More on flash charts to see temperatures

You never know from where the inspiration will arrive. Doing some banking managements I took a look at one interesting Euribor Web Page and  I came across a nice charts with lots of options to be able to explore values along a wide time range. Doing some research I found that the flash chart used belongs to amCharts. This web offers  the use of a wide range of flash charts for free, including the stocks chart, the one that I was interested in.

Conferencia de Ed Catmull. How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

Exiten muchos libros, charlas y conferenciantes dedicados a tratar sobre el tema de cómo gestionar equipos y cómo mantenerlos motivados.  Después de leer unas cuantas, casi todas tienen algo de dejavù. En mi opinión, esta conferencia de Ed Catmull destaca sobre las demás en 3 aspectos.

1. Ed Catmull es el CTO de una empresa de renombre dentro del la producción de películas de animación y resulta que es un sector del que no abunda información de gestión de equipos.


2. En esta conferencia la mayoría de los consejos y recetas van acompañadas de una breve descripción sencilla de como ha llegado a esas conclusiones. Como en cualquier problema es muy importante definir las condiciones de contorno para poder aplicar la solución más adecuada. Muchas conferencias  no describen el contexto que llevó a las conclusiones que se exponen, obviando gran parte del problema.


3. La conclusiones que aporta Ed Catmull sobre los cimientos de Pixar a la hora de gestionar sus equipos, bajo una apariencia de convencionalidad, no lo son. De hecho, creo que aporta ideas muy modernas de gestión, pero sin negar que implica asumir ciertos riesgos para que realmente fragüen. Vamos, que nadie da duros a peseta. Quien no arriesga no gana.

Antes de seguir recomiendo la lectura Conferencia, pero si no tienes mucho tiempo aquí va mi resumen. 

Debian Server Backup Script using Gmail

The third level in backup security and one of the most important is to be able to store backups in a place different than the production place, well known as Keep backups off-site. Currently taking advantage of free services like gmail, it´s much easier to fulfill this third level of backup security and to have all your backups available through an internet connection. Here I show a homemade script that does the following steps.

1. Compress your web server, database and svn repository
2. Encrypt compressed files with openssl
3. Send those files to a gmail account 
4. Clean gmail account removing old backups

PythonWin 2.4.3 Create wrap classes for COM automation

This is just a little tip for those who use python and work with COM automation components. If you are a windows user,  and you want to write python scripts to interact with Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Studio the best way to do so is using the this application's COM componts. But most of the times finding documentation this COM components registered in your Windows is tricky and difficult. Using a simple tool that is automatically installed with the pythonwin module, you can get wrap python classes for all interfaces and constants exported by a registered COM component. This usually helps a lot to find non documented methods, and even to make your python script more legible and clean.

Inkscape. Vectorize for free and without too much pain

A great friend and coworker drew my south park caricature. It was a hand drawing so I scanned and get a dirty grey-scale image, not to nice. So to get something cleaner I realized that I will need to vectorize the image. To do so I was looking for some freeware and I found Inkscape. This open-source software is surprisingly great and the vectorizing tool is awesome for someone like me that was facing this problem for the first time. So in the following lines, I will briefly document how to vectorize a bitmap using Inkscape and the help of The Gimp.

Modelling (II). Playing with subdivision surfaces.

The main idea behind modelling using subdivision surfaces is to create simple geometry that after applying a smoothing algorithm like Catmull-Clark or Loop it finally gets its smoothed and final shape. This way you model the low resolution mesh and you get the higher resolution meshes applying different levels of this smoothing modifiers.

The main problem is that this smoothing algorithms will smooth at all cost and you sometime want to keep several edges chamfered but hard. One way to do this is creating bound edges around the edges you want to be hard.

3dsmax Modelling (I). Using Image references

One interesting technique to model real things, is to use pictures of this real things as a reference and place them in our modelling software so we can do the blocking of the model based on that visual information. Here I will describe step by step how to do it using 3dsmax. Thanks to Ramón for all the help.