An alternative to Messagefaces compatible with Thunderbird 3

Posted in Web on February 22nd, 2010 by David – 1 Comment

MessageFaces Icon Some time ago, I found this cool plugin for Thunderbird (2.x at the time) : MessageFaces (or on Mozilla Addons). It made email conversations much less impersonal by showing images of the persons that I was having an email conversation with. The beauty of the system was that I didn’t have to do anything: images were gathered from gravatar.com, X-faces, or embedded PNG images.

Then Thunderbird 3 came along, and busted quite a bit of plugins. Sadly for me, both MessageFaces and Lightning, the calendar plugin, ceased to work. read more »

Brett Seyler Interview on Gamasutra

Posted in Game Development on February 19th, 2010 by Administrator – Be the first to comment

There is an interview with Brett Seyler at Gamasutra. He discusses why he left GarageGames to go to Unity3d, and what he would have done if the opportunity to work with them wouldn’t have been available. An interesting read.

Brett still posts on the GarageGames forums (or TorquePowered, depending whether the new name catches on). Keeping tabs on the competition I guess :-)

Personal Branding

Posted in Web on January 17th, 2010 by David – 1 Comment

A month or two ago, I came to the conclusion that I was sinning against one of the basic rules of modern communication by having a multitude of blogs, without a very clear distinction between them. I posted family-related news on this blog, along with news about my upcoming 3Mension.com site.

Of course, that’s wrong.

If your goal is to build a brand, you need distinct and clear communication. You can be certain different people will want different types of information when coming to your site. People going to karekiet39 will do so because of family- or home related stuff. People going to the 3mension blog will want to know the latest facts about 3mension, but couldn’t care less if we redecorated the garden last weekend.

read more »

Bryce3d 7 open beta at Daz 3D

Posted in Game Development, Technology on January 16th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment

After the merger/takeover between Daz 3d and Gizmoz, many expressed their reservations that the combined companies would continue in the direction the Daz3d community was used to, and was expecting.

Some had doubts about the reason for the merger, specifically because it was indicated that the founder of daz3d would step down after the merger. That, according to them could be seen as a move that Gizmoz was calling the shots, and that Gizmoz only wanted to take over the Daz3d webshop. read more »

Unity Technologies hires former Torque Exec Brett Seyler

Posted in Game Development, Technology, Work on January 7th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment

Unity Technologies has hired Brett Seyler, who oversaw Torque engine development for InstantAction and GarageGames, to serve as its VP of strategy. After Brett Seyler announced that he was leaving TorquePowered (former GarageGames), nobody thought he was leaving for a direct competitor.

In the torrent of comments following his blog, Brett indicated indirectly that he already had a next challenge in mind, but he didn’t specify. It was assumed throughout the Torque community that he would follow in the footsteps of his former GarageGames colleagues now at Pushbutton Labs. That company was founded by the former GarageGames owners, after the sale to Interactive corp. In fact, it was at that time that Brett took over daily operations at GarageGames.

The move to Unity3d is both a surprise and a read more »

A Working Trac installation on Dreamhost

Posted in Web on January 6th, 2010 by Administrator – Be the first to comment

trac-dhIn this post, I’ll try to describe the steps I had to make to get a working Trac installation on Dreamhost. A few months back, Dreamhost started providing a one-click advanced installation package for trac 0.11.1 . With this package, you can get a working trac installation in a few simple steps. You can even use the Dreamhost panel to upgrade to the latest version, if a new release is made.

Trac is a very powerful package, but installing it (and getting it to work) on Dreamhost hasn’t been easy. Several shell scripts exist that provide a Trac installation, but they all need some manual tinkering.

In theory, the one-click installers at Dreamhost are just that : one click, and you have a ready-to-go setup. In the case of Trac, the installation you obtain by simply using the one-click install is not quite usable nor complete. read more »

Sand displacement calculation using Blender in Linux Magazine

Posted in Blender on January 6th, 2010 by David – 1 Comment

The current issue of Linux magazine (#111) has an article about how researchers are using Blender 3D to calculate and simulate the volume of sand displaced when walking on a beach. This demonstrates the extreme flexibility of Blender, and also shows that that flexibility is more and more appreciated by the academic community.

This academic use is also becoming more and more apparent in the different Blender conference schedules, as each year there are very innovative ideas presented there.

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ImpressCMS IPF Session 1 part 2 – blocks demonstration

Posted in Uncategorized on December 12th, 2009 by Administrator – Be the first to comment

This second part of the first ImpressCMS IPF webcast gives a walkthrough of the blocks functionality, which was recently rewritten using IPF.

Next webcast in this session is on Monday 14 December 2009, at 21:00 (GMT)

ImpressCMS IPF Session 1 – Introduction

Posted in Uncategorized on December 11th, 2009 by Administrator – Be the first to comment

WordPress plugins get stamp of approval

Posted in Web, impresscms on December 8th, 2009 by David – Be the first to comment

It simply had to happen, with more than 6000 plugins on the official Extend site: the WordPress main developers are considering a way to lead the users of the popular blogging platform to the best-in-class plugins.

The plugins would be developed by the community, but there will be a specific category indicating that they are considered best-in-class, and that the compatibility with a new release is guaranteed.

The risk with this type of presentation is that the users will limit themselves to those best-in-class plugins, and that many developers read more »