Cessen Speaks

I haven't released a publicly available demo reel since 2008. So I figured it was time to put a new one together. And here it is.

I have been helping one of Tiffany’s daughters with her math homework recently. She’s currently learning about ratios. It is no wonder to me that she needs help. Not because she isn’t bright. In fact, she is very bright and has a natural knack for math, I would say. Rather, the text book is horrendous.

I am pretty decent at math, and I deal with ratios all the time in computer graphics and animation. But this text book confuses me. And I already know the topics it is covering. How on earth is someone new to the material supposed to find it helpful? And from what I hear, the teachers are extremely hit-or-miss.

Good god. This makes me really angry. The only kids that are going to learn this math are the kids that go off and learn it from completely separate sources. And at that point, what is the point of the school system? It seems like all it’s doing then is taking up valuable time that the kids could otherwise spend actually learning things. And how are kids supposed to develop a love of learning if this is their experience of it? It is sabotaging these kid’s lives.

Public schools need to be better than this. Why aren’t we funding them well, again? Why are we throwing them bone scraps? How do we stop this?

Also, apparently students are only allowed to go to the bathroom during class 3 times a week. Not per class, but for all of school. 3 times a week. How is that okay? If someone needs to go, they need to go. And they only have 5 minutes to get between classes, and their lunch break is 30 minutes. It sounds to me as if they need bladders and colons of steel if they expect to eat and get to their classes on time. Not to mention that is just an oppressive environment. I seriously fear for these kid’s psychological health.

This makes me absolutely livid.

Frame-stepping is important for me as an animator, because it lets me more precisely view the details and poses in video reference. Up until now I've been using Blender's video editor to do frame-stepping in Linux. But I just discovered that Totem can do frame stepping using the comma and period keys. It's just undocumented.

This makes things a lot easier for me now! I wish it had been documented...

I love distributed revision control systems (DRCS). Git, Mercurial, Bazaar... fantastic things. And I use DRCS's all the time for code. They have a lot of benefits over centralized models.

Unfortunately, they are not quite so nice for content creation. And there are two main reasons for this:

1. Media files are often large. A whole project of media files is typically huge. And a bunch of revisions of a project of media files is enormous. And that enormity takes a freakin' huge time to transfer over a network. All of the DRCS's that I am aware of force you to get a copy of the entire repo (excepting for Git, but the result of a partial clone is a repo that can't push/pull). This is pretty much a deal breaker.
2. Changes to media files cannot be merged. In a distributed system this is particularly problematic. Most RCS's that are used for media (e.g. Perforce) have locking systems to prevent more than one person from editing a file at the same time, which prevents conflicts. This is not possible with DRCS's due to their nature, which makes the ability to merge changes critical.

Point #1 should be fairly straight-forward to deal with if it is a design goal up-front.

Point #2, however, is a lot trickier, especially when you consider that there are a huge number of domain-specific and software-specific file formats out there. I wonder, however, if a plugin (or similar) system could make it workable. In that case, if you wanted to support a format, you would write a plugin that can diff, detect conflicts, and apply non-conflicting diffs for that format.

For example, let's take the simple case of lossless 24-bit RGB bitmaps (e.g. png's, bmp's, etc.). Writing a diff utility for them would actually be pretty painless. For each pixel in the image you just subtract each of the channels. Simple! And to apply the diff, you just add the diff. To detect conflicts, you take diffs of each changeset and compare to see if any pixels have non-zero values in both files. Should any conflict arise, an artist can take both versions into Photoshop or Gimp and combine the two versions however he or she likes.

(As a happy side-effect this could also enable more efficient storage of image data in the repo, since only the diffs would need to be stored. This is especially the case considering that many image compression algorithms make straight diffing far less effective.)

Clearly, manual merges would be necessary at times, probably more often than with code files, especially if you consider common image-wide changes like color balance, levels, resizing, etc. But in theory a plugin could get pretty sophisticated about detecting and merging certain classes of differences.

Of course, images are a fairly simple example, and are also an example that is not so critical. It is not hugely painful for artists to manually merge flat image files if need be, even with a traditional revision control system.

The really interesting bits would be more complex file types. 3D animation files, for example. And that is where the real benefits would come in. You can imagine one person working on one part of an animation, and someone else working on another part, and as long as there are no conflicts, it merges automatically.

But what happens in the case of a conflict? With software-specific files, how could the user do a manual merge? It would be extremely painful, and in many cases not even practical or feasible. So that is kind of an open question, there. But I would hope that if such a DRCS were created, software developers of these other applications would start to be motived to include a "merge" mode or some such thing that would highlight changes with some reasonable level of granularity, and allow users to compare and cherry-pick those changes.

The cool thing about a system like this would be that text files and source files would just become a special case. They are just another file type. In fact, a system like this would have broader implications than just content creation, because there is no reason for it to be limited to media-oriented file types.

I am switching blog engines yet again! How many times has it been now? Three? Four? I cannot keep track. It has been several, in any case.

Hopefully the switch is more interesting this time, however, because this time I am switching to a blog engine of my own creation. It is written in Python, using the Flask web framework, Mako templates, and a MongoDB database. I dub this engine Bloog. It is named thusly because it is one letter different from "blog" and it sounds completely silly when you say it out loud.

Also, you might notice that unlike every other time I have switched blog engines, this time I have not lost any content. All posts and comments remain. That is because I wrote a simple Wordpress importer. Huzzah!

For those who are curious, you can grab the latest source via git at git://git.cessen.com/bloog.git

I don't recommend anyone other than myself use the engine for their blog, as I don't plan to maintain it except as needed for my own purposes. But you are welcome to give it a shot if you like.

Anyhoo, I plan to keep working on it for a while yet. It's still not quite how I want it (especially in terms of page layout). But it is fully functional as far as my testing indicates. So I figured I'd switch over to it now and see what happens! Bwa ha ha ha ha!