If you didn’t believe me before, check this out. This was done with Blender, which was a commercial app until 2002 when the company who created it went under. They then offered anyone to buy the source code, and the open source community ponied up — to the tune of $147,000 US. Six years later, the code is improved to the point where it can create stuff like this. And I dare you to tell me this is any less than Pixar quality.
Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.
Tomorrow I’m destined for a last-second panic-attack-induced road trip to another work site wherein I will have to perform duties I estimate as being about 30 hours of work in much, much less than that. No cracks about the Scotty rule either — I’m serious when I estimate that’s how much work it will normally take to perform the toning out and migrating of 20 computers and VoIP lines, especially where any number of these lines might be set up to use Cat3 instead of Cat5. That’s right, VoIP (including PoE) on Cat3. Possible, but hairy as hell.
Anyway, I’ll eventually finish that draft I’m working on, but it’ll probably have to be tomorrow night. A teaser — it’s about my thoughts on the “resolution of the universe”. I won’t explain that until you see the post itself.
A computer-related rant, specifically. About some choices the Ubuntu folks have made that I don’t agree with.
That’s right, I’m about to complain about Linux, rather than my usual target, Windows.
Continue reading “That last post brings me to a related rant.”
I tried to take the remains of my yard sale to the Salvation Army today. I was turned down. There’s something a bit odd about being told that they can’t take your donations because they don’t have room, considering that the idea is less about keeping it in storage until someone can pay for it, than it is about getting stuff to people who CAN’T afford it. Evidently the Salvation Army is a for-profit organization that has its roots in religion (thus the “salvation” part… and maybe also the “army” part). So people donate to it out of the goodness in their hearts, and they then turn around and sell all these items to others. I’m sure they make more than enough to cover their storage fees, but given how many keep cropping up everywhere, I almost get the feeling it’s some sort of scam or something.
So I thought about it for a while, and then donated it to a girl at work who had recently had her house burned down when I recalled that she was still in need of some stuff despite some extensive fund-raising at work. All told, there was two boxes of dishes, some books, some board games, a few small kitchen appliances, and various cables and bits that I otherwise had duplicates for. She was grateful, as evidently pretty well all of it was useful to her. Plus I got rid of about five boxes of stuff we would never use, and wouldn’t want to move anyway. Win-win all around!
I also tried to install a Motorola SM56 Softmodem into a Windows Vista machine for a yard-sale-goer I met on Sunday. The computer was relatively decent in the specifications, a 3.06GHz Intel chip with 512 megs RAM, which ran dog-slow under Vista Home Basic. Strike two against Vista for this case, came in the fact that the softmodem is totally incompatible. I tried several different drivers from XP, but most of them wouldn’t even install, and the ones that did wouldn’t recognize the PCI card. The funny thing is, when I installed it, Vista recognized it and even tried to find the drivers, but when it failed it told me exactly what model of card it was and that it was incompatible. That same computer could run both the dial-up modem and Windows XP with absolutely no problems whatsoever, I’m sure of it. It’s sad. We all know Vista’s designed from the ground up to be as resource-intensive as possible, even on the most basic model with the lowest settings you can set, so it’s an obvious bit of money-grab when they do things to attempt to force you to upgrade to Vista such as tying DirectX 10 into it, trying to force people to upgrade both their computers and their operating systems despite XP finally making it through its extensive breaking-in period and achieving some modicum of stability and security.
Needless to say, it was a failed exercise. A bit of a down note on an otherwise up day.
No no, thank YOU. 7,800,000 and counting.
For those of you that are using Linux, you already know how to update Firefox — just use Update Manager and install any Firefox update that’s available. For you poor souls on Windows, good luck — the download site has been a very slow site all day long. And it’s no wonder — there have been (last time I checked) roughly 800,000 downloads today alone. The counter seems to be broken now, though, so I don’t know if that’s still incrementing.
Hooray for open source!
I’m on my lunch break, and I’m a bit annoyed right now. This morning I tried to install the pre-packaged Gallery installer that’s available in my website’s Plesk, and last week I tried to manually install Gallery2, both without success. Apparently PHP Safe Mode is enabled on my server, meaning I can’t install either, since they were programmed to be able to allow an admin to directly upload pictures and thus the administrator has to be able to mess with the server’s directory structure.
The reason I’m annoyed is, PHP Safe Mode is basically just a way of protecting poorly configured servers from “black hats”. If the server is configured with a chroot environment (as in, the user of the web site has his own “root” filestructure — and therefore can’t break out of it to mess with other peoples’ sites), then PHP Safe Mode is utterly useless; all it does is serve to break applications and frustrate PHP programmers. Honestly, the fact that PHP Safe Mode exists at all is kind of silly (even the developers of PHP say so!), considering that anything you can do in PHP, you can also do in CGI, and there’s no such thing as a CGI safe mode. The only reason I’m upset about this, and not simply switching to CGI, is that CGI is a vastly older web programming protocol, and while useful now and then (especially to black hats!), it is not the programming language of choice for today’s programmer. No, that honor goes to ASP, the demon-spawn of Microsoft. It’s only us open source geeks who prefer PHP.
I can see that Safe Mode is turned off for the Unix Pro packages on this server. I don’t know if it’s really worth paying more a month just so that I can put up a pretty picture gallery. I guess I might confront the web service about this, and see what they have to say. Maybe it’s just turned on by default on these cheaper packages, but can be turned off if you ask. Or maybe they really are holding me hostage, so to speak, to get more money for the “full featured” PHP.
But I’m not going to call them today. Today, I’m a bit busy at work, and I intend to get in touch with a mortgage broker during my spare time this afternoon… if I even get any.
This is my second attempt at posting from my Nokia internet tablet. The first attempt saw WordPy (a Python-based WordPress client) crash after having nearly completed the post, sadly. This time I’m doing it through the built-in Opera browser, which isn’t bad, though it’s not capable of handling some of the nicer bits of Javascript that powers the WordPress admin panel.
I’ve been rediscovering this nifty little gadget over the past few days, having recieved a 2-gig MMC Mobile media card, which by the way I can’t seem to get anything to reliably read past the 1 gig mark, even devices that say they can see the full drive. I’d ordered it from eBay in an effort to improve on my music-for-biking situation, as the CD player was falling short on a number of levels. The fact that this has no moving parts is a huge advantage, though the music interface that comes stock leaves much to be desired, and the CPU on this is overwhelmed by third party media players like Canola or Kagu.
For blogging, I’d have to say, if I had an IR or Bluetooth keyboard I’d be much happier. Oh well, at least this is Linux-based so I can install all sorts of useful utilities, especially now that I have room for them.
I made a favicon for the site (up in the address bar — the little blue leaf, like the site logo). However, for some godforsaken reason, it isn’t working properly for the RSS feed. I’ll figure it out eventually. Apologies, to the two of you who have subscribed via RSS.
I’m looking at integrating Gallery2 into this site, given that there are plugins to attach WordPress to Gallery2, and I have a ton of pictures to upload. Hope I don’t hit my bandwidth limitations, which is likely once my family gets a hold of this page and starts browsing all the pictures all at once.
