StickFigure Graphic Productions Blog

Board Closed, Site Moved

2008-12-03T00:04:00.003-05:00

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.

Net Neutrality For Newbs

2008-05-27T15:04:00.006-05:00

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

updates on the Linux Mom project

2008-02-29T23:34:00.003-05:00

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:

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.

The Linux Mom

2008-02-25T19:35:00.003-05:00

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:

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.

Dragon, day 2

2008-02-07T18:49:00.000-05:00

Today, I started off by screenshotting my skeleton, and assembling some reference drawings:

Then I loaded up milkshape again and started meshing :)

SO, essentially

2008-02-06T21:33:00.000-05:00

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.

ANNOUNCEMENT-BOT has been repaired

2007-06-14T20:33:00.001-05:00

The following is an e-mail sent to you by an administrator of "StickFigure
Graphic Productions". If this message is spam, contains abusive or other
comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at
the following address:

elfprince13@gmail.com

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hello everyone, after 2 hours of work and learning the phpBB3 DBAL system
I have repaired everyone's favorite Announcement-bot, stand by for more
upgrades before I disappear for the summer.

--
========
ElfPrince13, StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator

Temporary Board Shutdown

2007-05-20T18:18:00.001-05:00

The following is an email sent to you by an administrator of "StickFigure Graphic Productions". If this message is spam, or contains comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following address: elfprince13@gmail.com

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hello everyone, the board will temporarily be shutdown while I begin the upgrade process to phpBB3. thanks for your cooperation, and hang tight.
-elfprince

This is my gift, My Curse

2007-04-02T18:55:00.000-05:00

they say that curiosity killed the cat, I say it was the apathy brought on by relentless academia. As long as I can remember I've been curious about everything, and so when I was little, the opportunity to go to school excited me as a chance to satisfy that curiousity, and learn about the way our universe, world, country, and language behave. However as the years have gone on I've become increasingly disillusioned by the insistence of American teachers on how to be academically successful, without the background of actually teaching anything. Academia as a means of learning can be successful with a significant number of students, but when it leads to teachers worshipping the ways of academia in and of itself, it becomes meaningless, a shell kept alive by a twisted national obsession with honoring the mundane and mediocre, and ignoring the curious

Every year have I yearned
For the knowledge
Which I see just ahead of me

And every year have I learned
That the knowledge which I sought
Is nought but a shell
Made of that which I already knew

rant #1, my take on notes

2007-03-22T20:32:00.000-05:00

hello everyone, starting now I will post my rantings on various subjects, mostly related to the idiocy of the american public school system. these will also be mirrored on my myspace blog ( http://www.myspace.com/rancidmoose )

Mr __________,
you said to voice our opinions on how to handle note taking so here's mine. Notes are designed to help students by serving as a memory aid, not to be a burden on them. Note taking should be the responsibility of the student who feels they need notes to remember the material being taught in class, not the responsibility of the teacher to take make sure the student writes down every inane detail of the days lecture. For people like me who have learned much of the material already from outside reading, and who can learn
nearly anything just by hearing or reading it once, notes are nothing but a waste of valuable time that could be spent learning new material.
The purpose of school is to give students the opportunity to learn, not to take that opportunity away.
Sincerely,
Thomas

The american school system, despite all cries that we as a nation losing our edge, seems to have shifted its focus from providing an education opportunity for everyone to hindering the gifted students from actually learning anything, and to help the less intellectually fortunate feel good about themselves without actually teaching them anything that could help them catch up. Take note taking as an example. For about 50% of the school-going population, taking notes actually helps them remember stuff. For about 40% taking notes just distracts them from listening to what the teacher is talking about. For the remaining 10% they aren't so much a distraction as a flat out waste of time. And yet for some strange reason teachers seem to feel an increasing need to
come up with cutesier and cutesier ways of coercing students into taking notes, often by actually trying to make the note taking an assignment and grading it. Awesome for that 50% who it actually helps, but for the other half its useless or worse than useless. The responsibility to learn falls squarely on the shoulders of the students. The teachers are merely there to provide as much information as possible to the people who want to learn about it. Their's is not the responsibility of forcing a learning style on those who don't want it, and even worse, their attempts at doing so merely hinder those who most want to learn from actually doing so. Fie on you teachers, for you are no longer the suppliers of coveted information, but the feared dollers out of grades that determine who will get an education later in life, using a system that hurts those most interested in doing so.

Zelda gets renamed

2007-02-03T15:31:00.001-05:00

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Zelda :: Online Experience has now been renamed to Zelda's Dream as a better name.

Site Updates

2007-01-26T09:16:00.001-05:00

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Some of you may have noticed that SAX hasn't been working properly, its been fixed and Ive updated the backend to use an SQL table instead of a flatfile to allow for more customisation later.

Site Update

2007-01-26T09:06:00.001-05:00

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SAX seems to have been experiencing some issues, however I ported the backend to use a MySQL database instead of a logfile and it seems to be working fine.

Board Updated

2007-01-11T10:01:00.001-05:00

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The board has finally been updated to phpBB 2.0.22. In other news our year long total bandwidth ended up in the 4.5GB range. December was our hottest month ever with over 600MB of transferred data.

SFGP gets a facelift (finally)

2006-11-16T01:41:00.000-05:00

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hello staff members (and everyone else) of stickfigure graphic productions. Its been a while since we've had any major news, but as of tonight the site got a huge facelift including a new chat box built into the side of the site that connects to our irc channel (irc://irc.unitedti.org#sfgp for those of you who use irc, for those who dont the chat box works just as well.). We also have reorganize the games, designed icons, and merged some of the old subforums that didn't get much use. Finally, on a side note, bledoux has resumed progress on Zelda : Online Experience (to be renamed Zelda's Dream).

--thomas dickerson (elfprince13)

Zelda Online Subforum Repaired

2006-10-25T13:01:00.000-05:00

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after some help from Thoul of phpBBHacks.com I have repaired the custom themeing in the zelda online experience subforum.

Legend of Zelda : Online Experience

2006-09-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

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SFGP has an new project from one of our oldest members.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's what Bledoux has to say about his new project:

------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure most of you have heard of the Legend of Zelda game series. Well, I want to take the game to the next level and bring it online. I have the server up and running so Elfprince13 will host the server so we can keep it online. We're starting work on the game now but I will give you updates from time to time. I'm thinking that the graphics might be either A Link To The Past or The Minish Cap. To keep the original Zelda graphics going. Here are some features that the game will have that I can think of at the top of my head:

- News at login screen
- Auto-login feature
- Several different classes
- Quests
- Items
- Equippable items and equipment
- PvP (Player vs Player) Arenas
- Active Staff and Developers
- Jail for rule breakers
- Guilds
- Skills and Spells that can be performed using MP (Magic Power)
- Stats that increase as you level up through experience points
- Day/Night System
- Weather System

That's all I can think of at the top of my head at the moment, I will add more when I think of more features.

Once I get all the basic stuff worked out so that the game actually has some point in playing it, I will then have 50 Beta Testers to help me find out bugs so they they can be fixed. I'm adding Beta players now so if you want to be a beta tester, PM me and I will add you to the list, only taking the first 50! However, remember that I am only accepting 50 people to help beta test to help out with bugs and be able to play a little bit before anyone else. Once Beta testing is out, I will have boards for Bugs, Suggestions and Feedback.

Hope you guys try it out once it's open to the public.

~ Bledoux
-------------------------------------------------------

New AJAX Preview Box

2006-08-06T20:21:00.000-05:00

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the first step in converting our site to use AJAX has begun. From now on when you make a post in the forum, as you are typing a preview box above the posting area will update itself every second to give you a realtime preview of what your post will look like.

spam

2006-08-02T16:29:00.000-05:00

The following is an email sent to you by an administrator of "StickFigure Graphic Productions". If this message is spam, contains abusive or other comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following address:

elfprince13@gmail.com

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some of you may have noticed that spam recently in the announcements forum. anywho, for some reason guest posting had been enabled in the Announcements forum. :| its fixed now, and all spam has been deleted.

test2

2006-08-01T00:57:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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this is the final test of the announcement bot.

I am the automated bot who distributes messages from the site administrators via the mass emailer, the blog, and the announcements forum.

G'day mates.

hey

2006-07-18T06:53:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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testing the new announcement bot ;)

Finally some new releases.

2006-07-17T16:34:00.000-05:00

Ive taken a break from my other projects in order to complete the following projects:

CemetechAI Beta 1 bot script for DTB
Blogger Mod and eXtreme Antispam mods for phpBB

Blogger Mod integrates the Blogger templating system with the phpbb templating system. It is downloadable here:
http://rancidmoose.unitedti.org/members/software/blogger_mod.zip

eXtreme Antispam adds a fully customizable antispam control panel to you phpBB board as well as a non-graphical, 3 question captcha. It is downloadable here: http://rancidmoose.unitedti.org/members/software/eXtreme_antispam_mod_v1.1.0.zip

CemetechAI was written in conjunction with KermMartian and Jpez of http://www.cemetech.net. It adds some advanced robot army capabilities to the DTB blockland mod. It is downloadable here: http://www.cemetech.net/scripts/countdown.php?blockland/cemetechai.zip

--
----------------------------------
Sincerely, Thomas Dickerson
StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator
rancidmoose.unitedti.org

Finally another game.

2006-06-06T23:12:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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well, in programming class this week I decided to take a break from CeltQuest so I did a 10*10 implementation of the classic puzzle game "KnightMoves".

anyway, I got arounded to templating it into our forum, so without further ado I present KnightMoves: http://rancidmoose.unitedti.org/forum/knightmoves.php

anyway, please let me know what you think

Gone for a couple of weeks.

2006-05-31T22:29:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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School is approaching an end here and I have missed a crapload of school recently. Im gonna step back for a couple of weeks and get caught up. Make sure I make highest honors this quarter, etc.

Our others admins should be wonderfully capable of filling in while Im gone. Thanks guys.

CeltQuest continues to progress.

2006-05-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

I have almost finished the core RPGKit and can now begin developing the game itself. If anyone is willing to contribute to the graphics aspect of this project, please let me know.

--
----------------------------------
Sincerely, Thomas Dickerson
StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator
rancidmoose.unitedti.org

Site Updates

2006-05-04T18:16:00.000-05:00

our phpBB has been updated to 2.0.20

Also, I just finished updating all the games to use the phpBB skinning system. This should also generate a fair bit of traffic to our forum from all the links we get to Red Sox Slime.

:wink: Also, for those of you interested in the RPGKit project, I have finally released a demo.

--
----------------------------------
Sincerely, Thomas Dickerson
StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator
rancidmoose.unitedti.org

CeltQuest and the RPGKit get a facelift.

2006-05-04T14:56:00.000-05:00

After some intense coding I now have pretty much finished the base of the RPGKit. I have generated some Javadoc, and uploaded a demo for everyone (which is still a little buggy...works better on mac and linux, but thats normal for just about everything....)

--
----------------------------------
Sincerely, Thomas Dickerson
StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator
rancidmoose.unitedti.org

We now have an irc channel

2006-04-30T15:15:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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Hey everyone,
just though id let you know that our IRC channel is now available on http://rancidmoose.unitedti.org/forum/irc.php

or if you have an IRC Client already, you can connect to irc.unitedti.org and join #sfgp.

Thanks,
please stop bye when you get a chance

Our games are finally working

2006-04-22T11:00:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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I finally got off my lazy rear end and moved the last game from my original geocities site to this server, almost a year after I originally got this webspace.

Id like to think Jon Johnson of Nosolution.net for his continued gracious hosting here.

finally, I also managed to get all the games to actually work in most browsers, something they didn't even do at the old site.

--Elfprince13

hey

2006-04-18T18:35:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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our final staff replacement has been chosen.

Caffeine_addict has been chosen to replace md_gorilla_boy as part of the moderator team in an anonymous election held by the administrators.

congratulations Caffeine_addict

Happy Easter.

2006-04-17T15:51:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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Happy belated Easter to everyone. SFGP has now almost made it through it's first year of existence. anyway, in honour (no, Im not british, I just think thats a cool way to spell stuff), of Easter I made this:

you guys are great,
elfprince13

Staff replacement voting

2006-04-14T17:35:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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guys, please come vote in the staff elections in the private staff forum.

testing

2006-04-10T21:51:00.000-05:00

elfprince13@gmail.com

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last one hopefully

This is another test

2006-04-07T19:11:00.000-05:00

Im testing my ability to email in a post.

--
----------------------------------
Sincerely, Thomas Dickerson
StickFigure Graphic Productions Administrator
rancidmoose.unitedti.org

Blog installed.

2006-04-07T18:02:00.000-05:00

StickFigure Graphic Productions now has it very own blog. For us priveleged few (aka the staff), we have an email address which will allow us to submit blog entries.

the blog is here.

However we also have a nifty mod that checks our blog for posts and posts them into the announcments forum

testing...testing....

2006-04-07T16:40:00.000-05:00

hi everyone. this is a test of the blogging facilities. Hope you like it. Have fun.