Skeptoid Podcast

At first I almost fell into the trap of making this post that is a debate or argument against why many of the site’s conclusions are “wrong”. Looking at the comments on various articles from the site I could see how many people agreed and disagreed with the conclusions. However, I made a promise to myself a long time ago to stop arguing with people. It uses up a lot of energy both in research and maintaining patience. In the end I decided to admit that my own conclusions are subject to my own personal experiences and world view.
This is because that often time both sides of these kinds of arguments can have evidence or science that supports either side. Not being a scientist, I have to go with what sounds good, believable, or plausible. Often times this leads me to concluding that many of the major events in history are not quite what popular belief would have them be.
One of my favorite comments about how to approach these topics comes from a clip in an interview with Stan Freedman about researching UFO’s. Watch the 10 minute video and see:

Stan Friedman on Science

The part I like the most is bit about the judge and having to decipher in a court case whoe is telling the truth and who is not. I think most of the public is in the same boat. In the end each person has to make their own judgements about the situation based on their own experiences.
Personally, I’ve never trusted powerful or large institutions to tell me the truth about anything. Why should they? They are powerful and I am not as powerful. My experiences put me in the category of understanding that is different from those who do believe that JFK, MLK, and RFK were killed by lone gunman, 911 was an Islamic terrorist attack, and that UFO’s are merely unexplained natural earthly phenomenon. As crazy as it might sound I honestly believe that JFK, 911, and UFO’s are all tied together. Some may say that’s nuts but at least it’s honest.
It takes a lot of energy to argue with people. I don’t want to anymore. For now I spend my time trying to decipher an image of the world that make sense to me.

Thank you skeptoid.com for the podcasts you put up filled with alternative points of view, however, I do not accept the conclusions they have come to. They go against my better judgement and I really do not have a better argument than that.

Here are some links that are more towards my line of thinking:
Stan Fiedman on arguments against UFO’s
Kimball and Stan Friedman on media coverage of UFO’s

Richard Dollan – Writer of “UFO’s and the National Security State” does a presentation in 2009. It’s a six part video with the links to the side of the video.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Catherine Austin Fitts – At the Barter Association back in 2008.
Her Analysis of the US and World Economy

Essentially, Sons attempts to read the python build commands, analyse it and source code dependencies, and then build your project. This was a problem for me because I was wanting Scons to run a Java program after it had completed compiling my source code. This was done with the following Scons command:

action = env.Action('java -jar  dist/mypackage.jar')
env.Execute(action)

The problem with doing that is that Scons would execute the line of code  and run the program before it compiled and built the source code to classes. This means that the Java program I was running would run a previous version of the classes that I needed to compile. Again, this is due to the fact that Scons works by first reading and analysing the python build scripts and source code before building.

Now I did searching on several forums on how to circumvent this behaviour by building or injecting custom builders, however, it still was not what I wanted. In the end I came up with a simple solution. I decide to place my build code into a file called defaultBuild.py and then I placed the instructions to run Java in a separate file called Sconstruct, which is the default file Scons looks for when running the ’scons’ command in the command line. It looks something like this:

File: Sconstruct

# Import the needed Python modules
import os

print '-----------------------------------------'
print 'Building my project...'
print ''

env = Environment()

# This is the command that invokes the python script that has instructions on how
# to build the project 
action = env.Action('scons -f defaultBuild.py')
env.Execute(action)

print ''
print 'Done building my project.'
print '-----------------------------------------'
print ''

# Now we run the Java program and the newly compiled class
action = env.Action('java -jar dist/mypackage.jar')
env.Execute(action)

File: defaultBuild.py

# Create the build environment.
env = Environment()

# Compile the java source files
env.Java (target = '/bin', source = '/src')

# Package the java class files into a jar file
env.Jar(target = '/dist/mypackage.jar', source = '/bin')

What the Sconstruct file does is tell Scons that in the command line run the scons command again but call the defaultBuild.py instead of the default Sconstruct. Scons of course obeys, which cause another instance of Scons to run which builds the needed code and returns with the results. Once it returns the rest of the code in the Sconstruct file is executed which in this case means that the Java Virtual Machine is launched and told to run the Jar file mypackage.jar. Not bad. A simple solution.

Now this is just one way this technique could be used. I figure if one had a bunch of things they needed Scons to do, like cleaning up files, running test suites, or compressing directories to zip files, then this is one way to do it. Break the building process into seperate files and then run each file according to the order the developer needs. Of course being new to Scons I do not know if this has any serious repercussions. So I recommend using this for very simple and basic type of flow control. Hope this technique is useful to others. C ya.

Ubuntu 10.04

While I personally am looking way to move to a more Freedom orientent version of GNU Linux, like gNewSense, I do recommend Ubuntu as a start OS for people looking to explore alternatives to Windows. Check it out when you get a chance.

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

The project they speak of can be located here:

Project Diaspora

Apperantly, they were inspired by a talk given by the esteemed Mr. Eben Moglen on how the new computer industry business model of Software as a Service and social networking platforms essetially provide third parties access to your information. Hopefully it will be released under the GNU Affero General Public License which works well for ensuring that users freedoms are maintained when using Web Applications. If you haven’t seen the video I suggest you do. Moglen express many of the dangers of thinking that putting your private information in the hands of many of these companies and government agencies is an innocent affair. He also goes in to detail about how what can be even more insightful about looking at people’s personal information is the inferences people and very sofisticated software can make off that system. Take a look at the presentation here:

Eben Moglen on the Dangers of the Cloud – Part 1
Eben Moglen on the Dangers of the Cloud – Part 2

I’ve said it before. Eben Moglen is a please to listen to. Do a Google or YouTube search for many of his videos and see what comes up. If you can stand his highly intellectual vocabulary(he is a lawyer), then it’s an amazing experience. Enjoy.

Oh, also check out this article on why you should delete your Facebook account:

Ten Reasons You Should Delete Your Facebook Account.

I’m not deleting mine for the time being. However, I’ve decided to stop using it. I figure they’ve already got the information I’ve given them about me and are not going to delete it. I don’t plan on giving them any more.

At some point I’ll have to point out some of the finer details of problems with Mega Search Engine Giant Google, and the critiscims around how they deal with privacy.

Critiscims of Google
Scroogle – A search engine that masks your IP from being tracked when looking for stuff on Google

As with most of my comments and posts about politics and economics, I encourage you to at least watch the video before dismissing it. Very interesting points made.

Enjoy. In the tradition of their previous movies, the content of this project will be released under a Ceative Commons for anyone to use. Should be interesting to see how the final short film turns out.

An amazing and very inspiring speech. I immediately posted it on many of the forums and communities that I browse. It is interesting because it has provided me with several ideas for the future and what can be done. It’s also re sparked my interest in Freedom Software Operating Systems. I checked out a few that I will be keeping an eye on:

http://trisquel.info/en
http://www.gnewsense.org/

Great stuff.

I love seeing stuff like this. Keeping software open means the public has access to it and so then creativity is open for anyone to participate. It’s great.

C ya.

In the meantime I wanted to provide a stripped down example of how I got Blender running on my computer. This is so someone with a similar setup as me can try and get Blender 2.5 up and running as fast as possible. Please note that I am not an expert in this build process. If you are having trouble please reffer to the documentation I used or post on the Blender Artists forums or the Blender IRC.

Another important thing to note is that I used Scons to build Blender. This is what was used in the documentation I had available and so this is what is in this tutorial.

OS: Ubuntu 9.04

Hardware: Dell Latitude D820 Laptop, two Intel 2.0 Ghz Processors, 512 MB of ram, 80 GB Hard Drive, NVIDIA Gfx Card.

Getting the Needed Dependencies
In order to build Blender properly you will need to have on your system the needed 3rd party libraries that Blender uses. One way to do this is to download the “lib” folder from the Blender repository which will contain all the binaries for the needed libraries. Oddly I didn’t find any link to the repository and didn’t know how to get it myself so I just decided to install the libraries anyway. To do that first open up a terminal and type the following command:

sudo apt-get install svn build-essential scons g++ libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxi-dev zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libjpeg62-dev libfreetype6-dev libtiff4-dev libopenexr-dev libsdl1.2-dev libopenal-dev libfftw3-dev libsamplerate0-dev libjack-dev libavformat-dev libxvidcore4-dev libogg-dev libfaac-dev libfaad-dev libx264-dev libmp3lame-dev libvorbis-dev libtheora-dev libswscale-dev libavdevice-dev libalut-dev

Enter your password and then follow the terminal prompts as it will attempt to install all of the libraries and packages listed in the above command. Also note that the last package in the list, libalut-dev, was not mentioned as something that needed to be installed. I had to install it on my system because of an error the build was spitting out. More info about that library can be found at:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/hardy/freealut

Next we have to get Python 3.1 complied and working on our system. Now this an installation because want to make sure we keep Python 2.6(or whatever version you have) installed on our system. This is so other programs like Blender 2.49, which rely on the more stable version of Python still know where to find the stable version. So create a directory on your system where you want to keep Python 3.1. For example I chose to create:

mkdir /home/ronbravo/Library/python

Of course you can be whatever or wherever you want. Now download the compressed source file for Python 3.1 which can be found here. Unzip the file and into the newly created python directory you should have created from above. Then type in the command below, also rememeber to replace the directory in –prefix=”/home/ronbravo/Library/python” to point to the directory you created for Python.

./configure –prefix=”/home/ronbravo/Library/python“; make
sudo make altinstall

To test to make sure that Python 3.1 is working just type the full path to the directory that you created for python plus the path to the python binary. For example on my system I would type:

/home/ronbravo/Library/python/Python-3.1.1/python

Which should return something like:

Python 3.1.1 (r311:74480, Sep  9 2009, 08:33:52)
[GCC 4.3.3] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>>

which places you inside the Python interactive interpreter. Just press Ctrl-D to exit the interpreter. That means Python 3.1 is up and running on your system without interffering with the currently working version that you may have. You can doulbe check this by typing in the terminal:

python –version

and you should see something like:

Python 2.6.2

This is good because it means your system is still recognizing your old installation.It is important to remember the Python 3.1 directory you created(In my case: /home/ronbravo/Library/python/Python-3.1.1) because you will need it later on when

Getting the Blender 2.5 Source Code

In order to compile Blender 2.5 you will need to grab the source code from the Blender Foundation repository. Before this is done you should create a directory on your system where you would like to keep the source code. For me I just created a new project directory:

mkdir /home/ronbravo/Projects/blender_development

cd /home/ronbravo/Projects/blender_development

Now just tell the SVN program, which should have been installed when the dependencies got installed, to grab the source code from the Blender 2.5 repository:

svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/blender2.5

After that open you will need to open up the scons config file to add a new settings and point the scons build process to where you are keeping Python 3.1. So just type into the terminal the following commands:

cd blender-svn/blender2.5/blender/

gedit user-config.py

This should launch the gedit program that comes with Ubunutu so that you can edit the user-config.py file. If you’re using a different distro or flavor of Ubuntu, then just replace the word gedit with the name of a text editor that is on your operating system.

In the file add the following lines:

BF_OPENAL_LIB = ‘openal alut’

BF_PYTHON=”/home/ronbravo/Library/python/Python-3.1.1″

Note that the BF_PYTHON option should be pointing to the directory where you are keeping python 3.1 on your system. Then save the file and close. Now type in the following the commands to get Blender to build:

python scons/scons.py

From there Blender should begin compiling and you should have a working build with in several minutes. Now if at some point the build process comes across an error the build will stop and output some information about that error. Try to figure out what it means, but if you can’t then post on the Blender Artists forums or the Blender IRC.

If everything went well, in the terminal you should see something like this:

scons: done building targets.

And you should be returned back to the terminal prompt. The executable binary for blender should be located one level above the current directory you are in. So for example on my system we could find it from:

Directory where we compiled the source code: /home/ronbravo/Projects/blender_development/blender-svn/blender2.5/blender

Directory where the Blender 2.5 was placed: /home/ronbravo/Projects/blender_development/blender-svn/blender2.5/install/linux2

So just go into that Blender directory and you’ll find the blender binary file. Double click on the file and Blender 2.5 should be up and running. One thing you may want to do is copy this directory somewhere else. This is so if you ever recompile a version that has some serious bug, you will have a compiled version that is somewhat working.
So in the future if you wanted to get a newer update of 2.5 just go back to the source code directory, update the source, and fire off the build process again. For example on my system it would be:

cd /home/ronbravo/Projects/blender_development/blender-svn/blender2.5/blender
svn update
python scons/scons.py

Go grab a bite to eat and when you come back, a new and update version of Blender 2.5 should be waiting for you. Enjoy your new development build of Blender 2.5, I know I will. C ya.

One other thing, if nothing seems to work and you just can’t get Blender to run, remember you can always download uploaded development builds from Graphicall.org. Of course and personal changes to Blender that you make won’t be in these builds but at least you will have the chance to give it a go.

References:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Building_Blender/2.5/Linux

http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2009/07/11/109-compiling-blender-250-svn-on-kubuntu-904

http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2007/12/09/104-compiling-blender-for-kubuntu-710

http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/hardy/freealut