Beans!

A rant for the cats in the neighbourhood...

Enough is enough!

My garden is NOT a public toilet. Specifically, it is not YOUR (Knightly, light-brown turquoise, ugly-black-horny-rag, or the other sunbathing tabbies') toilet.

Public enemy #1 - "Knightley" just after doing the deed, and preparing to/contemplating do it again in another spot

What must I do to make this clear?

Weekend Outings - Ilam Homestead

The weather was nice and warm on Saturday afternoon, so I went out for a bit of a walk. Perhaps not such a great time for photos (being just after lunchtime with light), but on the other hand, it lends itself nicely to some dramatic results at times...

Doodle of the day

The turntable vs trackball wars...

It's taken just under 3 months, but I see that someone finally noticed that the change to the viewport rotation default.  For a while there, I was beginning to suspect that finally, after so many years of endless, heated debates filled with personal attacks trotting out well worn battle lines like the blasted blackbirds patrolling our garden do everyday, that finally we'd see some peace when this change occurred.

Saturday Afternoon Photos

Probing around the kitchen with a looking for interesting looking stuff again...

Blender 2.60 Released

Today marks a new era in Blender development, with the first release of the 2.6 series.

After a lengthy and tortuous period of bughunting and stabilisation following the initial 2.5 releases, we're finally getting back to a state of developing new features and improvements. It's great to see forward progress again, and hopefully as my own (increasingly busy) schedules allow, some cool new features too.

Moodle is a crappy bugfarm!

... or perhaps just the current version rolled out on the servers I've used it on was (though I wouldn't be surprised if most of the bugs still held)...

Like many other educational institutions around NZ, UC has been getting in on the whole "online learning" thing with a Moodle-based CMS (aptly named after a naming contest yielded the "best entry" by some random unknown as "Learn"). As diligent COSC student, and also dedicated UI design (semi-)professional, paying attention to the small details of how computer systems work and present themselves to users is what we do, and is also where we can aim to score brownie points over our competitors ;)

Duckings...

Time for a break

Yipee! Assignments all done at last! Now off for a good rest before exams :D

Days of plumbers, assignments, and other madness...

Phew! What a manic mess the past two days have been.

This week has been assignments crunch time, with several assignments for several papers all due today and tomorrow. Having easily dispatched an exam on Monday evening (thank goodness none of the really brain-churning material presented ended up in it), and finished the two halves of another assignment (which I'd been procastinating on for a while, but also been admittedly stumped by for a while) within a "day" (11am to 3am), we get to where the story starts.

Why do we do it?

Thanks Campbell for the link (see recent thread on bf-committers ;)

Photo Dump

Just taking a short break before bunkering down for another week of mayhem, late nights, and assessments...

Raking in the dough!

SVN Tip: Making a local copy of a SVN Repository (with history) on Windows

This evening I needed a way of making a copy of some externally hosted SVN repository, complete with history before it went down. After searching for a while and only turning up results with how to do it on Linux, I finally found the solution.

http://iacoware.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/howto-use-svnsync-to-mirror-a-repository-on-windows/

Thanks for the tutorial "Massimo Iacolare". Works like a treat here.

G6 Feedback

After a year of work, it's time to present G6 Feedback, an "Audience Response System". Written in Java (this was a requirement, not a free/willing choice), this system allows you to create and run polls, and have participants answer these polls using their laptops or Android smartphones.

RIP Steve Jobs

Yesterday, an influential figure in the technology world died after a long battle with illness. Although I am not an Apple fan (and perhaps at times been perplexed by their products), under Steve Jobs' leadership, they've clearly released some fairly influential new products which have changed the world forever. And let us not forget, we wouldn't have Pixar without the guy...

After his shock resignation just over a month ago, it was certainly a bit of a surprise that just 6 weeks later he's gone. Oh well... there's life and there's death. 

Impressive new rendering paper...

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

Spring Sights...

Over the past month and a bit, I've been quite busy with Uni stuff, possibly working on far too many interesting things at a time, so it's been a bit quiet around here. Combined with having had all the concrete around our house being dug up and relaid over a several week period, it's meant that I've nearly missed out on getting out amongst the spring flowers this year. Then again, apparently that's quite a common complaint from many people round these parts atm, so at least I'm not alone in that respect...