Adrenaline Rush

"Awang Cekmat" (I think it means careful/frugal guy or something) modeling, rig and skin. A Mascot for Brunei Darussalam PU and DES (Petroleum Unit and Department of Electricity Service~ as I recall). Must be finish in a day. Completed in about 6/7 hours.

When I was offered this project, it was noon, about 5 PM. Usually I'm arrive back home at 7PM. A colleage of mine gave me the all the detail but the last thing he said "1 day, 9 pm tonight must be delivered with all the rigs". Holy crap. Should I take it? I bargained "tomorrow morning". "Sure".

I'm pretty sure I can do this in less than 5 hours, but I always expect the worst thing would came up on the way. I'm not an optimists, I'm a confident pessimists :)

Started on about 7 PM. The modeling took less than an hour, but for the rig, I bumped into some problems on the way, such as the fingers won't curl or the faces flipped and the leg skinning setup got f-d up for no apparent reason. These kind of things happen alot if not because of the software itself, but because you're exhausted or sleepy. The clock shows 1 AM. I was started to get anxious. 2 AM it's finished. Whew.

The rig are very simple. 4 morph targets, 7 IK controllers, 16 custom attributes, 17 shapes for controller proxies. Done in Max 6 to maintain highest compatibility.

Ubuntu Fascination

Dang! All these times I haven't had any chance of testing the wireless under ubuntu. Now I have the connection. Yep. It's working. Using Intel pro wireless hardware. Thumbs up for Mark Shuttleworth and the whole ubuntu staffs. Thank you for such great distro. I say this is the most user friendly distro I've ever found, with superb hardware recognition. No wonder Ubuntu stuck up there on Distrowatch page hit rank. Would I turn back from this one? Maybe... someday I'll try to conquer slackware again.

The quest for 21 million rupiahs worth notebook

Well, my cheap Acer wouldn't be sufficient anymore to do my works. I need a new notebook, so far I have 21 million rupiahs, I earn that amount of money myself. That is moa money so I can do anything with it. Thou had problem with that?

First thing first. I can't risk my eyes damaged by the ugly interface that older operating systems have. A minimal Windows Vista Ultimate edition with aero glass effect would be required. Thus I would need a bleeding edge technology equipped notebook. Say, equipped with Quadro, with dedicated memory at least 512 mb of RAM. 1 gigabyte of RAM won't be sufficient since I'll be working on hundreds of lines of essays using Microsoft Word. I say 4 gigabyte of it. I don't want any lags occur when I'm using this notebook. So even intel core duo 3 ghz wouldn't be enough.

For browsing important websites such as http://uh-oh.net for our studies, I will need extra security so that no viruses nor spywares and trojans would able to penetrate my system. I'm too lazy learning to use weird browsers such as firefox and opera, let alone they're free! My gosh! What would people say if I'm using free stuffs? So I figure software based firewall won't be enough. I'm also too lazy updating my antivirus software database it must be hardware based firewall with double license of antivirus softwares, you know, just in case.

I'll be doing top secret jobs, so I will need extra hardware security on my notebook. Such as fingerprint ID, retinal scan, and perhaps for extra-hardened security I want voice recognition aswell. But I don't think even that would be enough. Maybe I'll order a custom build fart and burp recognition device. You know, scientist have discovered that our fart sounds very distinctively one another, base on what underwear we're wearing, also our arse's characteristic. Wether wet sounded (like brrrrtttttt!), or a hiss (sssssshhh). Our favorite food we eat everyday will also alters our genetic burping characteristic. So this will be very necessary.

Yet, I discovered every person's credit card have distinctive numbers on them. I don't know what the purpose is, but I just found that out. Maybe I can use this also for the extra security layer. A credit card swiper. How genious I am. I'll suggest this to notebook producers. So only those who have same numbers on their credit card can only access my notebook. While those who have different numbers would be charged everytime they swipe their card on my notebook. I mean how are the odds a person would have a same credit card number from another? base on a statistic came out from nowhere it's about 0.000001%. See? I'm a genious. I can gain profits from those who try to access my notebook without permission.

I will need to transfer my espionage mission snapshot from my infrared and night vision equipped cameras. Floppy drives and Thumb drives are old technology. And I'm allergic to old technologies. I require a built in multi card reader, bluetooth and wireless LAN. I will be keeping high resolution study materials I acquire from bangbros network so I will need at least 500 gigs of harddrive space.

Also I'm a clumsy person. I drop my gadgets and electronic stuff all the time. I will need adamantium (you know, those metal thingy from wolverine's claw) hardened case on my notebook. Also my hobby is diving, I figure it will be fun to work underwater with the fish. So at least 1000m water-proofed capable notebook would be very important.

I look around for the notebook of my dream. Let see. Oh geez. Turn out they sold some Rp.3.000.000 - Rp.5.000.000 priced notebook. Stupid people. Who would want to buy such cheap stuffs?

Here're my candidates notebooks (taken from bhinneka.com) :

ACER Aspire 9125WLHi
Core 2 Duo T7200, 1GB DDR2, 120GB HDD, HD DVD±RW, 56K Modem, GbE NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, TV Tuner, VGA NVIDIA GeForce Go7600 256MB, 15.4" WXGA, Win XP Media Center

ACER TravelMate 8215WLHi
Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, Bluray DVD±RW, 56K Modem, GbE NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, VGA ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 512MB, Camera, 15.4" WSXGA, Win XP Pro

ASUS Lamborghini VX1 Black
Core 2 Duo T7400, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, DVD±RW, 56K Modem, GbE NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, VGA Nvida GeForce Go7400 VX 128MB, 15" SXGA, Win XP Pro - BONUS Asus Optical Mouse

ASUS Lamborghini VX1 Yellow
Core 2 Duo T7400, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, DVD±RW, 56K Modem, GbE NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, VGA Nvida GeForce Go7400 VX 128MB, 15" SXGA, Win XP Pro - BONUS Asus Optical Mouse

FUJITSU LifeBook P-1610s
Core Solo U1400, 1GB DDR2, 80GB HDD, 56K Modem, NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, Fingerprint, VGA Intel GMA950 224MB (shared), 8.9" WXGA, Win Vista Business

TOSHIBA Qosmio G30-3012E
Core 2 Duo T7200, 1GB DDR2, 200GB HDD, HD DVD±RW, 56K Modem, NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, Fingerprint, VGA NVIDIA GeForce FX Go7600 256MB, 17" WUXGA, Win XP Media Center

TOSHIBA Qosmio G30-P650
Core Duo T2500, 1GB DDR2, 200GB HDD, HD DVD±RW, 56K Modem, NIC, WiFi, Bluetooth, Fingerprint, VGA NVIDIA GeForce FX Go7600 256MB, 17" WUXGA, Win XP Media Center

All price range is about Rp.20.000.000 - Rp.30.000.000

None of those notebook equipped with the technologies I want! What should I do! I know... I shall consult with our trusty, infamous technology, telemathics, psychic wizard.

Hi Roy! ™

Shadowpawn realization

So one of my colleage, Johanes a contacted me. He said, "hey how about realization of the shadowpawn?"

Shadowpawn is one of our collaborative project. I describe the concepts, descriptions and the base rough sketch. He did the execution all by himself. The new clean sketch with alot of modification (I actually wanted quake 4, frankenstein style) and coloring. But his new, modified concept gets warm welcome from everywhere.

You can see the shadowpawn page here :
http://johaneskurnia.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=27

artwork by Johanes Kurnia

Here's shadowpawn descriptions :

"Shadowpawns are Hell Warriors. Humans captured by the Hell forces, their memories wiped, their physical abilities boosted and all their emotions cleansed. Converted to fight on the Hell's side. But one human nature that hell can't get rid of. The desire and passion of love. Captured couples were assimilated, their bodies combined with their lovers, so that even in the war their lust and desire won't get in the way. Together within the newly formed body they fight their own people for hell."

see the page here from the Forsaken Earth universe :
http://novelas.wikia.com/wiki/Forsaken_Earth/Races#ShadowPawns

Well, I'm pretty excited, and he said the TD at his studio where he's working wanted to get involved with this project. Time to fire up blender again!

credit :

www.johaneskurnia.com

My Ubuntu Desktop

I always digg for slackware, especially for its simplicity (one of the slackware slogan is "simplicity is divine"). But sometimes it is too simple, and require too many hard work from the users just to get it running. On my Acer Aspire 9412 the network isn't working. I also tried several Slackware-based distro, like Slax, Myah, Zenwalk (I really like Zenwalk) but none can make the hardware works. Now this is really sucks.

So, I dig up my Ubuntu Dapper and reinstall it on my notebook. With ubuntu even my wireless is working right-out-of-the-box. A minor problem persist, occasional lockups occur. This is the reason why I remove ubuntu from my harddrive. It's minor but kind of annoying. I just realize this happens on my windows partition aswell, although not as intense. Most people still complain about this, Suse, fedora, etc users are reporting this symptom. A patch already worked, but well, would took more hard work compiling a kernel yourself.

No matter what, I need some linux softwares, specially Supertux and Frozen bubble heheh. Also Scribus actually, I don't know why Scribus isn't really working well under windows.

Anyway so I just reinstall ubuntu, and try to live with it until maybe feisty out (hopefully they've fix it). Installed xfce and fluxbox, but eventually I went back to Gnome again. Gnome is sexy... not so fat, not so thin, but very beautiful. Nuff said. Customizing everything so a little bit similar to Mac (no zoom effect on the Icons, and no, I don't like KDE).

Installed Wine, the classic unreal (windows version) is playable under Ubuntu, Portable Firefox and Thunderbird is working, life's good.

Here's my current desktop, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on Gnome 2.14.3 (the best DE evah!). The wallpaper found somewhere in the net.