Some interesting little numbers to do with the place some of us live.

So today was the last straw with Evolution. It is just too buggy and too unstable of an email platform for me to use anymore so I began the dreaded migration of 1.1 GB of emails to a different client. Thanks to the awesome walkthrough below it turned out to be a lot less painful than I had imagined.

If you are using Evolution and are getting fed up of the little bugs and instabilities here and there then check out the article below on how to switch to Thunderbird:

http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-migrate-from-evolution-to-thunderbird-in-ubuntu-intrepid/2008/12/04

A quick highlight :

Migrate local mail from Evolution

First, we will migrate the Evolution mails that are stored locally in your hard disk.

Open up two Nautilus windows (if you like, you can open two tabs instead of two windows). Press Ctrl + H to reveal the hidden folders. In one window, navigate to the .mozilla-thunderbird folder. You should see a folder with name similar to i7bqvbzk.default. Click on that folder, followed by Mail and Local Folders. You should see some files like Inbox, Trash, Unsent Message etc.

In the second window, navigate to .evolution -> mail -> local folder. Similarly, you will find files such as Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Trash etc.

Now copy the five files Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent from the Evolution folder to the Thunderbird folder. If it prompts you whether to replace the existing files, click Replace All.

If you have used any subfolders in your Evolution, you should see a folder with a .sbd extension (such as #evolution.sbd). In your Thunderbird folder, create a similar folder with the same name. Back to your Evolution folder, copy and paste all the files in the subfolder that don’t have a file extension to the Thunderbird subfolder.

That’s it. Restart your Thunderbird. You should see all your Evolution mails imported over.

I found this article today and wanted to reproduce it and share it around even more as it is such a wicked list.  More and more we are getting to a place where there are so many great alternatives to commercial software that you can almost see the business model starting to collapse.

Enjoy

Graphic Applications

ACDSee 9

Imgv is a unique and feature rich Image Viewer. It is released as free software with full source code. Imgv is portable and can run on Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX, and other operating systems. Features include a GUI that doesn’t get in the way of viewing your images, a file browser, slideshows, zooming, rotating, on-the-fly Exif viewing, histograms, fullscreen support, wallpaper setting, the ability to view 4 images on the screen at once, adjustable thumbnail sizes, playlists, view and download images from Web sites, movie playing, file searching/filtering, multiple directory loading, transitional effects, image hiding and more.

Cornice is a cross-platform image viewer written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn’t pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee.
Adobe After Effects

Jahshaka is an editing and effects system. It allows to edit with flexibility and speed, create effects in real time, animate with unlimited features, paint and design on moving video, create music with all the tools the pros use, work in any format at any resolution.
Adobe FrameMaker and QuarkXPress

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
KWord is a frame-based word-processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. Whether you are a corporate or home user, production artist or student, KWord will prove a valuable and easy to use tool for all your word processing and layout needs. KWord is a wordprocessor based on frames. This can be used to place components in precise locations, as with many professional DTP applications. KWord can also handle huge amounts of texts and allows you to do professional markup with ease.
Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It’s been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. It’s also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. It contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images. Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Gimpshop is a free graphics editor for Mac OS X 10.3/10.4, Linux, Solaris/SPARC and Windows. GIMPShop is a Gimp modification that features menu layouts, dialogs and naming conventions similar to those found in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop users should feel right at home using Gimpshop. (This is a better alternative to GIMP if you are used to using PhotoShop.)
Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw

Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera’s tone curves.
Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Movie Maker

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Kino can export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Still frame import and export uses gdk-pixbuf, which has support for BMG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, SVG, Targa, TIFF, and XPM. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Cinelerra is a free and open source software non-linear video editing system for the Linux operating system. (However, it has also been successfully ported to Mac OS X.) It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Anime Studio and Toon Boom Studio

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems but we expect to make it works on Windows systems too someday.

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.
Autodesk 3ds Max

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Autodesk AutoCAD

QCad is an application for computer aided drafting in two dimensions (2d). With QCad you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams. QCad works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCad community edition is released under the GPL.

BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military. BRL-CAD includes an interactive geometry editor, parallel ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support, image-processing and signal-processing tools. The entire package is distributed in source code form.
Autodesk Maya

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Corel Trace

Potrace is a utility for tracing a bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution. Potrace can currently produce the following output formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM (for easy antialiasing).
Adobe Flash Professional (formerly Macromedia)

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

IMPRESS is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools. IMPRESS has a complete range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to spice up your presentation. Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. Fontworks provides stunning 2D and 3D images from text. Create lifelike 3D images with astounding speed and response.
Macromedia Freehand MX

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Karbon is a vector-based drawing application for KOffice. It allows artists to create complex drawings without losing image quality when zooming in on, or resizing the drawing. You can use Karbon to add finishing touches to diagrams created using Kivio or charts created using KChart.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.
Microsoft Publisher

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ’stick’ to.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Microsoft Visio

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. ArgoUML provides constraint modeling support on UML Classes and Features. The Dresden OCL toolkit enables ArgoUML to perform syntax and type checking on those constraints. Diagrams can be saved as GIF, PNG, PostScript, Encapsulated PS, PGML and SVG.

Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape. It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ’stick’ to.

Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more. Features: scriptable stencils using Python, support for Dia stencils, plugin framework for adding more functionality.

StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on.
Pixar RenderMan

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Pixie is an open source RenderMan renderer for generating photorealistic images. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script). Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.

Ayam is a free 3D modeling environment for the RenderMan interface, distributed under the BSD license. This means that neither the author nor any contributors make money out of this software. We need your (yes your!) feedback to keep this project alive. If you use Ayam, please submit your pictures, bug reports, or comments.

The current stable version is 1.14, released 4. Apr 2008.

Ayam currently runs on Unix (Linux, IRIX, FreeBSD tested), Win32 (Win95-Win2000, XP), and Mac OS X (Aqua and X11).

“Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place “five minutes from now”). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It’s the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it’s about ideas, not selling merchandise.”

“Films like Star Wars use terms like empire and rebellion, but they are bandied about in bland ways — powerful words used to describe nothing,” Rivera said. “One of the original propositions of my film is that we (create that sense) of a world divided between wealth and power.”

“I love gnomes and goblins and elves,” said Rivera, who’s made a name for himself touring museums and festivals with his award-winning shorts. “But what I’m really interested in is speculative fiction. I wanted to use this film to ask the question, ‘Where are we going?’”

- Wired Article

Sci-fi has for a very long time served the purpose of framing current sensitive social and political issues and putting them into a clear perspective without making people feel preached to.  It was a way to get people to think about issues that they normally wouldn’t or didn’t want to think about for various psychological reasons.  I feel that this has always been the greatest strength of the genre and during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with the exception of Star Wars and a few other more trivial pieces, the genre as a whole set out to bring a multitude of social issues into the spotlight.  It was like film directors and authors realized this magic lamp where they could very surreptitiously put these unquestioned injustices into peoples minds and make them question them for the first time.  I wouldn’t call this a ‘golden age’ of sci-fi but it certainly was a purer age.  There was less science fiction being produced(as there were less movies in general being produced) but on a per capita basis they were overwhelmingly more thought provoking and taking full advantage of the above-mentioned strength of the medium.

Today however that is changed, and not that it is necessarily a bad thing as the more Sci-fi blockbusters we have the more

The porno of the sci-fi world

interest and acceptance the genre has as a whole and the easier it will be for true science fiction to get funded, but today is certainly a different age where Sci-fi is big business.  We have more and more pieces of strictly eye candy, where the strength of the medium to affect change in our thinking and society in general is thrown out for the ability to create big explosions and satisfy the increasingly shrinking attention span and ever expanding mental laziness of the developed world.  People don’t want to think, they want to be distracted from thinking by exploding starships and revenge seeking Romulans(referring of course to the latest Star Trek Film – thanks Abrahms).

However this isn’t a doom and gloom article, this is an article of hope for as I mentioned the more play these pieces of porno-graphic eye-candy get the more interest there will be in the genre overall and we are starting to see more and more thought provoking sci-fi than ever before.  While it may seem like the 60’s,70’s and 80’s were pumping out great sci-fi at a faster rate, it certainly wasn’t so.. There were so many classics made in this era no doubt but they were certainly spaced out over a long period separated by years at times.

Turn on your brain

Whereas we are seeing 2-3 fairly profound films coming out almost yearly now and even some of the frivolous eye candy such as Avatar will have an obvious and simplistic thought provoking message behind it.

Here’s a great resource that lays out a timeline of the SF era of the past: http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1960.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1970.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1980.html

Because of this evolution of the genre I feel that we are going to see a clear divide coming down between Sci-fi action flicks such as the last Star Trek, or Avatar and then the sci-fi that attempts to shine light on these dark recesses of our mind that we so conveniently block out such as District 9 or Soylent Green.

Alex Rivera, in the linked article at the top of this post mentioned ‘Speculative Fiction‘ which is a great term to show the other greatest strength of this medium.  As apposed to regular fiction or fantasy Sci-fi and speculative fiction forces us to look forward instead of being stuck in the mud of the past or present, but more importantly it forces us to look forward to where we are going and ask ourselves ‘Is that really where we want to go?’ .  I think that is where we are going to see a divide forming even stronger than before between Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction.  The latter intending to provoke debate and thought about our evolving society and the former meant to simply turn off your brain and take you on a mini-vacation from your everyday.  Both certainly having merits but I feel it is going to be incredibly dangerous to undervalue the importance of the former over the latter.

What cliff?

We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change and development we are experiencing.  So much so that some scientists playfully predict the emergence of a species of humans, homo evolutis, engineered by us. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don’t have time to contemplate the full ramification that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes.  Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another without any time to breath.  Speculative fiction however, if widely adopted makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.  It puts our brains into a future simulator of sorts where we are running through countless of possible outcomes for our society every week, culminating to subconscious database of sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios that we carry around with us.  Without this database in our heads we blindly charge forward through the jungle of our progress without any regard of potential cliffs that lay ahead until it is too late.  With a mind that is constantly being challenged with deep thought-provoking what if scenarios we will hopefully be able to recognize some of the signs of these impending cliffs before we are spinning our tires in mid air about to drop 1000 meters to our doom.

Clearly I am not saying that Speculative Fiction is going to single-handedly save this world however with the current rate of adoption of technology, a rate which is increasing exponentially, we can no longer afford to live in the past or even the present for that matter.  The logical part of our brains must exist 100% in the future at all times, not just one future but many possible futures.  A failure to do this could very likely destroy our future all together.

Found a concept design for tomorrow’s laptop today and thought it was cool enough to share.  What I like about this is that it doens’t just look cool and look pretty in a futuristic way but it incorporates common sense technology that not only makes sense but will be feasible very very shortly if not already.  The design was created by Orkin Design, a german design firm.  Either way very cool

Orkin Design has unveiled the rolltop concept with the support of Schlagheck-Design and the device comes with a flexible display which can be rolled and carried wherever you want.

Thanks to its OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen, it can be used a laptop while it weighs as much as mini notebook. It comes with a 13 inch screen while being used a laptop and when being used as a monitor, you could get a cool 17 inches screen. Power supply, multi media integrated pen and even a holding belt are integrated in the ROLL TOP and it certainly is an all-in-one gadget.

So if you fall into the half of the internet that has no idea what google wave is but is inexorably excited about it then check out this video explanation to see what all the fuss is about

A slightly less humorous explanation by the developers themselves

And finally if you have 2 hours to kill the full developer presentation:

Just caught this story on Cnet and thought I’d share.  Benchmarks of Windows 7 Vs Snow Leopard are coming in and the results are pretty much what you’d expect them to be.  Windows trumps the show with 3D stuff and Gaming, Snow Leopard takes the cake with Multitasking, encoding and boot times, as well as Battery life.

The entire article can be found here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31012_7-10319612-10355804.html and here are some of the highlights:

The conclusion? First all of all, you’ll get much better battery life running OS X on Mac laptops than running Windows. Secondly, performance-wise, Windows 7 is probably a better choice if you are a gamer (there are more games developed for Windows, anyway), even on Mac hardware.

Third, if you can get by with just software designed by Apple and if money is not a big issue, you will be happy with a Mac. Examples of these software choices are iTunes, iLife, QuickTime, Safari, iChat, and so on (and you probably won’t need much more than those for daily entertainment and communication needs). Finally, if money is not an issue–and it definitely is for most of us–you should get a Mac anyway. It’s the only platform, for now, that can run both Windows and OS X.

The wonderful thing about this talk that I found blog-post worthy was the fact that the topic it is on is something that I have always found incredibly tedious, as is the case with most people I think and yet I found myself clued to the screen listening to Garik Israelian talk, feeling my sphere of understanding expanding by leaps and bounds.  It really opened my mind up to the potential of what we can learn and the incredible exploration that is going on in our universe.

An animator friend of mine is starting to dive into the realm of facial animation so I promised him I’d dig up as many resources on Facial Rigging as I could.  So instead of just sending it over to him I figured otheres might be able to benefit from my hard work   This is primarily for Maya users .

Here’s a 2 Part Series:

Here’s a big 7 Parter that goes into some great advanced Detail:

Quick Tut expaining some of the principles behind facial animation:

Facial Animation Rig for Delgo: Not a  video tut but this covers some non-human faces which is rare

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/tutorials/character/c/facial-animation-rig-for-delgo

This page is not animation specific but HOLY CRAP the tutorials on this page are insane:

http://www.instantshift.com/2009/03/06/45-incredible-maya-tutorials-around/

http://www.opera.com/

Come one come all and fill your boots with delicious Opera goodness.  While I’m slightly dissapointed than Synaptic didnt’ alert me with an update sooner and I have to download it from the website I’m holding back my ire in hopes that Opera 10 can finally do away with the horror that is Opera+Flash in a linux environment.  With that hurdle crossed I will definitely switch 95% of my browsing to this far superior browser.

Why you ask?

Opera 10 alpha is powered by the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which, according to the website, should provide ’significant improvements in speed, performance and security’. Presto 2.2 also comes with improved CSS performance, web font support, and a score of 100/100 at the Acid3 test, where Firefox 3.0.5 gets 71/100 and Konqueror fails. Acid3 is a test page for web browsers which shows how much a browser follows web standards like DOM or JavaScript.  As I can attest to in linux firefox is an absolute tortoise compared to the lightning fast reflexes of opera and I’ll give nearly anything to not have to deal with feeling like I’m on a 386 everytime anything java related pops on the screen.

Opera Turbo, new compression technology for slow connections which the company claims enables broadband-like speeds by instantly compressing pages. Opera says that in its own lab tests, Turbo provided up to eight times higher speeds.

“Opera Turbo is our newest innovation, and one we think everyone should try, because we all will face a slow connection at some point,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO. “Now, there is a solution, and it is absolutely free.”

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a new toy to play with