shaking off the fallout | 6:09 PM >

I'm reading the latest issue of Analog right now, which starts off with an absolutely terrible story involving nuclear explosions, and the way my PC is behaving I feel like it's been hit by the EMP from one of the blasts.

So yes, I'm in the middle of my *fourth* reinstall of Windows XP this week. On top of crashing with torrents, now it won't do anything on the large drive at all. It just locks up the whole system every time you access files. WoW locked up during a patch process, borking the entire folder, which nearly annoyed me to the point of desktop defenestration.

(I actually ended up just reinstalling WoW on the C drive; with the expansion that's 9 CDs of file copying, bucko.)

Anyway, while all that's going in the background I'd like to share a quick note on Blender and a quick note on OSX installer packages.

Firstly, Blender now supports 2D IK chains! YAY! This solves so many issues with knees and elbows, as well as a host of other things. Someone snuck in a different kind of rotation limiter at the per-bone level, one that takes into account IK without screwing up other constraints, which is just awesome. I haven't figured out yet how to best put it to use, but I will as soon as my latest character is ready for rigging.

(If none of that last paragraph made sense to you, I apologize.)

Secondly, if you're having problems installing an older version of some software because a newer version was installed and removed, under OS X, check your /Library/Receipts folder for package receipts for the newer version and delete them. You can also use the nifty lsbom command on the Archive.bom file inside those packages to determine what, exactly, files were installed, and where. This makes a full deinstall a lot easier with regards to those packages that like to leave a lot of little files all over creation.

And now, back to work. However, I will leave you with a Moment of Zen:

Now that's celebrating the Easter holiday.