Broke categories….now all of my posts are uncategorized….

everything else appears to be working well….

now to fix the categories again….

I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about 15-20 minutes to get set up.

Collisions from djotaku on Vimeo.

But you may notice a problem here. The ball appears to accelerate as it leaves the bricks. That’s because the tutorial was just a quick example of how to do the task at hand. So I set about to find out what was going on and why my ball was not obeying the conservation of energy. It turns out that the settings as described in the magazine kept continuously giving the ball energy. So I had to adjust it so that it would only get energy at the beginning. After that, I got something much more realistic.

As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on….

Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to find a post to see what my Wordpress theme is called. (It’s called ramart) Wordpress 2.3 is out and they had a list of themes that were compatible, so I wanted to see if mine was, but I needed to know what it was called. (It isn’t compatible) I knew that I had changed to this theme early on so I was searching through my earliest articles.

another great one from xkcd:

What did you think when you saw the first panel? I thought of Roadrunner cartoons RIGHT AWAY!

My brother introduced me to “Guitar Hero” over the summer. I couldn’t really get into it at the time. There were basically two reasons for this. First of all, I just wasn’t in the mood for that type of game on the day he brought it over. However, the concept stayed with me and whenever I hear rock songs, I imagine how easy or hard they would be to play in “Guitar Hero”. The other reason I didn’t get into the game when Dan brought it over is that I didn’t know any of the songs, but one or two. It’s really hard to get into playing the guitar for a song you’re not really into.

I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the day’s Top downloads are $0.89 and the rest are $0.99. On iTunes the DRM-free songs are $1.89 or something like that. Looks like Apple’s going to need to do a price drop or there’s going the be a mass exodus to Amazon.com.

As you know, a student was tasered at UF a few days ago. I hadn’t written anything about it until now because I wanted to get some details from my brother who matriculates there. Before I get to his info, I just want to say that this incident has shown why video is important in news. Anyone who, like me, saw the video thought the kid deserved to be tasered. Why? The kid, who had the smirk of a self-entitled jerk as he stepped up to the podium, was clearly resisting arrest. When the police detained him, he pushed them away and broke free. He then pumped his hands in the air victoriously, although this was cut short by the police catching him again. He continued to push and shove the cops until they finally tasered him. You don’t want to listen to the cops, that’s what happens. But the people who only read about the tasering though that it was undeserved. Undoubtedly those written bits of news left out the way he was acting, the look on his face, and the shoves against the cops.

Then you may find the following a bit entertaining.

I just discovered this show and it’s hilarious! It’s an HBO show about two Kiwis (guys from New Zealand) who are in a band and are trying to make it big in the US. If you like absurdist Tv shows like “Ally McBeal” or “Scrubs”, then you’ll love “Flight of the Conchords”. The band members routinely break into singing and end up in a music-video-like sequence. You have to see it to get an idea of the way it works.

Stanford University, a leader in trying to get Congress and the public to understand the importance of the Public Domain have done what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a few months now. They decided to test the doctrine of Fair Use in copyrights by creating the following video. Any Disney fan should be sure to watch. Don’t know what fair use is? Don’t worry, they’ll explain it below.

In the case that the above video should be removed from youtube, download it from their page. If that page should happen to be down, then you can download it from me here.