Mine the Harvest

We have been enjoying the second season of Torchwood, currently playing on BBC 3 and your local bit torrent channel for everyone living outside the UK. The BBC page is here.

Torchwood is a spin off from the new (and wonderfully done) re-installment of the classic show Doctor Who. The BBC has done a completely admirable job reviving this classic sci-fi show I enjoyed so as a lad – but this post is about Torchwood – which is definitely not Doctor Who.

Torchwood: Outside the government beyond the police. The 21st century is when it all changes – so you had better be ready.

So describes Capt. Jack Harness, the leader of the Cardiff branch of Torchwood. They operate with near complete impunity, doing what they can to protect earth from one pending alien disaster to the next. Jack is a time agent from the 26th century – though he was from the WWI era originally. Time has made him a touch edgy. (Click for larger images.)

While much of Doctor Who takes place on other worlds, Torchwood focuses on Earth – with its unique population and all its flaws we as humans all have. The characters are all pretty messed up people, and their job is not exactly helping.

It is fairly violent and certainly illustrates the character flaws we as humans all have. The characters are all pretty messed up people, and their job is not exactly helping attain greater inner peace.

If you like good sci-fi with a bit of a bite to it, check out Torchwood. You’ll come away realizing that your life is a lot better than it could be.

I never cease to be surprised at the ever increasing number of excellent quality Open Source applications. Here is just another to add to my list of favorite Open Source apps (you can find my whole list of favorites here.)

The new discovery is Blender – described on the page as:

“Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.”

While I can describe blender, to do it justice you just have to see some of the work done by artists using it – check these out:

(Click for larger images.)

(These are all from the gallery at Blender.org site, more are available there to view)

Blender is available for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSB, OS X (PPC and Intel versions) and Windows. Installation was a one line rpm install of the package and it worked flawlessly for me.

Blender is one of the applications used to create the popular animation, “The Elephants Dream” – a pretty stunning production, and they are working on a sequel to this, a new animation called “Peach” – which is to be released quite soon. Here is a shot of a (minor) character from the new project:

(Click on me)

In addition, the project has a game development module with integrated physics engine. They are developing an Open Source 3D game using this called Apricot and it looks to be pretty damn cool too.

Though not a 3D artist myself, I do enjoy playing with 3D object modeling. As a kid I played with some 3D studio apps on my Amiga 500, these were precursors to the infamous Lightwave, which itself is still around and very widely used.

However, I could never afford Lightwave back then, nor the hardware to run it on.

What a pleasure to find Blender – completely Open Source, and it packs an impressive punch indeed.

If you are interested in graphics, 3D design or animation at all – definitely check this project out and spread the word.

The application is very well designed, has numerous tutorials and videos and extensive documentation.

I hope I can carve out some time and design some things myself.

For Christmas / Yule this year Syd and I went to Colorado for a visit with friends and family. We took a week off and had a great time. First we flew into Denver and stayed the night with some very good friends, Erich and his wife Kristin. (Erich has been know to read this blog and comment so I have to be nice . . . hehe) Actually, we have known each other for about 23+ years (OMG!) or so but I don’t get to see him much these days, so it was a real pleasure seeing them. We had a great time playing some board games and visiting. Can’t wait to see you guys again.

The next day we spent the morning with some old time friends in south Denver, the Vickland / Valdez clan. It was wonderful to see everyone and Juanita prepared a wonderful traditional Mexican lunch for us, home-made tortillas, carne and delicious deserts. It was so nice seeing everyone.

Then it was time to drive to Gunnison. We like the drive from Denver to Gunnison, it is a pleasant 4 hour trip. I’ve done it so many times I think I could draw a topographical map of the route. The scenery was beautiful as always and the blizzard they had just had a few days before posed no problem on the roads. We arrive at my folks’ ranch the evening of the 23rd.

Spending Christmas at the ranch with mom and dad was perfect. There was tons of snow – far more than usual – and it made for quite the Christmas spectacle. It was a very classic Colorado Christmas. Here are a few pictures of how it looked, though they of course don’t due justice. (Click for larger view.)

(continue reading…)

My Cisco instructor at St. Pete College also teaches the A+ classes there. He knows of my interest in Linux and that my job is primarily *nix based and asked if I would teach a class for his A+ students studying the Operating Systems portion of their curiculeum. He’s a great guy and I have really enjoyed his Cisco classes so I thought this would be a fun thing to do for his A+ guys.

I have not done any teaching for a few years, but really looked forward to the opportunity. It was just a one night class to introduce the students to Linux and how it can assist technicians in diagnosing and addressing common PC issues. There are some fantastic linux tools for data recovery, password resets and hardware analysis which are available on live CDs such as Ubuntu that are perfect for PC techs. Plus it makes them look like Uber-geeks.

We had a great time and I really enjoyed introducing new people to the Path of the Penguin. Many of them had never used Linux at all, so it was a definite change for them.

Here is the  wiki article I wrote for the class and for the students to reference.

Had a great time and I think we will  do it again for the next class next semester.

Power to the Penguin.

Last week I stayed after work a bit and got BackupPC installed and configured on my server at work.

I wrote a wiki article describing the install process and a few issues I ran into which might be helpful should you care to try this software out.

BackupPC is really fantastic. It allows cross platform backups to a central point, pools redundant files to save space, has various compression and transfer method options. If a few clicks you can restore files back to the client, or download them directly.

One thing is that it requires host name resolution of the clients. Since I will be backing up clients at home over the internet I am going to next explore setting up a VPN using OpenVPN so the servers can see these clients directly. You could also just use something like dyndns.com to assign a domain name to you dynamic home ip, etc.

Highly recomend this as an automated backup solution for personal or business use.