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Dec
18
2011

Backup malarky and prelimary theAbysmal scripts

If this post disappears, it's entirely my fault as I told the provider that this site could just be rolled back to the last backup (assuming the last backup he had was more recent than the one I had).

What happened with the backups? It's a long and sordid story.

Actually it's not that long, just slightly confusing.  See the provider does scheduled backups as all decent providers should.  But last month and earlier this month something very strange happened.  Three of my sites (this one, Red Planet and WANLN) lost a month's worth of posts.   It's entirely possible the other ones rolled back as well but these ones were the most noticable as they get updated constantly.

The backups were supposed to have been done about the time the rollbacks happened so my current hypothesis is that either the backup is happening and then it's restoring from a backup for some bizarre reason, or it's restoring from backup instead of backing up, or restoring from backup and then backing up.  Hopefully not either of the last two as if that's the case the stuff is gone for good and I'm hoping the lost posts can be merged back in from the backups into the current.  Will see how we go.  I'm really hoping it gets resolved sooner rather than later as my internet access is going to be sloooowwwwww from Christmas Island.

Nov
21
2011

Equal Rights

Earlier today, I got an email from AllOut requesting signatures for this petition (the image from which I've stolen).

Russian activists, stolen from AllOut site

Last week I got this email from Getup requesting donations to get a letter by a psychologist to the government run as an ad in a couple of major newspapers.

The week before that, another email from GetUp wanting yet another marriage equality petition signed.

Nov
18
2011

Insects and a gappy boy

It's all happening.  The garden is going nuts, we're going to go through a stage of not having to buy so many veges, and we're turning into those old people that like pottering around their gardens (though I don't do much of any garden work as I seem to have a knack for killing plants).

This morning, as we were going around to see how the garden was going (the zuchinni is huge, all zuchinni plants have gotten bigger since the last post), when we encountered this fellow practising kung fu on a mulberry leaf:

Praying mantis doing kung fu

Mantis kung fu!

Nov
17
2011

I think one of my roosters is possessed

Black naked neck cross rooster closeup

This one crowed directly outside the window and sounded like he'd been recorded and some sound technicians had remixed and resampled it and added some reverb and echo and all that (can you tell I don't know anything about sound?) and played back what a demonic possessed rooster would sound like if a film maker ever had need of a demonic possessed rooster crowing.

Nov
16
2011

Photos. Lots of them.

Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead.

kids storyboarding on a storyboard template

Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)

Nov
04
2011

AR notes: mashing a calendar for AR

quick and dirty calendar month page for dec2010 that I knocked up for a blog post that got eaten by my last providerSeeing as I've decided to use lojban as the IAL for AEfter Ragnarok (easy way to facilitate communication between people who don't speak the same language; all people are strongly encouraged to learn their own culture, language, traditions etc first and foremost), I figured maybe I should have a "culturally neutral" (or something to that effect) global calendar as well.

The calendar reform article on Wikipedia had a bunch of links to check out.

The most popular types of calendar reforms seem to have 13 months with 28 days with intercalary ("leap") days and/or weeks to adjust for the fact the planet takes a slightly incomvenient slightly less than 365.25 days to potter around the sun.  The extra month tends to get grafted between June and July and called Sol or Luna.  One calendar called it Aten.

A lot less common (I've only managed to find one easily, probably would find more if I looked harder) were calendars based off varying the number of days in a week, like 6 Day Week, which advocates dropping a day from the week (they proposed Tuesday and gave reasons why) to make a 4 day work week with the standard 2 day weekend, 12 five week months of 30 days each and an Intercalary Period of 5-6 days depending on whether or not it's a leap year.

So, looking for a calendar that's either reasonably culturally neutral or at least flexible with the naming conventions and isn't going to blow my head up with implementation.

Oct
19
2011

Everybody was kung fu fighting

Good thing I'm not trying for ranking in keywords to position myself as an expert on anything, as this would drown in a search :)

I've been wanting to get back into training for A Very Long Time (tm), so have been poking around for a kung fu school.  There's some wing chun and other styles floating around the place, but in the end I admitted to myself that what I really wanted was Choy Lay Fut.

I found one with the help of Dogpile.

I'm in my second week training chi kung and tai chi on the weekends and one class on kung fu during the week.

It's awesome.

It's perfect.

Oct
15
2011

3d-bek, now with eyebrows and face morphs!

3d me with eyebrows and some face morphs

I'm not convinced my colour map is working.  Will have to see when I do other random renders while fixing up the weight maps and seeing if I can work out cloth dynamics on the clothes.  And I think I need to darken my hair a little bit.  After that all I really need to do is see if I can work out how to get my freckle constellation on my face and I'm calling me done.

Did I mention I bit it and froze the model? Vastly better control on the shape and textures and things but gods working directly with the mesh is a pain in the system.

Animation coming eventually.  I really shouldn't keep going with the "rig test" but I really want to :S

Oct
13
2011

Drawing on the Cintiq

Ruan likes experimenting in all media.  Recently I let her have a go with Pixelmator and my Cintiq.  This is what she came up with.

Small girl and some of her friends

Now I have to go to Carousel to get her more paints and a canbus.

Ru: Can we get more paints and a canbus?
Me: Canbus? Canvas?
Ru: the canbus is what I paint on, silly.

Oct
12
2011

What to do when .gitignore doesn't

So.  At work we've switched from using svn to git (and GitHub).

Difference: decentralised, therefore "commit" commits it to the local repo rather than the remote/centralised one, and you have to "commit" then "push" to the remote.

Problem: .gitignore was not gitignoring some files (settings.php and .htaccess which I had to change to make it work on my local) which it was supposed to be gitignoring.

Solution as per RobWilkerson.org:

Do:

git status

which should spit up a list of modified files since lasy commit/sync/something (shut up I'm still working git out ;)

Next:

git update-index --assume-unchanged path/to/file

Yay, can now sync!

And for a listing of what's --assume-unchanged: