In the past decade computer graphics have reached a level of realism that makes it hard to distinguish them from actual photos. That is obviously pretty cool. The technological advancements have enabled artists to create amazing artwork and realize their creative vision. We are now as close as never before to visualize anything you can imagine.

When getting started with the Spark maschine learning library MLib you probably saw this warning in your console:

WARN BLAS: Failed to load implementation from: com.github.fommil.netlib.NativeSystemBLAS
WARN BLAS: Failed to load implementation from: com.github.fommil.netlib.NativeRefBLAS
WARN LAPACK: Failed to load implementation from: com.github.fommil.netlib.NativeSystemLAPACK
WARN LAPACK: Failed to load implementation from: com.github.fommil.netlib.NativeRefLAPACK

In this article I’m gonna give a quick guide on building and installing php5.5 with FastCGI Process Manager on Linux. I did test it on Ubuntu 12.04 but it should work on nearly any Linux distribution out there.
 

1.  Get the source-code
   

   wget http://de2.php.net/distributions/php-5.5.10.tar.bz2 

2. Extract and remove the archive
   

   tar xvjf php-5.5.10.tar.bz2<br> rm php-5.5.10.tar.bz2<br> cd php-5.5.10` 

3. Configure and create the Makefile
   

   ./configure --enable-fpm --with-fpm-user=www-data --with-fpm-group=www-data --with-mysqli --with-mysql --with-openssl --with-curl --with-zlib  

4. Compile the source-code
   

   make 

5. Enable the default fpm configuration
   

   sudo mv /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf.default /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf 

6. Copy the php-fpm executable into /etc/init.d/ and set permissions
   

   sudo cp sapi/fpm/init.d.php-fpm /etc/init.d/php-fpm<br> sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/php-fpm 

7.  Add php-fpm as a service and start it
   

   sudo update-rc.d php-fpm defaults<br> sudo service php5-fpm restart  

If you have any problems getting this to work or any further questions please leave a comment or mail me.

This year I had the possbility to go to Blender Conference 2012 which is annual meetup of blenderusers and devolpers in Amsterdam.
When I arrived in Amsterdam on friday moring I was very curios about what it would be like.  After seeing all the people at this year’s location “DeBalie” I knew that this was going to be amazing.  And I was right!
I enjoyed the presentations as much as I enjoyed talking to all these intresting people.  In the following I will just mention a few.
 
I met Joseph Masaki an american artist who showed me some amazing procedural textures he created. One was a shader that gave objects a look like a closeup of a print. I am not the created of the this image it’s just based on a .blend file he allowed me to use for this.

Hi guys,
Gimp 2.8 stable was officially released. To install it on a Ubuntu 12.04 you will need to install the same packages as for the RC.
If you already used the release canidate of 2.8 installing will be as easy as downloading the source from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/ and running:

Some days ago i read about the one-window-mode in the recent Gimp development version. So i spent some time figuring out how to get Gimp 2.7.5 running on my Ubuntu 12.04. After downloading the source code from gimp.org and running the configure-script i realized that this would be more time consuming than i thought. As i am not a Linux-expert it took me some time to find the different packages and get them working. That’s why i put together a little guide on how to do it for you.