Robert Marcano's blog

Elephants Dream released to the public

robert — Fri, 19 May 2006 11:51:58 -0300

Elephants Dream is a 3D movie made with Open Source software, even the movie is open content so you can download the rendered video and also the production files splitted across two DVDs. I ocassionaly do small things on Blender as a hobby, but I am downloading these movie source files in order to know how the professionals do their work

To follow the development of this movie was very entertaining, because it was a good stress test for Blender; many optimizations to the software where made in the process, for example when they were having memory related problems on Mac OS X that were more noticeable than when they were using Blender on Linux. WARNING: you will need a good computer if you want to render the video yourself, a lot of memory and patience is needed, unless you have a 64bits Linux render farm .

New hosting active

robert — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 18:48:46 -0400

The move to DreamHost is complete.

Changing hosting provider

robert — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 15:45:39 -0400

I am moving my site to the hosting provider named DreamHost. They have a lot features and a lot of them without limitations. The more important one that make me take the decission to move is that with only one subscription I can host any number of different sites, sharing the same storage and bandwith limits.

Disconnected for a long time, but now running at 64bits

robert — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:38:37 -0300

I have been disconnected recently from many internet related activities, the reason is that we have been a lot busy at work, so this weekend i will take a few days off. I will go to the beach, to an uncle house in Chichiriviche.

Ohhh and now I am running a 64bits desktop at work, running Fedora Core 4 (for 64bits AMD/Intel cpus). I only wait for the day when IBM/Lenovo will be able to sell me a Thinkpad with a 64 bits CPU, and for the money too .

Output from uname -a:

Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.13-1.1526_FC4smp #1 SMP Wed Sep 28 19:28:24 EDT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Output from cat /proc/cpuinfo:

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 4
model name      :               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 3000.145
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 5
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips        : 6009.70
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 4
model name      :               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 3000.145
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 5
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips        : 6000.42
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

A popular provider of XMPP

robert — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:35:03 -0300

XMPP or the protocol behind Jabber has a new friend: Google Talk. This is good news for instant messaging interoperability, because XMPP uses a decentralized model like SMTP, but still Google Talk does not have server to server support (for example: chat from a gmail.com account to a jabber.org account), but I think this is not far away.

Now, my recomendation to the Google staff, add a lot of emoticons to your client and a lot of people will simply move in droves, because regular users does not care about the protocol, only the coolness factor.

Discovery touches down on Edwards Air Force Base

robert — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 08:58:35 -0300

Now all space shuttles are grounded again, I hope this time is for a short period of time

New Falcon 4.0

robert — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:24:50 -0300

Big news for the fans of military flight simulation games: a new Falcon 4.0 has been released: Falcon 4.0 Allied Force. The previous release has an history of more than 7 years in the market. It was the best and more realistic simulation of a F-16, and the only game that has been able to surpass its supremasy is itself.

If you like simulators with an arcade style, this is not a game for you, just take a look at the keyboard layout. I am buying this game as I bougth the original Falcon 4.0, it is the only program that do not allow me to remove my Windows partitition from my home PC. Now that it has been modernized (new DirectX support) I hope to be able to run it in Transgaming Cedega or just plain Wine

Take a look at the screenshots gallery and a pair of photos of my Falcon 4.0 box and the very small manual:

Activated from hibernation

robert — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:27:52 -0400

I have upgraded my pLog installation to the beta release 1.0. I have been separated from the internet world for a few months because I had a lot of work. Now is the time to finally update and finish my work on a Mozilla bug assigned to me: Implement xforms:range element. I hope to finish it in a few days

Mozilla Firefox + RSS feeds

robert — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 22:50:38 -0300

The latest release of the best web browser on earth has added support to RSS feeds, they look like simple bookmarks where a subscription is a folder and a post is a bookmark item, a simple but easy to use method to display them, see it for yourself (click on the image to zoom)

GMail

robert — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 21:49:29 -0300

I have received an invitation to gmail and I have one left. The first person to post a comment will receive it

Update: It was sold in less than a minute