A few quickies.

1) I fixed up a bunch of my links.  Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website.  So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.

2. I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken.  Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on.  I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable.  I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future.  Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie.  It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream.  Check it out!

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  ( Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora).  Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux.  (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza)  Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed.  Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs.  For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.

This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!

I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His l ast.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.

On graduation from Cornell!

Although, since you’ve done a summer job every summer, like me, you probably won’t notice that you’ve graduated until winter comes around and you don’t get a winter break.

I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that 5000 people have seen this one picture of mine.  It’s nuts!

Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny.  What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any tools that make armatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which should allow most of the video editing to take place inside of Blender.

I’d love to play with it, but right now I’m working on some animation projects so I need to wait until at least Fedora comes out with the 2.46 rpm.  Ideally also my FreeBSD render farm would also get updated.  A lot of the new goodies like hair/fur rendering are not backwards compatible.  Good job from the coding team and I hope to test it out soon enough.

[emesa@mario ~]$ uname -a Linux mario.mushroomkingdom 2.6.24.5-85.fc8 #1 SMP Sat Apr 19 12:39:34 EDT 2008 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux [emesa@mario ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}’ | sort -rn | head 176 ls 172 eog 81 ./makeSpiral.pl 80 cd 61 ./makefibonaccicollage.pl 58 mplayer 51 ./makePolar.pl 36 mv 28 flickr_views.py 24 exit

and root:

[root@mario ~]# history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}’ | sort -rn | head 193 ls 127 cd 102 exit 87 mount 77 yum 71 history 43 emacs 35 cat 20 rm 16 ifconfig Notes:

As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers.  To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system.  These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing the proper logo, will no longer play once August comes around and Microsoft turns off the servers which validate you as a non-criminal.  I hope there’s a huge outcry that forces them to un-DRM all these songs and sounds the ultimate death knell for DRM.

I’ve used Damn Small Linux (DSL) quite a bit in the past. Before getting my laptop I used to use it to be able to get a Linux desktop at my in-laws’ house. I decided I wanted to try out some of these other lightweight Linux distros that everyone is always talking about. Even on Linux Outlaws they mentioned how they like some different light distros over DSL.  Since I’ve used DSL so much, I decided to evaluate these other Linux distros based on how they compare to DSL.