New Web Layout / Projects Update

I'm pretty happy with the new layout of my personal page.  It's a simple layout and the color palette isn't as weird as it was on my last design.

What's coming next?  Moving back into Maya and doing some modeling and rigging for pieces on my technical reel.  First up is a cannon from the Attack of Titan manga.  I started it this past weekend and I'm taking some creative rights as far as some of the design and aesthetics.  I'm trying to make the design actually work mechanically while staying true to the original design idea which is causing me to add pieces and change the shape of the base the cannon sits on a bit.

The farm has been on hold while I waited for our apartment's cooling to settle down.  We're between seasons here in Texas and our apartment's cooling system has been shutdown because it's cool enough to just open windows.  While it sounds great in theory, it makes it hard to cool servers while maintaining a decent decibel level where the cooling fans are concerned.  Once it drops another for or five degrees on a daily average, I will spin up the servers again and begin work on the Deadline/outside-access implementation on the App server.

Rule of Fire (WIP) - Wing Test Rig

I finished rigging and skinning the Wing concept mesh.  The Range of Motion test was successful.

Next on the task list are some animation tests:
Walk, Skulk/Crawl, Climb, Fly, Land, Take-off

Windows SBS

It turns out I didn't need to reformat after all.  I simply swapped the hard drives from one machine to the other, installed new drivers and the OS is working fine.

I'm currently tweaking the firewall and trying to get it so emails will start filtering through again.

I'm hoping to have it done before I get home from work today so I can reinstall Ubuntu Server LTS.  The plan is to install Ubuntu with Samba, LAMP, and a desktop for easy program management.  Once that's done I can begin installing the trial version of the Farm Manager and begin tweaking the interface for portal view.

New Servers - Test Runs

I thought I would end up having to wait a while to get back to work on my render farm because I didn't have the servers I needed.  Low and behold, 2 servers were donated to me by my family.

After scrounging some old disks for testing I now have 3 servers.
Right now, 2 of them are being used as test beds: 1 is now running a test run of NAS4Free for the family's internal backup/media server.  I have some problems copying files but I'm working on it (timeout and permission issues).  I am I am installing a test run of Ubuntu Server on the second new server.  If I can make this work with LAMP (webserver), Samba File Share, and Mail server, I will reformat my 2011 Windows SBS server and reinstall on it because it has 2x the memory and 2x the hard drive space for email storage.

NAS server test

So for the last week I have been experimenting with several free Linux-based NAS solutions: openfiler, nas4free, and freeNAS.  I have unfortunately run into several problems with both: primarily that the server stops responding while copying files. 

Not being able to copy is going to be a HUGE problem moving forward regarding both replication and storage with the customer's files.  I am unsure if this is a common software issue (if I'm downloading a version too advanced for my hardware) or if this is an inherent problem with my hardware. 

My hardware is rather dated: Opteron 242 1.6GHz with 4GB of RAM.  It's a 64-bit hardware solution running on a x86-64 Linux OS.  I currently do not know enough to effectively solve this.  I will need to seek help from the various OS' communities

1st Server Status :: Operational .. Mostly

OS is finally installed. I'm going through the final configuration.  I need to start picking out the server side programs (anti virus primarily).  I'm going through the whole Exchange nightmare now of making sure that only certain firewall ports are open.  Stuck on the email and RDP ports at the moment.  DNS changes have been made (and will need to be made again when I bring the server home).

final piece (besides email folder setup, rules, etc)will be the customer portal.  I'm hoping to get the intial portal up by the end of this week (as soon as the firewall is done)


I almost have enough cash to buy the second server (initial access storage) where the source files will be uploaded and read from and the render files will be saved to.

First Server - Meh

Putting together this first server is not going as smoothly as I thought it would.  I have yet to get the OS loaded onto the system.  First there was no optical drive bay, then we had problems getting a USB CDROM to be detected, now I'm having issues getting the CDROM to be picked up on the IDE ribbon cable.  It's just one thing after another with the project.

Time to Revamp

Got a dose of cold truth: my reel isn't up to snuff.  After watching it, there's just a lot of really old work on there along with work that isn't my best.  I've decided that it's time to archive it and update my demo reel by starting from scratch.  I will only include work from Black Ops, but nothing further back than that.

The plan is to make 4-6 scenarios and do variations of each, a technical demo reel primarily with rigging and motion capture, and a a short animated sequence (hopefully fully rendered).

I'm at the starting line. Go!

HydraFarm - Server 1

Bought the first server on Thursday of last week (or was it Friday?).  Anyways, the server is a 2x Quadcore, 2.66GHz Xeon , 16GB RAM, and 2 500GB SATA drives.

The plan is to load Windows SBS 2008 and Exchange on this server.  It will act as the customer portal (using Windows 2008's portal configuration) to allow users to upload/download and submit jobs as well as control account information and payment information via  secure connection.

Two draw backs to this: users will have to submit a form for account creation which will have to be hand built (safer and keeps away bots), and files will have to pass through the SBS to their final destination (end user or user's NAS folder).

I'll plan around that for the next hardware migration in a few years.  Regardless, I'm super pysched!

Visual Databases

I had a brainstorm in the shower, where I do all my critical thinking; Are there neat ways to visually represent data in the web?  Webs have connective strings.  Databases have lots of data and have relationships. Families and friends have relationships and connections. Can I show family and friend relationships and connections visually, in 3D, on the Web?  I think so.

I've added a fairly simple project to my to-do-list: create a node-based, 3D representation of a database file.  I've got the visuals in my head: sprites and bursts, glowing connection lines; basic visuals to display a dynamic database.

Already started on the flow, database design, etc.  Looking good.