Yeraze's Domain 2.0

My Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you'll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that's your debut album.

I tried it, and I'm impressed.. I think I'ld buy my Debut Album.

Band Name: Atsuhime
Album Name: Be Fired with Enthusiasm
Cover art found here

Wiimote with Linux

This week at work I've been lucky enough to get a new project. I've been attempting to get a Nintendo Wiimote to work with a Linux system so that we can use it as the new input device for our Renderwall. I was given (temporarily) a Laptop with RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (OId, I know) with full root priviledges (but no network access) to work on.

I got a DLink DBT-120 for the Bluetooth communication, and an el-cheapo wireless sensor bar. Plugging in the DBT-120 worked magically without any intervention from me (Linux hardware support has come a looong way). I pretty easily got the 'hcitool scan' to show the Nintendo Wiimote. Next step was to actually compile something usable for it.

I finally settled on CWiid (At http://abstrakraft.org/cwiid/). It has a good selection of demos and an API. To get it to compile, I did have to upgrade Flex (compiled from source) and install the bluez-libs-devel RPM to get the bluetooth headers. With that in place, everything works just great!

As a final feather in my cap, I setup wminput. it's a simple daemon that will let the Wiimote inputs emulate (via uinput) a Mouse & Keyboard, so I was able to use it to interact with our openGL demos without any code changes. It's all pretty slick and pretty easy to use.

So, where to from here? Well, I'm going to build a simple GLUT-type wrapper to work with the Cwiid API, so that we can get low-level access to the LED's, battery information, and tracking data. With that, I should be able to pretty easily gather a set of demos that we can use to show visitors! I'll post back more as I get more stuff working!

Conglomerated "Stuff that's good" Post

I've fallen a bit behind on posting, so I'm gonna conglomerate a few together into quickies for what few viewers remain.

	Laura & I went to see Iron Man on opening weekend. Great film, two thumbs up. I had my doubts whether Robert Downy Jr could pull off Tony Stark, but he did a fantastic job. The Special Effects are top-notch as well. Definately a must-see.
	I picked up Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Wii a few weeks ago, and I've been thoroughly enjoying that. I've beaten the single-player mode "The Subspace Emissary", and I'm working my way through the various characters in Classic mode. Tons of stuff to do and unlock in the game, every time I play it I see something new. Great addon for the wii.
	Season 4 of Dr Who, the final season of Battlestar Galactica, and the new show "The Sarah Jane Adventures" have all begun airing on the SciFi channel. I'm a little disappointed they picked Sarah Jane over Torchwood, but glad to see that they're still dealing with BBC. Hopefully, Torchwood will replace Dr Who after this season ends. So now I keep my MythTV busy on Friday Nights.

Twitter : Another nail in the coffin of privacy

Over the last several months I've heard more and more rumblings of "Twitter" and just how fantastic it is. I've dug around it a bit before and simply never seen the appeal. Well, I finally decided to bite the bullet and I've been using it for a few weeks now.

Well, it's fun. I'm still not particularly convinced it's useful or even a good idea, but it is fun. I use the IM interface almost exclusively, since I run meebo at work and it's a great way to see the tweets go by. So, if you're bored and in search of a new friend for your twitter login, Add me. I've added the stuff at the top of the blog to show my most current "Tweet", so you can click on that to see me.

Outlook Macro : Move to Specified Folder & Mark As Read

As a victim of Microsoft Outlook, I hear alot about using it in the GTD philosophy. One of my favorite websites, LifeHacker, extolls it's virtues (GTD, not Outlook) on a daily basis. Yesterday they posted an article about how to modify your toolbars to give you shortcut keys for "Copy to folder" and "Move to folder" actions. I don't know why I never thought of that before.

I quickly set that up, and then realized I could add an additional shortcut for "Mark as Read" (our IT staff has disabled the ability to Mark as Read when Previews). With those in place, I decided I might actually try another GTD point: an empty inbox. The key to an empty inbox is to have a place to dump mail you've read and responded to, but don't really need anymore except for reference. They call it an "Archived" or "Processed" folder. While I could do this with the "Move to" shortcut, I had to select the folder everytime. With a bit of googling, I was able to setup an Outlook VB Macro (Under the Tools Menu) to Mark the message as read and move it to my personal PST file, in a folder called "Ancient Archive".

For everyone else's benefit, the VB code is as follows:

Sub MoveToArchive()
On Error Resume Next
    Dim objFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
    Dim objNS As Outlook.NameSpace, objItem As Outlook.MailItem

    Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set objFolder = objNS.Folders("Personal Folders").Folders("Ancient Archive")
'Assume this is a mail folder

    If objFolder Is Nothing Then
        MsgBox "This folder doesn't exist!", vbOKOnly + vbExclamation, "INVALID FOLDER"
    End If

    If Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Count = 0 Then
        'Require that this procedure be called only when a message is selected
        Exit Sub
    End If

    For Each objItem In Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection
        If objFolder.DefaultItemType = olMailItem Then
            If objItem.Class = olMail Then
                objItem.UnRead = False
                objItem.Move objFolder
            End If
        End If
    Next

    Set objItem = Nothing
    Set objFolder = Nothing
    Set objNS = Nothing
End Sub

Freezerburn - Screenshots in Action

So, I've talked a good bit about the technical guts of Freezerburn, so I figure it's about time to show what it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the Job Details page (in IE6 unfortunately, so the transparent PNG's are a big nasty).

Up top you see some basic statistics about the server. Right below that you see the progress of the entire job, and then the progress of all the frames. Each little box indicates a frame.

Green box - Frame is completed
Striped box - It's a Mental Ray frame, and the three stripes indicate percentage complete of either Photon Emission (top bar), Final Gather (middle bar), or Rendering (bottom bar)
Spotted Box - some other unrecognized render stage
Red box (not shown) - Errored frame
Grey box - unassigned frame

Below that you see some basic information about the job (output frame, frame size), and i've expanded out the renderframe chart (Generated via Google Charts). Below that are dropdowns for Server selection & individual frame controls. It's a very clean & organized interface, largely thanks to some fine HTML & Graphics work by my co-worker Kevin.

Comments?

Laura is now an RHIT, CCS

Just wanted to make a nice public announcement that now Laura is an RHIT, CCS! She took her CCS Certification exam this weekend and passed with flying colors! Congratulations Laura!

Aquaria

This weekend I was digging through old bookmarks and dug up an old reference to a game called Aquaria. I first heard of Aquaria when it won the IGF2007 Grand Prize, but it wasn't available for download at the time. Now, they have a good 60M Demo of the game (good for 2 hours or so of playtime), and for $30 you can get the full 250M version. I've been playing it all weekend, and after 6 hours of playtime (according to my savegame) I'm still finding new stuff and continually being astounded by the game.

The graphics are simply beautiful. The entire game is a side-scroller basically, but with lots of little bells and whistles. Seaweed and flowers flow as you swim by, matching your movements. Schools of fish following true flocking behavior swimming around. The environment changed from lush green landscapes, to barren castle hallways, to eerie organic fleshly tunnels, and all done seamlessly. The music is even more impressive. An eerie lonely tune that adds to the mystery of "Who am I?", with fast-paced music added for boss fights and action scenes. The cut-scenes are great, and the british accent voiceovers are a perfect match.

At it's heart, Aquaria is a puzzle game with a little bit of combat. Primarily you're searching for new "forms" (spells) to give you new abilities, but usually each form comes with solving a puzzle. Boss fights are there, but are usually puzzle-based. Eg. The boss has only a single special weakness that you have to discover and exploit.

The game is a blast, and I'm catching myself humming the theme music constantly. I look forward to seeing how the story plays out, and seeing what other fantastic environment there are for me to explore.

Webservers with Python - SSL & CAC Authentication

Working in the DOD, there are a few things you just come to accept. Webservers require security (SSL), and SSL requires Common Access Card Authentication. I had hoped that when I implemented the HTTP Monitor for Freezerburn, I could ignore all the security aspects and simply say that "It's behind all the government firewalls" and "It requires an account on the fileserver". I wasn't so lucky.

After alot of research from articles like:

I finally came up with a way to make it work, that required very little variation from Python's built-in HTTPServer object. Starting with the ASPN Cookbook recipe for SecureHTTPServer, I came up with the following:

import socket, os
from SocketServer import BaseServer
from BaseHTTPServer import HTTPServer
from SimpleHTTPServer import SimpleHTTPRequestHandler
from SocketServer import ThreadingMixIn
from OpenSSL import SSL
import sys

class SecureHTTPServer(HTTPServer):
    def __init__(self, server_address, HandlerClass,
                dodcerts, serverkey, servercert):
        BaseServer.__init__(self, server_address, HandlerClass)
        # Based on online Documentation, the v23 actually enables TLS1 as well.
        ctx = SSL.Context(SSL.SSLv23_METHOD)
        #ctx = SSL.Context(SSL.TLSv1_METHOD)

        print "Loading Private Key from %s" % serverkey
        ctx.use_privatekey_file (serverkey)
        print "Loading Certificate from %s" % servercert
        ctx.use_certificate_file(servercert)
        print "Loading DOD Certifications from %s" % dodcerts
        ctx.set_verify_depth(2)
        ctx.load_client_ca(dodcerts)
        ctx.load_verify_locations(dodcerts)

        print "Creating SSL socket"
        callback = lambda conn,cert,errno,depth,retcode: retcode
        ctx.set_verify( SSL.VERIFY_FAIL_IF_NO_PEER_CERT | SSL.VERIFY_PEER, callback)
        ctx.set_session_id('Freezerburn')
        self.socket = SSL.Connection(ctx, socket.socket(self.address_family,
                                                        self.socket_type))
        self.server_bind()
        self.server_activate()

class SecureHTTPRequestHandler(SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def setup(self):
        self.connection = self.request
        self.rfile = socket._fileob...

Family Pics

Laura made this for her MySpace page the other day, and I thought it was worth showing to the world here :) Enjoy.