Blender 2.4.8 Broken

I was having trouble exporting 3DS files with a default install of [Blender]. According to this [post], I had to edit line 10 of “C:/Program Files/Blender Foundation/Blender/.blender/scripts/3ds_export.py” which fixed the problem. The special ‘a’ characters in the author name had to be replaced with ASCII ‘a’. I also had to install [Python 2.5.4].

I’m trying to work in Blender with two uv sets, but unfortunately most of the exporters and importers are stripping off the second uv set. [forum post]

Windows Emulation on Linux

I found [Ubuntu Linux] easy to work with for the past couple months. Shortly after running Linux, it’s common to want to play games and run office on Linux. To run games on Linux there are three options: 1) Wine 2) Cross over games and 3) Cedega. [Wine] is a Windows emulator that is free and game setup is done by manual setup of config files. 2) [Cross over games] is a commercial product built on Wine that facilitates the manual process. [Cedega] is also a commercial product built on Wine; check the [game database] for supported game information. Cross-over initially created a product to emulate Windows so that MS Office could be installed on Linux and it looks like they want a piece of the gaming market as well. So far Cedega appears to work better for games. Cedega also comes bundled with “Spore Creature Creator” so obviously they are the better choice. Cedega doesn’t support MS Office as far as I know. I installed MS Office 2007 with CrossOver Office, but found MS Word 2007 crashes on startup and the product is still working on support for Office 2007 SP1.

Revisiting Shaders

I’ve been out of shader land for more than a year now. And it’s time to jump back into the realm of shaders. Last time I was here, there were two camps: [HLSL] and [Cg] shaders. HLSL are windows specific and Cg are platform independent. The syntax for each is similar. Nvidia provides [FX Composer] that facilitates rapid shader prototyping and does shader profiling. AMD provides [GPU Shader Analyzer] another shader profiling tool. Shader engineers can be found in either the [AMD] or [NVIDIA] or [Mental Mill] or [ShaderFX] developer forums. RenderMonkey can also show [disassembly], but it’s hidden.

Broadcom wireless drivers (Ubuntu 8.10)

I’m running [Ubuntu] 8.10, but my broadcom drivers keep having issues. I followed [this post] and connected to the wireless Internet. But when I rebooted, the drivers were unloaded. Investigating… No luck. There was a kernel update which is probably causing issues. For now, I’ll have to run a wire through the wall…

[This] seems to work off and on.

Using a Mac

Apple Remote Desktop Client:
As a Windows user, I’ve used Remote Desktop to connect to other computers frequently. I’ve recently been learning Mac, and apparently there’s an [Apple Remote Desktop Client] that will connect to a Windows Remote Desktop session. This [kid] can show you how to use it.

I downloaded the [Ubuntu] iso on the Mac because it downloads 10X faster over wireless than my other Vista machines. And then I found [a short list of steps] on how to burn an ISO disk image on a Mac.