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djotaku's twitter feed
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- 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/
- Saw Mike Burbiglia tonight! He was hilarious! http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/2790733907/
- what the heck comcast!?! You could have warned us before radically changing the chanel lineup! Luckily the mythtv channels were ez to fix.
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Nov
30
Fedora 8 upgrade on Mario
Category: Fedora | 
2 Comments
Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove:
lalbgl
x264
cinelerra
dvdrip
ffmpeg
ffmpeg-libpostproc
gstreamer-bad
k3b-extras-nonfree
kino
libquicktime
mencoder
mjpegtools
mplayer
mplayer-skins
mplayerplug-in
ogmrip
subtitleripper
transcode
vlc
Most of these I plan to reinstall afterwards. Further reporting if there are most steps that need to be taken and/or when I get to a Fedora 8 desktop.
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Nov
30
Month Old Quote
Category: Quotes | Leave a Comment
“She’s going to be a slutty eight ball for Halloween?” - Me, hearing my wife incorrectly
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Nov
29
Another Shot at Indigo and Suzanne
Category: Blender | Leave a Comment
Posted over on Blender artists and told them about the problems I was having with Indigo and getting it to render Suzanne as glass. It turned out that I had two things wrong. One: I needed to set the gain to 2 instead of the standard 100. Apparently this controls the transparency level. Two: I needed to set the absorption color as it didn’t transfer over from Blender. In fact, a quick look on the Indigo forums showed that the materials don’t export over well without some work. Here’s the final result after 28 hours:
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Nov
27
The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.
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Nov
22
First Try with Indigo Renderer
Category: Blender | 3 Comments
For nearly a year now, I’ve seen a lot of really great images in the blender gallery. Many of the most breathtaking images are rendered with outside renderers like Yafray or Indigo. Here’s an example of a subtle, but real-looking render made with Indigo.
Image by Sergio G Ejeda
I already tried Yafray before, and didn’t really like it too much. I decided to give Indigo a shot. So I went to the Indigo website and followed their directions for rendering with Indigo from Blender. The tutorial shows it as coming out like this:
Here’s how mine came out:
For comparison purposes, here’s how it looks with Blender:
To be fair, for the Blender internal renderer, I’d have to have a different lighting setup as Indigo takes the “sun” light and lights up the entire scene. This might be a more fair comparison.
But before I continue, I want to go back for a second and talk about how Indigo works. Indigo works by pretending to be a camera, albeit a very, very slow camera. It shoots out light and then calculates where it will bounce from. Then you wait for the “film” to develop. It continuously refines the image and you stop the process when it looks good enough. The following will illustrate it very well. When I first launch Indigo, this is what my image looks like:
Not that pretty, eh? Here it is after about an hour
Much better, right? But still has a bit of grain. How long did it take to get my final shot? Approximately 11-12 hours. So Indigo is really best used for still images, not animation. Still, there’s one key difference - the tutorial looks more transparent like glass. While mine looks more like marble. However, the version of Indigo that I’m using is much newer than his. Also, I had a different exporter - at least mine was called Blendigo and look a little different than his. BUt here you can see that I had the same settings in Blender:
his:
mine:
And you can see from my blendigo exporter that it didn’t pick the right material as he thought it would. So I changed the parameters to be the correct material and let this render for a while and got:
Closer to his example, but still no transparency. If anyone out there knows what I did wrong, I’d appreciate being let in on the secret. I was finally able to get some transparency in Blender by playing with the alpha values and it looks like this:
I started up an Indigo render with the alpha turned down. It will be a while before I can tell if it worked or not, so I may have to post that in the comments.
For completeness, here’s how the scene loked when renedered in yafray - frankly, it may have redeemed itself in this shot. In fact, with what I’ve learned recently from using Yafray, I didn’t use it correctly the first time around and that’s why the scenes rendered so horribly. I’ll have to redo that comparison in the future.
with the same light setup as the Blender internal renderer:
and with indigo light setup
One last thing - the Indigo logo on the images can be removed - I just didn’t realize it until it was too late.
Again, if anyone knows what I did wrong, transparency-wise, let me know, I’d be happy to learn more about how to use Indigo with Blender.
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Nov
21
I followed the procedure at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq so the point of this is just to go over my experience with these steps.
- Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading
I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them. - for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done
I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case - yum clean all
- rpm -Uvh http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-8-3.noarch.rpm http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-8.0.0-3.noarch.rpm
- v /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
I tried this, but it appeared to be irrelevant as the .rpmnew file was not created. Got an error about the file not existing. - ctrl + alt + F1
- telinit 3
- yum update rpm\* yum\
- yum upgrade
This is the part that takes the longest, but I think it took just a few hours max. The dependencies were resolved within about a half hour and the rest of the time was downloading and installing - yum install yum-utils; package-cleanup –orphans
I did this, but they were mostly packages I didn’t care about too much - mostly some emulators. - yum groupupdate Base
In my case, this only updated/installed one or two packages - yum groupinstall sound-and-video (if you are using Gnome)
- rpm -e –noscripts avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7
I then realized I had not had freshrpms enabled so I enabled it and yum update , but some of them failed; due to conflicts with livna, I presume.
And then I was updated and everything I’ve used so far on there appears to be working correctly.
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Nov
20
- The bootup screen is pretty, but….
- The default GDM screen looks a little ugly to me….perhaps it’s just too new.
- The new SELinux notification tool may be useful if something is not working correctly, but it just bugs the heck out of me as every single program appears to be trying to access protected memory. Of course, some people may welcome this new program. It looks very nice, but I’ve never been one of those who had problems with SEL to begin with
- Overall, the new Gnome theme looks very good, but the inactive window title bars kind of blend into each other if you have a few overlapping windows in the background. Perhaps that’s supposed to be the way it works - all other windows fade into the background. I’m not really sure.
Edit:
Also, I forgot, the background looks like it belongs in a pamphlet for an airline, but it is a very nice looking background
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Nov
20
Fedora 8 yum upgrade success
Category: Fedora | Leave a Comment
Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.
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Nov
19
L’Animateur
Category: videos | Leave a Comment
This short film won a contest over on MyToons.com and it’s no wonder!
Check it out!
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Nov
19
Yum upgrade may be the way to go if you have Third Party packages
Category: Fedora | Leave a Comment
Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem. I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware). It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less. It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase. Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer. I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading. It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Fedora8, upgrade, livna, yum
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