Don't put those 3D glasses away just yet

I guess this is a follow up on the last post featuring Anaglyph. My girlfriend's cat was being particularly still, and allowed me to take a couple of photos. Photographing an animal for 3D is difficult because even tiny changes can become glaring artifacts once composited. His eyes kept darting about which caused a few retakes. But finally I got a good clean pair of left and right images. Enjoy Brody 3D!

Anaglyph Photo

This isn't exactly a full blown post, but I thought I'd throw up a photo I did to test my new camera. I just got back from my friend Mike and Mindy's wedding, which had a 3D theme to it. It was a lot of fun, so I thought I should try to do an anaglyph photo. Enjoy!

Sequential Brute Force

I'm still trying to find time between work and life to continue with personal projects, but by the time I get home I generally just want to veg. So my apologies for the lapse in posting. Tonight, however, I decided to build a Sequential Brute Force application for cracking passwords. Yes, yes, it all sounds very nefarious, but I only did it for fun and to test some benchmarks on my P.C.

For those unfamiliar, a Sequential Brute Force program basically iterates through every possible non-special character combination until it finds a match. Kind of like trying every combination of a Master Lock (I know you've tried this too!), but instead of dealing with just 0-9, which is a nice small range, passwords can generally be a-z and 0-9 giving us 35 possible characters. With longer passwords this is a less than ideal approach. For instance a 6 character password has 1,838,265,625 possible keys. Considering most security systems require at least 6-8 characters as the minimum, that value could be much, much higher. My computer took 31 minutes and 8 seconds to crack a 6 character password, while only 53 seconds for a 5 character password, and only 2 seconds for a 4 character password. A better solution would be to skip all possible 1 to 5 length combinations since they are very unlikely and just focus on the heavy end.

A more human approach to this problem would be to predict likely combinations. Social studies show that most people use passwords that are real words but with numerical characters tagged on the head or tail. Meaning a dictionary database with numerical variations might provide for faster results than testing each individual character, but it is hit or miss. It can only provide a set of 'common' keys. Brute force is the more thorough, but also more time intensive.

Both of these methods can be rendered useless by putting a maximum number on the amount of attempts allowed within a specific time before being locked out.

iPhone SDK

I just downloaded the iPhone SDK from apple this week. I am now an unlicensed "apple developer". Of course to publish anything, I need to front a hundred dollar license fee. All in all not too bad, as I can just tool around learning objective C for now. The SDK comes packaged with xCode and an emulator for testing applications locally. Ideas for an app are welcome.

The New Apartment!

I dropped into Glendale this morning hoping a day would provide enough time to settle on an apartment, and get the details taken care of. This is actually the first place I visited, and it was, unquestionably, the best. I tend to go for the lovingly restored, 'homey' apartments. The landlord was nice, and the building is small so there are only 2 other tenants. I'll be moving in on the 14th of November.

I followed up with the rest of my appointments, but nothing else really caught my attention. So I took care of the paperwork and managed to get back to the airport way ahead of schedule. Fortunately there was an earlier return flight to Oakland that I was able to sneak aboard. Now it's time to pack it all up.

Hired!

After a couple of months of sitting at home looking for work, and mostly just doing whatever I wanted, I finally got myself hired. Although Pixar left me heart broken (oh you cruel bitch), I'm ready to move on. I'll be headed down to Glendale to work for Rough Draft Studios. They worked on the Simpson's movie, Futurama, and various other cartoon T.V. series. I'm particularly excited about working on Futurama Season 6 as that show is, hands-down, one of my favorites.

Of course this means that I'll be moving away from what I've finally come to think of as home here in the bay area. I've made lots of friends here so, it will be hard to leave. The idea of finding a new apartment is one I do not welcome. My next landlord has a hell of a lot to live up to (another reason I don't want to move). They feel a bit like family now.

Besides the tedium of scouring craigslist and calling and arranging walk-throughs, I'll have to travel back and forth probably a couple of times to get things settled before I pack up. I love the animation field, but more and more I am wondering if my career is going to continue being like this. Work for a while, transplant to a new town, settle in, and then have to uproot my life again. It would be nice to stay put for a change. At least this time I'm not moving halfway across the country, and by flight it is only an hour to visit. So here's to all my wonderful friends in the bay area. You will be missed.

Smash Bros. Brawl Texture Hack

So I did this a while back for fun. It's a texture hack for Zero Suit Samus in Smash Bros. The figure and build seemed a good fit for Kid from Chrono Cross. The UV topology was kind of a mess, and there was no good way to test it in Maya at the time. Just looking at the original textures in Photoshop, it was hard to tell what was what. So the the work flow was pretty tedious. Paint a bit in Photoshop, compile texture, write out to SD card, play Smash Bros. After trying to pinpoint bad areas in the texture (stretching and scale issues), I'd go back to Photoshop for more guess work and then repeat the process. This is the result. The compiled textures can be downloaded here if you have an interest in trying them out. It was a interesting experience, but too much trial and error to really get creative. I'd like to do a Starky hack of Olimar, but until I find a way to preview textures and models in Maya, I'll stay away from that.