.: the bojicas

Putting all I have learned into practice – modeling a real crane barge in Blender. Here comes a screenshot of my model.

Main difficulties I have encountered were in the curve areas at the stairs, (see front view), where I tried all my best to use 4 vertices per face, those avoiding faces made from 3 vertices.

I still need some more practice

Now, Gus is detailed, and rendered as follows:

Blender file is here: b009_gus_detailed_cont.blend .

And my blender file b011_architecture_blender_part3, before applying the background.

This has been done, based on the tutorial of Yorik van Havre – “A (first) introduction to architecture modeling with Blender”.

Following the Blender tutorial, here is the result of the first phase randering of our Gus – the gingerbread man.

And attached is my b007_gus.blend file.

“A (first) introduction to architecture modeling with Blender” is a general, but step-by-step introduction to quick architecture modelling with Blender by Yorik van Havre.

I have downloaded the .blend file and I am definitely impressed with the final result.

More details here.

Playing around with Blender, I could obtain the above tennis ball.

How?

Simple. Following the guide How to model a tennis ball, which you can find on Blender Artists forum or Blender’s wiki

And here is my .blend file: b006_tennis_ball.blend .

It is a very good exercise for those who want to get familiar with Blender’s interface.

Random Ubuntu Advocacy. Refresh your browser couple of time to witness randomness.

Source http://crunchbang.org/archives/2008/01/25/random-ubuntu-advocacy/

From Jonathan’s blog, CEO and president of Sun Microsystems, Inc. we can learn that Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in MAMP”.

That’s right, Sun is acquiring MySQL AB, the developer of the most widely used open source database. MySql is sharing a big portion of database market share pie, along with SQL Server and Oracle. Due to its open source nature, trends indicate an increasing adoption.

Curious now. Sun recently open sourced Java … and now they complete their open source portfolio with MySQL.

Hopefully this is good news for the open source community.

I am managing a remote server (Debian) which accommodates an IMAP server (Cyrus). Users may set up an email client or check emails via a web browser, using SquirrelMail.

Today I have noticed that I could no longer check my emails. I would get an authentication failure message. I have checked and cross-checked my username and password. Both were correct. So what was wrong?

Getting via ssh on the remote server and launched:

ps aux | grep saslauthd

Nothing. No output.

Aha, saslauthd daemon is not running. Then lets try to start it up:

/etc/init.d/saslauthd start

At this point, it complaint that START variable must be set up to yes in order to automatically launch the daemon. Looking for /etc/default/saslauthd, I have noticed that there is another file /etc/default/saslauthd.dpkg-old.

Solution:

Edit /etc/default/saslauthd, locate the line START = no, and replace it with START = yes, then again

/etc/init.d/saslauthd start

And it works. Checking my emails. It works fine, now.

So, what was the problem? An update overwrote my original file. Editing this file I realized that it stayed in default state START = no. Bringing START = yes, saving and restarting my daemon sorted out the problem. I did even a remote restart to be sure it is loading on reboot.

And yes it works.