f r e e f a c

I just updated my demoreel to the 2007 reel- it’s very similar to the old one with a few new things, and it’s (sorry) re-encoded from the DVD reel- I couldn’t find my original source project (whoops).

I’m using the cortado applet from flumotion to stream the .ogg source. I’m not terribly sure this is the right thing ™ to do, since I have trouble on my own machine viewing it (audio cuts out sometimes), and I’m not sure how many people can view it. I also have the .ogg, an avi and mp4 for download.

So if anyone reading this knows if there is an intersection of open source/patent free and playable easily on linux/windows/macos way to embed video on a page, let me know! I might end up using flash/flowplayer, or quicktime-style embedding (mplayerplugin can handle this on linux) but there is still the small matter of codecs.

well, I may have gotten a bit overconfident, but after my wordpress install, and having a bit of a lull, I upgraded to ubuntu hardy (still in prerelease) from gutsy.

I’ve gotten mixed results- nautilus is simply screaming fast on ftp shares compared to how it used to be, the intnl clock applet is nice, and network manager/intel wireless drivers are both completely smooth/non buggy compared to how they were.

On the downside, I got exposed to a nasty nvidia bug that causes (with the proprietary driver) random freezes in blender , usually during transform. I fixed this by uninstalling the hardy driver, and installing the latest beta driver from nvidia.. so far so good, I’ll edit this if the problem comes back.

Another downside: keyboard and mouse input are both impaired in hardy, and I have no idea why (very odd)… my wacom tablet still works (phew) but my synaptics touchpad and ibm red joystick thingie both stopped working completely.. the pad on the tablet doesn’t work (expresskeys just exits claiming it can’t find it).. and certain special keys I had mapped to numpad keys on my lenovo keyboard give keyrelease events, but no keypress events.. making them useless (between that and the pad not working, I’m once again sadly numpadless in blender). I hope these issues can be resolved before the release, but I’m not even sure what causes them, any clues, short of plugging in an external numpad?

I just upgraded to the shiny new wordpress 2.5. so far it’s been very smooth- I’m really impressed at how easy it has been to upgrade wordpress each time. If anyone has any changes/difficulties viewing the site, let me know.

Just a quick blog from my hotel in Potsdam, NY- I’ve been invited to give a talk at Clarkson University about animation in Blender as part of a one day digital arts festival. I’ll be showing the Big Buck Bunny teaser trailer, Elephants Dream and Dukduk by Glenn Melenhorst as an example of a blender game. (don’t worry, I will tell them about project apricot as well). I’ll also talk about the Blender Institute, documentation, the open movie workshop series, etc. etc.
For the rest of the time I will be showing off blender, primarily animation features, using examples from my own work as well as Elephants Dream and Peach, but mostly with Mancandy.