(g)nu box testing

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 I enjoy drawing and exploring the variety of tools available; especially the free ones. I decided to give this software 'a go' today, but was stopped almost immediately by two things:
  

1. to end drawing a polygon, line, etc., right mouse clicking terminates the process without leaving the object on the drawing board.
    
   Quite by accident, I found middle button mouse clicking performs the desired behavior. Sheesh. I may have to change that behavior.
    
2. a Meta key combination, e.g. Meta - U for undo, is used for a lot of its keyboard commands.
   
   I found this can be changed in Gnome by choosing System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts. I chose USA and Layout Options and clicked "Alt and Meta are on the Alt keys". I closed these windows and went back to XFig.
   
   Alt - U (or u) now does undo! Houston, I have a Meta key

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 I've been fooling around with sound on my (g)nu box over the last couple of days. This was something I did have set up to my liking on my µSoft box.

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 Command line conversion of a .avi file to an animated gif.

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$ mplayer -vo gif89a:fps=15.0:output=output.gif input.avi

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 speaker-test - command-line speaker test tone generator for ALSA (in Linux)

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$ speaker-test -t sine -f 440 -D plug:front -c2 -l2

 Sends a 440 Hz tone to the front speakers, alternating left then right, loops twice and stops.

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 To record "what you hear" in Linux, use the command line and "arecord". This is a much better way than sticking your mic up to a speaker.

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$ arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -v -v  -D front foobar.wav

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 gnome-sound-recorder

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 I use the previous to record sound via my mic on my Linux box. The question is how good is the sound card, how good is the mic?

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 First, I stumbled across the Mops ...

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 ... then I found Ayam, which supersedes the now defunct (but downloadable) the Mops.

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 Ayam currently runs on Unix (Linux, IRIX, FreeBSD tested), Win32 (Win95-Win2000, XP), and Mac OS X (Aqua and X11).

 Ayam features at a glance:

• RIB (RenderMan Interface Bytestream) export and import.
• Support for NURBS curves and (trimmed) NURBS surfaces, Boxes, Quadrics (Sphere, Disk, Cylinder, Cone, Hyperboloid, Paraboloid, and Torus), CSG, MetaBalls, Patch Meshes, Polygonal Meshes, and Subdivision Surfaces.
• NURBS modelling includes approximating and interpolating curves as well as extrude, revolve, sweep, birail, skin and gordon objects with caps, holes, and bevels.
• Custom objects that may freely implement their representations (using OpenGL and RIB) and even small GUIs to edit their type specific parameters may be written by the user and dynamically loaded at runtime.
• Scripting interface: Tcl.
• Misc: instancing, arbitrary number of modeling views, object clipboard, independent property clipboard, console, n-level undo.
• File formats (r/w): RIB, DXF, 3DM, 3DMF, OBJ, X3D.

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 I've gotten Ayam to 'sort of' run on my machine, but having troubles with renderers. I downloaded and installed Aqsis.

 As a test to see if it was working properly, from the command line,



 Note the surface texture, here.

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 Shader Test #2



 Note the difference in surface texture, here.

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 Shader Test #3



 Notice again the difference in surface texture, here. All it took
was a few lines of code to produce this rather dramatic effect.

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  "It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which modern
 applied mathematics has been shaped and fueled by the gen-
 eral availability of fast computers with large memories. Their
 impact on mathematics, both applied and pure, is comparable
 to the role of the telescopes in astronomy and microscopes in
 biology."
        -- Peter Lax, Siam Rev. Vol. 31 No. 4