Mantle Cat

Mantle Cat

Originally uploaded by jrishel.

this picture explains a lot of the odd noises we’ve been hearing at night.

captcha

captcha

Originally uploaded by jrishel.

got this captcha today when filling out a webform… I misread it at first.

Beowulf 3D: Almost Out Of The Uncanny Valley?

As a late birthday present Gail and Bryon watched Cory for Meg and me last Saturday. We took the time to go see Beowulf in 3D.
The way the actual Anglo-Saxon text was integrated into the songs and the speech of Grendel was well done. The additions to the story line to make the story more than just “I am Beowulf, I killed a monster and his mother and then 30 years later I killed a dragon and died” were well done, a tied into the mythology setting. If the movie had been made with more traditional film-making (live action actors, CGI Monsters) , We’d only be talking about the brilliance of the Gaiman/Avery script, but with “Performance Capture” and 3D presentation are really what steals the show.
Unlike the dead mannequin eyes all the Tom Hanks clones had in The Polar Express¹ we see glimpses of actual emotion being portrayed by these fancy puppets. This is partly because the 3D nature of the film adds a lot of realism, but also the subtle movement of an eyelid or movement of pupils allow Anthony Hopkins character to really express the sorrow and grief he feels. Unfortunately, that level of emotion still hit or miss. For every character interaction where I feel like I’m seeing real emotion, there are 3 where it just doesn’t look right, often coming from John Malkovich and Robin Wright Penn’s characters. And I can’t define what’s not right². Perhaps I’m just studying their faces a lot more closely because I know what I’m seeing is not a direct capture of a human on film, so what I’m noticing are flaws in a performance translated by the computers to the screen, not a flaw in the capturing process.

Overall, I give this movie 2.5 waxy turnips.

1. Perhaps this is just a result of Tom Hanks? I kid, I kid. [↩]
2. But that not-rightness is detected by an ancient reptilian portion of my brain. [↩]

Colorblind Synesthete experiences colors his eyes can’t see.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition where a certain sensory experience is mapped or overlaid with another sense. The most common form of this is Grapheme (numbers or letters) to color synesthesia. What’s really interesting is most synesthetes can easily differentiate a grapheme’s actual color from it’s “synthetic” color. This all gets really weird when you get a synesthete who is colorblind. He sees colors in his mind that his eyes are physically unable to detect. Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Man School

I can’t decide if this is awesome, or insane: 2 out of the 3 original Blue Man Group are starting a pre-school.

But after you’ve spent fifteen years spattering audiences with paint, pounding drums and pipes, spurting goo out of your chest, and spitting chewed-up marshmallows onto canvases, what’s next? For Goldman and Wink, married fathers in their forties, the answer was clear: start a nursery school for your kids and tell all your friends. Last week, the Blue Man Creativity Center (it can’t call itself a school until it gets state accreditation) welcomed forty-three boys and girls between the ages of two and four to its first day of classes and mayhem.

I wonder if the teachers pretend to be mute and get the class to follow directions from a dis-embodied voice with written directions on a large projection screen. That would be… different. “How to Be a Pre-Schooler, Motion #37: Run around and scream”

via BoingBoing

OMG WTH

OMG WTH

Originally uploaded by jrishel.

still doesn’t beat “TOBLAVE”

mysqld failing to load after changing default locations

I just solved a problem at work that google was no help with. I’m posting this in hopes some other poor soul who has the same problem finds this post. After an OS re-install (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4) we were changing the default location of data used for application into a different filesystem mounted to /obscure/location/work/uses/ in that directory, each application has it’s own folder, and then automounts to /apps/appname. We setup /apps/mysql and edited /etc/my.cnf to point everything but /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid to this new location. Makes sense, right? But now, mysql won’t start. statur reports:
#service mysqld status
mysqld dead but subsys locked

in course of investigation, I check /var/log/messages and see something like:

Jan 6 01:23:27 localhost kernel: audit(1105003407.183:0): avc: denied { append } for pid=12380 exe=/usr/sbin/mysqld path=/var/lib/mysql/localhost.localdomain.err dev=sda1 ino=3450322 scontext=root:system_r:mysqld_t tcontext=root:object_r:var_lib_t tclass=file

this error message will lead you down a trail of dispair. If you’re having the same problem I did, ignore this error message.

The reason the startup scripts are failing is that something is hardcoded to look for the mysql files in /var/lib/mysql. A symlink to /apps/mysql:

ln -s /apps/mysql/ /var/lib/

and mysql starts up without problem.

Now, if someone could explain why mysql client or startup scripts fails to read /etc/my.cnf correctly, I’d love to hear it.

Ubuntu from Dell “Day 2″ impressions

As mentioned earlier, Meg’s new computer is a Dell with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Overall, we’re still happy with the system, but I wanted to mention a few “gotchas” i’ve found since being able to poke around the system a bit more.

First, Meg’s system came with a widescreen monitor. X windows was only configured with one 16:9 resolution choice, so if Meg want’s to reduce the resolution, everything is stretched out. I know if this is a fairly simple xorg.conf fix, and Meg’s gotten used to the 1680×1050 resolution, so it hasn’t been a big deal.

Secondly, in an effort to conserve power, I enabled power management so the system would suspend after after an hour of activity. Most of the time, this works. Every few times, it doesn’t recover correctly and needs to be shutdown before coming back up. Other times, the network connection is unable to get a DHCP lease. I’ve turned this off to stop irritating Meg until I can get it to work more consistently.

Meg is busy taking grad classes and her only complaint about OpenOffice.org is the lack “WordArt” as seen in Microsoft Word. I’ll have to see if the Format > FontWork option does the trick for her.

Overall, I’m still very impressed. The screen resolution is a minor nit-pick, and I’m not even sure if that level of polish exists on the windows side of the world. Suspend or hibernate don’t work correctly on my own (older) system, so that fact that it works most of the time is still a good sign.