Although a .1 update may not sound exceptionally exciting, Shade 12.1 shipping with solid FBX Export is something to be excited about. FBX is a format that unintentionally has become an important interchange format for 3D objects that can include animation data. For example, you can set up an animated character within Shade and, using FBX export, export the animated character so that the animations can be played back within another 3d animation program or in a game development system like Unity3D.
Ars Technica is reporting on the OPEN Act from Senator Wyden (D-OR) and Darrell Issa (D-CAL) as an alternative to SOPA/Protect-IP. I congratulate Senator Wyden on producing an alternative after several years of thwarting present and previous bills that would have provided greater protections to American intellectual property. OPEN has some very good points, however it also has numerous weaknesses. Continue reading
There are people I know in other industries – more traditional and commoditized ones – that tell me just how bug nuts crazy software and web services industries are, by comparison. But we have nothing on the motion picture and entertainment industries. The motion picture industry seems to be able to repackage the same products again and again in ways that the software industry can only dream about. One thing that really mystifies me are films and subtitling. For example – consider the releases of the television series LOST. When individual seasons were released in Region 1, they included English subtitles. The Complete Series on DVD includes French subtitles. The Complete Series on Blu Ray include French and Spanish subtitles. What happened to English subtitles on the Complete Editions? Why would you exclude Spanish on individual season releases when Spanish is spoken so widely in the countries covered under Region 1? Continue reading
Silicon Florist is covering how Oregon Senator Wyden has come out against SOPA and PROTECTIP, bills that would update protections and criminalize intellectual property theft to fill the obvious loopholes with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Silicon Florist gave me the opportunity to rebut Senator Wyden’s stance before, and my request to Senator Wyden to propose alternatives that protect the intellectual property rights of creatives – unfortunately Senator Wyden is fresh out of new ideas. Continue reading
Meshbox Design, which is a division of Proactive International has released a Poser and DAZ Studio compatible 3d character called Chunk™ over on Toon People. This is the first in a series of free 3d characters. Chunk is also a framework character in that it is the new core of the forthcoming Toon Santa 11 character – a 3d character made famous primarily for his status as an official Santa Claus for the NORAD Tracks Santa website. If it seems like my interest in free is really blooming – well – it is. Continue reading
As reported by C|net on a Wall Street Journal article, Zynga, the company that made its fortune on viral games on Facebook has been compelling its employees to give up their pre-IPO stock options or risk being fired. There’s a word for that that has nothing to do with every day business. It is comforting to some CEOs who find themselves in difficult situations to justify their actions by claiming it is for the good of the company. But this isn’t the same thing as mandatory lay offs, or mandatory salary reductions to avoid lay offs in a time of crisis. Continue reading
Valentina Office Server is a combined database and enterprise ready reports server from Beaverton, Oregon-based Paradigma Software. Almost any individual or organization can now get a free copy of it -actually, up to three copies – one for each operating system: Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. With all the FOSS databases around, why Valentina? For one, you get an awesome reports server, and I have yet to come across a FOSS reports system to beat it. On the database end, Valentina is an extremely fast and modern columnar database. It can do so many things you won’t find in FOSS products.
I had a long cool drink of reduced writing brought about by some pernicious malware. For all the work I do with different content management systems, my WordPress blog seems to get the worst of it when it comes to malware infections.