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
It’s been a long time, friends. We know that you, the Intertron, have missed us greatly. We’ve been lethargic about updating the blag for most of the last year, but I return to you with good tidings! First, and most obvious, is the fact that we’ve returned to the blogotronic. We’ll be posting updates over the next few weeks detailing the events that transpired while we were in hiding, which include but are not limited to: the completion of our company website, the production and completion of other websites, a strategic move toward photorealism, a number of near-epic fails, and a large increase in our collective Sass Level™.
[cue title sequence, credit roll, and introductory overture]
So we’ll begin this hot, supersonic reentry into the blogosphere with the purchases that we made over the past few months.
Back at the end of winter ’09 I momentarily shirked the day’s obligations and went “surfing” around the Inter-tubes. I ventured over to meetup.com and searched for “animation,” which I’d done a few months before with lackluster results. This time, however, the search turned up a recently-established computer animators meetup which, we soon discovered, met less than half a block down the street from our office at a small one-room computer animation school. Fate? Destiny? Happenstance? You decide!
The meetup groups were fun and packed with people in our industry, but unfortunately the school failed when the economy ate six kinds of shit and Tom,the rad fellow running it, had to move back to Los Angeles. Tom, it turns out, has worked as an animator and lighting guy for all sorts of notable animation and production companies. Long story short, we visited him for a few hours on his last day in town and ended up buying two badass computers from him that were used as workstations for Disney.
Now you're playing with POWER!
They even have “Property of Disney” stickers on their cases.
Bought, not hot
The computers were used to create Jimmy Neutron and a handful of other movies and originally cost Disney something like $15,000 each to build. This is mainly due to the fact that they’re now six years old and are still capable of keeping up with pretty modern computers (dual 2Ghz Xenon processors with with hella RAM and kick-ass Quadro cards WHAAAT UUUUUPS!!). They were sold off to Disney employees when they were replaced and we ended up purchasing them from Tom for one hundred bucks a pop. We also picked up a really nice HD monitor to replace Karl’s dark, flickery monitor and save the last remnants of his already-withering eyes. He is far too young to have eyes-fall-out syndrome. His step is too spry.
Face-eyes
Tom also told us about a book called “Digital Lighting and Rendering,” from which he apparently learned a lot of his badass lighting skillz. I just finished it and highly recommend it to a lady or a dude.
A Rim Light is Pretty Important.
We’ve purchased that book in recent weeks, along with a few others:
Karl has not yet mastered it.
Mastering Blender: A sweet little book full of tasty secrets about the open source animation software we use and love. It goes over some advanced Blender skills/strategies and goes into writing Python scripts to make Blender do things that would appear to most to be indistinguishable from magic.
They're not tricks, Michael.
The Illusion of Life – Disney Animation: This book is on the course book requirements list for basically every animation class out there. It was written by some of the greatest animators who have ever lived. This is hardcore, no-nonsense hand-drawn tactics for giving life to drawings.
It's funny too.
The Animator’s Survival Kit: This was also on hell of course lists. It’s pretty much a huge handbook for walk cycles, run cycles, movements, expressions, and everything else that makes animated characters look as captivated and lifelike as this universe allows.
Aaaand there’s this one just for good measure:
We've had this book for a few years. It isn't new.
We’re also in the process of formulating a plan to purchase two high-end workstations from Dell. These beasts will likely have two 4-core Ghz processors each, making each about four times as powerful as the workstations we currently use. It would be the equivalent of upgrading from a steam locomotive to a super high-tech SPACE TRAIN.
NOPE! ALLLLLREADY BEEN THERE!!!
It is a wonderous, fantastical time here at Pixelfab Studios. We are becoming more legit by the day and our plans for world domination draw ever closer. We can already hear the Pixelfab Beast singing its banshee cry as it begins its emergence from the womb of Imaginative Creation. Soon it will rain its magical, cleansing fire down upon the world of animation and creative content production. All who stand in its path shall fall victim to its row upon row of terrible, bloody fangs.
The final bell tolls. It rings out death and destruction.
The stench of its festering carnivore breath has already begun to wilt the flora and sicken the fauna. Stay tuned for the continuing rundown on the past year’s developments!
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
The time: three weeks ago.
The place: Wagner Murray Architects.
The situation: a megamillion-dollar deal gone sour.
So the WMA boss comes up to us and explains that the stadium spaces we’ve been designing for UNNAMED SPORTSKETBALL TEAM have come to a grinding halt for reasons we can’t mention. We were assigned the task of putting together great-looking renderings of each of the spaces, some of which we’ve never even worked on, in order to unfreeze the gears of this complex machine we call capitalism-based public-funded sports multi-sponsorship. The rigors entailed by this process included the creation of props and scenes in 3-D, the lighting and rendering of said scenes, and the gathering of approval from all of the affected parties. This entry, unfortunately, cannot reveal the innermost secrets of our work as of recent. We really can’t even put the renderings up on the Internets because they’re still under wraps. But, suffice to say, we have been fruitfully busy these past few weeks (and weekends…sigh…) and, therefore, have a legitimate excuse for not posting much on this blag for a little while. I mean, come on! We did months worth of work in three weeks.
We can, however, reveal to you some Pixelfab plans for the somewhat-near (read: 5 years) future because WE are the gentlemen in charge of this company and WE get to say who can tell whom what and when! Our main idea of this week revolves around the (hopefully near) future office space of our company. Out of hand we immediately dismissed all of the standard solutions to the problems that hang heavy on the soul of the Modern Head of Company. Why settle for a brick-and-mortar, or possibly glass and steel, solution? It’s the 21st century, so we figure that it’s important to at LEAST use late-19th century technology to aide our office ailments. Who needs a geographically-bound office space when, like modern information, you can soar over the horizon at or near the speed of thought? Our office needs to be hip, it needs to be modern, and, most important of all, it needs to be railworthy.
Enter Charles A. K. Pullman. I don’t know his first or middle names, so I’ve inserted my first name and Karl’s first two initials.
In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had revolutionized the world. Rail travel was a shining beacon of future progress, but it was wrought with the unpleasant trend of overcrowdedness and the inconvenience of frequent explosions and collisions with fate herself.
The Pullman car changed all of this. It was a model of luxury in a world of toil and scant antiseptics. The Pullman car was the ideal mode of transportation for the 19th and 20th century elite and, thus, is the ideal mobile office space for the elite businessmen of the 21st century.
Gone are the days of draftstables, career typists, and notary-scriveners. We live in a world where a magical box can think a billion times faster than even the most gifted maths-genius; where the word “digitron” is no longer an adjective, but a noun; where a businessman can travel from one side of this vast globe to the other and be made BORED by the entire excursion. We live in a world never conceived of by even the most insane fever-dreams of man or god.
The mounting of our business inside of a train car has, of course, long been a dream of both Karl and myself. We just didn’t know it. We figure that the best way to go about it will be to buy some fashion of circa-1860s decroded-ass railcar and, over a year or two, improve her until she is sleek, steadfast, and impermeable, not unlike the Titanic on her maiden voyage. It will be a good opportunity for us to learn to weld (NO RIVETS!), as well as design, with the utmost quality, the inside of part of a train. All we’ll need after that is a plot of land within a stone’s throw of a legitimate rail line and clearance from Uncle Sam so we don’t get thrown into prison for Impersonating a Train, or whatever railroad-based crimes happen to currently exist in the lawbooks (we don’t know much about this).
Security for this vessel will certainly be a concern, but I assure you that she’ll be properly moored.
We plan to buy the largest anchor chain possible (within reason (or, rather, “reason”)) and attach it to a large steel post stationed, not unlike a sentry, in the firm, bountiful piedmont clay of the Carolinas. An intricate security system involving trap-doors and spike-and-acid-filled tiger pits should protect our valuable computing hardware. We haven’t really thought this part through as much as the rest.
Your thoughts on this matter are greatly appreciated. Anyone with a hauntingly intricate knowledge of trainlaw and rail engineering may be considered for consulting work. We look forward to inviting all of you aboard our vessel, at least as far as fire code will allow.
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