Updates...

Finally...I had time to update my website.

I decided to "rummage" through my hard drive and looked for all those bits of previous work...and sometimes you'll find things you forgot existed. Its also interesting because its a grounding experience...it helps you remember where you've come from and what you've done. The past few years went by like a breeze.

But perhaps the most interesting part of "rummaging" through your hard drive is remembering the friends you've gained and those you've lost. Through pictures and videos, they help you remember.. Cliched as it may sound...you really know who your true friends are during those difficult times in your life...and I've been fortunate to have known who they are now.

I'm back...

Sunshine

I just stepped out of the movie house after watching Danny Boyle's latest movie "Sunshine", and I must admit it is one of the best films I've watched recently. The premise of SUNSHINE is that in 50 years from now the Sun is dying. It is no longer providing the energy and the light that mankind needs to survive on Earth. The entire global community pools its resources to send a mission into space to deliver a bomb to reignite the part of the Sun that is failing. The story concerns the eight astronauts and scientists who lead this mission. On their journey towards the Sun the crew stumble upon the ship that was sent on the same mission seven years previously, the Icarus I, drifting in space. From this point on things start to go very wrong and it’s about how the crew react under the enormous pressure of their endeavor to save mankind.

It's a beautiful "psychological science-fiction thriller", scientifically sound, great characters and wonderful directing (the story and directing is so compelling, I didn't notice the visual effects). I guess what I find interesting in the story is the idea of "travelling towards the sun". I guess I always dreamed and wondered what it would be like and seeing all of it in the big screen is such a wonder. Danny Boyle in an interview about the movie said: “Traveling to the Sun is great visually, but also very interesting psychologically,” he explains. “We wanted to make the film as psychological a journey as possible. There is the question about what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe, which for some people is a spiritual, religious idea, but for other people it is a purely scientific idea. We are all made up of particles of exploded star, so what would it be like to get close to the Sun, the star from which all the life in our solar system comes from? I thought it would be a huge mental challenge to try and capture that.”

And capture it he did....kudos to Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Andrew McDonald.

Official Movie Site

The Origins of Apollo

Adobe has been working on a project, code-named Apollo, to create a cross–operating system runtime that enables developers to extend the reach of rich Internet applications to the desktop. On March 19, they released the alpha version of Apollo on Adobe Labs. In this article, Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch discusses the origins of Apollo and the advantages it offers both developers and end users.

Puff Away to Keep Sleep at Bay!

Guys at ThinkGeek.com have made it their mission to get caffeine into your system in as many ways as are available: eating, drinking, absorption. There is one final way to get caffeine into your body: breathing! Yep.....unbelievable....here's the full article.

Launchy

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Official Site

Behind The Scenes of 300

The film brings Miller’s (Sin City) acclaimed graphic novel to life by combining live action with virtual backgrounds that capture his distinct vision of this ancient historic tale. In this production video you will see some of the virtual backgrounds, some compositing and some rendering. To see the clip, click here.

COLLADA

COLLADA has been a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. COLLADA, since its 1.4.0 release, is a standard of The Khronos Group where the consortium members continue to promote COLLADA to be the center piece of Digital Asset toolchains used by the 3D interactive industry.

COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse DCC and 3D processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The interchange format provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes Including shaders and physics, and even multiple versions of the same asset. COLLADA FX enables shaders to be authored and packaged using OpenGL Shading Language so that leading 3D authoring tools can work effectively together to create OpenGL / OpenGL ES applications and assets.

www.collada.org

Eraser - free hard drive cleaner

Do you know that even if you format your hard drive, tech-savvy individuals can still retrieve your data? So if you're selling a hard-drive or formally returning a borrowed laptop to your company, you'll need to run a "digital shredder program", which will wipe your hard drive of any trace of the data that once lived there.

Eraser, a free software program, replaces and randomizes the 1's and zero's on your hard drive, completely destroying any previous disk image so that no one can retrieve the information on your hard drive. Eraser is a tiny program. You can fit it onto a floppy--which helps when you want to create what they call a "Boot Nuke Disk". This allows you to boot from the floppy and erase all the information on a given computer. You can also use Eraser to schedule regular clean-ups of the unused space on your disk.

Download Eraser

Learn Linux Programming with Free E-Book

In Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, author Greg Kroah-Hartman shows you how to build, configure and install a custom Linux kernel. You can get the e-book version free from the author's web site.

The Linux Equivalent Project

The goal of The Linux Equivalent Project is to provide an informational and available website for all linux users. The website is currently in beta form and the database will be periodically updated with Windows software and the Linux equivalents and alternatives.

Official Site

Cord-and-Charger Organizer

Cool blog entry from someone fed up with all those chargers which come with every electronic equipment we buy. Out of a cardboard box and an off-the-shelf office computer surge-protector, she built a box that kept everything organized (no more soup of wires). Ofcourse, this is just a start, the possibilities are endless. Please customize to taste.

Here's the link:
Lisa: Supercharged

JAJUK: Advanced Jukebox

Jajuk is a Java music organizer for all platforms. The main goal of this project is to provide a fully-featured application to advanced users with large or scattered music collections.

Download Site

Open-Source I-Tunes, anyone?

Voodoo Camera Tracker

Voodoo is a non-commercial matchmoving software developed for research purposes at the Laboratorium fuer Informationstechnologie, University of Hannover.

The voodoo camera tracker works very alike to commercial available camera trackers (e.g. Science D Visions 3D Equalizer, 2d3 boujou, RealViz Matchmover,...).

Official Site

Icarus 3D Tracker: Free Matchmover

Icarus is a motion tracking application. It has been bought and improved upon by The Pixel Farm and is now available as a commercial application called "PFTrack".

However, Icarus is free for non-commercial use (okay, it's not open-source but some of you might find this useful). These links are from Colin Levy's Tutorial page on how to use Icarus for matchmoving.

Download ICARUS for MacOSX (55.6MB)
Download ICARUS for Windows (44.2MB)

Enjoy!

Capture Your Linux Desktop on Video

To those who want to capture their Linux desktops ala CAMTASIA Studio, here is an interesting article on how to use open-source software (Istanbul, xvidcap, Pyvnc2swf) available on the net.

Enjoy!

Screencasting Article

New Cinelerra CV Wiki

Heroine Virtual just released the Cinelerra CV Wiki. This wiki allows its users to improve the documentation for the open source software, and can be found here:

http://cvs.cinelerra.org/docs/wiki/doku.php

Cinelerra is a free non-linear video editing system for the GNU/Linux operating system. 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.

More info here:
http://cvs.cinelerra.org

CinePaint Glasgow Released!

Robin Rowe developer of Cinepaint just released an evaluation version of Cinepaint, called Glasgow. CinePaint Film Gimp is a popular deep paint program used mainly in film
industry for frame-by-frame image retouching (Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, TIFF, JPEG, etc.).

This is a technology evaluation release for developers and others interested to see where Glasgow is at. Basically, it proves that Glasgow exists and encourages developers to participate more.

Checkout http://www.cinepaint.org

Welcome to Silent Alarm!

Finally my very own blog site. If you're like me, you may find some stuff here which maybe of interest to you, namely:

• Open Source Software for 3D/CG and Visual Effects
• Visual Effects and Computer Animation
• Mental Ray and Renderman Applications
• Just about everything else, except for country music....

Cheers!