leadiv

I have been on a vacation this pass week and decided to try this Blender tutorial (click thumbnail to the left for full image). I saw this tutorial last year when it first came out but my blending skills were still very novice and I could not get through the first 5 minutes.

This is a good intermediate tutorial. I was able to practice working with mesh manipulation, materials, uv wrapping in the new Blender interface and learning about the render node editor capabilities. Made lots of mistakes along the way (always due to my lack of understanding how Blender works) but all in all was able to follow along with the tutorial with out getting lost. The number of balloons is homage to twentysixcats.com. Technically you can see all 26 balloons but a few of them are almost completely hidden from view. Here are the blend file for anyone interested.

Released OpenRule 2.0 (Venus) into the wild. Lots of new features including:

* Transparency controls
* Can measure in Inches, Centimeters, Pica and Pixels
* Custom measurements can be created
* The new Preference dialog allows you to customize the functionality and look of the ruler
* The tick leader line — a small line that hangs off the ruler — helps you keep track of where your mouse is on the ruler
* The ruler can be nudged by one pixel using the arrow keys and moved by 10 pixels by holding down the control key and using the arrow keys
* New about information
* Pressing F1 takes you to the user guide page
* Window and Mac executable are available

Yes I haven’t updated this summer and really I don’t have a good excuse. Just got out of the habit I guess. Well here is a new theme for the fall.

The Onion, one of my favorite fake news sources, just recently added video and audio sound bites to their site. I found one video entitled “Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti” that really highlights the absurdity that sometimes occurs when 24/7 News agencies (such as CNN) are reporting a breaking news story especially when the story is still quite fluid.

This is a reposting from theborregos.org — 2 May 2007

Update: It appears that the onion removed the video but you can still see it here courtesy of AbsZero of http://fliiby.com – 5 Dec 2011

Created this logo the other day using inkscape. The idea is that the rose is a graphical representation of a haiku—a 3 lined poem in the format of 5-7-5 syllables usually about nature. The font used for “haiku” is called dreamer one found on urbanfonts.

haiku logo

haiku logo by leadiv is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Thats right folks I have upgraded my phone recently and now have T-Mobile’s new sidekick. This spiffy piece of technoloy allows me to IM several people at once, grab my email from 4 different accounts, listen to music, and take snapshots (1.3 giga-pixel but what can you expect its a cell phone!) all while surfing the web for random (and useless) facts. But thats not all, I can extend it by taking images and uploading them to flickr pretty much in real time; use ssh to log into servers to move files and edit information; access your home computer for files; and to actually make phone calls without going through T-Mobile — which is good since I only have a data plan — using Skype (:-). All this for the low low price of $250. Yeah I know thats a fairly steep price but for what you can do — not to mention the fact that the data plan is one of the cheapest plans out — with the sidekick I think it can easily make up for this price.
Right now I am trying to figure out how to get it so that I can edit my website and various blogs that I own.

This is a reposting from theborregos.org — 9 April 2007

There I was biting my nails like I do in the middle of an intense thriller movie. Looking intently at the screen hoping and praying everything turns out okay. Of course I was not watching the latest thriller, I was just trying to install Ubuntu 8.10 on an old IBM ThinkPad. The past day or so I have been trying to get the installation CD to work to no avail.

I have at least learned a few things in the process though. Like for one don’t ever fully wipe out the partition until you know for sure the installation will work. You never know when a CD/DVD drive is going to bit the dust. A better idea is to partition off a section and try installing Ubuntu along side Windows or whatever other OS you currently have before blowing the whole hard dive away just to find out that halfway through the install process you get an unresolvable error. Better to have one OS then none.

The second thing–which I think is the issue I ran into–is if you are installing it on an older computer you should really take into an account that it has older hardware and not the latest and greatest. When I went to burn the ISO to the CD I just used the default speed on my burner (maximum). This as it turns out did not really jive with the ThinkPad’s CD/DVD drive’s speed. So after many failed installations and thoughts of just chucking the laptop out my second floor apartment and telling my brother it was stolen by intergalactic computer hacking gnomes. I tried writing the CD at x20 instead of the maximum (whatever that might be on my CD/DVD burner). So far it seems to be working albeit slow and steady.

I was messing with Photoshop this morning and came up with this image. It kind of reminds me of a movie or book poster. However, I could not think of any good captions.  So if any of you fine creative people out there can think of something please leave a comment!

For those interested in how I came up with the image. Here are the steps I took:

1. Using the Select ->Color Range.. feature on PhotoShop I grabbed the highlighted area of the image.

2. Made a copy of the base image and applied the Difference filter to the image.

3. Making sure that the Highlight is the top most layer followed by the Difference and then the base image created the image.

The orginal photo can be view at twentysixcats’ flickr page.

The pass few days I have been trying to figure out how to work with property files. A project I am working with uses Java DB and I want to have a property file that customizes where the database is located. Finding and loading the file has proven a bit difficult because I am trying to call the property file from the static main function of my program. So I can’t use the usual static functions to call the resource file in a physical independent way. I am hoping that encapslating it in a class might solve my problem.