Being the geek that I am I have more projects that I am working on than I can ever hope to finish. Recently I decided to add another one to the list.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve had the itch to get back into 3D Animation. Its been a few years, since college, that I’ve done any animation. So I decided to download Blender and go through some of the tutorials I have. One of the things I have is a Blender 3D Design Course. I was happy when I fired Blender up and I still remembered some of the keyboard shortcuts. I also like some of the new features that have been added since I last used it.
To start off the course it went through a tutorial to model and animate a little submarine.
(sorry wordpress doesn’t like my flash video)
The next lesson was about basic modeling skills. The first tutorial from this lesson was modeling a sofa.
Then it had you apply a texture to it.
The 2nd tutorial was modeling a simple hand.
Then adding an odd texture to it.
The 3rd tutorial in the lesson was modeling a snowman scene. I went a little further than the tutorial did. First this is how they wanted it to look.
I decided the straight black arms, black nose, and circle mouth all looked kinda stupid, so I made mine better.
The next lesson has you animating the snowman scene and I’ve already been thinking about how I’ll make it better than what they show.
All in all I’m having a lot of fun and look forward to learning more about Blender than I have known in the past. I’ll have to dig up my stuff from school and post it.
-Dexter-
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with animation, blender, pictures.
Hello Planet!
So today Herlo noticed that my blog wasn’t on the Utah Open Source Planet and decided to add me. I’ve been meaning to get myself added but thought that I should wait until I started writing more tech-ish content. Well looking at the past things I’ve written most are pretty tech-ish in nature. Guess I’m more of a geek than I thought. So I guess its good that I finally got added to the planet. Except now I might have to get rid of my “nobody reads my blog” shirt…. hmmm. Anyway hope you enjoy it.
-Dexter-
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with UTOSP.
Woot. Server is back up and running. Took a little while longer than I expected but its all good now. Got the server reformatted and new versions of everything installed. Got a little more work to do to get everything how I want it, but that will be able to wait a bit.
Posted in Uncategorized.
So my mom picked up one of those little pumpkin carving kits and my brother and I decided to give it a whirl since we haven’t carved pumpkins in a few years. So I was out running some errands the Saturday before Halloween and decided to swing by to the pumpkin patch to pick a couple up. And being me I got a couple of decently large ones.
The following Sunday we sat down to carve them. My brother went with a pattern from the kit called AI Face. I used one I had found on the internet of the linux mascot tux.
Beginning to carve
Its slimy and gross in there
Yes the tongue helps
Me scraping my pumpkin
My brother doing some carving
My brother getting help from dad
My brother's pumpkin lit up
The way mine turned out
My brothers looked awesome when it was lit up. As you can see on mine I carved out the middle but then scrapped down the feet and beak areas. Scraping a pumpkin, just so you know, is insanely difficult. I ended up using an X-acto knife to help. I was hoping the effect would be something like a glow through the part of the pumpkin that was still there. It kinda worked but not as well as I had hoped. Oh well it still looked cool and was fun to do.
btw. Blogging pics with wordpress is kinda a pain. I need to get gallery2 setup and hooked into this thing.
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with family, halloween, pictures, pumpkins.
So here we are at the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference. I’ve been excited for this over the past few weeks. Got some really nice swag. Got a nice new messenger bag, several t-shirts, a cool little penguin, and other small things. Presentations were been good. Hit up a python one to begin with. Learned some nice beginner python stuff. Then went to a wordpress performance one. Joseph Scott did a good job presenting ideas to speed up a wordpress site. I then went to a SSH Tips and Tricks presentation. Learned some cool stuff about secure tunnels. After that I got roped into the Guru Labs Trouble Shooting Challenge. Only managed to figure out 2 of the 6 questions. Still glad I didn’t go down the sysadmin route. The first day ended with keynotes by Mac Newbold of Code Greene and Paul Frields of Fedora. Mac talked about the benefits of using open source in a business. Paul talked about the Fedora community.
Day 2 started with Chad and I missing the first round of presentations, cause neither of us can get up that early. The first presentation I made it to was Linux Media, Security and Automation which was an interesting talk about setting up your house with security cameras and motion sensors and light dimmers, all controlled by Linux. Unfortunately I thought he spent too much time talking about the costs and the interoperability of the different items, than talking about the hardware and how to set it up and stuff. Next I went to HOWTO: Start an open-source radio station presented by Michael Place of utah.fm. This was a cool talk about what it takes to create an online radio station. It was a surprisingly relatively inexpensive project.
There was then a lunch break followed by that days keynotes. Friday’s keynotes were by Michael Place and Joe Brockmeier. Michael Place is the author of Schlock Mercenary and talked about how he’s making money off of a free comic. He was a great presenter and I’m going to have to add Schlock Mercenary to my reading list. Joe Brockmeier is the project manager for openSUSE and talked about where openSUSE is today and where its going.
Things at the conference got a little out of whack after the keynotes and presentations ended up getting pushed back or something so I spent the next presentation slot hanging out in the exhibiters hall talking to people like mindjuju, fungus, and John Taber. Next I went to the Vim and Python presentation which the presenter didn’t show up for so Kevin Kubasik tried to fill in and was able to talk a little bit about vim but unfortunately I didn’t learn anything new.
After the presentation there was a geek dinner over at Tucanos in The Gateway. There were like 50 some odd geeks and geekettes there. The food was great and the conversations with all the other geeks were interesting. UTOS payed for Brazilian Lemonades for everyone, which were delicious. After the dinner Erik and I managed to catch the last train of the night.
Saturday I started off the day with an Ubuntu keynote. Christer Edwards talked about using Ubuntu in the enterprise. Next up I went to a presentation by Kevin Kubasik on Writing Web Crawlers. The way he was doing web crawlers was quite advanced and way better than the way I used to do it. Then I went to Tools for Video and Images which talked about the various programs for dealing with images and video on Linux. After this we had lunch provided by The Smokehouse.
After lunch there wasn’t any particular presentation that I was intent on going to see and I was quite tired so I called it quits. I went home and promptly crashed on the couch for about 3 hours.
Overall I had a great time at UTOSC this year. Got some nice swag. Learned some new things. I’m looking forward to next years.
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with Conference, Learning, Open Source, Utah, UTOSC.
So previously I was running a terribly old version of Wordpress. (like installed over a year and a half ago old). Problem was I installed it then never really used it. I’d been telling myself recently that I should upgrade it and start using it. But I thought that if I was going to upgrade Wordpress I might as well make some upgrades to my server and the other things on it. But upgrading my server has been something I haven’t gotten motivated to do. I use it so much that pulling it offline just doesn’t sound fun. So recently I decided to just start using my blog.
It’s been bothering me having that old of a version of Wordpress running, but I didn’t feel like going through the pain of figuring out the upgrade. Well this evening I was reading an article on linux.com about the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped but it seems to have gotten the job done.
I installed the plugin then started the process. The plugin stated that it would ask for my “ftp credentials” so it could gain write access, but it never did. I ended up getting permission denied errors 3 or 4 times. I also don’t think it even completed the last couple of steps it was supposed to take.
After the upgrade I went to view the site and all my categories were missing. Looking at the database, the records were still there but they were all blank. Luckily I only have a few categories and was able to just go into the database and re-enter them. Although I think I’ll start using tags from now on. And on a random tangent, anyone know if there’s a way to do rss feeds based on a tag or a category? So that rss feed only shows posts that have that tag/category.
I really like the admin for 2.6. Quite professional feeling. Now I just need to get the actual site looking not so ugly. And figure out what these ‘widget’ things are….
-Dexter-
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with general, wordpress.
So after watching the amazing Dr. Horrible for free more times than I can count over the weekend, I decided I would support their efforts and pay for the downloaded version. That and I really just want to watch it more.
So I goto their site and click the link to get it from iTunes. This takes me to a browser page asking me if I have iTunes installed. For some reason it pops up the confirm box twice for me to click yes I have it.
iTunes pops up and takes me to the page for Dr Horrible. So I click the ‘Buy Season Pass’ button. This pops up a box asking for my account name and password. Now I have an iTunes account but I only ever used it way back in the day with those free pepsi songs. So I enter in my password and iTunes thinks for a second then realizes it will need my credit card details. Expected. So it pops up the account login box again before it takes me to the credit card page.
I enter in my credit card details and billing address info and click done and I’m taken to my account page. I’m sitting here wondering ‘am I done?’. Is it purchased? Is it downloading? A few clicks around iTunes and a trip to the ‘purchased’ section reveals that I have nothing downloading. It didn’t purchase anything.
So now I have to go start over. Which for some odd reason a trip to the my account loses your iTunes back button. I have to go back to the website and click the iTunes link again to get back to the page I was in in iTunes. Click the ‘Buy Season Pass’ button. And it asks for my password again. This box has no remember password feature.
This time I come out successful and a downloads section appears with 3 files downloading. Finally.
If this same user experience existed in online shops no one would ever use them. Seriously, can you imagine having to add something to your shopping cart. Login to proceed. Login to enter you billing info. Have to start over with adding it back to your cart. Login again to purchase.
So much for Apple usability.
update: To add to this, downloading through iTunes is painfully slow. Then when I went to watch them I popped them into the best media player around, vlc, and all I got was black. Turns out they are DRM protected m4v files. So the only option is to watch them in either iTunes or quicktime. Both of which chug barely able to play them. So after searching the web for something to strip the drm from the videos, like I did the few audio files I got from iTunes, and not finding anything usefull I turned to the amazing bittorrent and found a high quality rip to download. So now I have the unwatchable DRM laden ones I payed for and the watchable bittorrent ones.
Posted in rant, software.
Welcome back Firefox 2.
That was how my Firefox Download Day went. I installed FF3, played with it for awhile, then reinstalled FF2. I was a little unimpressed. I wish I could like it, it’s got some really great features, but for now I think I’ll stick with 2. The couple things I don’t like are just too big for me to want to cope with.
The first and big one is the “AwesomeBar”. That thing is really not that awesome. Over the years of using the internet I’ve become very attached to the model of I type into the urlbar and it shows me url’s that start with those letters that are in my history. I don’t need my urlbar searching in my bookmarks. If I wanted to find something I had bookmarked I would go look for it in my bookmarks. I want my url bar to look in my url history.
Another thing is that when I click the dropdown arrow on the urlbar I expect to see a list of urls that I have typed into the bar. In firefox 2 you can open that dropdown and see the list of urls and arrow through them and hit the delete key on ones you don’t want in there. I would do that and basically keep a list of recently visted url’s that I could quickly jump to. Firefox 3 shows like the last few pages I have visited. That’s what the history menu up in the menu bar is for.
Also I miss the ‘go’ button on the urlbar.
The other big thing I was less than pleased with was the new behavior when you visit a site with a semi invalid ssl certificate. In firefox 2 it would popup a message telling you why the ssl cert was bad and ask if you wanted to continue to the site or leave. In FF3 it blocks you outright and you have to go through this mess of setting up the site as an ‘exception’. Call me lazy but I like to just hit the OK button to get to the site.
The reason this bugs me more than it probably should is that being a web developer I have development machines that have self signed certificates. Which is ok cause they are just used for testing https so they don’t need to be signed by a CA. Also my firewall uses https for the web interface to it. The ssl is completely valid and encrypts my traffic. Firefox 3 just doesn’t like it cause it’s not signed by a special CA. Yeah I could setup these 3-4 machines to just be exceptions but I come across sites that use self-signed certs on a fairly frequent basis and I just think it would get annoying to have to go through the steps you have to in FF3 just to get to them. Especially on the ones I only want to allow the ‘bad cert’ temporarily.
Lastly are my extensions. I had like 12 extensions that it said weren’t compatible with firefox 3. I’m sure in time these will get updated to work with it, but in the meantime being without them is like having pizza without the cheese.
There are a lot of new features in FF3 that I did like. Things like the new download manager. Being able to tag bookmarks. The new theme looks quite nice. Speed and memory improvements. The new way the remember password thing works. I really think if I could just get the urlbar to work the way it did before I would switch immediately. I’m sure in time I’ll switch and probably be forced to get used to the ‘AwesomeBar’, but until then I’m happy with FF2.
-Dexter-
Posted in firefox, rant, software.
Welcome to my blog, Beyond the Misty Mountains.
This website will be primarily my blog. A place where I can talk about programming and Linux and other technology based topics. And also the occasional rant about other things. The website will also eventually hold projects I’m working on and projects I’ve done in the past and various other little things. I’m not that great of a writer so I’m hoping that blogging frequently can help me with this.
So I hope you can enjoy a thing or two here. And that I don’t offend you too much with my opinions. 
-Dexter-
Posted in general.