MOCCA – C4D

I recently discovered how easy it is to rig something to use mocca, which makes me feel kind of stupid, because I was rigging all my models the old fashioned way – anger and elbow grease. For those who aren’t familiar with MOCCA, then read on, you don’t know what you’re missing out on.

MOCCA is a system for animating something with IK, creating a set of rules for how bones move and bend. Think of it like this: Rather than rotating the thigh bone, and then the shin bone, to get the foot in the right place, you would move a grip object, and the foot would follow, bending the knee properly and everything. It makes animating something really easy.

And it’s easy, too. </fanboy>

  • Set up you bones ( they must be bones, not joints ).
  • The first bone must be a null bone, so add another bone at the top of the chain with length 0.
  • Select all the bones and fix them ( under the ‘fixation’ tag in the properties menu ).
  • Select the root bone (the one at the top, the parent bone ) and then click Character->MOCCA->setup mocca chain. It might be Character->mocca->setup chain.
  • There will not be an object called ‘bone#.goal’ under the root bone. Move it around.
  • enjoy.

IB world lit exam!

IT has suddenly dawned on me that I have an IB world lit exam. Tomorrow. Gah.

Taking world lit has had some strange effects on my life, like my new found tendancy to analyse everything that I read to the point of utter nothingness, or the tendancy to twich around hardback books. It hasn’t actually improved my writing skills, however, which is going to be a problem, considering that I don’t really know what I’m supposed to write for the exam. Which is tomorrow.

I also have a spanish exam after the world lit one, but If it is anything like the classwork we do, it will be four games of bingo and a crossword, followed by a short sleep. And people will be playing PSPs through out the exam.

It’s slightly unnerving that I’m not concerned with my physics exam *at all*, but am paniking over a subject that I don’t really care about. If I don’t post by tuesday, assume the worst has happened. I donate by PC to xkcd.

bash.org = awesome

I have known about the various irc quote databases for a while, but never really delved into them. bash.org, xkcdb.org, they are truly awesome. Here are some of the quotes I have found today:

  • * @darklyndsea claws bizarre’s eyes out

    <@Bizarre> (

  • * Ainslee is back -( cemetery )- gone 1 hr 3 min 29 s

    <Kajun> Pickup or delivery?

  • <Sev> Come on.  You know that you want to die in a way that inspires people to invent new, flaming drinks.
  • <Hiroe> he was dressed as a big fuckin devil
    <Hiroe> like, HUGE costume
    <Hiroe> 8-foot lizard wings, giant horns on the head
    <Hiroe> at some anime con in california
    <Hiroe> they were double booked with a southern Baptist group in the same hotel
    <Hiroe> he’s riding the elevator down to the con space
    <Hiroe> doors open, little old baptist woman standing there
    <Hiroe> he just says “Going Down” in his best evil voice
  • omg its zack wtf: my math teacher staples burger king applications to failed tests

And so on. I’m really just using this post as a marker so I don’t loose those quotes, but hey, I’m sure someone would enjoy them. If anyone read this thing, anyway…

PC upgrades! yay!

Well, a friend of my dads acquired a new computer, which he got me to set up. I installed some new hardware, a 1TB hard drive and a new DVD burner. In return, he gave me his old PC, which had 1 gig of ram and a 120GB harddrive which happened to fit my desktop, meaning that I am now 1 GB of ram richer. Which is good.

Unfortunately, given moores law, the fact that my PC has a 2.0 GHz processor is rapidly becoming unbearable, but I have neither the money to buy a new core, nor would my motherboard support any of the new variants. Which makes me very sad indeed.

Webcomics – you don’t miss them until they are gone?

As most people know, webcomics are one of the more reliable sources of internet entertainment – I know that isn’t a particularly interesting statement if you don’t follow comics, or think comics are a geek focused passtime, but comics are fun. Fun for staring at a screen, anyway. I personally have a comic collection which takes three days to review.

The reason for this post is that my favourite webcomic ( sequential art ) hasn’t been updated for the last 12 days – that sounds so lame when I read it – but it is important. It shows how dependant we are on *instant* information. What would the nerd race do without up to date info? no news, no comics, no IRC? The world revolves around people being connected, and we rely on the internet so much to achieve that.

If you’re not that spiritual, ignore what I said. It really boils down to an excuse to complain about a lack of new comics.

Back!

I have returned – both metaphorically and physically. Metaphorically being posting again, and physically being back from holiday. Which means that I have exams. Tomorrow.

IB higher maths seemed like a good idea at the time.

Spore: I wants it.

Spore is finally here, after how many years of waiting, spore has landed. Or leaked out, or whatever. You see, it turns out that a group of stores in the land down under – Australia – started selling the game on September the First. good for us, bad for EA. The early release meant that the RELOADED (?) group had plenty of time to crack the DRM on spore, and post it online. While I decided that I must procure a copy of this game to see if this is true, the spore torrents are clogged by pesky leachers. GAH! So, I’m stuck downloading from rapidshare, which is dull. Hopefully, I can convince a friend to purchase spore and nick a copy off them, and apply the crack to that. Hopefully.

Hacking DMZ – a lost cause?

We’ve all had the experience of being confused by internet jargon and buzzwords, albeit ones created by the runescape generation, be it things like “Trad?” or the slightly more sophisticated “ERROR 42 – invalid …..”. Never the less, as the number of protocols we have to configure grow, so does the chance that someone else has misconfigured one of theirs, allowing you access. DMZ is one such protocol.

Technically it’s not a protocol, but I needed it to be to work with my introduction. DMZ stands for demilitarized zone, and ironically refers to a computer with no defences. It should be called the helpless zone. Unless you have your DMZ as a computer with a good firewall, then you are opening your network up to the whole world.

In order to exploit DMZ, the other computer must be running some form of server that you can exploit. Simple as that. The chance that you find something running on that server is higher – assuming they have no firewall, but anyone intelligent enough to work out how to set up DMZ and a server will probably have a firewall as well – and they show up brighter on the NMAP radar.

A useful trick to exploit DMZ for safety reasons is to have your DMZ pointing to a nonexistent IP. That way your network remains invisible to the online world. Unfortunately, aside from confusing people, it becomes difficult to find any meaningful use for DMZ. Sorry guys, better luck next time.

Suger Free Mints – Contain Glass?

I acquired a packet of mints recently, a small packet with an interesting lid. If you press down on it, it bends inwards and you can take it off the packet. You then put it back, press the sides together and it snaps back into shape, locking the container again. This can be used as a weapon, if you hold the lid close to someones ear and then press the sides. Also – a quick examination of the ingredients list reveals that the mints contain a small portion of silicon dioxide, which – for the non chemists – is the chemical formula for glass. Painful.

Useful ports – which ones can you hack? ( intro to metasploit tutorial )

A question that is often asked is Why the hell do we have so many ports? Nobody is ever going to use all 63-thousand of them, so why so many? And which ones are useful? Mostly, if you’re reading this then you will be looking for something to exploit, something with less then perfect security. In that case, you don’t need to know what’s on every port, just what runs on the common ones.

First of all, the bad port: 554. I have no idea what runs on it, some Microsoft radio service. It’s not something that can be exploited, but if given the chance and included in a port scan it will take valuable time to resolve, all for a useless piece of information.

The good ports are much more interesting: Port 80 means that either the victim has a webserver or an unsecured router – fun. port 25 indicates an FTP server, which often goes paired with the unsecured router. Anything running on port 23 is fun, because port 23 is telnet. If you find something running a telnet server, try youre hardest to get in, because telnet will allow you greater control of the victims computer then any other system – broadly speaking . Note, however that telnet can sometimes be used as a command line only router configuration tool, in which case it becomes useless for hacking purposes.