Cube Mine

 It took a lot more time than I thought it would but spammers finally managed to mess up the comment system. I'm temporarily turning off the comments while I figure out what I will do regarding this.

When I first developed the current comment system I thought that spammers wouldn't bother with this site since it does not use any common interface (like Wordpress) and it's relatively low ranked. Sure, a few spammy comments appeared but they were usually from a single IP address, so it was easy to ban they.

But a week ago things started getting ugly. About ten comments per day, from cheap car insurance to free casino games, were posted from various IP addresses, much more than I can keep up with.

I love how they carefully put an ID in each of their comments. Has somebody ever though of google bombing these IDs to mess up with then?

In other news, I haven't forgot about Cube Mine! I have been busy (more than usual!) helping the LuxRender project. Yes, now I'm an official coordinator there! But I will return soon, with cool wallpapers.

—Ratow

There is a new 3D renderer worth checking out called LuxRender . It's free, as in freedom, and despite being barely a month old, already has a big momentum, attracting many developers and artists. Some of its main features are:

• Physically correct, unbiased renderings
• Optional high-dynamic range output using OpenEXR
• Multi-thread support, with dynamic adding/removing threads
• Cross-platform, well written code (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X)
• Philosophy and goals (!)
  

Most open-source renderers end up as being just toys and get abandoned after some time, but LuxRender Goals clearly estates that they want to create a robust and high-end production renderer. Only time will tell, but it's clearly a step in the right direction.

Also, Metropolis Light Transport (MLT) is going to be available on the next release candidate and is probably the only open-source render to offer this. MLT is the latest trend in ultra-realistic rendering and is used on the Maxwell Render and Indigo Renderer. It can speed up rendering quite drastically on certain types of scenes by sampling important light paths more frequently.

LuxRender's gallery already shows some quite impressive renders:

And here's a quick test I did with the Cube Fields wallpaper scene, after changing a bit the materials:

It still is a very young software, with bugs and not optimized, especially under the Linux and Mac OS X platforms, but if development continues at the current pace, I bet LuxRender with substitute the rather dormant Yafray as the default external renderer in Blender very soon.

—Ratow

Today I finished the wallpaper resolution selector and now it's possible to download a wallpaper with the exact dimensions of your screen. There's an automatic detection script so you should only have to click the download button. If you change the resolution the preview should also change (my first AJAX!). But before I started this update, I did a small analysis of the resolutions visitors were using.

The resolution I speak here is the size of the display, in pixels. The many resolutions fall mainly in three categories, according to their aspect ratios: 4:3, 5:4 and widescreen. The 4:3 was pretty much the standard when the CRT was king. Now, thanks to LCDs and projectors, the other ratios are becoming the norm.

For almost a year now I've been collecting resolution information of my visitors using Google Analytics . Although this is hardly any reference, it shows what resolutions one looking for wallpapers use:

It's interesting to see that 800x600 is a lot less frequent than in other sites. Maybe these users don't really care about customizing their background or maybe they just don't see the background since any window takes a good portion of their screen

The aspect ratios are more or less equally distributed, with 5:4 slightly less common:

The 4:3 standard is still the most common, but only by a small margin. Given that most quality wallpapers on the net are still made for 4:3, widescreen wallpapers are an increasing trend.

Now that it's possible to select which wallpaper resolution to download, it will be interesting to see if these numbers change. Anyway, I hope to analyze this again in the future and with any luck 2560x1600 displays will be much more common then.

—Ratow

Hey everyone, I've just finished a much needed update to the site. Most obvious change is the new visual layout but a lot has changed under the hood also.

I'm using Symfony 1.0.6 plus a few plugins. I really took a while to get to this point but the problem was that I didn't know how I wanted the new site! So my best advice to building a web app would probably be "know what you want" or you will just keep trying the many things symfony alows you to do.

Any way, there are still some things I want to put in here, so stay tuned, and by that I mean subscribe to the RSS feed. YES! I finally have one. In case you have no idea what to do with this, try Google Reader.

Please take a look around and if you find bugs or have some suggestion, please leave a comment.

Cheers,

—Ratow

This title is probably one of the most famous "last words" for blogs but I've been busy the last couple of months developing a new Cube Mine website. There will be more emphasis on my wallpaper gallery and less on the blog, since I'm not really the blogger type.

But here's a sneak peak of the upcoming layout: (click to enlarge)

If you are here looking for some new "Splash" wallpapers, take a look on Splash - Dusk on my DeviantArt scraps. Be sure to read the description.

Well, not much more to say right now, but at least I got that old article out of from the front page...

—Ratow

When someone thinks of rapid web application development, Ruby on Rails is the framework everyone remembers first, but it has a problem. It does not run on standard LAMP web servers and so most web hosting services don't support it on their basic plan, which is the shared hosting. There are a few exceptions like Site5 however many complain of high loads and slow response. Alternative frameworks luckily exists though.

Symfony is a similar open-source PHP web framework but only requires PHP5. Many shared hosts provide PHP5 support very cheap, like GoDaddy, especially with coupons code from RetailMeNot. One can easily get the standalone sandbox available at the site, upload it to the web host and begin playing from there, without having to install a library since only Pear is needed and it is widely available. On the following sections I'll show the process of programming a basic blog+gallery, which you can see here, in about 24 hours. Just keep in mind I have very little PHP experience and never used Symfony before.

• The Process

Symfony is very well documented, with tutorials, screencasts and even a real-world web app with step by step instructions. And so I began by reading the “my first project” tutorial and it was a great way to quickly get acquainted with the framework and its structure. Having had a good first impression, I decided to do a full install through Pear but then I got my first problem: not enough memory. After some quick googling, I found the error to be a low limit in php.ini and raised it.

Even though there are many tutorials available, I prefer to get by just with the API reference and the Symfony book. After a few minutes of reading, I started creating a new project and initial modules. Once again I had an unexpected little problem, after firing up my web server, I couldn't access any page. With the help of the development frontend, I found the error to be permission related because apache couldn't write to the cache directory, and so some tweaking was necessary.

I had a pure HTML and CSS version of the site done before of this project and so building this dynamic version wasn't as difficult as building something from scratch. After cleaning up one page, it was used as the template, and suddenly it looked like some good progress was made.

Next step was using the admin generator which creates simple pages to list, create, edit and delete the various entries in the database. Nothing much really, but it is a nice base to build upon later. The modules which I created were Article, Comment, Wallpaper and Author.

With some basic articles and wallpapers created in the DB, I began creating the main app modules: blog, gallery and comment. Once again, having used the CRUD generator (scaffolding), I had a base to work on and it was only necessary to do a little customization.

The final step of the implementation was the front page. At first I thought that I needed to create another module that would list all articles and wallpapers. It turns that there is a much better way which is to customize the default module to include components from other modules. This keeps the application modular and much cleaner since the logic relative to a module is kept inside the module.

Setting up the site on my shared host (GoDaddy) was easily done, thanks to this post. Basically, I just had to copy Symfony libraries to the web host and setup the rewrite rules. But there was a problem: all links would begin with “/web/” and internal files could be seen. This is because it isn't possible to point the document root to the “web” directory, in my case. Feeling adventurous, I started tinkering with the code and managed to patch it so that the “/web/” part would be dropped.

• The Results

The end result is, of course, this site. As of this writing, stable Symfony version 0.6.3 is being used, but a beta for version 1.0 is already available. I plan to upgrade it soon but even this old version is very satisfactory. Templates, scaffolding, actions and helpers all worked together to speed up development and only a few lines of code (less than a hundred) were needed. My site is far from complete if you compare it with WordPress, for example, but for its purposes it's pretty good already.

I did ran into some problems like a fill-in bug when using XHTML and uploading a site through FTP can be very boring since Symphony only supports RSYNC. Authentication support isn't that great either, in my opinion, with you having to do some manual checks if some more complex authentication is needed. But overall, Symphony proved to be a very decent framework for the ruby-impaired, with quick learning and setup time.

—Ratow

I just added a new section Prints which is actually redirecting to my DeviantArt store page. The new DeviantArt Shop looks incredible with many high quality prints and their printers are certainly top notch.

I once thought that images designed as computer wallpapers wouldn't look as good in print, but after seeing one of mine printed in high quality paper and in large format, I quickly changed my mind.

Currently, the following six images are available. If you would like to see any other available as well, just ask.

Splash

Fractal Sculpture 1 - Blue

Fractal Sculpture 1 - Dark Red

Yin Yang Revisited

Yin and Yang

Cube Fields

—Ratow

Welcome to CubeMine.com. This is the first post and I'll be talking about what's this site about, who am I and what to expect in the next coming weeks.

• What's this site about?

Cubemine.com is about two things: art and technology. Here, you will be able to find wallpapers. Abstract, minimalistic, hi-res 3D computer generated wallpapers mainly. The newest are available right on the main page. There is also my blog here, which I will try to periodically update with content about art and technology in the broader sense. Yes, configuring an LDAP server on OpenBSD to act as a Windows Domain Logon Server is a damn fine art! And speaking of technological art, the playground area will be a place for little experiments, toys and games that I sometimes come up with. Right now, this site is a little more than a mockup, and thus is open to changes. Got cool ideas? Tell me

• Who am I?

If you're wondering who the heck I am anyway, well, I'm Ricardo Lipas a.k.a. Ratow, a Brazilian who lives in South America's biggest city, São Paulo. I'm a graduated eletrical engineer but love to make 3D renderings whenever I can. Right now, I post my art on two places, DeviantArt and InterfaceLift, which is probably where you came from. I'm a big open source fan and use only free tools like Blender and Gimp to make art.

One of the reasons to make a blog section here is that I'm seeking a degree of master and I need to finish my disertation. The problem is that I'm a lousy scientific writer and thought that perhaps writing a blog might help.

• What to expect?

Well, first and foremost, expect new wallpapers. This is the easiest thing for me to do right now. But I what I really want to do is finish coding the site. I could use a blog software like WordPress but reinventing the wheel is cool. Besides nice features are planned, like multi-resolution and multi-aspect (wide and dual-screen) wallpapers. Next on the list is support for comments and RSS or else I'm not going to get much feedback...

—Ratow

PS: Minor edit on the pages and, yes, I just sold my soul to a big ad company.