Whee! Siggraph, the world's leading graphics conference, is rolling around the corner, and this year is looking really good. Probably won't surprise anyone that my interests are largely Blender oriented, but I'm really enthusiastic about the festival in general. It looks like it's running from the tenth to the fifteenth of this month, but I really want to go on the thirteenth, because that's when The Making of "Big Buck Bunny": An Open-Source Evolution is going to present.

It's here in Chicago, and it looks like a one day pass is a mere $45. That doesn't sound so bad.

Hm. The thirteenth is just next Wednesday? Maybe I can't attend that. If not, at least it's good to see Blender and Big Buck Bunny gettin' represented.

From eighth grade all the way through high school, there was a single, late-dos era two-player game that all my friends and I knew and loved. Upon many occasions that we got together, we would play it. I'm talking about Liero, that fantastic game that's somewhere between a two dimensional game of Quake or a real-time Worms. It was great, though a little buggy, but damn did the physics felt nice (in a wonderfully unrealistic way), and the ninja rope was a freaking blast to use.

But it was closed source, and apparently the author lost the source code due a disk crash, and for years we were stuck with playing the same tired old binary. Then Windows XP came out, and sound stopped working entirely. And eventually it moved from a game we played to a game we reminisced.

Over the years I've checked on the number of clones which have come about, but none of them really had the same feel as the original Liero. But now that's changed, for a new free and open source Liero clone is out, called OpenLieroX, based off the Liero Extreme codebase. And it's awesome. It supports the original Liero weaponpack, as far as I can tell, flawleslly, and has a vast wealth of mods and levelpacks available for download. On top of that, it has network play... which isn't perfect, and I often find myself running into my own bullets in ways that would never happen offline, but it's still pretty good.

Installing it on Linux actually isn't that hard. There's a .deb file available on the sourceforge download page, if you happen to be running Debian or Ubuntu, as well as windows builds. But I'd recommend running from subversion, which currently has auto level and mod download support (the latest stable releases don't). To compile, run these commands:

svn co https://openlierox.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openlierox openlierox
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libgd2-noxpm-dev zlib1g-dev libxml2-dev
./compile.sh

...then you can run either 'sudo ./install.sh' './start.sh', depending on whether you want to install it or just run it locally without installing.

I'm actually interested in playing a few games online with people I know... maybe even having a small local openlierox lan party. Anyone interested?

The title of this post is actually less me trying to make a bad SQL joke as it is me ripping off my favorite Dinosaur Comics comic. But yeah. Lots of deadness of non-funness. Anyway, this is one of those boring personal life posts that people probably don't care about, but it at least has a fairly simple moral to the story.

So I noticed from work on Friday that my ssh connection kept resetting to my home machine. Every once in a while, RCN is flaky, so I figured that's what it was until I realized that emacsclient wasn't connecting to my existing session and that my uptime was only five minutes. It was raining, so I figured that maybe the power went out several times.

Well, I got home and quickly realized that my computer wasn't turning on. At all. I took off the case and noticed that, while the power supply fan was running, the processor fan wasn't. Cycling the power supply and then hitting the power button would lead to the processor fan spinning for a couple of seconds and then stopping. So I tried reseating the ram. No luck. I tried with individual sticks of ram. Again, no luck. So it didn't seem to be the ram. My couple of years of diagnosing and repairing machines at my previous job have made me pretty decent at fixing machines (though I mostly got by at that job with using my software skills to overcome my lack of hardware skills), but I'm pretty rusty. But anyway, at this point I figured there was a good chance that it was the powersupply, despite the fact that the fan was running, as it might not be supplying enough power to power up the machine entirely (which I've seen happen before). So I tried replacing the powersupply. Nope, no luck. Luckily I had made a backup of my data a couple of weeks ago, so I wasn't really worried there. Even so, most likely I figured the drive wasn't damaged, so I probably hadn't even lost anything within that group of time.

At this point, I figure it's probably the motherboard, but it's not within my budget to replace that right now. So I asked Morgan, my wonderful fiance, if she'd mind if I "moved in" to her computer until I was able to fix mine. She was fine with it. I figured this would also be good motivation for me to actually start regular backups on her computer, which I've been promising to do for a while. About six months ago, I installed a second drive on Morgan's computer so she could easily run Ubuntu. She hasn't touched the windows drive much since then, except to pull data over. So it shouldn't be too hard for me to move over.

So I pull out my drive, and with one of those nice little PATA-to-USB adapters I started rsync'ing my data over to my home directory.

Except, bad news. That drive I installed Ubuntu on for Morgan was a rather old one, and apparently moving several gigs of data over was just too much for it to handle. Halfway through the transfer, it died. Completely died. Like, I couldn't even 'dd' the drive to an image so I could try to inspect and recover its contents. I deliver the bad news to Morgan. She takes it pretty well, since most of her data was still mirrored on the windows machine, but she probably did lose a paper or two. At any rate, I was pretty clearly an ass for not backing up her drives sooner. So I promised to back up her Windows drive right then, to be sure that no more freak accidents could happen where she would lose all of her data.

So I took the Western Digital Passport I had bought expressly for this purpose several months ago. Fired up rsync, and... well, it didn't die, but it kept clicking and then disconnecting during the middle of transfer. Thankfully, rsync is inherently well designed for this scenario, but... dammit.

So I went out and bought two new drives, one to replace the dead Linux drive, and one to put in an enclosure for regular backups. Those drives are fine, but I'm pretty disturbed by the multiple system failures I experienced. The moral of the story is pretty obvious. Backups are critical. Losing your computer is a frustrating experience. Losing your data can be a traumatic experience. Thankfully, not much data was lost, though that small amount of data that Morgan did lose was totally preventable.

I'm also planning on writing a tutorial on how to do easy backups with rsync and either an external drive or another remote computer. I'm also thinking about starting to back up to an entirely remote location, like either a family member's house or maybe even something like Amazon S5. But if I did that I'd want to encrypt all my files with something like GPG. I'm not sure about that yet, but I think it's generally a good idea in case some sort of disaster were ever to strike us. Hopefully such a thing won't happen, but with the kind of luck I've had this weekend, I'm all about preparing for the worst.

A lot of people have been complaining about not being able to install, or know where to install, Firebug for firefox

1. Thought I'd spread the news that, yes, there is a release available. It is a beta version, but I haven't seen any problems so far, and it's a bit nicer than the previous version too.

Ok, I'll stop slacking and get back to work now. ;p

To celebrate the release of Firefox 3, the folks at Mozilla are trying to set a world record for most downloads ever in a 24 hour time period... aka, download day!

Well, download day just started (though their main page, at the time of writing, still says firefox 2). But you can get it now, while its hot, for Linux! OSX! Windows!

You want Firefox 3. All those memory leaks? Haven't noticed a one since I've switched. Plus better native deaktop integration, and.. have I mentioned the awesome bar?

Yes. You definitely want this.

Update: Firefox 3 is now properly appearing on the Mozilla homepage... when it actually loads, that is. At the time of writing, I'm hearing on IRC that downloads are between 3000-5000 downloads/minute.

Update 2: Oh hai, download stats counter! (Currently > 12000 downloads a minute... holy crap!)

Update 3: The world record page page is showing a lot more downloads than that other page is (by like, double). I wonder why?

Check out sfxr, an awesome awesome awesome video game noise generator.

I've seriously been sitting here for the last half hour just goofing around with it. I legally shouldn't be allowed to enjoy this so much. If only the real world sounded this beautiful.

Hm. I wonder how hard it would be to use this to generate noises/notes for some home-brewed chiptune-like beats... but probably nobody in the world would like listening to that stuff but me.

Update: Looks like the same person is working on an unbelievably cool looking music editor/synthesizer called musagi which seems extremely well suited for such means. I hope this gets released as free and open source software some day.

Another update: Sorry to keep spazzing about the subject, but you should seriously check out this dude's article on how sound works. As someone who's never studied the subject, I find myself surprised to be mostly understanding this. Really an illuminating read.

If you've read this blog before, I'm sure you're expecting me to talk about Obama's awesome win. But no doubt you've already heard about that.

What you might not have heard is that 82 people were arrested for opposing torture at Guantanamo Bay. (One of them was my good friend Ken Butigan.) To top it off, the location they were holding their protest at was the US Supreme court. So much for being a temple of justice and liberty.

The Washington Post also ran a story.

Big Buck Bunny (previously Project Peach), the world's second fully "open movie" (the first being Elephants Dream), has been released! Grab a torrent and go!

It's quite a good little short. Much more accessible, much less experimental, than Elephant's Dream. It's also totally gorgeous, and gained enough attention that its CGTalk thread got frontpaged. CGTalk's community, in the past, was somewhat notoriously snarky toward Blender for just being a hobbyist's software, but from the talk going on, it's clear that that attitude is changing.

Great news for Blender, great news for the free culture movement, and great news for blenderheads like me! The direct collaboration between the artists and developers means great new features making it into blender's codebase.

And if you like the movie? Like Blender? Like supporting free culture productions like this one? Well then, consider buying a DVD so you can support the Blender Foundation. It's good for you, good for the public at large, and you'll feel good about it at the end.

Now I'm looking forward to the next projects coming out of the Blender Institute, including Project Apricot, the Blender-based Big Buck Bunny game, Creature Factory, a blender training DVD made by the well known Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, and lastly the whatever-successor-to-peach movie they're coming out with next (I hear it involves robots). Lots to look forward to, but in the meantime my Big Buck Bunny DVD is on its way, as is the ManCandy FAQ, a Blender character animation training DVD.

Mmmm. Mancandy.

Wow.

I've Been thinking about the way I currently organize my home directory, and I'm not sure it's quite the best. It's actually a lot more messy than this in reality, but here goes:

Directory Contents

~/bin/ What you'd expect... local scripts & executables.

~/backgrounds/ Backgrounds for my desktop

~/college/ College notes, essays, etc. Has subfolders of individual classes.

~/docs/ Writings and documentation, not by me.

~/devel/ Code-related projects I've created or have been involved with. I also have a ~/code directory that I'm planning on deprecating.

~/elisp/ Code I use to extend emacs. Some of it my own creation (and symlinked to ~/devel). Mostly stuff I've downloaded

~/gfx/ Graphics of my own creation, or that I've been involved with.

~/mail/ My local mail spools...

~/music/ Third party music. I don't make music, so this is all other peoples' creations.

~/Plans/ "Muse" files from Planner Mode. Personal notes and documentation, todo lists, etc.

~/programs/ Programs I've downloaded (and usually compiled from source) that I don't do any development for.

~/proj/ Some projects that are too wide encompassing to fit in a specific folder.

~/python-local/ Common python libraries I use. Normal setuptools-y directory. I'm planning on moving this into ~/programs/ soon.

~/records/ Stuff I need to remember, like how much my rent bill is and what my landlord's address is. Some of this is encrypted with GPG.

~/svn/ Some svn repositories I've set up. It's not one big repository in here, but several... one for ~/college, one for ~/devel, one for ~/gfx... you get the idea.

~/tmp/ What you'd expect... files I'm just downloading temporarily. I clear this out now and then.

~/vids/ Videos... pretty much all made by others, except for a few blender animations I hacked together.

~/words/ Writings, by me.

Well, that's the way it is ideally, at least. Now, this probably looks reasonably clean, but of course, looks can be deceiving. There's a fundamental problem with this design.

I'd like to have a distinction with projects I'm involved with and projects totally made by others. This isn't an issue of "fear of influence" or whatever. I think it would be pretty hard to be part of the free software/open source/free culture movements and such and be afraid to be influenced by or collaborate with others. Its just really convenient to separate the things I'm working on from the rest.

So anyway, how to reorganize things? The easy way would be to either have an all encompassing ~/projects directory that could have separate subdirectories for ~/code ~/words ~/gfx & etc. Or maybe I should do the reverse and keep all of my personal projects at toplevel of my home directory, and keep a ~/media directory for all files that aren't mine?

How do other people organize their home directories?