Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Board Closed, Site Moved
StickFigure Graphic Productions is finally closing its forum on http://rancidmoose.unitedti.org and migrating to one hosted by the Cemetech community. I'm taking this opportunity to completely revamp the website, and ask that any forum discussion that would have taken place at StickFigure Graphic Productions to be moved to Cemetech. Not that big a deal since nobody's posted there in ages.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Net Neutrality For Newbs
So, some of you "old" (over 35) people out there may have heard of this thing called net neutrality, and be wondering what the big deal is. Or you may not have heard of it all, and were just directed to read this by a concerned child/grandchild/newphew/niece (though this last option is unlikely at best). Either way, its something thats important for you to know.
When you attempt to read a blog, check your email, or watch a video on youtube, your request gets chopped up into little packets and sent out into the world. From your computer they first travel to your Internet Service Provider (or ISP, examples are Comcast, Verizon, Green Mountain Access, Earthlink....whoever you pay your Internet bill to). From there, your ISP tries to figure out a nice short path across their own network (very much like a set of intersecting roads), for your packets to reach their destination with no blockages. Usually this will involve leaving their network, and sending the packets onto another ISP's network. In a fair world (i.e. one where "network neutrality" is observed), packets get sent on to their next destination as fairly as possibly....in the order they are received. Unfortunately, sometimes the networks get too much traffic (for example, when lots of people are using youtube, or bittorrent, or other audio-visual sorts of things), and begin to get clogged - kinda like a traffic jam. When this happens, everyone using that network begins to experience the speed of their Internet connection dropping. Many ISP's are now lobbying to be able to use "Traffic Shaping Software" to prioritize certai types of traffic, and redirect (or even stop!) other types of traffic. While they advertise that this would only ever be used to improve the quality of their service, the sad truth is that once ISP's are allowed to shape traffic, they can shape it however they want. This opens up several disturbing possibilities. The most obvious one is that it would allow them to begin charging for tiered service, where they slow track all your traffic unless you pay them extra money for "premium service." More troublesome yet, is that they could do the same thing for web services that you want to use. A hypothetical example of this would be if Yahoo or Microsoft formed a partnership with a local ISP, and paid them to slow down traffic to and from Google. Every with that ISP would find Google to be unusably (or at least inconveniently) slow, and people would switch to Microsoft and Yahoo, drawing revenue away from Google. While Google is a fairly large company, the same sort of tactics could easily be used to effectively squelch new competition from starting up. The final, and most serious, issue is that traffic shaping software can be used to entirely block certain applications (as is already happening in many places with BitTorrent), or even to censor webpages that aren't in the best interest of the ISP or big telecom companies.
For further information, or to learn how you can help protect your Internet freedoms, please consider the following resources.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
http://www.eff.org/
thank you for reading this!
~Thomas
When you attempt to read a blog, check your email, or watch a video on youtube, your request gets chopped up into little packets and sent out into the world. From your computer they first travel to your Internet Service Provider (or ISP, examples are Comcast, Verizon, Green Mountain Access, Earthlink....whoever you pay your Internet bill to). From there, your ISP tries to figure out a nice short path across their own network (very much like a set of intersecting roads), for your packets to reach their destination with no blockages. Usually this will involve leaving their network, and sending the packets onto another ISP's network. In a fair world (i.e. one where "network neutrality" is observed), packets get sent on to their next destination as fairly as possibly....in the order they are received. Unfortunately, sometimes the networks get too much traffic (for example, when lots of people are using youtube, or bittorrent, or other audio-visual sorts of things), and begin to get clogged - kinda like a traffic jam. When this happens, everyone using that network begins to experience the speed of their Internet connection dropping. Many ISP's are now lobbying to be able to use "Traffic Shaping Software" to prioritize certai types of traffic, and redirect (or even stop!) other types of traffic. While they advertise that this would only ever be used to improve the quality of their service, the sad truth is that once ISP's are allowed to shape traffic, they can shape it however they want. This opens up several disturbing possibilities. The most obvious one is that it would allow them to begin charging for tiered service, where they slow track all your traffic unless you pay them extra money for "premium service." More troublesome yet, is that they could do the same thing for web services that you want to use. A hypothetical example of this would be if Yahoo or Microsoft formed a partnership with a local ISP, and paid them to slow down traffic to and from Google. Every with that ISP would find Google to be unusably (or at least inconveniently) slow, and people would switch to Microsoft and Yahoo, drawing revenue away from Google. While Google is a fairly large company, the same sort of tactics could easily be used to effectively squelch new competition from starting up. The final, and most serious, issue is that traffic shaping software can be used to entirely block certain applications (as is already happening in many places with BitTorrent), or even to censor webpages that aren't in the best interest of the ISP or big telecom companies.
For further information, or to learn how you can help protect your Internet freedoms, please consider the following resources.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
http://www.eff.org/
thank you for reading this!
~Thomas
Friday, February 29, 2008
updates on the Linux Mom project
woot, got the printer working (whoever wrote that particular article on the wiki linked to a bad PAP backend), after HOURS of futzing with the URI and trying to figure out why cups was telling me the pap backend was failing on the same URI it gave me to use. Finally I started digging through the errors log for cups and found a bunch of these:
google had nothing on "Bad line from "pap" errors, so I figured the PAP backend recommended by the Ubuntu wiki and various other sources was likely borked, and spent a while googling around until I found this
Mom is rapidly adjusting to thunderbird + firefox vs mail.app + safari, and Rhythmbox continues to be a hit.
E [29/Feb/2008:15:05:58 -0500] [cups-deviced] Bad line from "pap": -e network pap://%2a/Arwen%20Dickerson/LaserWriter "Unknown" "Arwen Dickerson@* (pap)"
google had nothing on "Bad line from "pap" errors, so I figured the PAP backend recommended by the Ubuntu wiki and various other sources was likely borked, and spent a while googling around until I found this
Mom is rapidly adjusting to thunderbird + firefox vs mail.app + safari, and Rhythmbox continues to be a hit.
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Linux Mom
So, with both my mom's 10 year old iMac G3, and my slightly newer Pentium 3
Dell running XP experiencing harddrive failure in the last few months I had
to come up with a solution to consolidate computers. Fortunately I now have
my laptop, so I didn't need the desktop, but it made it hard for the
non-laptop owners in the family (e.g. brothers + mom) to do anything on the
computer. Fortunately I had a copy of Gutsy Gibbon laying around and a spare
20 gig hard drive that I mooched from our high school IT department.
The installation went pretty smoothly, I set up a separate partition for
/home/, everything else on the primary partition. Then came the process of
recovering data from the other 2 drives. The G3 was fairly easy since it
still booted up (usually), so I turned on FTP file sharing. Note: the ftp
server on OS X 10.3 SUCKS. So I turned to Samba and dumped everything onto
the Ubuntu machine that way (I realise that sharing information between 2
non-Windows machines with a M$ protocol is made of fail, but it worked). The
Dell's old harddrive was a little harder since my external drive enclosure
is for 2.5" drives. I ended up turning it off, unplugging the CD drive,
plugging in the old harddrive and turning it back on. I mounted it, and
copied everything over into everyone's new home folders. This was PAINFULLY
slow from GNOME so I ended up switching to tty1 and doing it from the
terminal.
This brought me to the step of importing all mom's mail settings from
Mail.app into Thunderbird. This was fairly easy at first, copied over the
settings by hand and found an apple script to export Address Book entries to
.csv format. I started thunderbird again just to double check, sent out a
test email, everything was working fine. The next day Mom sent me an email saying that for some reason NEITHER computer could get incoming mail, but that she could still send mail out fine, and asked if I thought the new computer had broken it. I couldn't think of how it would have, but at least the problem made some sense since she uses our ISP for outgoing mail and her account with the college for incoming mail, but the college webmail was working fine, so obviously their servers were still up and running. I emailed both a friend at the college who uses linux, and the college IT desk, and evidently they recently designed to enforce the use of SSL to connect to their IMAP server. Problem solved. Also, since Linux has better support for Windows media formats then OS X does, mom was really psyched to be able to listen to her VPR classical internet radio with Rhythmbox. Score another one for Linux :D I also copied over her background image from the Mac, and she really likes the scroll wheel over the iMac's puck mouse. Not too fond of the right click button yet, but I think she'll adapt.
Outstanding tasks:
help on any of these would be useful if someone reading this is familiar.
Dell running XP experiencing harddrive failure in the last few months I had
to come up with a solution to consolidate computers. Fortunately I now have
my laptop, so I didn't need the desktop, but it made it hard for the
non-laptop owners in the family (e.g. brothers + mom) to do anything on the
computer. Fortunately I had a copy of Gutsy Gibbon laying around and a spare
20 gig hard drive that I mooched from our high school IT department.
The installation went pretty smoothly, I set up a separate partition for
/home/, everything else on the primary partition. Then came the process of
recovering data from the other 2 drives. The G3 was fairly easy since it
still booted up (usually), so I turned on FTP file sharing. Note: the ftp
server on OS X 10.3 SUCKS. So I turned to Samba and dumped everything onto
the Ubuntu machine that way (I realise that sharing information between 2
non-Windows machines with a M$ protocol is made of fail, but it worked). The
Dell's old harddrive was a little harder since my external drive enclosure
is for 2.5" drives. I ended up turning it off, unplugging the CD drive,
plugging in the old harddrive and turning it back on. I mounted it, and
copied everything over into everyone's new home folders. This was PAINFULLY
slow from GNOME so I ended up switching to tty1 and doing it from the
terminal.
This brought me to the step of importing all mom's mail settings from
Mail.app into Thunderbird. This was fairly easy at first, copied over the
settings by hand and found an apple script to export Address Book entries to
.csv format. I started thunderbird again just to double check, sent out a
test email, everything was working fine. The next day Mom sent me an email saying that for some reason NEITHER computer could get incoming mail, but that she could still send mail out fine, and asked if I thought the new computer had broken it. I couldn't think of how it would have, but at least the problem made some sense since she uses our ISP for outgoing mail and her account with the college for incoming mail, but the college webmail was working fine, so obviously their servers were still up and running. I emailed both a friend at the college who uses linux, and the college IT desk, and evidently they recently designed to enforce the use of SSL to connect to their IMAP server. Problem solved. Also, since Linux has better support for Windows media formats then OS X does, mom was really psyched to be able to listen to her VPR classical internet radio with Rhythmbox. Score another one for Linux :D I also copied over her background image from the Mac, and she really likes the scroll wheel over the iMac's puck mouse. Not too fond of the right click button yet, but I think she'll adapt.
Outstanding tasks:
- editing device permissions to make digital cameras, TI graphing
calculators, and iPods usable without administrative privileges. - netatalk recognizes our Apple Laserwriter 320, which is currently hooked
up to the house LAN via an AsanteTalk gadget, but won't actually print
things to it. - Samba network browsing is still touchy.
help on any of these would be useful if someone reading this is familiar.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Dragon, day 2
Today, I started off by screenshotting my skeleton, and assembling some reference drawings:
Then I loaded up milkshape again and started meshing :)
Then I loaded up milkshape again and started meshing :)
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
SO, essentially
I've decided to get back to doing 3D graphical things for fun and as a stress relief valve for all the political goings on, and starting to get a taste of commuting with all the trips to Montpelier.
Anywho, I'll give you a brief visual history of playing with milkshape 3d and model skeletons (which is a different ballgame then the lit scenes I enjoy making in CADkey or the occasional static item/plant model).
first, outcome of me playing with the CS GIRL tutorial before I got frustrated with rigging the skeleton to my slightly different than instructed model.
For this one I started with the gsg9 skeleton from Counter Strike and did some drawing around it:
Not too shabby IMHO, although he obviously needs a little work.
And then an upclose face drawn from scratch:
Then I moved on to skinning:
Anyhow, it was right about here, when I started attaching the skeleton to the mesh that I got frustrated (back in August), and put it on hold for a while:
Then, about a 2 months ago, a friend asked me to make a model of a lego person, with separable body parts, for him to use with Panda3d, and after playing around with skinning the model it renewed my interest in some older ideas I had for projects.
Which brings us to last week. Browsed around on google images, found a diagram of a dragonfly, and after 2 or 3 hours, voila:
Fired up LithUnwrap, did each group/bodypart as a separate UV mapping, and skinned them one at a time:
Finally, I rigged the skeleton and started animating the legs. The wings weren't rotating properly, so those are on hold, but here he is:
Finally, coming to my latest project, similar to the last one, but with a shorter name, and WAYYY more complex skeleton. Also, The only good reference image I could find was from one view only so I decided to do the skeleton first to get a good sense of depth before I started the concept art + the mesh:
I'll keep you all informed as he progresses.
Anywho, I'll give you a brief visual history of playing with milkshape 3d and model skeletons (which is a different ballgame then the lit scenes I enjoy making in CADkey or the occasional static item/plant model).
first, outcome of me playing with the CS GIRL tutorial before I got frustrated with rigging the skeleton to my slightly different than instructed model.
For this one I started with the gsg9 skeleton from Counter Strike and did some drawing around it:
Not too shabby IMHO, although he obviously needs a little work.
And then an upclose face drawn from scratch:
Then I moved on to skinning:
Anyhow, it was right about here, when I started attaching the skeleton to the mesh that I got frustrated (back in August), and put it on hold for a while:
Then, about a 2 months ago, a friend asked me to make a model of a lego person, with separable body parts, for him to use with Panda3d, and after playing around with skinning the model it renewed my interest in some older ideas I had for projects.
Which brings us to last week. Browsed around on google images, found a diagram of a dragonfly, and after 2 or 3 hours, voila:
Fired up LithUnwrap, did each group/bodypart as a separate UV mapping, and skinned them one at a time:
Finally, I rigged the skeleton and started animating the legs. The wings weren't rotating properly, so those are on hold, but here he is:
Finally, coming to my latest project, similar to the last one, but with a shorter name, and WAYYY more complex skeleton. Also, The only good reference image I could find was from one view only so I decided to do the skeleton first to get a good sense of depth before I started the concept art + the mesh:
I'll keep you all informed as he progresses.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
ANNOUNCEMENT-BOT has been repaired
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