On the weekends and during off-hours from Peach I've been pecking away at a personal animation project of mine. It isn't even at the 3D stage yet—I'm still writing the story and doing character design—but still, I'm a revision control junky, and I want my files versioned. So versioned they will be.

My first reaction was to use Subversion, but I would need to set up a server for that. Making an online server for a small personal project (that might not even get off the ground) seemed like overkill, but on the other hand, making a local server on my laptop would tie my project to my laptop which seemed equally silly.

So what was a poor soul like me to do?

I decided that it was time to look for alternatives. I had heard of a few other revision control systems, namely: Git (used for the Linux kernel), Arch (the GNU solution), Mercurial, and Bazaar. So I decided to check them out.

The thing that all these systems have in common is that they are all decentralized revision control systems, meaning that they don't use a centralized server (at least not by default) to store revisions. It's sort of a peer-to-peer approach to revision control. Instead of having a central repository, each person working on a project gets their own local copy of the entire revision tree (called a "clone" or "branch"). This is handy because it means you can use revision control locally, committing to your own local copy of the repository. The primary means of combining changes then becomes merging branches rather than committing to a repository. It took me a bit to wrap my head around this, as I'm used to the commit paradigm, but it really makes a lot of sense.

For you artists out there, I've run across a couple of really nifty programs. Actually, I ran across them a while ago, and have been using them for some time now. But I'm just now getting around to writing about them.

The first one is called MyPaint. It's a small paint program written in Python and C. In some respects it is quite primitive (it doesn't support layers, for instance), but in other ways it's extraordinarily advanced (its brush system is insane). However, the thing I like best about it is that it has an infinite canvas, meaning that if you run out of room you can simply scroll over and keep painting.

I use MyPaint as a digital sketchbook. You can assign any brush/color combo to the number keys on the keyboard, so I simply assign a black pencil brush to 1 and a white paint brush (eraser) to 2, and then sketch away. I like to close all the windows except the drawing area and then maximize it so that I have the maximum drawing area. Then I can just sketch to my hearts content without ever running out of room thanks to the infinite canvas.

I don't recommend mypaint as a full-fledged paint program, but as a simple sketch program I have found nothing that beats it. Seriously. I mean it. This is the ultimate sketch program. Ever. The only thing that could make it better would be if it recognized the back end of my stylus as an eraser (unfortunately it treats it the same as the tip).

So here I am, sitting in the kitchen at the studio with my laptop after the first week of project Peach, sipping at some orange juice. And I'm thinking this: holy shit, this is going to be awesome.

The apartment I'm staying in is large. Very large. Which is something I didn't expect. It even has a proper dining room, for goodness' sake. Admittedly, I'm sharing it with three other people. But that's awesome, because I think the size of the apartment would be intimidating otherwise. Moreover, I really like the guys I'm sharing it with. We even sat down and watched "Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool" one night. We had a blast. I hope to introduce them to UHF at some point.

The apartment is about 3 kilometers from the studio, which makes for both a nice walk and a nice bike ride. Speaking of which, everyone bikes in Amsterdam. I hadn't ridden a bike in quite some time, so the first couple of trips were a little interesting. But I'm starting to get my biking feet back. It's nice that they have dedicated bike lanes everywhere here—they even have a tiny concrete divider to separate them from the road.

The first week of Project Peach was a workshop led by Arno Kroner. He gave us a crash course in story development, visual story telling, and animation production. For many of us it was mostly review, but it was still very valuable. He went over a lot of stuff that had gotten lost in the recesses of my mind, so it was valuable and important to dig them up to the forefront again. The team also now has a common vocabulary to communicate with, which is good. And just in general I think the workshop has prepared us to be more organized and efficient than we might have been otherwise.