A couple of months ago we received a bill from the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina notifying us of some sort of late payment for whatever sort of taxes they collect. Clearly the ESCNC erred, but because of formalities, we had to contest the charges in writing. So contest we did! Enjoy!
Needless to say, we haven’t received a response. BUT we also have not received another bill–maybe next time we’ll notarize the letter and send it certified mail. We’ll keep you updated.
-Karl
Data corruption is a funny thing. It happens to everyone, all the time. It’s happening to you right now as you read this post. You don’t know it, but it is. Often people confuse data loss with data corruption but they’re two separate things. Data corruption can lead to data loss, and in fact it often does, but they aren’t the same thing. For example, take that USB hard drive you have sitting on your desk that has every precious photo you’ve ever taken. Sometime in the future you’ll turn it on and nothing will happen except for a horrific sound.
Awe, snap.
You lost everything. You don’t know why the hard disk won’t spin up so you take it to a data recovery specialist. Dude takes one look at it says, “You’re fucked.” And you are. Before the heads in that drive decided to fuse themselves to the platter, all your bits were in order. That isn’t data corruption. Data corruption is something more sneaky. It comes at you from behind, like a Thief in the Night™. Data corruption is incremental and happens when a ‘0’ should really be a ‘1’ or in other cases a ‘1’ should not be a ‘1’ at all, but in fact a ‘0.’ These sorts of things happen for all kinds of reasons: read/write errors, cosmic rays, the electromagnetic force, cheap silicon, a bad vaccum tube, cosmic rays, and so on. Cosmic rays. Software like ZFS and Btrfs stands to make data corruption for the laymen a thing of the past, but you know as well as I that we’re all still waiting. Because “normal” data corruption is just flippin’ a few bits all willy-nilly, you usually never see its effects until it is much too late. Often some 1s and 0s are flipped on that copy of Shovel Time you keep around, but you never see the results because some random pixel is now one shade darker. Who cares, right? You don’t . . . normally. Unless those bits happen to be in the ole’ boot sector. We here at Pixelfab Studios have a prime visual example of data corruption and how sometimes it’s a bitch to figure out why EVERYTHING just turned green. Take a look at the image below.
Fuck you, the Irish
What the hell, right? How can there suddenly be a green spot in multiple separate meshes?! Yeah, it is pretty obvious now (they share a texture), but at the time this was a big WTF. We went through the normal procedures for figuring out why, to use a Chaseism, everything went “pear shapped.” Eventually, we made our way to the source image:
Image in Blender's UV editor
The texture's image
Pretty cool, right? I guess Blender, or its constituent the operating system, decided that when it was making a copy of “wood texture 01.jpg” it would rather just read a random address space in RAM instead of doing what it’s supposed to do, which is not fuck up.
-Karl
The other day Chase was googling around for god-knows-what and came across an hilarious discovery. It seems that if one Google Image Searches for the word “geeknights,” as in the now famous GeekNights Podcast, a particular result is returned. Here is a screenshot of the results taken this morning:
Pay close attention to the fourth picture in the first row. It turns out that, for whatever reason, my impromptu photo op with Wil Wheaton and a band of xkcd supportin’ geeks is more “GeekNights” than the hosts of the show! A photo of Rym and Scott doesn’t show up until the first picture in the second row.
Now I imagine at this point you’re asking, “Karl, how is this relevant or even noteworthy?” and I say to you, “Good question!” You see, the truth of the matter is that photo was hastily fabricated and posted in the show’s forum in a discussion about teh awesomeness of PAX 07. Now, in my haste, I made a grievous error and misspelt Wil Wheaton’s name (with two ls instead of one). Later that day I realized my error but thought to myself that the moment had passed and it really wasn’t necessary to make the change. It was small error buried deep within a thread of a topic that didn’t really go anywhere. Fast forward to the future and now we see my innocuous error is now front and center! Why that particular image carries so much weight with our search engine overlords I don’t know.
In closing, I’d like to point out that the reason this is relevant is because of the lesson in all of this: CORRECT YOUR ERRORS. No matter how small. If you know they are there and it is possible, take the time to make the change. With that said, if any of you have noticed any particularly hilarious errors we have made please tell us. Also, if any of you have mad Google skills and can shed some light onto this mystery I’d be much obliged.
The change to the image has been made but I sill have the original. So at this point we’ll see how the change propagates, if anyone notices the change, and/or if the change affects the image’s ranking on Google.
-Karl
Pixelfab Studios has an official Geohashing team. If you’re interested in participating shoot us an e-mail and we’ll notify you when there is a reasonably reachable or particularly adverturious-looking coordinate in our graticule!
More photos from our adventures!
-Karl
With Con season rapidly approaching, Chase and I thought it would be appropriate to announce the inaugural launch of CK1! This year’s adventure, CK1, will begin August 21st and will mostly likely end Sunday the 31st with a red-eye back to the east coast. Chase and I have planned three or so major stops.
The first of said stops will be Pi Con, located in the great state of Massachusetts. The plan thus far is to travel with the utmost dignity, class, and style; that is to say, by rail. We’ll hop The Crescent and steam north to or nation’s capital. There we’ll catch The Vermonter which will take us further north to New England’s bustling center of culture and business: Springfield, MA.
After a weekend of gallivanting with the likes of Cory Doctorow and Randall Munroe, guests of Pi Con, we were thinking of chartering a mid-sized sedan and heading eastward to the City of Notions (Boston Proper) for a day or so, to take in the sights. From there it is due west to our next major stop, The Windy City.
The plan gets a little hazy as we kill time until we decide to fly further east, over the murderous Rockies, to our final destination: Seattle for PAX 08! Suffice to say, the weekend will consist of a 72 hour binge of gaming and geekery of all kinds and, as a plus, GeekNights will be holding a panel! That’s the plan so far. Ideas are welcome. Any and all are welcome to join our Great Adventure on any leg of the journey, unless you are a person who we would find particularly annoying and/or unwholesome (in which case we would likely let you know immediately). Please rsvp asap so we can plan accordingly.
-Karl (dictated but not read) & Chase
Today, as Chase and I were dutifully Photoshopping footballs into photos that were otherwise footballless, I noticed a particular trend in my Photoshopping technique that can only be properly portrayed, purported, and propitiated in a visual fashion. I present to you the following graph:
Now that the dust has settled from last week’s escapades, I have some time to talk a little about what went on. Long story short, right when we were down to the wire with our last and, incidentally, largest renders we hit XP’s 2GB memory limitation per program with a standard Windows build. Needing a quick and ultimate solution, we deployed a 64bit install of Ubuntu on my Laptop, allowing us to bypass the pesky 4BG memory address space of a 32bit system and PUNCH THE FACE OF GOD with a address space of 16.8 MILLION TERABYTES. These measures solved our problem but kicked our ad hoc render farm down to one machine, so Chase and I spent the next 14 hours monitoring our renders and watching Star Trek IV, Fire and Ice, and Star Trek V. What a way to make a fistfull of cash!
When it came down to it we went with a 64bit build of Linux, not just to kick the tires out from under our memory problems, but because we were curious to find out if we’d pick up a speed boost by lighting up previously unused circuitry in our Core 2 Duos. Well, the wait is over! Last night I took a random test shot from our current projects and rendered it out on a Windows 32bit build, a Ubuntu 64bit build, and the same 64bit Ubuntu build but with an optimized build of Blender I scored at graphicall.org.
The numbers are as follows on my Core 2 Duo (T7250) 2.0 GHz with 3GB of RAM:
Windows XP SP2 Version 2002:
13:41:54
Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 with std. build of Blender:
11:14:78
Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 with an SSE3 optimized build of Blender:
11:09:98
The difference between the Windows 32bit and the Ubuntu 64bit is quite substantial. On this test I picked up a 17.9% decrease in render time. W00t! The difference between the 64bit optimized and std. build leave a bit more to the imagination with only a 1.47% decrease in render time.
Umm . . . that’s all.
-Karl
I updated teh WordPresses to 2.5 today. I haven’t really poked around it yet so I can’t report much of anything other than a snazzy new dashboard. Rest assured, that if anything pisses me the hell off I’ll report it here. SO, if anything ’round here ackin’-a-fool please shoot me an e-mail and I’ll investigate, pronto!
Also, we traveled back in time 3 hours. Hooray, time zones!
Werd.
-Karl
Here at Pixelfab Studios we have a habit of printing things big. Our main client, WMA, usually instigates these large-scale jobs. A few months ago, I designed and created a 45’x8′ banner. That’s enough banner to stop an entire team of bicyclists. We got it printed and couldn’t even unroll it all the way because there wasn’t enough room IN THE HALLWAY.
Well, we just got something else printed in a huge way. It’s not as big as the aforementioned banner, but it’s still Larger Than Life (life = my height). Our task was to edit footballs into otherwise football-less scenes. The idea is that these images will be places on a stadium wall by one of the stadium’s sponsors, arranged in such as way as to be 8′ high and 100′ long. People would rather pay us money to spend weeks Photoshopping the footballs in photo-realistically than just drive their lethargic asses down to the store, put some footballs in amongst the fruits and cheeses, and snap some photos.
This is our market. These are our clients. This is our niche.
We’re pretty sure that the next thing we print will have to be put into orbit or etched onto the surface of the moon with a very powerful laser.
This is me…PONDERING THE FANTASTIC!
This is Karl…REACHING FOR MEDIOCRITY!
The footballs look like they’re really there, eh? BEHOLD! THE MAGIC OF MODERN TRICK-PHOTOGAMY
♥ Chase
Last week Chase and I embarked on an urban “exploration” of sorts. The adventure was a success! No one was stabbed by a hobo or succumbed to scurvy and we made the following startling discoveries. We didn’t find a skeleton either. In the drain pipe. A hobo skeleton. With a hat on.
Evidence of beavers, mutant beaver-hobos, or just a really hungry hobo. He would have so very many splinters in his tender hobo gums (tender from hobo-malnutrition).
Jungle thicket. Bambi’s mom may have been shot dead here.
Unbeknownst to us, a red deamon fog was settling in our midst. It continues to haunt us to this very day.
Our triumphant discovery! This innocent-looking hobo den apparently runs all the way under our building. Frothing at the embouchement, it smelt of lye, urine, and phosphates.
Chase staring into the cold, empty abyss of the hobo haven. The darkness is impermeable and infinite, like the soul of a madman.
Conclusion: The darkness beckons.
-Chase and Karl OUT