While I was deciding this this course of action, I realized if I was about to go about destroying my partition tables, I might as well see about getting some form of Linux on the machine as well. You know… for science. I decided to go with Linux Mint. Mainly because I like the word Mint and Ubuntu has too many ‘u’s in it for my tastes. (And Mint is a bit more new user friendly)

This led me to the fabled triple boot system. Now doing a bit of research into this, it seemed that putting all three operating systems on wasn’t going to be as easy as simply telling each one to install. It eventually got to that point, but not the first three times.

One factor that made this triple boot up a little more complex was that I wanted to put in a storage space that all three operating systems had access to. I’m not very familiar with boot loaders, tables, mbr, efi and everything else, so this became an adventure. But the basics of the complexity boiled down to this: The macbook will only see four main partitions. To get all three operating systems plus storage partitions, you need five main partitions. This is a small problem.

But wait! Three + One doesn’t equal Five! Correct! Mac creates another partition when installing the mac OS that it uses as it’s own boot loader. This counts as a main partition. Surprise!

Now for added fun, the Internet informed me that I could skip boot camp on the mac side, and make the partitions myself. Since I was installing everything from scratch anyway, this seemed like a good idea.

At this point I didn’t know anything about what I just posted above. Since boot camp used windows XP SP2 I went with that the first two rounds. I never made it to installing Mint as I got stopped at windows XP.

The third time around I decided to give Windows 7 a chance, which worked beautifully, and discovered that windows thought my storage partition was empty space wanted to put in a volume and format it! I worried about it but continued on. I installed Mint and still couldn’t see the storage partition, only the mac OS could for some reason. At this point, I began looking into what was wrong since now I had an idea of what was wrong. And then I managed to nuke Mint somehow.

Now I learned how to properly partition my drive and how to properly install everything. (There is a trick apparently.) Once more the drive was wiped, and partitioned again. I installed Leopard, then Windows, and finally Mint with baited breath. This time everything worked as intended and my storage drive is available to all.

There is a worrying moment while booting Mint that makes the screen look like it exploded yet… Booting is funny as now here are two different boot menus I need to get through (rEfit and Grub) and there may not be much I can do about that.

So far, everything still works and I didn’t break anything (yet) this time around. Let science begin!

Wouldn’t it be great if Photoshop could auto-save your open document? It would! But it doesn’t! This causes a conundrum: How does one get to automatically save your work every so often if Photoshop does not have such an option.

Recently when one of the many web-comic artists I follow complained of loosing three hours of work; I realized that I could fix that problem. (No, not the Photoshop crashing problem) Or I could at least mitigate a lot of the damages by loosing three hours of work.

Hence, I’ve made a program PS AutoSaver to solve this issue. This is a C#/Python program that sits neatly in your taskbar tray and will remember to save your open work document every couple of minutes for you. It also has the ability to auto-launch Photoshop, start directly in your task-tray and even create versions of the saved file every time it saves.

The goal was to design a simple enough tool that it could replace the Photoshop shortcut and add in the bonus feature of auto saving the work document. Hopefully it succeeds in this design.

You can download the program from this page.

Something new I’m working on for myself, is a market wallet journal for characters in the game eve-online. I already have an alpha version from some time ago, but I’ve started over in favor of newer programming methods I’ve learned since then.

Here is my much more streamlined version of the character api get portion. So far it will let me know if I have the correct number of characters for the id and key and then goes off to the eve-api servers and brings me back some names. It also keeps all the other information you get with the character names, but that’s not important for this window.

The end goal is to have a full program that I can use to follow my market orders, price fluctuations, where I’ve sold my items and who’s been buying them. Plus lots of other useless information that is required to know but of little importance.

Adventure awaits! I can hardly wait!

arch -i386 python2.6 %pathToScript%

otherwise, running it just as:

python2.6 %pathToScript%

will throw this kind of an error:

ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyQt4/QtGui.so, 2): no suitable image found. 
Did find: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyQt4/QtGui.so: mach-o, but wrong architecture

http://www.expobrain.net/2010/06/22/install-pyqt4-in-snow-leopard

This attempt was a success!

When working in Maya I find myself wanting the folder that belongs to the current file that is open. So I just made up this simple script, added it as a button and now I can have my folder opened whenever I need it to be. Which is surprisingly often.

import maya.cmds as mc
import os

fileList = mc.file(q=True, l=True)
os.startfile(os.path.dirname(fileList[0]))

I’m still trying to figure out how I want to lay out my sections and pages. So things may change yet.

Such with an update, there is a new page across the top one can now click to take themselves to the past to view the demo reel.

If I replace it with a mov instead of using flv, I might not have to worry about the control bar. But that shall be for another time.