It's not your 3D, It's Dan's 3D!

Well, I have known for a while now that I really should learn to use some form of the Linux OS, but I have never had the dough to spend on piecing together a custom machine just for the purpose of installing and running it. Lucky for me there was a cheap solution sitting right under my nose.

Right from the get-go, Sony had built the Playstation 3 with support for third-party operating systems. So after a little research, I decided to install Yellow Dog Linux on my console. From what I gather, certain versions of YD have been created specifically for use on the Sony console.

The install process was not without problems. After installation of the bootloader, the Linux installation process would freeze on me every time. I re-downloaded the ISO file(s), re-burned the images to DVD’s and rebooted the console at least a dozen times and nothing was helping. Finally, after much time spent researching my issues online, I found out my only problem was that the USB keyboard I was using (Logitech G15) was causing I/O errors during installation. I switched it out with an old USB keyboard and retried the installation process and everything worked like a charm!

I haven’t had much time to spend with the OS yet, mostly because it is a pain in the rear to unplug the mouse from the PC and put it into the console, move my keyboard out of the way to make room for the old one – and finally, the PS3 only has 256MB of RAM and so Linux isn’t quite the fastest OS I have ever used!

Much more stuff to go over in the coming days though! A little patience is all I need.

MEL Scripting for Maya isn’t something I do nearly enough so I made the decision to buy “MEL Scripting for Maya Animators” and work through it. I wan’t sure if I would be better off learning MEL or Python, but seeing as I haven’t done scripting in a while I decided to stick with MEL for now. While I do not wish to become a programmer by any means, I certainly will have use for any ability to script within Maya. There are so many tasks I do almost every time I run Maya that could be simplified by the use of a script or two; things like creating lights and aiming them, creating a sky-dome and setting it’s texture map and ambient map, Setting light intensities and colors. What would be most useful would be to learn to create custom User Interfaces that would give me just the information and settings I want to see without all the stuff I don’t.

I have just began to read the book and am still within the first 100 pages but already I am starting to remember commands I haven’t used in several years! I cannot wait to get further through this book.