Author: Eric Mesa

  • A Wonderful Poem by Jeremy Bornstein

    It can be found here, but in case it disappears, I’ve reproduced it. Zero and her Origin Zero, the number said to be discovered Nine times by ancient magicians, was Found again by a mysterious order of Nine modern alchemists, who built One machine after another, until finally One exploded with fascinating results. No fire…

  • Ever wondered which Linux distribution to use?

    Well, these guys came up with a survey that tells you which Linux distribution you should use. I took the test and it predicted all the ones I use (Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian). You should check it out!

  • WTF?

    This picture: is now my #1 most viewed photo over this one:

  • I think I’m a clone now….

    While cleaning up the animation for “Jose’s Dinner”, I was having a bit of trouble with the character’s mouth. I told it to open, but it still appeared closed. It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What…

  • A little more benchmarking

    I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the…

  • Blender used for music video!

    A pretty neat music video was made using Blender and it can be found here. It’s for the song “Machines” by KissKiss

  • Renderfarm Node Performance

    Today I tested my POS Compaq render node (running freeBSD with no GUI) with the same bouncing ball as in this previous post. It took my node 796 seconds to render the same animation. This is somewhere around 1.65 times slower. However, the software should just be throwing frames at whichever computer is ready for…

  • Excitement!

    Last night around 2300 I finished up the preliminary 3D render of Jose’s Dinner. Now I just need to tweak up the animation with the fine details such as blinking and mouth movements. After that I just need to create the soundtrack and credits and the short film will be completed. I’m excited about debuting…

  • Jose’s Dinner

    Jose’s Dinner is what I am calling my first true animated short film. Unlike “Penguin Flight“, it actually has a plot! A lot a books I’ve read on animation have influenced the production of this short film. Most importantly, I created a 2D animatic – or animated storyboard. It REALLY helped me to get the…

  • 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

    What a beautiful hex number! Check this page out to see what it may mean. The Free Speech Flag…..just check out the hex that represents these colours.

  • My computer Experience

    Responding to Penguin Pete’s WHY is the transition from Windows to Linux easy for some people?, I had no idea my response would be so lengthy. So I decided to copy it over to my blog. Read his and the other comments and here’s mine. As for me, my first computer was a Tandy T80…

  • I absolutely LOVE this comic!

    Again, courtesy of xkcd, here’s one I just can’t stop going back to look at.

  • Interesting new developments for Linux

    As a general rule, Linux users are not terribly prone to loyalty to any particular Linux distribution. This is due to the fact that open standards allow it to be generally pretty easy to move one’s settings from one distro to another. Thus there have been several darlings of the Linux movement. In the beginning,…

  • Scott Adams once again was playing philosopher the other day and tackled a pretty important topic: fairness. Imagine trying to “fairly” divide ten identical marbles between two kids. You could give five marbles to each kid, wave your arms and declare it fair. The kids would probably agree with this arrangement. The illusion of fairness…

  • Today’s Shot of the Day