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djotaku's twitter feed
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- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
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Feb
27
Since about my Senior Year at Cornell I’ve been shooting in RAW. When I got Photoshop CS 2 I was so happy with all the new features they added to make the workflow so efficient. It really eliminates the “raw is more work” complain that most people have. Recently, as I was reading a book on raw workflows, I realized that, ever since getting CS2, I’ve still been doing things horribly inefficiently!
With every raw file I’ve made the corrections and then converted them all to 16-bit tiffs which [for 90%] of them were then converted straight to jpeg with a script I had created. I wasn’t doing any other modifications! All this time I could have eliminated the [very] time-consuming task of conversion to TIFF. I had reasoned doing it for the purposes of conversion to black and white so that I would start with a higher quality file than a jpeg. However, with CS2, the features I can use to edit the raw file directly and then save as a PSD (which I do anyway) should result in a MUCH faster workflow!!!!
Always keep learning - you never know what you will learn and it may really improve things.
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Feb
27
My Favorites…
Category: Photography | 
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Some of these may be repeats from past posts, but so what, it’s *MY* blog!
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Feb
26
and the Oscar goes to….
Category: Movies | Leave a Comment
The Departed - for best picture.
I stayed up, so I figured I’d blog it. The movie also won Scorcese his first Oscar.
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Feb
26
Some shots….
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
I just want to share some shots that call out to me. I’ve been so busy with so many things from jump-starting a photography side business to trying to realize all of the Blender Computer animation ideas in my head. So, I may or may not have time to blog. Here are some great shots:
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Feb
25
iPhone commercial
Category: Computers, Technology, tv | Leave a Comment
The iPhone commercial shown tonight during the oscars was pretty sweet! It featured clips from a ton of movies where people said, “hello.” It revealed a June release date and, as far as I know, is the first commercial for the phone. Looks like they got the trademark thing settled with Cisco.
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Feb
25
Introducing Character Animation with Blender
Category: Blender, computer animation | Leave a Comment
Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, “Penguin Flight“, and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, “Budgies“. However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.
So I am going through this book, and boy is it awesome! (You can get it on amazon here) It also comes with a DVD which includes installers for all 3 major operating systems, the project files used in the book, and a bunch of sample movies - giving you an idea of what you can aspire to with Blender. The first part, where we model the character, isn’t too new for me. I already learned most of these techniques while making my shorts. However, I did learn how to use an image to model off of, as well as the advantages to doing so. The book has the user create Captain Blender. I have a feeling there will be a ton of Captain Blenders floating around the net if people decide to post their versions of the character.
If you think you’ll want to do some computer animation with blender, this is definitely the book to pick up.
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Feb
23
One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.
Networking computers together, however, adds another dimension to the customization. Networked computers need to be named so they can be identified on the network. My router, for example, uses the computer’s name to let me know which computer matches to which IP address. People take this naming as personally as they take their other customizations. If you don’t believe me, check out this forum thread called “What is your computer’s name and why?”
At my work, there is a pig theme going on amongst one cluster of computers. The boxes are named by the scheme [adjective]pig. So they are things like strongpig, fatpig, etc. My brother has a great, funny theme with his computers. His large Alienware is called ElCapitan (the captain) and his laptop ElAdmiral (the admiral)
I took the naming of my computers no less seriously. My wife gave me the nickname Echan after we saw P-Chan in the anime Ranma 1/2. The nickname has fallen out of use, but persists in the name of my windows computer. Actually, my current Windows computer is called Echan2, as Echan died about a year ago. I have two Linux boxen currently running. Until now I had some pretty creative names for them (in my mind), but I decided to rename them. This isn’t the first time I’d renamed a computer. One of my computers used to be called ECEVeteran, this is because the computer used to be a computer at the ECE department of Cornell. It was my main Fedora box until I got short-e, a very short eMachine. Then it became my print server. I wanted to rename it while retaining some of the original name, so it became printman-eevet. Up until today these both ended in .localdomain. But in the last couple of days I decided I wanted to have a bit more fun with my boxes.
So I decided to rename them. After a bit of thinking, I decided to go with a Mario theme. My current setup works perfectly. short-e, my powerhouse little box became mario.mushroomkingdom. printman-eevet, the tall behind-the-scenes box became luigi.mushroomkingdom. If I ever get around to building my mythTv box, I’ll name that one toad.mushroomkingdom, because it’ll be tiny.
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Feb
22
I LOVE getting published!
Category: Photography | 1 Comment
Here’s another shot someone has asked to publish:
As I mentioned before, getting published (as wish my other shot on NPR or the beach shots in the Tampa guide) is a photographer’s dream come true. It’s an acknowledgment that one has pictures worthy of others adding to their reports, websites, brochures, etc.
Here’s the email for this photo:
That picture is an awesome shot. I would like to know if you would give me permission to use this shot on a college report on the cultural aspect of the Brighton Beach community.
Thank you.
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Feb
21
Forget Second Life, Get an account with First Life!
Category: Computers, Geek Love, Internet, jokes | Leave a Comment
With all the recent hype revolving around Second Life, Darren Barefoot created First Life. In case the site goes down or is sold off, here’s a screenshot. Click it for a full resolution view.
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Feb
20
A Journey Towards a More Professional Photographer (also the picture of the day)
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
I’m working my way towards making money from my photography. I really enjoy the trade craft a lot and if I get to do it as a job on the weekends, all the better. So I’ve bought some books to shore up my technique since I’m pretty much a self-taught photographer. One thing my latest book has driven home is something I’ve noticed countless times in magazines, books, and my own work. I need to relax and take my time. I know enough, and have slowed down enough, to think about the aperture and shutter speed in relation to the effect I wish to achieve. I also know to frame my shot correctly and double-check my ISO settings.
But I still need to slow down a bit more. I need to look at the histogram because I’ve come to learn that the LCD display lies. It almost always looks perfect there. But a quick check of the histogram would allow me to reshoot instead of lamenting it later on my compute rand trying to use photoshop to fix things. I even took a shot today and make a point of checking the histogram to try and cement it into my photography rituals.
Another thing I sought to work on today, but which was not mentioned in the book, is to really pay attention to setting up the lighting - especially when it’s something in my own house where I can control the lighting. I find that pictures look much clearer and have a sort of amazing quality when attention is paid to those kinds of details.
So here is my first attempt at taking it slow and being patient.
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Feb
20
Hidden Features
Category: xubuntu | Leave a Comment
Veterans of Linux installs from the early days may chuckle at my new discovery, but I’ve only been installing Linux since the graphical days of Anaconda and Fedora Core 1. (But first some background info) I was recently installing Xubuntu on my father-in-law’s computer. He wanted me to install a new Windows Media Player version, but I needed to upgrade to Windows Service Pack 2. The Kami at M$ were not smiling upon his household because this hosed the computer.
No windows recovery disk, and it was an old POS computer so I decided to install xubuntu. My brother loves Ubuntu and recently I read an article about how awesome Xubuntu is on old POS computers. The computer was so old I had to use to alternate CD so that I could do a text install. In my opinion, I should be able to do this off the regular CD too. This wasted my time and an extra CD-R. Well, they’re cheap nowadays, so no biggie.
The install appeared to hang at the part where it read the partitions. This was, no doubt, due to XP SP 2 hosing things, but I became impatient so I rebooted and tried again. Again it appeared to hang. So I searched the virtual terminals to see if I could run some commands in the background to figure out what was going on. This is where I came to the part where veteran Linux hackers will laugh. I went to F4 and viola! It was showing all the errors occurring during the install! Then, some part of my mind remembered reading that in the lore. In the old days of text installs (before beautiful GUIs and error boxes) the only way for the computer to communicate on more than one channel was to have diff