billpratt.net

Jana, Tony and I all flew to Buffalo over the fourth of July holiday for a Cellino family reunion. Everyone was great and we had a blast. We visited Niagra Falls (although we almost weren’t allowed to cross the border), Tony smuggled in some Cubans, and I can’t play Can Jam to save my life (although I kick ass at Beer Pong). I have the pictures converted to Tiff’s, although none of them have been touched up yet. You can download the pictures, but be forewarned, they are HUGE. Each image is around 23MB, and the total zip archive is about 7GB. I will eventually go through these images and clean them up, remove duplicates, then post them here as a gallery. When I will have time I’m not sure (it took me this long to just get them posted!) Sorry it took so long to get them posted, but we have been really busy and this stuff gets back burnered quickly.

Let me know if you have any questions or want a particular image in it’s native .cr2 raw format, want one touched up, or want them sent to you on 2 dvd’s.

I have finally found some time for myself. Jana and I are spending 13 days in Tahoe with Sean, Nicole, Thomas, and Sean’s Parents. We stayed at the cabin next door and have had a great time. I had some time Friday and today to shoot some photos, specifically macros in the woods. I found an interesting knot hole, some sap leaking out of an injury on a pine tree, and some electric green moss. I shot these with my Canon 20D, Canon 24-105L IS lens wih Kinko extension tubes and Sigma Ring Flash on a Gitzo carbon fiber tripod. I battled with the wind a lot. With this high of maginification, it does not take much movement to render a blurry image. I have smaller copies of some of the interesting images in the Macro Images in Tahoe page. Please leave a comment telling me what you think.

I wanted something similar to Keychain on OSx for Linux and I remembered a shell script from years ago. I did a quick yum search and found a keychain package managed by Gentoo. You can find the full how-to here, but the basics are simple if you are familiar with ssh keys at all. First, install it using sudo install keychain. After it’s installed, add a line to your ~/.bash_profile that looks similar to:

/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
. ~/.keychain/`uname -n`-sh

Then add the following line to .bashrc as some terminals (gnome-terminal for one) do not log in each time and will not see the sourced environment variables above:

. ~/.keychain/`uname -n`-sh

You can add as many paths to private keys as you want. Now fire up a terminal, and you will be prompted for you passphrases as if you had run ssh-add. From now on, any terminal you start will have your keys loaded. It works well and I have not had any problems yet. See the man page or the link above if you want further information as there are options that I have not mentioned here that you may be interested in.

Assignment 7 required us to create a natural looking landscape that included a structure of some sort. I chose to create a mountain valley landscape with a river front cabin nestled amongst Fir trees. The cabin has a lot of detail and most of the time was spent on it. I still want to add some details to it and once I am done I will render some close-ups and publish the object file here for anyone to use in Bryce.

• Download the Full Size Version of the First Render
• Download the Full Size Version of the Second Render

Well, I had fun with this rather obscure error today. The basics are simple, for some reason, app/controllers/things_controller.rb could not be loaded or did not supply the expected class ThingsController. One common cause of this is that the helper for this controller is mistakenly named in singular form instead of plural. In the case of app/controllers/things_controller.rb, make sure app/helpers/things_helper.rb is not named thing_helper.rb and that the module it is supplying is named ThingsHelper and not ThingHelper. It is ok if the helper does not exist at all. This error is sometimes even more difficult to debug in the case of a misnamed helper because it can appear to be intermittent. The problem will only occur when a method defined in the helper is called due to lazy instantiation.

I hope this helps someone. As always, comments are welcome.

This project entailed creating a realistic landscape scene using only terrain’s and stones along with a sky and a ground or water plane. We were not allowed to use trees, plants, etc. Here are 3 different renders of the scene, each with different sky and one with fog added.

• Download the Full Size Version of First Render
• Download the Full Size Version of Second Render
• Download the Full Size Version of the Third Render

For a long time I have used a program called chkrootkit for root kit scanning on Linux. This program recieved a much needed update in December of ‘07. To use it, download the package, extract it, and run make. Finally run chkrootkit > rootkit_scan.txt. After it finishes, view the results in rootkit_scan.txt. This is a really nice tool to add to your security arsenal.

I seem to struggle with installing Sun’s Java on Fedora every time. Here are the quick steps to get it working including the Firefox plug-in. I hope this helps someone.

1. Download Java from Sun as a self extracting rpm.
2. Remove java icedtea if it’s installed
   • sudo yum -y remove java-*-icedtea java-*-icedtea-devel java-*-icedtea-plugin
3. Install Java and answer yes to the license agreement (this is for version 6 update 3, you will need to adjust the filename to match the version you downloaded)
   • sudo sh ./jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm.bin
4. You will need the following packages to get the Firefox plug-in to work
   • sudo yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-296
5. Now symlink the plug-in (this is for Firefox 2.0.0.12 so you will need to adjust the path for your version of Firefox
   • cd /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.12/plugins && sudo ln -s /usr/java/latest/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
6. Setup alternatives to point to Sun’s Java
   • sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 2 /usr/sbin/alternatives –config java

   There are 2 programs which provide 'java'.
   Selection    Command
   -----------------------------------------------
   *+ 1        /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.5.0-gcj/bin/java
   2           /usr/java/latest/bin/java
   
   Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number: 2

7. Verify that the correct version of Java is being used
   • java -version

   java version "1.6.0_04"
   Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_04-b12)
   Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 10.0-b19, mixed mode)

That should do it. Please let me know if you have any questions or find any problems with this little how-to.

If you are a Ruby nut like I am or you are just beginning in the language, I highly recommend Russ Olsen’s Design Patterns in Ruby.  The book covers many of the original “Gang of Four” patterns from the classic book Design Patterns but it applies all of the Ruby magic that is inherent in the language.  For those new to Ruby, this is not really a starters book, but it does have a simple introduction to the language that would suffice for those with development experience in other languages, especially object oriented languages.  The examples in the book are well thought out and include enough detail to allow the reader to understand the pattern in full, without going too far which could obscure the point of the example.  Congratulation Russ, this is a fantastic book.

The 5th project in Computer Graphics class was to create a composition that included modeled real-world objects built solely out of primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, pyramids, and cones). We were also required to incorporate at least one boolean in the composition. A boolean is when you use an object to cut a piece out of another object. The screwdrivers contain many booleans. The handle has the yellow spaces, the circular “dent” near where the blade meets the handle, and the tip of the blade. We were required to turn in 2 separate views of the same scene. The second view is below along with links to both full-sized images. Please let me know what you think.

• Download the Full size version of the first view
• Download the Full Size Version of the Second Render