There’s a tutorial on BadPopcorn that is the first place I’ve actually seen all the steps a git newbie needs to follow to make a repository accessible from a regular, unmodified webserver. Thanks Ben!

I was running into a problem with blender where I couldn’t preserve the aspect ratio of an image being used as a texture on a deforming surface. For rigid surfaces, the solution described here (basically, using an Empty) worked fine. But for a deforming surface, a better solution turned out to be to modify the “texture space” of the object. I didn’t even know that objects had a texture space, but they do (see bottom of this page, the “texture space transform” part), and you can change it. Just select your object, hit “T”, choose “Scale” and resize one of the dimensions (by hitting X, or Y, or Z) to get your aspect ratio back to what it should be. Yay! I wish I’d known about this earlier…

We were impressed by the cerberus helpdesk software that bluehost was running, and since we needed something similar for our own site (not coincidentally hosted with bluehost), we decided to take a shot at installing it. It worked out, but had some tricky bits. So here are the steps that worked for us.

We began by downloading Cerberus (the free community edition) and following their instructions for unpacking it, setting permissions, and getting started on installation.

First problem: Cerberus complains when checking server requirements that a php extension called mailparse is missing. It really wants this extension, but it isn’t available on bluehost. Are we stuck? No! We can install the plugin ourselves. We worked from a helpful write-up someone had made for an imagemagick extension. We did the following from our bluehost shell:

pecl download mailparse
tar xvzf mailparse-*.tgz
cd mailparse-*
phpize
./configure
make

This gave us a “modules” directory with a mailparse.so file, which is what we need. We moved it into our home directory on bluehost, so we had the file /home/our_user_name/modules/mailparse.so

Then we need to tell PHP where to find this extension. To do this, we opened the php.ini file that bluehost created in our web directory, and modified the following entries:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Paths and Directories ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
…
extension_dir = “/home/our_user_name/modules”
…
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Dynamic Extensions ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
…
extension=”mailparse.so”

While editing this file, we also set the “upload_tmp_dir” away from the default, since cerberus didn’t like that.

At this point, we had a problem with the new information in the php.ini file not getting used. Probably it suffices to wait, but we gave php a “kick” from the bluehost control panel “Php Config” just for testing purposes. And indeed Cerberus at this point was happy with its new home and ready to start operations.

The only remaining problem was quick a nasty one. When setting up incoming mail, we could never get the mail test to pass, until finally one of us had a brainwave and replaced the “+” symbol that bluehost email usernames have with its url-encoded version “%2B”. This worked like a charm. But then when we tried the system for real, email logins were failing. So we put back the “+” and found that the real system worked with this while the test stopped working. Yuck, but no real problem. We suggest you get things working with the test first, using “%2B” instead of “+”, and then when that test is passing put back in the “+”.

Done!

We got a report that version 0.1.6 of ucanvcam for linux needs the “gd” library to be installed on your machine. Sorry about that, we’ll fix this next time around.

In the meantime, if you are getting messages like this:

ucanvcam: error while loading shared libraries: libgd.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory

You can get rid of the problem by doing:

apt-get install libgd2-noxpm

or

apt-get install libgd2-xpm

or the equivalent for your distribution.

Please let us know if you run into any other problems like this.

Our demo video for ucanvcam has caught up with the latest version. See the silent grainy happy lizard demo. The videography leaves something to be desired, but the main point is that effects can be created online with the picture mixer and downloaded as stills or animations. So put your video stream in a heart or on a wine bottle and enjoy!

A new version of ucanvcam has been released (download from the usual place). The most interesting addition is an effect that lets you take a blender-based design created on the picture mixer and project your webcam feed onto a surface or surfaces within that. Video examples coming soon…

Update: video example is available.

Instructions about using the ucanvcam virtual camera on linux and windows have been updated in the user manual.

Coming soon: create pictures or animations with the picture mixer, and use them from ucanvcam.

The ucanvcam GUI is now compiling for Linux in portable form and available for download. No need to compile it manually any more. Any feedback about failures/successes with the build would be much appreciated. It has so far been reported to run on various versions of debian, ubuntu, and redhat.

ucanvcam is a free and open virtual webcam tool, currently supporting Linux and Windows. No Mac support yet, for lack of a Mac guru…

We added output-to-file as an option to ucanvcam on Linux; in a related event, we now have a demo video of a rather enigmatic elephant.

Is it just me, or is google trends to a first approximation just reporting what has recently been on TV? I found the trends an interesting idea to begin with, but seriously, more and more it looks like a very high-tech method for figuring out what was shown on TV a few minutes ago. I guess broadcast media can really push a fraction of the nation’s consciousness around.