The trailer for the peach movie project is out. The title is "Big Buck Bunny" and it looks great. Be sure to check out the higher definition versions on the website!! Or watch the high definition streaming version at vimeo.

I took a look at the Google summer of code mentoring organizations for 2008 and was surprised to see BBC research listed. They were probably previous participants but it seems that BBC maintains a number of open source projects on their open source page. The most notable ones seem to be the ones that they are going to use the interns for, Kamaelia, which is apparently a test system for large [...]

A couple of days ago Google released some new themes for iGoogle. They also mentioned that they have a new API for creating themes for iGoogle and that anyone can create themes. This is a bit of a misnomer because you can basically create a theme using the API and test it using the testing interface but it won't be added to iGoogle unless it's good and you did you homework and used the API pr[...]

I can't believe I didn't know about Gnarls Barkley until the other day but I find their St. Elsewhere CD to be pretty creative. From Wikipedia, "Gnarls Barkley is a musical collaboration between multi-instrumentalist and producer Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) from New York, and rapper/vocalist Cee-Lo Green (Thomas Callaway), from Atlanta". It mixes a several musical styles and capitalizes well [...]

Peach just released on the Peach blog some animation tests that test the new model rigs that they have been working on. The rigger Nathan has been working on creating rigs for the 3D models that are used for the animation. Basically the rig is the skeleton and rules that you use to move the character around. You can check out the blog post here and the rigging demo posts here and here. If you[...]

I recently came across a recording of a piece of music that I borrowed from my beloved college mentor Dr. Hopkins. It is a piece by Eric Whitacre and performed by the Concordia Choir of Concordia College in Moorhead Minnesota. The lyrics are taken from Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" and it is quite possibly one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen or heard. It [...]

Today I found the Peach website and became one of the first 1000 to pre-order the DVD. If you get it you should see my name in the credits. Peach is the next short movie project after Elephants Dream that is being produced by the Blender Foundation. It is an open movie like Elephants Dream so it will be presumably released under the creative commons and available for download for free as wel[...]

I recently saw an interesting article on the "Loudness War". Basically it's a sort of loudness arms race between competing music labels and radio stations to increase the loudness of recordings so they stand out. Wikipedia has an extensive article on the subject. The loudness of the entire recording is increased, but the maximum volume of a particular part of a CD/Vinyl recording is fixed so[...]

Much to my excitement, Rush has released a new album called Snakes & Arrows. It's Rush's, count 'em, 18th studio album. Rush has my utmost respect continuing to come out with new music that is markedly different than their previous material after all these years and with the same band mates. (Who wants to hear the same songs over and over with no material. Can you say Rolling Stones?) One of [...]

I was surfing the web earlier and found a link to elephantsdream.org. It's a project to create a movie short created with only open software like Blender. The production files are also available under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The content itself was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam and financed equally by the Blender Foundation and Montevideo in the[...]