Recent Macro Experiments

So, it's been a while since I've posted any macro photos here, so here are some recent ones...

Bumblebees on bottlebrush (or pohutakawa, or rata) flowers. Ever since I first saw such a photo several years ago, I've been trying to take one "better" than that (it was great, but I felt that it could've been a bit better still). For the record, this isn't it yet (this is a bit OOF), but the sharp eyed out there may have already noticed that this is the photo in the background of the screenshot in this post.

SVN Quick Tip - Enable AutoProps...

As part of work on Duality SVN, I've been periodically reading the SVN redbook and other SVN documentation to find out how to get SVN to behave in ways that I like most so that my tool will make things significantly easier for myself in the long run.

Today, while working on adding files, I noticed an option: "--auto-props" that can be used in conjunction with svn add. From the documentation, when set, this will automatically add SVN properties to files based on some pattern-matching magic.

The Handle-Type Hotkeys Debate

Today there were some changes to the hotkeys for setting the handle types for keyframes and also for standard curve editing back towards the old 2.4x style keymappings. While I admit that the implementation in the Animation Editors was a bit clunky - namely, the menu being a bit unwieldy/ugly - the key benefit of this approach over the old one was that the handle-type hotkeys were now accessible in a logical + consistent grouping.

Therefore, I think this brings up a very natural point at which we should re-evaluate how we're doing this. As I see it, both ways have their pros and cons, though perhaps we need to be looking for another (better) alternative still!

Duality SVN - Self-Hosting Milestone Reached

Today has been a very productive day. 
Today is also a very important day.
Today Duality SVN became self-hosting.

Duality SVN in action, preparing to be used to commit some changes to it's SVN repository. It can also be used to update the working copy from the SVN repository, allowing for the basics of day to day collaborative development work already. Hence, as of this morning, it has "self hosting"! ;)

Duality SVN - Gathering momentum

Things have been getting a bit quiet here over the past few days, so let's dust off the cobwebs here!

Over the past week, I've been slowly working away on getting the Duality SVN UI up and running. Unfortunately, things have been going a bit slower than hoped (so this post does NOT announce the first public release as tentatively advertised before), as I ended up getting stuck for a few days trawling so-so documentation (and dissecting example scripts) before finally figuring out the necessary code to get a few core components working. In particular, most of this work all just went towards...

The "status list" widget.

(NB: The colour of the "external" status indicator is something I'm still playing with. I've been trying to get it as invisible as possible using the "predefined" colours as I really don't care about such entries much. Anyways, on second thought, the yellow seems to be a bit too loud still, yet grey makes it too similar to "Unversioned" which I want discrete yet still visible. Hmm...)

Not all "pedantic" compiler warnings are made equal

IMO, "pedantic" compiler warnings are for the large part evil. Or at very best, very very annoying in most cases. Just like lawyers seem to find some kind of masochistic satisfaction gleaning over twisted nests of spaghetti-legalese clauses, picking apart code so that it is totally "semantically" correct is just an picky exercise in tedium and pointlessness unless something is going wrong.

Without further ado, let's look at some "pedantic" warnings which I think should be considered harmful to resolve - that is, DO NOT CHANGE CODE THAT CAUSES THESE!
DISCLAIMER: you may need to research your compiler's documentation to identify which warnings equate the the ones being referenced here.

In a little pickle...

A little Garfield figurine sitting in one of the side cups of my new desk. After so many years of trying to find one, I finally had a nice graphics/drafting desk (i.e. one of those that you can angle), which are so much more comfortable to use than standard desks.

FollowPath Changes - 2.55 onwards

Recently I've been seeing quite a few complaints/confusion regarding some of the changes made with the FollowPath constraint and Path Animation in general in 2.5, in particular, since 2.55. So, if this sounds like you, read on!

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.