Recent Photos of Note - Early Morning + Twilight + Fireworks

Over the past few days, the days seem to have been getting longer - it's still kindof bright at 9pm, with some rather interesting light at this time. Here are some highlights from these shots...

The strange "greyish blandness" (Katherine Mansfield describes this kind of light quite well in one of her short stories IIRC) at twilight.

Abstract "suggestions" of light. These were simply OOF shots of the power guard on my laptop's power cable ;)

Some of the items damaged during the earthquake and subsequent aftershocks!

Duality SVN - First Sneak Peak

After a bit of deliberation, I've decided to release an little teaser for a little side-project I'm working on at the moment. Please be aware that this is still a WIP design, with a few things that I've already tweaked/added since when this screenshot was made.

This is the current UI design - version 3 to be precise - of a little SVN client/frontend that I've been working on. It spawned out of my frustration with regard to current SVN tools, especially in terms of branch management, which lead to an idea for trying to (hackily) get the best of both worlds.

Post #100 - Quick Action Management Tip

Yay! According to my sidebar, this marks my 100th post on this blog. 

The real topic of today's post is to answer a little question regarding managing Actions - that is,
How do you change/remove the Action used by a datablock?

F-Curves, Keyframes, and Other 2.5 Animation Bits and Pieces

In continuation of some of my earlier FAQ posts (#1 and #2), I'll be discussing a bit about various aspects of the 2.5 Animation System here, especially related to keyframes and F-Curves.

Turning the gears of change - mingw update

For the past few months, I've been compiling Blender using MSVC+scons, as some change(s) made broke the final linking with mingw+scons. Unfortunately, the change in question was causing an "internal error" in the linker, which was not a good sign.

Today, I finally got around to trying to install a new version of mingw with a newer version of gcc (version 4.x at last on Windows... half a decade later!). As I reported in the post linked above, last time I checked on the mingw site (over half a year ago), it was an utter shambles - hosting troubles every few days and little consistent clarity over the actual latest version available. That included no clear postings stating whether gcc 4.x was finally usable, available, and obtainable from where.

Bugfixing - Node Tree Design Rant

Argh! Stupid Node Trees!

I've just been doing some work on a bugfix related to animating material nodes. As it turns out, I've seriously misunderstood how the node trees are stored, leading to some "interesting" consequences...

The Silvereyes Have Landed

After a long wait, the first of the silvereyes have started appearing in my garden at last!

My first shot of the season. IMO it's not the "best" shot that I'm looking for, but it's a nice start.

This was taken through the net curtains, as I didn't quite have enough time to safely set up everything before this one arrived, and I'd managed to scare away another one from a window twice as far away minutes earlier. But next time I'll be more prepared, and hopefully get a much better shot.

A More Detailed Deconstruction of C++

Today while checking my inbox, I found a very cathartic link:
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

Cheers to "Wolfgang Draxinger" for this.

It's like a more detailed version of my own list. I'm in complete agreement with every point it mentions. No wonder we have so much buggy software out there!

Ducklings Extravaganza

The weather over the first half of the weekend was really nice, that it would be a shame if I didn't try to take advantage of it and take some more photos. However, since the silvereyes have still not showed up in my garden within lens-range as the bottlebrush is still not totally flowering yet, and I was sick of seeing or shooting the blackbirds which have begun to rule our garden, it was time to take some more duck (and specifically duckling) photos!

These were some of my favourite shots, but there were some other cute ones...

The Beauty of Flying Fish

Taking some time off (away from computer) today, as well as dodging some "aftershock" activity (it's been quiet most of the week, but starting late last night, the ground got back to business...), I stumbled across a little documentary from the BBC about marine life in the South Pacific and "greeny" concerns about the effects of commercial fishing while waiting for the news.

Bullet SoC - Doing the SVN Dance - Part 1

In order to start work on this project again, especially on Point Cache support, I figured it was time to grab a more up-to-date Blender trunk to work from, since many things have changed there AFAIK, not to mention in a few other places too.

Teardrops

Phew! It's been quite hot here over the past few days, ~26 deg C, and predicted to get up to 27 (i.e. more like 30) tomorrow.

This morning, I woke up early and saw the following on the spiderplant in my room...

F-Curve First Aid - Identifying and Medicating "Disabled" F-Curves

One of my items on my todo list for ages has been dealing with the problems associated with F-Curves with "data paths" (a way of referring to the property that a F-Curve affects) that can't be "resolved" correctly, and are thus tagged as "disabled".

Finally I've had time to work on some experimental measures for dealing with this, and I'll use this post to discuss these changes. The commit for reference sake is #33008.

Exams Over + Other News

At long last, exams (and thus the uni year) are over at last! Yipee!

So, this means that I finally have time to work on various projects again. Including...

• Completing the Bullet Integration work
• Baking and Scrubbing (Pointcache support)
• Checking on Ragdoll support
• Rigid Body Constraints
• etc.
• Making another attempt at the Manipulators API
• Finishing off loose ends in 2.5 Animation System
• A few other coding projects that I won't reveal yet

Waiting for the Silvereyes...

Finally exam season is drawing to a close (just 1 more to go! :)

During this time, I've been taking a good look outside the window everyday, watching as the bottlebrush (slowly) gears up to bloom. As I learnt last year, not only does the flowering of the bottlebrush signal the (imminent) start of summer, but it also marks the fleeting time of the year when the "silvereyes" visit my garden in droves, and most importantly, just outside the window, within eye- (and lens-) sight ;)

These small birdies are small (sparrow-sized) and have a distinctive greenish colour, with white rings around their eyes. Their visit last year piqued my interest in photography, as trying to get a shot of one or more, let alone a decent-looking shot was a real challenge! It also informed my criteria for getting hold of some better equipment (fast autofocus + shot-to-shot times to not miss them in interesting poses, the absolute essentiality of a comfortable grip, and the need for zooming to be able to be done with the other hand instead of being a control just behind the shutter-release (which is perched on top of the camera body)). That said, I suspect I still need to get hold of a longer telephoto lens still...

Hopefully this year I'll be able to get some great shots of them in action.

Sintel DVD

In the mail today...

Yay! Off to watch the extras now (and the film again on the tv this time) :)