fair though, I should have waited until each shut off from lack of power. I had a previous laptop that would keep goin 30 minutes after it showed a similar error message.

I said in a previous post that the Mac seems pretty worthless for web development and I stand by that for now. For the way I do web development work (i.e. with a text editor) Linux is far better. Plus, the tools in Linux are free.

I recently bought Poser after not using it for years – they don’t make a Linux version. I’m trying to rebuild a rusty skill set there. I used Poser 3 or 4 years ago and now they are on Poser 7, which came out last year. It also seems like it’s changed hands a lot over the past several years. It almost seems as if every time they come out with a new version, the company gets sold. Some company called e-frontier developed Poser 7, then the company got bought by Smith Micro for something like 6 million dollars last autumn. Sounds like a drop in the bucket for Silicon Valley prices. Poser and the Mac seem to go well together, though it helps to have a two-button mouse attached rather than using the trackpad with one button. Also, I’ve only had Poser for a few days, so the impression may change later.

It’s so-so for Blender. Using Blender it best to use one hand for the mouse and one hand for the keyboard, because Blender has a lot of hot keys or key sequences that control actions. One of the biggest reasons for using the keyboard is to use the number pad to go between alternate views, but the MacBook, with it’s full-sized laptop keyboard, the number pad is an alternate function of the main keypad. This is common with laptops, but it makes using Blender very difficult. I’ll probably try plugging in a full-sized USB keyboard and see how that works.

So far so good, but after a month I’m only giving it 3.5 of 5 stars (I’m a tough grader), because it seems mostly average.

This better be good

I’ve been on one of my Blender kicks lately. Part of it is because I am teaching myself Yafray and part of it is so I can build up my online portfolio/store. Since a couple of the projects I’m working on require glass blocks, I figured I would model them in Blender. I should have remembered one thing from the last time I made glass blocks – the render time.

I made a glass block this weekend and was rendering it with Yafray, but not having much luck. Sometimes if I am staying up late I will set Blender to render a big image overnight, since it takes longer to render a larger image. I had been doing 640 x 480 images, which were taking an hour or two two render. They weren’t necessarily compex, but I only have a 750 MHz AMD Duron and about 750 MB of RAM, so it’s not the speediest PC in the world.

On Sunday evening, I was getting ready for bed, so I set Blender/Yafray to render a 1280 x 1024 image. However, with the previous images, I kept getting rendering artifacts. I read that one way to make it a better render was to increase the Ray Depth. The default was 5, but I set it to 10. It was about 12:00 am on Monday when I set it to render, figuring it would be done by the time I woke up. It wasn’t, but then I thought it might be done by the time I got back from work. It wasn’t done then either. In fact, it has been rendering now for 46 hours and shows no sign of finishing up. That’s one of the frustrating things about Blender and/or Yafray is that there is no progress indicator. It’s frustrating because I don’t know if the render is 90% done or 10% done. The only option with that would be to leave it on that desktop at all times (Linux/Unix = multiple desktops), but the screensaver will kick in before it shows any progress. I’m pretty sure no other renderers have progress indicators either. So I’m going to leave it on again tonight while I sleep and hope it is done when I wake up. All I know about it is it had better be a very good render, or I’m going to be disappointed.

Faster and more intense

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith came out today, and while I wasn’t one of the die hard souls to see it at 12:01 am, I got done with work early and saw it.

If you have problems with spoilers, profanity, randomness, or spelling errors, then I suggest you avert your eyes. Otherwise, feel free to click for (more…)

Blender 2.35 is out

The latest Blender is out and can be downloaded here.

I’ve been back on a Blender kick and have started doing some more modelling. Currently, I am making a loft apartment with all of the details. Here is a good shot of where I am at the moment. That image took over four hours to render. All those glass blocks are what killed the time. Anyway, that picture shows the closet (with the door), an opening to the outside hallway to the right of the closet, an entryway to the kitchen to the left of the closet, and the bathroom behind all of the glass blocks. Now that the basic model is set up, I am adding the details. Here is a shot of the bathtub. At the moment, it is the only thing in the bathroom, but I think it looks pretty nice. The details are a bit tedious, but in the end, I think they are worthwhile.

Speaking of details, I recently found a site called Turbosquid, which sells thousands of 3d models and which are avilable for immediate download. What caught my attention was the fact that some of those models cost a good chunk of change. It has me thinking about possibly posting some of my models for download. People put up their models for download, and Turbosquid takes a 50% cut of the price for their services. I haven’t decided if that is a good deal yet or not. It is an interesting idea, though.

Back into Slackware again

First off, it’s pretty hot out there. Of course it doesn’t help that I was wearing a dark grey long sleeve shirt outside, but I’m expected to dress nice for work.

I got Slackware 10.0 up and running on my computer, and I got the network going, so I must be doing okay. I got it to recognize my scroll mouse and I downloaded the current nVidia driver, but I haven’t edited the xorg.conf file except for the part about the mouse. I’ll have to edit it to recognize my JP106 Japanese keyboard and to get it to use the nVidia driver so I can run Blender, which needs GLX/OpenGL to run. I’m slowly moving stuff from the hdb to hda. When I have most of the essential stuff on hda, I will probably fdisk (format) hdb and just use it to hold Blender and/or music files.

I keep toying with the idea of getting new stuff for my PC, but I want more stuff than I can afford. I will probably buy things one or two at a time. What I want/need is a DVD-RW, a flash media card reader (with USB), a new processor, more memory, speakers, a better graphics card, etc. I was looking at graphics cards today and noticed one of them required a hard drive power cable!!! That must do some serious computing if it requires more power than what it gets through the motherboard.

Shoulda known better

I should have known better. I was fooling around in Blender 2.33 for a little bit while slackupdate was installing the files. Not often, but occassionally, Blender 2.33 will freeze up while doing a render on my machine. I thought it was only on complex models, but I guess it happens on simple models too, because that’s what happended last night. When that happens, any interaction with the machine is impossible. I can’t ALT-TAB, or change desktops (it’s a Unix thing), or even CTRL-ALT-ESC (*nix version of CTRL-ALT-DEL). I even tried to CTRL-ALT-BKSP, which is a major *nix key command, but to no avail. So I put on a movie, hoping it would clear up.

After the movie (American Grafitti), the lights on my hub were still going full speed, but the Blender issue was still there. I pondered what to do and ended up hitting the rest button on my PC. In hindsight, it was probably not the best idea. The computer rebooted, and went to LILO, and I found I couldn’t get into Slackware (no surprise), but I couldn’t get into Mandrake either. I have (had) Slackware on a 40MB hard drive (hdb) and Mandrake on a 120MB drive (hda). I don’t really use Mandrake all that much, but I do use the hard drive space (mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda) and voila I have a ton of space. It was handy having Mandrake in case something happened. Since I couldn’t get into Mandrake, I had to try and reinstall either Mandrake or Slackware. I mainly use Slackware on the hdb drive, so at first I decided to try and install Slackware over Mandrake, but that didn’t work due to a corrupt CD-R. So I ended up reinstalling Mandrake on hda.

Mandrake is quite nice, but it is more of a beginner’s Linux. It doesn’t offer the configuration choices I want and expect, where Slackware does. Mandrake does a good job of setting up the network and recognizing my video hardware, but doesn’t recognize my Japanese 106 key keyboard. Anyway, I got Mandrake setup and proceeded to download Slackware 10.0 ISOs, which I just finished burning and will install shortly.

If I don’t come back in three days, send a search party ;-)