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 a new frame. The node took about 20 seconds per frame on average to render. My Linux computer takes 12 seconds. Here’s where I’m pretty bad at math, but I think this means that a render farm with just these two computers should finish in a little over half the time as just my Linux computer. But I can also throw in my laptop which should also be in the same range. So a 3 hour render should go down to a 1 hour render. (Roughly speaking)

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 it, so this will probably take up all my spare time (instead of playing games or watching tv).

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 timings correct and made the process a LOT less frustrating than it was with " Penguin Flight", where I was always trying to guess how long/how many frames an action should take. As I have no training in animation, my timings might still be a little bit off, but they are MUCH, MUCH better thanks to the animatics!

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.

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’m not 100% sure about it being a T80, but I know it was a Tandy. It was just a keyboard that connected to a Tv. I learned to program in basic and I played proprietary games that came on cassette tapes.

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

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, Slackware was introducted to server rooms and was the most popular. Then Red Hat Linux became the new distro to use with its easy to use GUIs. Mandrake (now Mandriva) became the best distro when Red Hat began to slow down their pace, leaving Mandrake as the most bleeding edge and easiest for new users. It was known for “just working” even if being on the bleeding edge also meant it was chronically unstable. Now the distro to be running is Ubuntu. It works flawlessly with most hardware, is easy to install, has a liveCD, and the great apt-get system to resolve package dependencies.

Recently I’ve been a tad annoyed at the criticisms of the Sugar interface to the laptops in the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC). The developers chose to forgo the desktop metaphor as the kids over there in the third world don’t even have desks or files or anything like that. Instead they tried to reengineer things to be as fun and intuitive as possible for the kids that will get the laptops. So many people have complained that the interface is so non-intuitive that there’s no way these kids will get the interface. It should have been made to mimic Windows they claim! I think they just find it unintuitive because we’ve been using the desktop metaphor here since the 80s.