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Blender turns these ideas on their side. Blender is a commercial grade three dimensional modeling application that is used to create any kind of three dimensional computer generated image you can imagine. Among the many features Blender has, is the ability to link images into video frames to create movies. It has game creation tools to develop full video game visuals, both real time and cut scenes. It has python scripting integration. Texture creation and mapping. Lighting effects. Camera angles. And so very much more. So much in fact, that I can’t begin to do it justice. Blender is incredibly easy, or incredibly complex, depending on your level of expertise, and what you’re trying to accomplish. The potential complexity is due to the powerful combination of flexibility and capabilities that this amazing package provides. In spite of this, the new user will find the learning curve less painful than might be expected due to a plethora of community support, forums, documen Image rendering is a really interesting process. You will initially create simple shapes from the shape modeler. This tool allows you to pick a shape, for instance a rectangle, and attach connection points that act like puppet strings. With these ’strings’ you can change the angles of the shape, modify it to show new connection points, even add other shapes to it . I had some creative fun with this, in the beginning. I would take a circle, create connection points, and pull spikes out of the virtual fabric of the shape. I then used the render command to create it into an interesting three dimensional object that was sort of mindless modern art. There are a lot of easy to do things for beginners that you can experiment with to get some fun results. The process for a more mature scene is a bit more complex and can include camera angles, lighting effects, layering, wire framing, texture mapping and more. When the render is started, you can be looking at a long process. Depending on the complexity of the scene(s) and the speed of your computer, it’s not unusual for this process to take hours or even days. It’s for this reason that in major movies containing a lot of rendering, just to crunch the rendering numbers, powerful computers are often linked together into a dedicated network called a “server farm”. Blender is open source software. This means that, within the terms of the GNU General Public License, the end user, that would be you, is allowed to make as many copies of it as they want, distribute the copies for free, even modify the source code (which is available free) to meet your own needs. Blender has a GPL FAQ page that makes understanding the licensing simpler. Blender is a amazing application that the amateur and serious artist will love. Heck, it’s just plain fun, no matter what your experience level. Get it at: http://www.blender.org/
Compliments of Hulu.com, all fourteen episodes of the excellent science fiction series, “Firefly” are now available from the video section in the main menu bar. Thanks to the folks at YouTube, The “R. Tam Sessions” are there as well, and they are a must see for the fan. The Firefly page has all the episodes each in their own player screen. The full page takes a moment to load because all of the players have to be loaded. An episode is loaded when a scene shows up in the player screen. As I said, there are fourteen players. They are Flash players, and your browser has to support Flash. If you have trouble with the video or sound, make sure you have the most recent version of Flash installed. The episodes may be watched standard or full screen, and closed captioning is available. Just hover your mouse over the window. There are a few minimal ads, but very tolerable. Enjoy the best short(est) lived Scifi series ever made!  Hulu.com “Founded in March 2007, Hulu is co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Providence Equity Partners.”This is the first sentence of the Media Info page of Hulu, a streaming video content site. I wanted to let folks know about Hulu, and I wanted to make it clear right off the bat that it isn’t some kind of copyright infringement/pirating site. It’s 100% legit. And 100% cool. Hulu provides full movies, television series, clips and special features via the internet and they’re constantly adding new stuff. It’s always got very fresh content. If you aren’t familiar with streaming media, it works like this; Hulu sends you the video, say a movie, and your computer receives it on your end. Think You Tube with a quality picture. It’s great because it’s often just like watching TV. The video is buffered so if you need to, you can pause it to let the buffer “fill”. There are many things about Hulu that are sweet, but a couple stand out. In addition to new stuff, Hulu has old classic movies and television shows difficult to find anywhere else. The television shows are usually presented in a full season. I have yet to see a lone TV show without any others in the series. Most movies are full length and it’s clearly indicated. My personal favorite thing about Hulu is that some network shows are released to Hulu right after they air on TV. For instance, I love Dollhouse which airs on Fox Friday nights. Saturday, the previous nights airing of Dollhouse is available on Hulu. I always work friday night, so Hulu is the only way I get to see it. I should mention that Dollhouse is off season now. Just an example. I used to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Cronicles the same way until the buttheads at Fox cancelled it. Just like they cancelled Firefly. But that’s a rant for another time. By the way, all fourteen episodes of Firefly are available here under the “videos” drop down menu, or from the Hulu site itself. See it. Please. SciFi fans will love it. Did I mention Hulu’s free? Yup. Free. Hulu is ad supported, but the ads are very non intrusive, and there are very few of them. They are single ads, not a minute and a half of multiple commercials. They show up on the time line as dots so you know where they’re going to be, and when they are running the window header says “your video will resume in [number] seconds” . If you quit in the middle of a video, the next time you come back the video will resume where you left off. As a side note, the two most common commercials are for cell phones and charities. Oh, and an edge shave gel commercial that only a guy can appreciate. Very funny. Hulu has many features that are available if you create an account, also free. You can subscribe to series, make play lists, share favorite videos and more. And you can embed video. Check out Dr. Horrible embedded here. There are two downsides to Hulu. Hulu can’t be watched outside the United States, apologies to our international friends. And unfortunately, you may experience some lag time, “burps” with a slow line, during peak hours and/or with a slow(er) computer. The latter is especially true of computers running things in the background like firewalls, virus scanners and screen savers. Dial up is definetely a no-go. For some reason two friends of mine, one running a Mac, and the other a flavor of Linux, get no sound just video. This is strange since the Hulu player is apparently a Flash player. Any browser with Flash (just about all of them) should be able to present the video just fine. Oh well, in a perfect world and all that. Give it a go. I think you’ll like it. http://www.hulu.com Denigris It pains me to admit it, but I broke my own personal rule of survival in the computer age. Not once, but twice in one week. I kid you not. Don’t update. It’s that simple. Well, with one qualifier: Don’t update unless you have a compelling need to do so. I broke this rule against the better judgement of that same little voice that tells you when you’ve had one too many. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink. Anyway, the rule is simple and important. Don’t update your software if it’s meeting your needs simply because it’s the latest, coolest version. If it works and does what you need it to do, don’t change anything. The reason is that upgrading is rarely a good thing unless it’s to plug a security hole, and even then the fix can be worse than the illness. This is because security fixes tend to be bolt-on code, and in my experience that means two things.
In addition to these considerations are the problems that can go with an upgrade to software that already exists in a working setup. I am referring here to the kind of upgrade that is designed to change the functioning of the software on a tangible level, such as the user interface. Hopefully, for the better. This is where I first broke the all important rule. It happened a couple of weeks ago when some software I was using had an upgrade available. It was a feature upgrade, and a security upgrade. I decided to click the one step upgrade installer and let the application do the upgrade work. Big mistake. The application got broke, as in reamed. The Long and the short of it is that the application now couldn’t connect with it’s database. A lesser man wouldn’t be willing to admit the error of his ways. Remember this if you remember nothing else. BACK UP COMPLETELY, BACKUP FREQUENTLY! I follow my own advice as much as possible, and fortunately, I had made a back up of the application database before the upgrade. I ended up fully reinstalling new application version, and restoring the database with the backup. I then had to get to work reconfiguring everything. Not fun. It was a not so funny comedy of errors. More like a greek tragedy. Only the fact that I had backed up the database, admittedly in a bass-akward fashion, meant that I eventually recovered a years worth of content creation and development. I dodged a major bullet. In other news, I really blew it about the same time with my other computer, which runs Ubuntu Linux. I upgraded to a new version of this fine operating system, but the aging computer the old version was running on (quite well thank you very much) just didn’t have the ommf! to make the new version work well. Frankly, it just barfed. Big time. My reason for the upgrade was the worst reason there is, and I know better. I heard it was “better” than the current version running on my computer. I haven’t gotten to the tortuous task of cleaning up that mess. At this point, I’m too tired from my last flub up. Here’s to learning from our mistakes, Denigris
The election of Barack Obama is a historic event that has changed the face of our nation forever. I don’t think you’ll find anyone that will disagree with that, whatever their beliefs are. An African American president represents a shift, a societal growth that I believe is healthy for us as a nation. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be other firsts for the presidency. In my lifetime, I fully expect to see a woman, Native American, hispanic or other firsts for our nations highest office. Now for an observation which I think should be obvious, but doesn’t seem to be very popular these days; It seems to be taboo to talk to one another about the competency or skills of our current president. If you have made this observation yourself, have you asked yourself why this is? Have you looked inward and examined what your silent views about the situation are? How do you really feel about having an African American as the president? Does it matter to you? If you feel he isn’t doing his job right, are you afraid to let yourself think it because you wonder if that makes you a racist? Does political correctness pressure you into silence about the president’s performance for the same reason? These are all valid, and important questions to be considered. We do a disservice to our fellow Americans if we aren’t willing to speak our minds about the issues surrounding the governing of our nation. Race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and culture have nothing to do with a president’s ability to be an effective, competent leader, and that’s a fact. They also have nothing to do with the success or failures on the part of a president. If a president is counting on using any of these factors to leverage power for their self, their administration, their party or their constituents, the job is in the wrong hands and they have no business in the oval office. This is not a pot shot at Mr. Obama. It’s a truth that applies to any president. Now Mr. president, I have some harsh words for you. Addressing the title of this piece; It seems that president Obama is spending his time developing his status as a public celebrity to the exclusion of the more pressing issues facing our nation. He has a press secretary. His name is Robert Gibbs. Did you know that? It’s OK if you didn’t. It’s not immediately apparent and as a result, hardly common knowledge. How many times have you seen him presenting the voice of the president to the media on issues of substance? That’s his job description. How many times have you seen him behind a podium with the presidential seal on it? Not a whole lot is my guess. President Obama, you’ve had your interview, you got the job. You don’t have to campaign anymore. Now please take your job seriously. The nation is in trouble. Return to the White house, and leave the talk show circuit. You aren’t a comedian. You’re the President Of The United States. Jay Lenno, 60 Minutes, and 20/20 will have to survive without you. You have the appearance of a political amateur suffering from a really bad case of ego inflation. This is not the image that we as a nation can afford to present to the world. You actually said, “I’m the president, I can do anything I want”. Wow. What were you thinking? Don’t be arrogant Mr. president. You need to get your priorities straight. Virtual town hall meetings and bad jokes are meaningless to the millions of people who are losing their jobs, their houses, and the money to buy groceries. Oh, and please give the Special Olympics a break.
Some would say that the original Star Trek series is the greatest work of fiction ever created for television. I won’t take a position on this assertion except to say that I am a Trekkie, and Star Trek addressed social issues and broke T.V. taboos. A good example of the latter is the fact that it was the first television show to feature a black woman in a leading role. Unfortunately, it was canceled after three seasons. Poor ratings were cited. Six months ago, if I had been asked what the best show ever canceled was, Star Trek would be the instant answer. What happened six months ago? I discovered Hulu internet television. They are owned by a subsidiary of Universal, and offer a huge selection of streaming television and movies, both old and new. I have to admit, as much as I like like Star Trek in all it’s various incarnations, thanks to Hulu, I no longer think that Star Trek has the distinction of being the best show ever canceled. That honor belongs to a show that was canceled after fourteen episodes. Firefly.
It’s definetly worth mentioning that all the singing is done by the actors, with the exception of a couple of backup vocals. I want to say a word about Felicia Day. She has created a web series called The Guild made up of short episodes and released only on the internet. It is incredibly well written, very funny and intelligent. She writes and produces it with donations of time and funds by professionals, friends, and fans. The series is about a group of online gamers that take part in a long running massively epic role playing game. None of them has an actual social life or sense of the real world, and their only interaction with each other is through speakers, keyboards, microphones and headsets; when they finally meet, they don’t know quite how to take the reality of their mundane existences. The characters are incredibly well written and developed, and this is another web release that should not be missed. On with Dr. Horrible. Dr. Horrible can be seen in the video section of Teamtuxedo or: on Hulu in either normal size or full screen. Dr. Horrible tells the tale of a super-villain apprentice, working on his “PhD in horribleness”. He’s not very good at it, and gets his horrible inventions built, well, not quite right. For example, his transmatter device that was supposed to transport a gold bar to him from a bank vault, produced a baggie of chocolate milk-like fluid instead of gold. Bummer. Continue reading Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; The Doctor Is In!  August 31st, 2008 |  Entertainment, film, internet, musical, webcast |  Category: Entertainment, review |  Leave a comment The Most interesting thing happened to me about five minutes ago. I was attacked by a web site. An intrusion attempt to be specific. The attack was unsuccessful because Norton (yes, I was using MS Vista instead of Ubuntu Linux, see confessional [1]) detected it and blocked the attempt. One of the interesting things about it is that it attempted to gain access to my laptop through high, non standard, TCP port numbers that my router’s firewall totally ignored. While I’m at it, it’s worth noting that network address translation (taking my modems IP address and changing it before it gets to my laptop) didn’t slow it down. It happened when I logged into the administrators account for TeamTuxedo to do a little work. Akismet, the excellent free spam blocker for WordPress has been catching more and more really yukky garbage lately, and I take a look at it every now and again to see if any legitimate comments get caught in the net by accident. Continue reading Web attacks from internet attack sites. An oldie but goodie. August 25th, 2008 | firewall, Malware, Norton, router, security, Trojan, Virus, web site attacks, Windows Vista | Category: News | Leave a comment A friend said this to me one day while we were talking about encryption and wireless networks. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t, and he’s a technically savy guy, although I wouldn’t call him a geek (well I might, just to mess with him). That’s why I thought he was pulling my leg when he said it. He’s like that. He has an interesting sense of humor. He went on to say, “I leave my [wireless] internet connection open [unencrypted]. My neighbors can use it, I don’t care. It’s unlimited access, and I’m just not an interesting target to a hacker. Leo LaPorte (of Tech TV) leaves his access point open, I do too.”
This isn’t paranoia, it’s the world we live in. It’s why we have policemen. Listen to this podcast with Leo and Steve Gibson to hear what they say on the subject in Security Now! Episode 10 “Open Wireless Access Points”. Continue reading I don’t need to secure my wireless connection. I’m not paranoid. |
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I wanted to write a bit about a free open source program called “Blender”. It’s been said from time to time that free open source software can’t be counted on to be very good. Basically the notion is, “it’s free, and the source code is available to use for any purpose including commercial use. It’s written by a bunch of volunteer programmers scattered all over the world. Don’t expect too much. Be realistic.”
tation, and even video tutorials. The user interface has been developed into a good balance of power, functionality, and ease of use. Having said that, it can be daunting the first time you see it. Blender is a type of software called a “rendering engine”. A graphics rendering engine takes visual input from the user interface and creates it into a series of mathematical representations. The final step in the process is the actual rendering of the image. In this step, all of the mathematical instructions associated with the image creation process such as wire framing, texture mapping, layering and so on, are processed by the computer into the final image. This is how many of the special effects for The Lord of the rings trilogy were made, and it’s how Pixar does their magic. You can do the same thing with just as powerful a suite of tools for zero bucks. Rendering is what separates the best of the two dimensional, from the three dimensional scene. Texture mapping allows the scene to be rendered photo realistically if the artist desires it. In this case, you literally can’t tell the difference from the real thing once the rendering process has completed. In the egg scene, if you didn’t see the fried egg inside the broken egg shell you probably wouldn’t realize the scene is completely artificial. The unreal can be created to look real, and the real can be created to look other worldly. A creative mix of the photo realistic and 
the imagined is an art form all its own. Visually, anything is possible. This is the true magic of Blender. It’s a powerful tool that allows for endless creation, and it’s free. Once you’ve used Blender, I think you will understand why I keep restating the word free. This is an uber-powerful package, comparable to commercial applications costing thousands of dollars.
The bottom feeders of the internet.
Site Vandalism is what you call the kinds of comment spamming and abuse that is perpetrated by the low life’s of the internet, the bottom feeders.
Blogs make the perfect target for spammers/vandals/thread hijackers because they are interactive by nature. They are dynamic by design and it keeps the content fresh. thats the whole Idea. I’ve touched on this subject before, but only briefly.
Blog abuse is a common phenominon and it almost always takes place in replies to an original article or post. There are several methods that are used to accomplish this. The most common are pingbacks and trackbacks which allow comments to be made remotely from another source, sort of a “long distance ” reply to an article or post on the blog in question. There are varying goals that drive these bogus comments and a pandora’s box of methods. One of the most prolific kinds of posting garbage are responses to original posts that are entered into the blog automatically by a program called a “Web Crawler”, “Spider”, or ” ‘Bot “.
Continue reading The bottom feeders of the internet.