In the past week, I’ve been messing around with a pre-alpha version of Ramen. This open source compositing project recently surfaced in a number of software and visual effects (VFX) news outlets. Compositing software is what VFX companies use to create the complex computer graphics shots we’ve come to expect in big budget Hollywood movies. Ramen is a node-based compositor, like Nuke or Shake, as opposed to a layer-based compositor such as After Effects. In node-based compositors, networks of image operations are strung together with connectors called noodles. I suspect that the name for this software (Ramen) might have something to do with an inexpensive yet popular brand of noodles (Ramen).

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I recently celebrated the release of Windows 7 by upgrading the Windows Vista operating system (OS) running on my HP Pavilion dv9000 to 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04. I was never happy with Vista, despite spending hours running Windows Update. I knew better then to try to upgrade a Windows Xp installation to Vista. However, the HP Pavilion came installed with Vista, so you’d expect things to work for the most part. And the reality is most things did work right. It was the little annoying gotchas that drove me nuts. For example, every time I tried to extract from a zip file, the Windows Desktop would crash. I spent hours scouring forums for a solution, which I never did find. Read the rest of this entry »