Funny way to say important things. Worth watching. Originally posted on pinktentacle

New Limited Edition print

Originally uploaded by Linzie Hunter

Smashing magazine put Linzie spam-collection in their best-of-january-2008. Huh, it’s amazing. Linzie Hunter, UK illustrator had… smashing idea. She collected best of the best spam sentences, and with her astounding talent - look what we’ve got. Spam art! In case you’ll enjoy one of my favourites go and see Linzie website, her portfolio is quite impressive, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it

A bit more then week ago Lisa Hoover posted extremely interesting article about stuff that might increase your privacy while browsing the net with Firefox on Linux.com. If you wasn’t aware about all that stuff it’s a good read. For example: I wasn’t aware that by posting some popular links a malicious site might get info about which of ‘em you visited. That sounds bad IMHO.

Anyway, the most interesting part for me is the one about TOR - The Onion Routing. That fancy proxy/routing service with a little help of privoxy let you become almost impossible to find by any site that wants to know something about you. Read about details on TOR project site.

The article on wikipedia states that it’s not *that* secure and basically it’s not exactly what people think it is but, from my point of view, it gives you the most interesting thing: advertisers don’t have bloody idea where you are and who you are. While playing with it I had IP from France, Germany, Norway… The other thing is that it’s too slow, almost unusable if you would ask me. On the other hand for people in some countries like Belarus or China it might be pretty helpful when they want to avoid jail.

Back to the article: the most funny part of it is the Lisa e-mail address. Tt’s on GMail! which is the least secure and privacy-aware service as far I know (shame on me, that’s for those who know that I still use it ;). If you write about security you want to sound serious you should avoid such services. Anyway, great article.

So, finally I’ve managed to grab Jesh in action thanks to XVidCap. Nifty tool, makes desktop recording pretty easy IMHO. Anyway, today I’ve uploaded Jesh demonstration to youtube, result’s below. What we’ll see in the movie? 3 basic models loaded, rotating/zooming/moving around, I’ll show how the triangle collapse works as well as edge collapse. Have fun!

Check out first working snapshot! Its awesome
Let me list some features here:

• Allows you to load PLY and Obj models.
  PLY models should contain indexed triangles, Obj files triangles only and should not have ‘parts’.For a load of nice PLY files supported by Jesh the best place to go is The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository.
  Some Obj files that Jesh can handle are located at Obj file format info page. Best choose cube.obj or humanoid_tri.obj. Those were tested
• Moving, rotating and zooming around
• Simplifying mesh with 3 local simplification operations:
  • Edge collapse
  • Half-edge collapse
  • Triangle collapse
• When having one of the simplification operations selected you’ll see which triangle will be affected
• You can choose to render model as points, lines (wireframe) or solid (no lighting yet)
• You can enable back face culling (default), front one (use for Stanford Bunny for example) or disable culling

I hope you’ll have a lot of fun with it, just remember to increase heap size and install Java3d 1.5.1 or newer.
Feedback through mail or issue tracker highly welcome!

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have few minutes to put demonstration on youtube, who knows.

After looking at all those blogs with fancy tag clouds, categories and stuff I’ve decided to move to WordPress It looks nice, has nifty themes and is quite simple and straight when it comes to blogging.

And yes, I migrated from Joomla!. Reason?
Basically I believe that there’s no ultimate tool for every task you might want to do, Joomla! is fantastic when it comes to content management but WordPress is much better when it’s about blogging. Why’s that? Because Joomla!’s not trying to be blog app (thank god!) and WordPress is the best when it’s about blogging. Why not blogger? Huh, Google *is* scary, that’s why

I hope that moving to WordPress will allow me to focus a bit on other things. I wonder how crawlers will handle my site btw, I love my PR6 and site being indexed quite nice. We’ll see anyway.

My never-to-be-finished masters thesis software package has grown lately (let’s say it was lately). Anyway there are some major changes in codebase. I’ll cover my idea for MVC in SWING in another post, I wanna tell you how proud I am that 3 of mesh simplification algorithms actually works! Yes, I tested it on few models and triangle collapse, edge collapse and half-edge collapse works for all those fancy large-size 3d scans. I hope I’ll prepare pre-alpha package in a week or two so those of you who have some interest in 3d meshes will be able to take a look. Still, it’s long road before someone will be able to use it like Meshlab but there’s light of hope that it’ll happen some day. If by some unlucky coincidence you didn’t have chance to take a look at my beloved project go here.

Love from the first sight? That could have happen if Wengo-folks would give a lil effort to share with users how to run Wengo on RH distros :/. Wengo looks really great to me but will have to spent some time to actually run it on my beloved FC6.

Lately I had to move some data from mysql db to postgresql one. I was thinking that it’ll be nice & easy task, I couldn’t be more wrong. Obviously there’s no!? reliable migration tool from MySQL to PostgreSQL so for a not-pg person like me it wasn’t fun, not at all. OK, there’s PERL script on pgfoundry (wow, they even got their foundry ;). It is marked as ‘mature’. I have to disagree. It doesn’t work. It helps a bit but it doesn’t. So, if you wanna migrate table structure with data be prepared, get pg documentation and expect troubles. It’s not *that* hard but will take more then 5 minutes, that’s for sure

I was even more sure that switch to pidgin was good idea after last Skype network crash. And saying that it was Microsoft fault is, sad but true, childish. Bad software design is the fault of designer :D. Anyway, I’m pretty scared about the report posted by one of the users on Skype forum, let me give you a link, read on /. of course. That’s another reason to stop using proprietary software. I use Skype rarely but now… it’s offline for ever, that’s for sure.