i’ve kinda been lusting after one of these babies ever since they got announced.  too lazy to click on the link?  well, its a kindle.

i reckon they’d be a pretty sweet little item to have.  i don’t get a huge amount of time to read these days, but i do catch the bus every day.  and while there is nothing stopping me from taking a book (and i sometimes do) that just means i’ve gotta keep up with the books that are out there, and that means find time to poke around book stores.

anyway, about the only book store i generally poke around these days is amazon anyway, so…  hence the lust.

of course, at $360, its sadly going to be un-fulfilled lust…  if it falls under 300, thats starting to get into the just maybe zone.  so fingers crossed.

i know i’ve complained before, but man… anyone know how to query perforce for a pending branch/integrate’s source? I can’t see any way to get perforce to tell me where a pending integration came from. shouldn’t this be possible using the “describe” change command? I mean if “describe” change doesn’t fully describe the changelist, whats the point of the command?

So I was hoping (stupidly I know) that 2009 might have addressed some of the shortcomings of python integration in 2008.  Stupid I know.  And yes I know about the awesome work the pymel dudes are doing (although I doubt they have a solution for this either).

But one of the most annoyingly stupid things you can’t do with python in maya is set custom exception handlers.  Why?  I’m not really sure…  But its a real bummer.  All of a sudden this awesome way of tracking problems is gone.

For a bunch of standalone tools I’ve written lately I’ve put in custom exception handlers which shoot off emails in some way when errors occur in the tool.  The error email includes a big dump of the callstack, local variables etc…  Oftentimes an issue can be fixed and submitted before a user can even construct an email complaining which is super useful.  But tools within maya…  Not possible.

Sad making.

so i keep an eye on blender from time to time.  i mean i love maya as a tool, but its development seems to becoming more and more stilted.  i can’t remember the last time i cared about a new feature.  well…  ok thats a lie.  python integration has been the best single feature they ever added.  and the new animation layers is pretty nifty too…

but before that, i think the last interesting addition was like the parent constraint or something.

but anyway, enough about maya.  blender looks like it might start to get interesting soon.  the upcoming 2.5 release includes user defined hotkeys (yes, seriously, the lack of this feature has kept me away.  re-learning hotkeys is kinda like rebuilding the pyramids or something) and a bunch of other fundamental changes that really sound kick ass.

speaking of python – while having python available in maya is awesome, the actual integration of the language is abysmal.  like beyond abysmal.  in fact, I’d be willing to bet that less than a man week of time was spent on it.  very VERY poor form autodesk.

anyway.  blender.  keep an eye on it.

anyone use it?