Wegg’s Blog

What has happened in Haiti is horrible beyond words.  Tragic, catastrophic and heart crushing.  I am very proud of those who have immediately mobilized and taken action.  Proud of everyone but the US military.  That part doesn’t make ANY sense to me.

We are a sovereign nation with borders.  We have a constitution in place to confine our government to specific tasks.  Nowhere does it say that it is ok to send our military into another nation if there is a natural disaster!  What are they going to do?  Shoot the earthquakes?

And of course whoever has the guns is the boss.  So the stories I’m reading just make me SICK.

US Army’s 82nd Airborne division, who immediately after landing in Port-au-Prince, marched through the city’s rubble-strewn streets and past its smashed businesses to take control of the hospital.

“Look at that – they’re already telling us to leave,” said Shelove Cassamager, 33, who said he had come to the hospital to tend an injured relative, but was unceremoniously shown the door by the US troops.

. . . . . . .

US military helicopters also touched down yesterday on the grounds of the damaged presidential palace, dropping off more than 100 US marines – a deployment met with even greater ire on the part of many patriotic Haitians.

For many dejected Haitians, even as they welcome the prospect of vital aid, the arrival of US troops is a symbol for how low the country has fallen in the space of one dismal week.

And the US deployment was not welcomed by some in the crowd who saw the arrival as an affront to Haitian sovereignty.

They are a sovereign nation!  Proud of who they are and have hope for the future and it must just CRUSH their very souls to see a foreign military land at their capital.  Imagine if things were in reverse and China were landing at the White House with fully armed gunmen “taking command of the situation.”

We bully our way around the world in a way that continues to cause unforeseen problems generations later and when we realize its happening. . . even with our “Change” president. . . we just go ahead and do it again.

If there was REALLY a need for security then wouldn’t it be smart to HIRE security?  Retired police and service men who would probably even volunteer.  They could be hired, organized and work under the relief organizations themselves.  No single big entity that “represents” our country.  No need to build monumental permanent structures and housing while starving kids look on.

NO MORE NATION BUILDING!  PLEASE!  Our country is broke and yet we constantly go around the world trying to solve the world’s problems using money we don’t have with methods that have been shown time and time again not to work.  You can’t shoot everything.  You don’t send our young kids with guns into countries without there being consequences that are never good.  Its just common sense!  Please please please stop this madness.  :-(

I love it here.  I feel like I only take half as many breaths to get twice as much air.  No need for air conditioning. . . just a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean.  Swimming in bath temperature ocean water. . .   The food, the smells. . . its all so “home”.

I have had Gigner Beer, 3 pies, the most amazing watermealon, Nutrigrain.  Mmmm.

A few frustrating things.. .  all these “rules”.  There was a sign saying we couldn’t go on a walk on the beach due to alge.  Bugger that. . . we walked anyway and just hosed our feet off when we got back to the house.  But there are fines and fees and rules for everything!  It feels very “big brother”.  You can’t chop down a tree in your own yard!

And then the cost of everything continues shock me.  $4.50 per gallon for fuel.  Little bitty houses are $400.000 etc.  It presents such a frustrating barrior of entry that I keep feeling like I’ll never be able to live here again. 

Going to be meeting up with an old friend and heading down to the Gold Coast today.  That should be a blast.

When setting up a renderfarm, one of the most important things you need to be able to do is get instant access to each machine on your farm with as little physical interaction with that machine as possible. You want each machine to be like an appliance. You walk up to it, press a button and it starts rendering.

One of the main hurdles to that is the initial startup of each machine. You could just not enter in any name or password but then Windows security doesn’t allow you to use Remote Desktop to remotely administer it. And when you create an account and enter in a name and password Windows requires you to enter that in at bootup time. Hard to do when your computer doesn’t even have a keyboard!

SO! This is how you get around that. Its not great for security obviously but most render nodes don’t need to see the internet so. . . its good for this.

In this video I walk you through how to enter tell Windows what account to use at startup, how to make it automatically enter in a password and boot into Windows without you having to do anything but turn the machine on.

Link to the product.

I’m rendering a big project right now so I took advantage of the fact that I had to set up a new machine on my farm and made this little video. Not sure how appealing it will be to people but its something that really stumped me for a little while.

I have a LOT of computers.  What usually happens in a big production is that the client will pay for a bunch of new equipment, I dive in and upgrade a whole bunch of stuff but I usually only get about half way through upgrading everything before my attention has to go back to “working”.  So my renderfarm is usually only about 75% of what it could be if I went in and discovered what went wrong with the other 25% that aren’t working right.

Two days ago I figured out why one of them was only able to see one of it’s internal cores.  The fix was to do a “repair” from the Windows XP install disk.  Now its a dual 3600+ Athlon X2 instead of a single.  So thats a free computer right there!

Last night I pulled a machine out of the “fix me!” rack and discovered the thermal paste had all dried up. . . hard drive was full of temp files etc. . . so I thought I’d update the drivers and bios while I was at it and discovered that the motherboard was capable of a much more powerful CPU than I thought it was capable of.  I thought it was an AM2 motherboard but it was actually an AM2+ and Asus had a bios update that let it recognize all the latest and greatest CPUs!  SWEEET!  So now for $112 I go from a combined 4ghz machine to 11.2ghz!  Thats like. . . discovering 4 machines when you thought you only had 1!

Very happy with these findings if you can’t tell.  :-)

My “Fix me” rack is still pretty big.  Wonder what other treasures I’ll find.  :-)

I’m all alone while Jen is visiting her family for Thanksgiving so I thought I’d rent some movies that I thought I’d enjoy but knew she wouldn’t want to see.  I went right for the geek stuff.  How can you go wrong with Superman AND Batman in a movie called Public Enemies.  I was ready to geek out and enjoy them duke it out.

Didn’t. . . work out like that.  Turns out they were PUBLIC enemies as in. . . the public didn’t like them.  Not them fighting each other.  <sigh>  You know those episodes of TV shows that are just a montage of a whole bunch of older episodes in a “remember when?” kind of thing?  Mash used to do it a lot.  Its one of those “You lazy buggers!  This isn’t a real episode. . . this is a highlight reel!” kinds of things.

Thats how I kind of felt watching this.  Its like DC had a list of about 500 characters that they had to incorporate into a single story so they came up with this wacky massive crazy rushed mess that I’m sure would appeal to die hard DC fans but for me. . . I didn’t know what the heck was going on.  All these people Superman and Batman were fighting had all these crazy names and powers that all seemed FAR superior to both Superman and Batman but they would all goof up in some way that would allow the “heroes” to just squeak by just in time to be thrown into the next fight.  I mean. . . Batman is pretty dang cool but is he faster than LIGHT!?!  He must have dodged about a thousand laser blasts and projectiles during the course of the movie.  One. . . two I could understand but over and over and over.  Its supposed to be a regular guy right!?!  He must have thrown about 80 pounds of explosive “thingies” and “bat-a-rangs” and grappling hooks and smoke bombs etc etc.  I know its a cartoon but. . . bloody hell.

And why does EVERYONE seem to have Kryptonite!?!  Bad guys would inject it into themselves, use it as a power source, die their hair with it, use it as bullets etc.  I know its because Superman is so powerful that its the only way to even the playing field but it seems just a little bit too convenient.  Oh and the meteor thats going to crash into the earth at any moment?  Guess what its made out of?  You guessed it.  Kryptonite!  <palm to face>.

The other DC movie I just recently saw was really good.  Wonder Woman.  Jen actually watched that with me and it was a blast.  There was an actual story!  We got to see her origin story, understand why she is so important and powerful and the baddies were pretty cool without any stupid beams of energy shooting out of their belly buttons.

So Wonder Woman was super cool.  This movie?  Not so much.  Actually not at all.

DC really flubbed this one.  Big thumbs down for me.

Back to being dumb.

We got one little bright spark of hope in the last episode but it slid back down into a strange Canadian soap opera again.   Now we have lesbians kissing, a single stripper Mom raising a love child. . . a higher up military leader flirting with the wife of one of the guys on the other end of the universe. . . NO NO NO NO!

There is no way possible that any military organization would allow these idiots from across the galaxy to take over people’s bodies and allow them to do what they do!  Its totally stupid!  Its not entertainment at all!  The entire premise is flawed to its core!  Its TORTURE to sit through this crap.  I can’t even imagine who they are trying to appeal too!

Get back on the ship and STAY there.

Please.

About three weeks ago on NPR they were talking about how there is no inflation.  But then the VERY next segment was about the rising cost of tuition and then a few days later on the crazy disparity of health care costs.  One caller was brave enough to call in and mention how high gold has shot up in the past 6 months but he was put on the spot and couldn’t think of any other “signs” of inflation.  They kept going back to “the cost of milk at your grocery store hasn’t gone up”.  I couldn’t get to a phone fast enough to back him up but. . . its just so obvious to me.  Whatever the government touches instantly causes the cost of that thing to go up.  They print money, pump it into in-expensive loans for <insert vital thing we all “need” here>, it causes a bubble. . . costs shoot up and we all suffer when it pops.  When no one can afford quality higher education and enrollment tanks there are going to be a LOT of Universities shutting down.  Massive disruption.  :-(

Ok they pulled it off.  I’m back in.  They almost lost me but that was a really good episode.  Probably the best.  Really tricky story that made you rub your temples to work it all out logically. . . fun exciting action. . . lots if special FX and for once the planet didn’t look like Canada!  Did look a little bit like they had raided every rubber tree plant in Canada to pull it off but I can live with that.

Flash Forward lost me though.  Won’t be watching that again.  Unless I can’t sleep.  You know a show is bad when you think its over at the 3/4 commercial break and its disappointing that you have to sit through more.

Isabelle likes to swing on her door. We try and get her to stop but she is 4 so. . . its like trying to get the dogs to stop chewing on things. You try and hope but expect that it will happen again. So I have had to learn how to fix doors! Yay! Tried the obvious things of just getting bigger screws but Isabelle soon had it hanging skewed and rubbing the frame within a day. So then I took the whole door apart only to discover that there were multiple holes! No wonder it wasn’t holding. The wood was very weak due to there being all these old holes right next to where it was screwed in. So I went on the interweb and they said toothpics were good for fixing this problem. Just dip them in wood glue and shove them in there. HMMMmm well. . . if toothpics work. . . why not sucker sticks!?!

So I raided Isabelle’s Halloween stash and found a whole bunch.  Perfect!  The door seems to be holding firm.  :-)

Creating a template for SetupTab to have others help in promoting the site and messiah:studio itself. This one is my attempt to show off the Dolleyes shader. What do you think?