http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2011help/index.html?url=./files/Setting_up_your_build_environment_Linux_compiler_requirement.htm,topicNumber=d0e677620

There were several issues I encountered, so here is the process that someone needs to do in order to compile it correctly.

1. You will need to install texinfo 

sudo apt-get install texinfo

2. Download gcc-4.1.2 from http://gcc.gnu.org/

3. Create a directory called gcc412

mkdir gcc412

4. CD into it

cd gcc412

5. Make another directory inside called gcc-build. This is important and is almost never mentioned but you need to have two separate directory trees. One of compiling and one for the source.

mkdir gcc-build

6. Copy the gcc archive to the gcc412 directory and unpack the archive there. Not in the build one.

cp gcc-4.1.2.tar.bz2  .../gcc412

cd .../gcc412

tar jxvf gcc-4.1.2.tar.bz2

7. Go to the build directory

cd gcc-build

8. Now you need to configure . In the Maya documentation they say you need to do this:

../gcc-4.1.2/configure --prefix=/opt/gcc412 --program-suffix=412 --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --enable-checking=release --with-system-zlib --disable-libunwind-exceptions --enable-__cxa_atexit

But I was having problems if I use these options only so for me this worked instead:

../gcc-4.1.2/configure --prefix=/opt/gcc412 --program-suffix=412 --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --enable-checking=release --disable-libunwind-exceptions --enable-__cxa_atexit --disable-multilib

Notice the --disable-multilib flag and the missing --with-system-zlib flag.

9. Now because gcc-4.1.2 has a bug and thinks that versions of makeinfo greater than 10 are actually lower than 9 we need to do something manually. In our case if you run makeinfo --version you will see which version was installed by the first step, but it's usually version 13.  Open the Makefile that was created by the ./configure and edit the line where it says:

MAKEINFO = /opt/YOURUSERNAME/newlib-1.15.0/missing makeinfo

and change it to:

MAKEINFO = makeinfo

Save the file.

10. After the configuration run make

make -j 2 bootstrap

11. Run make install as root after that.

su root

make install

12. Then for convenience you can link the freshly compiled gcc412 to point to usr/bin

ls -s /opt/gcc412/bin/gcc412 /usr/bin/gcc412

I hope this will be in help of somebody else that is struggling with compiling it.

{iframe width="560" height="315"}http://www.youtube.com/embed/FQMO6vjmkyI{/iframe}

Some time ago a colleague with whom we share a passion of making stuff showed me something called Raspberry Pi. It's a pun with the word pie I suppose. The idea is a mini computer with the size of a credit card , which you can buy for extremely low price. Why ? The best explanation probably comes from the Raspberry Pi guys themselves:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/sample-page

" The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton was lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University. Eben had noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that. Fewer people were applying to the course every year. Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. ..."

In recent years I have been thinking about the same too. When I was growing up I had computers around me to play with. They were quite expensive, but you could get one with the money you saved from summertime jobs and help from your parents.   The computers didn't do much by their own, so you had to make them do something useful. I saw the rise of the dot-com bubble , I was trying to explain to my parents what the computer is and what you can do with it. I was seeing that we are quite different generations and that I can understand the computers in a way that they never will be able to. I thought that the generation coming after me will be so knowledgeable about programming that I can not even fit in my mind. Well it turns out it's not the case. The kids growing up now play on closed hardware and software consoles instead of Amigas and Pravetz 8s. They "design"  web pages instead of hacking code together to make it draw random pixels on the screen. They are tweeting and updating their statuses in FB instead of ssh-ing an obscure server via a modem and chatting with other people on the server. They play angry birds on their phones instead of Doom with Parallel connection between two PCs. The differences are very small, but important and lead to two different places. When you have a hardware and software that you can play with you learn a lot about how it is made. When you have a closed hardware and closed software, this is almost impossible to understand. When you have an open hardware and software (here you can substitute the word "open" with "free" or "open source") it is much easier to see what it is doing and learn how it is doing it. Most of the boys here will see the analogue : Imagine a car toy that your parents gave you for your 11th birthday.  It runs on a track but the car itself doesn't have battery. You are wondering how it runs on the track when there is no electricity in the car itself. You open the car and you see that there is electrical motor , but instead of being powered by a battery in the car, it's powered by a little connection from the track itself. So the next time something on the car breaks you know how it's made and you can fix it yourself without the need to ask your parents to do it. Now imagine the same situation but this time, when you open the car there is just a black box, and you don't see anything in there except a little words saying "Patented" and "Proprietary".  If you need to know how it works, you will have to break this black box and in essence break whatever you are trying to understand how it works. This is the general difference between open source and closed software and hardware. And this is the general difference between the ability to know how something functions and not. That is why things like GNU/Linux, github, FSF and Raspberry Pi are important to our society. There is still a little bit more to be asked from Raspberry Pi though. Currently some parts of the hardware and some parts of the software are still closed. They explained the reason behind this from the fact they tried to make the board as cheaper as possible. The perfect scenario would have been if everything in it is open source, but for now it's not. To see why this is so important you can read a little story by Richard Stallman called "The right to read" You can find it with GPL license in the internets somewhere.

{iframe height="281" width="500"}http://player.vimeo.com/video/34482004{/iframe}

What surprised me yesterday was a timelapse sequence that I found on the internets featuring a shot from the timelapse we shot! It is cool to be plugged there!

test = round(0.1**0.1, 2)

print test
print [test]

#0.79
#[0.79000000000000004]

I never knew about this and it looked weird at first but then on further investigation I found that print value prints the str() conversion of the value, but print [value] prints the repr() of value instead.

I think not. Some days ago the founder of MegaUpload was arrested and the website shut down. The people should start seeing now in what world we are actually living.  People should start using more free software, start using Tor, if you are a programmer, be involved in free software, don't use eBooks or at least buy them directly from the author and not the publisher, if you are a hardware maker, make a hardware that's not locked and you can actually use for what you really want. Jacob Appelbaum describes it the best:

on January 18th in protest of the Internet Censorship Bills.

My website will be down on that date too.

Here is a better quality trailer, but you need quicktime for it:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/iceagecontinentaldrift/