brainwagon

Holy crap, I spent the day at home today, and was scanning my usual blogs when I read this shocking article that Pixarian Joe Ranft had been killed in an automobile crash. While I didn’t know Joe personally, his infectious smile and humor were a regular feature of the halls at Pixar, as was his […]

Every once in a while, it disturbs me that there are parts of the computer graphics world that I rarely delve into, and simulation near the top of the list. I did spend some time fifteen years ago trying to understand inverse kinematics and the like, mostly in the context of robot motion planning, but […]

Slashdot pointed at this kind of cool article on how the hidden code on the Xbox was hacked. I thought it was pretty cool and illuminating.

Each year Pixar tosses a Renderman User’s Group meeting at SIGGRAPH. In the past few years, we’ve invited some of our users to present some of their techniques to a wide audience in a portion of the program we call Stupid RAT (Renderman Artist Tricks). Each year, there seems to be at least one presentation […]

Next week I’ll be leaving for SIGGRAPH, the premiere computer graphics conference. Today I’m trying to work through my agenda, make lists of papers that I want to see, figure out the reception schedule and the list of parties that I’d like to attend. While doing so I noticed that the Computer Animation Festival trailer […]

Sometimes I’m amazed by webpages which answer profound or trivial questions that I’ve asked myself before. This time, I’m more amazed that someone would work to answer a question that has never and probably would never occur to me: can you teach a spam filter to play chess? Laird Breyer wrote a program called dbacl […]

I’ll be trundling off to SIGGRAPH at the end of the month. Any attendees (who I don’t see everyday at lunch here at Pixar) want to get together and schmooze a bit? I haven’t been in a few years, so my dance card is likely to be pretty clear. Drop me an email and let […]

Boing Boing documents the quick imposition and then reversal of a cell phone ban in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in NY. Apparently they were concerned over the risk that remotely detonated devices presented, but (as the NYPD apparently pointed out) the idea of having a place where people cannot use their cell phones to […]

Broadband Reports has this cool overview of where residential networking is likely to go in the next few years. I’m currently stuck on cable modem because we are too far from the phone switch for DSL, but it is good to see what might be possible in the next few years.

Dear God. Some hacking projects seems horribly misguided. I like the idea of using junk and recycled components as much as the next guy, but The Poor Man’s Raid Array is simply an abomination. Why? It’s got 14 50gb SCSI drives in it. Holy crap, think of your power bills. You’ll never need a space […]

Tom sent me a pointer to Jef Poskanzer’s notes on how he handles a million spam messages every day. No, that’s note an exaggeration, Jef gets hit by a million of them every day. Holy crap. Jef is a the author of the really nice thttpd, which I used to run my website for years […]

Courtesy of Scoble’s blog, here is a post concerning “Low Rights Internet Explorerer”: IEBlog : Clarifying Low-Rights IE Low-rights IE will only be available in Longhorn because it’s based on the new Longhorn security features that make running without Administrator privileges an easy option for users (User Account Protection). When users run programs with limited […]

I was trying to justify my inner hunch that the Apple announcement was all about laptops, and found the wikipedia page on the Pentium M to be a good synopsis of what Intel has in mind in that space. Just FYI.

This website runs on a VIA Nehemiah 1Ghz motherboard. I used to run it on a dual 400Mhz Celeron box I built on an Abit BP6 motherboard, but that thing sucked power and generated heat far in excess of its utility. Now my webserver runs quiet and lowpower. That’s why I thought I’d plug the […]

Cool link today from Boing Boing which extracted elements from the game Halflife 2 and embedded them into real scenes using high dynamic range lighting. This kind of approach is one that I think amateurs could pursue in making their own hybrid CG films. Good stuff. Boing Boing: HOWTO add Half Life 2 elements to […]