How to set up wireless in Hardy Heron ubuntu

In this post I shall tell you how I got wifi to work on an Aptiva desktop with an Atheros wireless card on a brand-new installation of Hardy Heron 8.04 Ubuntu Linux. But first, I am compelled to recap all of the bad and failed advice I found on the web:

1. Just use Network Manager, and you're all set.
   I found this to be a most annoying experience. Network manager seemed to keep forgetting my ESSID and key after I had typed it in. I'd do the network start thing, or reboot the computer, and still no wifi. Frankly, Network Manager didn't work on ubuntu version 7.04, either.
   
2. Try Network Manager, and if that doesn't work, try this advice regarding the Windows driver ...
   This is horrible advice. It has folks going to try something hard (like locating the CD's with your Windows drivers) and unnecessary (Network Manager is broken, you should use other means).
3. Go download this program ...
   Helllloooo! We're talking about a way to connect to the internet! How is someone supposed to download anything?!
4. Edit your interfaces file by typing sudo gedit /etc/networking/interfaces
   This was obviously typed by an experienced user of ubuntu. Someone so experienced that he forgot that Hardy Heron (the kubuntu version at least) does not "come with" the gedit application. This won't work for a new install.
   

It seems that anyone can give advice on the internet, (uh, including me!)

So here's my advice. First of all you will want to edit the file /etc/networking/interfaces as root or as superuser. In Hardy Heron, this can be done by right-clicking on the file, as shown in this screen grab below. You can click on the image to see it full size.


Now, edit the file to look like this. Note that the double-spacing is not required (or helpful). I needed to insert double spaces in order to get the file to look properly in my browser:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

address 127.0.0.1

netmask 255.0.0.0

auto ath0

iface ath0 inet dhcp

wireless-essid [insert your wireless essid]

wireless-key [insert your wireless key]

Then, open a Konsole or command window, and type:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

And now you should be all set.

More free tracks for animators

I explored the Jamendo music site and found a whole bunch of goodies that I think would be of use to animators. As I said in the last post, I am of the opinion that the Creative Commons license of cc-by is the best one for those looking for music to make derivative works out of to consider. You're required to provide Attribution to the artist, but are free to make derivative works, and yeah, right may make "commercial use" out of the music.

Jamendo has a site of music broken down by various licenses, but I found special interest in the grouping of cc-by albums.

I made up some playlists on the Jamendo site to enable the browsing of the most liberally-licensed tracks as a function of tag.

Two such players are embedded in this post (unfortunately, they don't allow random shuffle play).

But here are some URL's you can paste into your MP3 player to get a random play:

• 1106 songs with cc-by license, multiple genres, the most popular (by Jamendo's stats) half of 283 albums
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83139&n=50&order=random


• 21 cc-by tracks with "downtempo tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83199&n=50&order=random


• 214 cc-by-sa songs with "downtempo" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83155&n=50&order=random


• 231 cc-by-sa tracks with "classical" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83254&n=50&order=random


• 84 cc-by tracks with "guitar" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83247&n=50&order=random


• 338 cc-by tracks with "techno" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83202&n=50&order=random


• 77 cc-by tracks with "jazz" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83201&n=50&order=random


• 149 cc-by tracks with "ambient" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83195&n=50&order=random


• 81 tracks with a variety of CC licenses and the "gospel" tag
  http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/m3u/?playlist_id=83248&n=50&order=random

Enjoy.

A source of free music for derivative works in animations

There's a lot of times when I wanted to start an animation project, and I spent most of my time looking for music for a soundtrack. RIAA-produced music is a no-no-- you or youtube will get sued. Creative Commons licenses which are -nd- "no derivatives" are a no-no-- if you're making it a soundtrack to one of your works. Creative Commons licenses which are -nc- "non-commercial" are also a no-no, because while I'm an amateur, I've got a blog with ads! The remainder for us animators is the realm which is -by- or -by-sa-. It's refreshing to find quality music that is literally being given away for free. I found BrunoXe's work on the music site jamendo.com. Here's a player for one of his albums.
(Okay, and yes, I did Paypal the guy five bucks, you satisfied?)

Mancandy starts to learn to dance

The only improvement in technique that this one represents is that I just figured out that the "Paste Flipped Pose" is located in the "Pose" menu when in Pose Mode. The music is BrunoXe's "Mandrake."

Sarah Palin's church

Here's a video I found on the web about Sarah Palin's church. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about the material, but I thought I'd pass it along. I confess that there are gifts of the Spirit that could be practiced today; I have not yet seen a faith community I'd want to join that was stating their expression of such. I'm not sure if the organizers of this material are scoffing at all of the gifts of the Spirit, or just the sociologically ill ones that are also opposed to a Theology of the Cross. I hold that much of that atheists gripe about in the church is stuff that isn't even required of scripture and is spiritual practices that the Church Fathers warned us about anyway.

The article does make this valid point:

If Sarah Palin may hold apocalyptic end-time beliefs or believes that she has a divine mandate to initiate an end-time conflict, American voters have the right to know about the doctrines taught in Palin's Alaska churches.

Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo.

Forgive me folks, these'll get better soon.

Thoroughly testing out the ability to make dance animation in blender. I had to try it out with a standard music file converted from MP3 to WAV using Audacity. The soundtrack is BrunoXe's "Mandrake" from jamendo.com

A lame test of the concept of being able to do dancing in blender from pterandon on Vimeo.

Scared of crickets

I know that this is quite lame as far as character animation goes, but I'm just celebrating that I figured out how to get sound in a blender animation "automatically" with the ffmpeg settings. Improvements to follow.

Finally, sound with animation on blender

I'll post a tutorial shortly, but here's an otherwise boring animation that was created on the fly as an MPEG-I with sound by blender. The key detail was to use the Video Sequencer to attach the WAV file. The audio is from this Freesound clip.

Procedurally generated landscape

Here's a landscape I made with povray. I first defined some pigments based on the cells and bozo patterns. Then I defined a new pigment which is the average of those two. Then I made a heightfield based on this function.

I always think it's neat to make living spaces for humans by procedural means in 3D. I've got a friend who's a professor of architecture, who so far hasn't responded to my suggestion to write a paper on this.

Seinfeld's Microsoft ad

You know, at first, I thought, "Et tu, Jerry?" How could Seinfeld sell out to the devil? But then after hearing the ad, I see it really doesn't puff up the horribly deficient current product, it just makes us hope for the future from the company. All in all, it's harmless. Maybe it's Jerry's joke back on M$.