iXce’s blog

Wrote a quick python script for blender to generate paraboloïds a while ago. Feared I might have lost them. Posting them here today. Could be reused as a base for any parametric surface as well. Three flavours included. Have fun.

Hyperboloic Paraboloid Mesh Script
Paraboloid Mesh Script (with basis)
Paraboloid Mesh Script (circular)

Si vous le rencontrez un jour, il vous dira que l’ascenseur de l’hôtel de Crillon l’a amené plus haut, beaucoup plus haut qu’il n’aurait pu l’imaginer. Il vous dira aussi qu’il était parti chercher l’âme d’un vieil Indien, et que c’est la sienne qu’il a trouvée.

English:
If you ever meet him, he’ll tell you that Crillon Hotel’s lift brought him higher, much higher than he could have thought. He’ll also tell you that he left to search for an old Indian’s soul, and that he found his own.

Christof: You can speak. I can hear you.
Truman: Who are you?
Christof: I am the creator… of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
Truman: And who am I?
Christof: You’re the star.
Truman: Was nothing real?
Christof: You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch. Listen to me, Truman. There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear. I know you better than you know yourself.

The Truman Show

I discovered pamusb a few days ago (actually, I had already heard about it, but never puzzled to try it), and WOW it’s great! In case you wouldn’t have guessed it yet, it lets you use an USB drive or a removable media (SD cars or so), as a mean of authentication for any pam-based application (su/sudo, keyrings, screensaver…). The setup is damn easy (it’s all about adding one line to a file in /etc/pam.d, typing two commands and adding an agent run on every session), and the whole thing works damn well.
It’s just really cool to just have to unplug an usb key to lock my laptop and replug it to unlock it, or to insert it upon login or… It’s just greatly useful. I’m still a bit reluctant to make it “required” and not just “sufficient”. It’d just be awful to be unable to login because I lose it or so…

Oh, just a little tip, to avoid “Unsafe disk removal”, just add the drive to /etc/fstab (you can reference it by label) and make it readonly and mountable by user.
LABEL=MY-KEY /media/auth vfat ro,defaults,user,noauto 0 0If you want to rename *your key, just head to the RenameUSBDrive article in Ubuntu Documentation

Here are 0.4.2 debs for hardy (which currently only has 0.4.0):

• libpamusb 0.4.2 deb for hardy
• pamusb-tools deb for hardy

And a few handy links:

• Neat howto for debian based distros
• pamusb homepage
• Andrea Luzzardi’s blog (pamusb author)

I’d been looking for a short domain name to alias guillaume.segu.in (that’s 17 characters!) for a while. chui.la (“I’m there” in French) looked good, but aulo.in seems easier to type . So here are those 7 (only!) characters, with a pretty (imho) logo:

Merry chrismas everyone =)

We don’t need no thought control…

Meh, it’s been a long while since I last blogged. Figured I’d to post this one after the one about today’s server outage.
Let’s say that life has been awfully overwhelming. School is taking more and more of my time day after day, week after week. I’ve been trying to improve at physics for months now, but it still seems to be unsuccessful. Well, we’ll see.

I haven’t been completely idle code-wise though. My gnome-about rewrite got committed to GNOME 2.21 SVN and will make it in GNOME 2.22 release, scheduled for March 12.
There’s also another top secret project we are working on with a good friend of mine. No ETA (because, you know, 5 minutes a day isn’t much) though I hope we’ll have something ready for Christmas.

HAI
  CAN HAS STDIO?
  I HAS A 2710p
  PLZ
    GIMMEH 2710p
  AWSUM THX
    LOL "2710p is great"
  UR DOING IT WRONG
    LOL WTF
  KTHX
KTHXBYE

I know this is my seventh post today. I should probably stop and get a nap. Meh.

Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés
(Happy people aren’t in a hurry)

(from Vincent Untz)

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

(a.k.a Hanlon’s razor)

If it moves, it’s biology; if it smells, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics.

In order to get the latest and brightest X.org version, namely X.org 7.3, and more specifically the neat stuff from xorg-server 1.4.0 which won’t be in Ubuntu before at least a couple of weeks (probably more), I switched to Gentoo Linux on my laptop last month. My desktop is still powered by Ubuntu even though there’s a fully featured Gentoo distro ready on it

The switch went quite smoothly. It takes quite a lot of time to compile all that, but heh, Rome wasn’t built in one day, and I have a lot of cpu idle-time anyway (*cough* school *cough*). There are still a few things missing/broken (mostly the cpufreq GNOME panel applet not applying changes and gnome-power-manager behaving oddly) but it’s running mostly fine and I’m using it daily. It’s a real pleasure to be able to get mostly up to date softwares, and even be able to use development version of these softwares in a seamless manner (by simply using a -9999 ebuild).

Well, my last word will just be….

# emerge -DaNuv world