A Hedgehog...

At this time of the year, the hedgehogs usually migrate through our property, moving between some unknown overwintering destination and (presumably) Deans Bush. Tonight, I managed to catch one of 'em in action.

Bullet Integration - Small Goodies + Fixes

Just a quick update on this. As I finally managed to have some spare time today, I spent some time doing some "fun" hacking for a change (from writing reports and reading papers)...

Auto-Mass - Select a material preset to calculate mass

I've just pushed two changes to the Git branch:
1) An "auto-mass" feature, which calculates the mass of objects based on their volume sizes (mesh-objects just use the bounding box for now, which may overestimate in cases) and a "material" preset (which provides density information about the type of material that your rigidbodies are made from). Activate this tool from the "Change Mass..." tool in the toolbar, from the RigidBody panel. No more guessing mass values for hundreds of fragments by hand anymore!

2) An experimental patch from Sergej Reich which makes the collisions work properly out of the box (i.e. fixing the various problems with mesh-mesh collisions many were having).

Google Summer of Code 2012 -- Projects Wishlist

Over the past few weeks there has been quite a lot of discussion about projects which would be cool to have for this year's Google Summer of Code. With applications opening again this week, I'll take some time to quickly go over a few of the project ideas that have been coming up.

Autumn Harvest

With winter slowly creeping upon us (the last few nights have been starting to drop down to single figures, and next weekend daylight saving ends), it was time to finally harvest all the fruit and veges that had been growing around the house over summer.

Bullet Integration Updates - 23 Mar

It's been a while since there have been any updates about the Bullet Rigidbody project here. Over the past month, I've been practically swamped with deadlines and uni work, hence the lack of updates or Blender development activity recently.

Having said that, tonight I've managed to squeeze out a little chunk of time to field support questions/requests from the Mango crew, in particular with regards to Bullet integration. 

GOF Design Patterns Reference Card

For the software engineers out there, this is quite a handy little graphical reference for the GOF Design Patterns:

http://www.mcdonaldland.info/2007/11/28/40/

Cheers to Jason McDonald for creating these (and the corresponding poster version).

Response to the "Action Fake User" issue

or Answer to "Where did my Actions go 2.62?" ...

Wow. I've just gotten back to checking various things afterseveral busy days of being swamped with work and deadlines, and it appears that a massive firestorm has been erupting in multiple places over the past few days. So I'll try to take some time to respond and hopefully "diffuse" the situation a bit without inciting vitriol (fingers crossed).

Gone fishin'

Just a little fun the other day...

Linux Tab-Completion: .inputrc Hacks

As a followup to my post the other day (re case sensitivity), I've ended up applying a few hacks to my Linux environments to get things working nicer when dealing with the command-line. So, my ".inputrc" in my Home Directory (i.e. the config file for the shell) now looks something like:

set completion-ignore-case on
"C-i": menu-complete

So far this seems to be working quite well, and removes two of the annoyances, making the Linux command-line behave in some ways more similar to the Windows one for increased productivity.

Japan - One Year On

So it's been a year since the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which unleashed a nuclear emergency and barrage of death and destruction in its wake.

How time flies...

Case Sensitivity and Issues of Usability

Once upon a time, when I had up until then only ever worked with Windows based computers, I discovered the world of Linux/Unix through Cygwin (as a result of needing or rather wanting to run GNU LilyPond, a story in itself). At this point in time, I also discovered the issue of case sensitivity, or rather the lack of it in Windows (but its presence in Linux).

I can't remember the exact reason(s), but at the time, I found this really cool, and wondered why this wasn't the case on ALL systems.

Argh! Damned Fraudsters!

Aaarrrrgggggh!!!!!

It appears that a certain damned fraudster, or group of fraudsters, have spent the past weeks using some of the money left on one of my Google Summer of Code cards. Some $70 USD has been illegally spent over the course of the past week or two (as recent as yesterday, and as early as Feb 23rd - the day I fell ill) on the Apple iTunes Store (raking up $45 in one particularly rich feast - apparently through/from a Luxembourg address/account), Paypal, and some bogus skincare crap.

To add insult to injury, Citibank's phone systems have been impossible to navigate; dozens and dozens of different numbers, but none of which I can get through on.

Anyhow, damned be the "Luxembourg Fraudster or Fraudsters". I hope they face an unpleasant end to their days, but not before facing the full force of the law.