I’ve been having so much fun lately I decided to give the Power-One logo another shot. I’m not fully happy with how this turned out, but I did it without following a tutorial (ok I used a lot of what I’ve learned from the last few BlenderGuru tutorials I followed). The main thing I want to do a better job with is the red tube/glow. I’d like to make it more like a pulsating plasma beam. Time to learn how to make one!
Had some fun following a recent tutorial from BlenderGuru.com. Decided to make two varients, one as a 2×2 screen background for a quad monitor setup and one as a 1×2 screen background for my monitor’s at work.
Had some fun last week taking pictures of the comet Pan Starrs. I was barely able to see it wirhout using mt camera. But with a two second exposure and a 200mm lens, it was quite beautiful.
For a while now, my wife and I have been working on designs for her website. I think we have come up with a great logo for her and I did a little title animation for her using Blender.
Needed a bit of a break from the constant psychotic pace life has been moving at lately so I decided to get in and do another lesson from Andrew Price’s Nature Academy.
Here are a few samples of what I’ve been trying to do using the Flower lesson with Cycles as the renderer instead of the standard blender rendering engine.
There are also a couple noodle diagrams of how I created the textures. If anyone reading this has some pointers on how to make them better, please leave a comment.
Since my last post about setting up Gallery 3 on ISP Config 3 and using a free Lightroom publishing plugin, Lightroom 4.0 was released. While the free plugin worked in the Lightroom 4 beta, it doesn’t work in the released version. I finally decided to stop wasting my time and bought the $15 one instead and am VERY happy with it. Everything works perfect right out of the box.
Features:
While the site says it only work on Lightroom 3, everything works on Lightroom 4.0 to. If you want to test it out first, you can try it for free, with some limitations:
Writing this mainly to keep a record of what needs to be done in case I have the same problem again as I setup more ISPConfig servers/Gallery3 sites.
I’ve had multiple picture galleries online over the years and have tried most of the different picture gallery software out there. While services like Picasa are great, for me, nothing beats having my own server sitting next to me which I can connect with directly. For those who don’t know what’s needed to do this, it’s just another computer which you’ll leave on 24/7. When I first started running my own webserver, I was installing things like Apache, PHP, MySQL, BIND etc. from compiling the code and managing everything from the .conf text files. While I learned a lot in the process there is a LOT of overhead in just managing the system and keeping things updated.
About 5 years ago I came across a site called howtoforge.com and they are the main sponsors for a BSD Licensesd piece of genius called ISPConfig which is a server backend thus creating a browser based environment for managing Web Sites, Users, Databases, DNS Records, Virtual Hosting etc. All from a really smooth interface. The best way to learn how to use/install ISPConfig is to go through one of the HowToForge tutorials. My current server is running version 11.10 of Ubuntu in 64-bit mode.
The problem and the reason I’m writing this is that I had a problem with installing Gallery3 on my ISPConfig servers. When I tried to upload a picture to my gallery using the built in uploader, or the publish method in Lightroom 3 or the xotof Android module, it wouldn’t work. The only way it worked was to use the Server Add feature which had a fairly cumbersome workflow. While searching for things around the net to help there are a few key settings I changed. In ISPConfig, to customize the php.ini settings, it’s done on the Options tab for individual sites. I wanted to allow the server to use more memory for the picture gallery, I also want to be able to upload video files up to 1Gb. Here are the settings I put in the Custom php.ini settings box.
memory_limit = 512M post_max_size = 1024M upload_max_filesize = 1024M
I also wanted to use GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick as the image processing backend but Gallery3 wasn’t able to find the necessary files with the default settings. To fix this there is a PHP open_basedir box on the same page as the Custome php.ini settings box where you can add the directories which contain the GM/IM binaries. Here is what I added to make it work.
:/usr/bin/php:/usr/bin/pear:/etc/pear:/usr/share/php/:/usr/share/php/PEAR
However, they were all the well documented ones and I still had the problem.
It wasn’t until I looked at the Apache error.log file which on ISPConfig3 is located at /var/www/(site name)/log/error.log. In that file I found a error that showed up whenever I tried to upload a picture.
...mod_fcgid: HTTP request length 132090 (so far) exceeds MaxRequestLen (131072)
This provided something different to search for and I found that the default for that setting used to be 1Gb but that a few years ago the default was changed to 128Kb. To get around this issue on a site by site basis in ISPConfig, the best way is to add a variable setting to the Apache Directives setting on the same page as Custom php.ini settings and PHP open_basedir. I wanted to increate my limit to 1GB so I put in:
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c> MaxRequestLen 1073741824 </IfModule>
After this I restart the Apache2 Server and wait a few minutes for the changes to happen. Then I was able to upload pictures directly using the HTML Flash uploader and xotof. However, I also liked the idea of using the Publish functionality in Lightroom3. Turns out there are two plugins available which do this. One is free and one costs $15…. I chose the free one but it doesn’t have much support and feels like it hasn’t been updated in a LONG time.
To correctly install the Galery 3 Plugin for Adobe Lightroom 3, the instructions state:
This plugin supports displaying and adding comments to Gallery photos. Since Gallery 3 does not expose all necessary information without an additional module, this feature is disabled by default. If you want to use it, make sure you’ve installed and activated the REST User Resource (user_rest) module (you can get it here.)
So I tried to do that. But when I tried to activate the module, and click the save button, it wouldn’t activate. Turns out there was a typo in the user_rest_installer.php file.
Line 26 needs to change from:
if ($version == 1.0 || $version 1.1) {
to:
if ($version == 1.0 || $version == 1.1) {
After that, the module would install and the plugin worked inside of Lightroom 3 and the Lightroom 4 Beta.