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![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Jun
30
Thanks System76!
Category: Linux, ubuntu | 
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System76, which sells customized Ubuntu laptops allows you to write in an get a free set of “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers. Thanks for offering this service! It was annoying me that my computer said it was perfect for Windows Vista Basic, when it’s running Ubuntu! So, I now have my Ubuntu stickers.
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Jun
27
Vimeo Version 5
Category: Internet, videos | Leave a Comment
is out!
The good news is that it looks slicker. That bad news is that I no have no idea where the heck anything is!
Check my stuff out at:
http://www.vimeo.com/djotaku/videos
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Jun
26
Yafray
Category: Blender, Computers | 6 Comments
I’ve heard about Yafray so much and I’ve seen that it can deliver VERY photorealistic shots. The Blender internal renderer is not bad - as a matter of fact, it’s awesome. However, for all the really realistic stuff people tend to use Yafray. I tried to use it before, but all I got was a blank screen. Today, doing some research, I found out that, for some reason, the lights need to be jacked up in order for Yafray to work. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger size.
For my first example, a nice simple frame from my bouncing ball animation, I had to take the light from 1 to 6 in intensity to get it to look similar in light intensity to the Blender internal renderer. Here’s how they look. They pretty much look the same to me, perhaps you can see a difference.
Blender:
Yafray:
Then I decided to render the glass from my final exam. If anything, that should give a good example of how much more realistic Yafray is. I didn’t change any of the default Yafray settings. I didn’t use the exact same setup in this one for both shots because I forgot to save the file after setting it up last night. It took a while to render - over 20 minutes. I didn’t want to do it again, so I wasn’t super scientific. It looks clearly much worse with Yafray. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong here? All I did was tweak the lights so that it wasn’t darkness.
Blender:
Yafray:
Finally, I wanted to try one more thing to see if it really looks different when it counts. Here’s a shot of water hitting my glass. Here, the Yafray render doesn’t look as bad as above, but I still prefer the internal render.
Blender:
Yafray:
So does anyone have an idea of what I’m doing wrong? Or is this the way it should be? I am using the latest Yafray and Blender stable builds - or whatever is in the Fedora repositories.
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Jun
25
A brief respite from computer animation
Category: Jose's Dinner, Me, Photography, computer animation | Leave a Comment
I’ve spent a pretty good amount of my free time to try and finish Jose’s Dinner. Now that I’m done, I am taking a bit of a break from animation to do some of the other things I like to do, such as play civ4. The new expansion pack is coming out and I’m extremely excited. It has all kinds of great improvements like colonies, popes, and corporations. So I wanted to play one last game, Eric XI of the Chinese is probably going to be my last game before the expansion pack comes out.
I’m also finishing up with my pictures from Coney Island.
I wanted to make sure I didn’t get animation fatigue - I enjoy it, but doing something worth showing to others is time consuming and, since I mostly love the animation, some parts of it are tedious to me. However, I have two great new projects I’m working on. One is the project I was speaking of before I started Jose’s Dinner. I’m already in the storyboarding stage there and will simultaneously begin working on creating the characters and rigging them up. The second story is a bit more grandiose. I have some ideas and some scenes in my head, but that’s way,way in preproduction. I don’t even have a script yet.
So keep on checking up, probably starting next week, you’ll start seeing some of the first parts of my next animation.
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Jun
23
Thanks to my wife, Danielle, and my brother, Danny, for providing voice talents for the film.
What are you waiting for? Go see it here.
And check back over the next few days, I have some stuff I’ll be adding there.
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Jun
22
Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.
We got there at 2215 (1015 pm) and their website said it becomes a club at 2200. They didn’t even play any music until 2315. Then it was one reggae song after another. My wife went to ask the DJ what was up with all the reggae, where was the merengue, salsa and bachata? (We waited until 2330 because I’ve been a DJ before and didn’t want to be rude) He told her that there was no spanish music tonight. I’m sorry, but is it such a bad assumption that a CUBAN restaurant that moonlights as a night club should play CUBAN music - ie merengue, salsa, and bachata????
So we left right away. I F-ING HATE dancing to reggae. I don’t mind listening to it and if we’re at a dance club and one or two songs go by, I’ll dance to it. But I didn’t pay $20 to dance reggae all night long, I wanted to dance to Spanish music. We haven’t been out dancing in over a year and really wanted to.
If Babalu had put a sign up that said it was going to be a reggae night, I would have never paid the $20 cover. But they didn’t say anything. I ask again, was I wrong to assume that a CUBAN restaurant would play CUBAN music???
I’m never going there again and, frankly, I’m pretty fed up with Baltimore and Inner Harbor. I’m going to give this one more shot some time in the future with a Salsa club in DC, but if they don’t play at least 50% salsa, I’m going nuts on the management.
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Jun
22
Dilbert Movie
Category: Movies | Leave a Comment
Looks like, mentioned a couple of times in this post that there will be a Dilbert movie. This one seems to hint that it will be a live movie rather than a cartoon. I think that would be a horrible idea. Cartoon/newspaper comics make lousy movies - see The Flintstones movies and The Dennis the Menace movie. I was excited with the first and disappointed with the second one. However, he seems to mention in the first one that he doesn’t think it’s actually going to get made. (That, IMHO, would be a good idea)
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Jun
19
To see more shots, check out my flickr page - by clicking on any of the photos.
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Jun
17
flickr collection of the day
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
Collections on flickr are groups of sets. Today we look at my “Favorites” collection. Here is one photo from each of the sets inside.
From Self-Portrait:
From “1 A Day”:
From “Famous” Pictures:
From Most Talked About:
From My Favorites:
From Your Favorites:
From my pictures from my “Favorites” collection, just click on the link in this sentence.
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Jun
10
More Render farm metrics
Category: Blender, Computers | Leave a Comment
I expected this to be an awesome triumph because I spent a good deal of the weekend trying to get blender installed on bulletbill. It finally got installed, but it doesn’t work. I had to do some editing here and there to try and get it to work and I think that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure exactly how to redo this in freeBSD, but it’ll probably be another month before I dedicate the time needed to it. That said…..
I did get a new ethernet card for kingkoopa, so I switched luigi from a master to a slave. Then I ran what has become a benchmark test for me, rendering the ball bouncing. This time it took:
3 minutes and 6 seconds or…. 186 seconds to render this ball bouncing.
Last time it took 260 seconds. So it went nearly 1.5 minutes faster. So for 400 frames, one might expect it to be 15 minutes faster. Sure, it might not seem like a lot for this small, easy to render scene. But it can be a real life saver in longer, more complex scenes. It’s why I was able to leave my “final exam” going over night instead of closer to 24 hours. (And it didn’t even have luigi’s help!)
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Jun
10
Final Exam
Category: Blender, videos | Leave a Comment
I decided to give myself a little “final exam” and practice everything I had learned in Blender so far. So I co