Besides some UI and updates to the renderer, AOI 2.9 doesn’t have much else to offer. However this little gem of an 3d animation tool still offers some value to artists moving in to 3d. Do consider checking it out.

• Added compound move/scale/rotate tool in the main scene window.
• Camera filters can be edited and reapplied after an image is rendered.
• Added depth of field filter.
• Noise reduction filter is now a standard camera filter.
• Cameras can be set to render images with a parallel projection.
• Lots of minor enhancements and bug fixes.

Download your copy now!

Wings took it’s own sweet time to hit release 1.0 and now it’s here.  Wings has just released Ver 1.2 RC2 and it looks really good. Download here…

Here are some Wings tutorials to get you started…
http://www.brilliant-creations.com/ghoulconstruct.htm: Model a Ghoul
http://medlem.spray.se/nuvilljaghahemsida/twodescphotos5.html: Model an Eye
http://www21.brinkster.com/jrcsurvey/tutorials/alana/Index.html: High Heeled ladies Shoe

“This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more…”

Inkscape’s new Spiro splines concept…

One of my favourite new features is a new effect that simulates hand drawn lines…

There’s loads of new stuff for me to explore. I’m especially excited about Spiro splines. Will keep you posted about my experiments with this banging new version.

Openclipart.org is a pretty cool community initiative. It’s a repository of public domain clip art that is free to use by anyone, forever. It already seems to have close to 20,000 free clip art images.

So, I’ve been contributing to the collection, through my studio Pencil Sauce. I’ve also been logging my collection on a blog. Take a look.

Let’s take a fresh look at Software piracy shall we?

First of all, I.P theft is not the same as theft. It does not displace the actual product, rather it disallows the owner to profit off of it. Naturally, no I.P owner is going to give up his hard earned rights so easily.

But also consider this. Software developers dont actually sell their software, they lease it to you. But they also charge you VAT, so it’s kinda a product. (They will insist that the packaging is, not the software!)

Most importantly, the blanket criminalisation of I.P is something that needs to be looked at. Currently I.P theft is categorised under two headers. Criminal and Civil. The former are those that trade in illegal software, the latter are the users of it.

But there are way too many layers.

For one, I.P theft between two companies is a direct example of theft where one firm steals from another. This is direct theft. Example: http://www.financialexpres s.com/news/Source-code-thefts,-hacking-on-the-rise-/117138/

A few lines into the site and you immediately know that you’ve landed at one of those strange corners of the internet where time diasappears, surfaces accquire boundless properties and the ecommerce store promises a warranty of  “ONE MILLION YEARS that within a Euclidean plane, the square of a right triangle’s hypotenuse will equal the sum of the squares of the two remaining legs.”

I couldn’t stop reading the man’s writings. While the content of the site could be termed any product managers’ nightmare, I loved and devoured every bit of it. See the unconditional guarantee‘ page to see what I mean.

ACME Klein bottles however is an actual business, and not a joke. Cliff Stoll who calls himself the main bottle washer is the one man corporation behind this business enterprise. He makes and sells Klein bottles over the internet and he doesn’t seem fussy about his business. In fact he even trades, and in the past he’s traded bottles for a silicon chip, a box of sliderules and a couple of chainmail Mobius Loops.

So I mailed him and asked him if he’ll trade me a bottle if I redesigned his website.

He mailed back this morning saying he knows the site could be better etc and he has to get around to it etc. So, I figured perhaps he knows a bit about programming.

This is when serendipity grabs and happily slaps me. I had read a book a few years ago called the Cuckoo’s egg. Turns out Clifford Stoll is the ‘author of the book.‘ It’s a story about the detection and apprehension of a hacker by Stoll when he managed some computers at Lawrence Berkley Labs in California. After reading more and more stuff about Clifford, I finally landed a Ted video on him speaking about… everything.

A new mind to love. Enough said.

“One of my most valuable lessons from that time was the discovery that trained reflexes could create a weakness as detrimental as a complete lack of knowledge or skill. There was a certain incalculable advantage in maintaining a pure level of spontaneity. The joy was in riding the edge of the fractal equation in its shifts through sets of variables. The challenge was to pull back just as the pattern turned from Complexity into Chaos…”

PDF link: Download the pdf from Godess Chess

Goddesschess is a really cool resource. I also found a nice article on GO, the chinese game of strategy and why it’s far more difficult for a computer to compute GO moves.