End of term hangin' with my Fine Arts class

This afternoon I went with my super awesome Fine Arts class out to Molly Blooms for a bit, it was reeeeeeallllllly fun. They are a really awesome and talented bunch of people and this has been a monstrously exciting class.

Anyway here are some photos and also click here: http://www.mikejutan.com/3D/movies/mollyblooms.avi for a random video of me record-scratching the dinnerware at Molly Blooms, oh happy times. :)


Cory getting psyched for upcoming beer

On the way to Molly Blooms

Kristina and Cory checkin out the menus

Paul ready to beer-it-up

Don looking very serious

Andrea and Me

Random picture of me

Paul reminiscing about the school term

Really nice "Think Different" quote

I found this really awesome quote/poem from Apple Computers, this was from their "Think Different" advertising a few years ago. I really like it so I thought I'd post it here. :)

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits...The rebels....The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent...They imagine...They heal.
They explore...They create...They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Awesome. I love it!!!!!!

Website should be up again soon

Hi all,

Seems that my web server went down for a day or two and the company that my site is hosted on is completely replacing the server. Should be up again very soon. Swwwweeet.

Looking for Raytracer book recommendations

Hi all,

I am taking Graphics next term (summer) at school and I am looking for Raytracer book recommendations.

I have been told that "Physically Based Rendering" by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys is a good choice so I am picking up that for sure.

If anyone else has good recommendations for this kind of reading material please let me know at jutes@rogers.com Thanks!!

3D NURBS assignment

My next assignment for Fine Arts is a NURBS assignment with a cloth and 2 well-placed potatoes on it, (in my case a regular potato and a sweet potato), interesting shadows with reasonably complicated lighting setup and a table and wall behind the table.

I have been busy so I had to start and finish the assignment today and it went pretty well. I got the modeling and texturing done reasonably quickly, the lighting took a long time to get right. Really enjoyed this assignment though, it was fun times!!!!

Anyway here is my final product, I am going to submit the one with the brick wall.


First render with wallpaper

Final render with shadows, lighting and bricks with bump mapping

Original cloth and table work

New Disney/Pixar Cars Trailer!!

I just got an email from a friend at Pixar, and he was really excited because the new Cars trailer is out!! Take a look at http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/cars/ and there is even a High Definition version of it for download, it looks AWESOME. Can't wait to see the movie when it's all done!!

My sister's Masters Proposal Defense and Dinner

Today was my sister Norma's Proposal Defense for her Master's Thesis. She did a really awesome job of presenting and answering questions, and of course the Jutan family was there for all of the action. It was really fun and we celebrated afterwards with a fancy Indian curry dinner, it was realllly good.


Random picture of Norma, my sister

Norm with a memory stick around her neck

Norm at dinner

Me and my sister

Mom and Dad wearing a winter hat because my sister needs to turn the heat up in her apartment, haha!!

A few winter photos

Well it's officially Winter here in freezing cold Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, haha!! Yeah it's been pretty cold over the past few days, but today was one of the first of those "nice winter days" where it is snowy and cold but there is lots of sunshine. So it was pretty sweet today and a perfect chance for some winter photos of Waterloo's campus!


The street near my house on the way to school

The pathway on the way to school

Snowy trees

Another tree that is chilly

A cool willow tree

My building! This is the MC, the "Mathematics and Computer Science building"

The SLC, the Student Life Centre where I usually hang out between classes

Transferred a Dave Matthews Band file on my network!

Ok this is TOTALLY awesome!!!! :) I have been continuing work on my Reliable Data Transfer assignment for Networking and since I am transferring byte streams across my network, I don't have to just transfer text files... I can of course transfer Binary files too right? Well this is SUPER awesome, once I finally got my reusable "wrap-around" sequence numbers working, and also fixed my packet headers so that they contain a few bits which specify how much "actual" data belongs in each packet, I successfully transferred a large text file across my network.

This is exciting, but I then copied a 5.2 Megabyte Dave Matthews Band Mp3 file to my school account, and tried to transfer that across my network. 3 Min later, it arrived on the "other side" of the network (i.e. it completed writing the output file to the directory), I FTPed the file back to my own computer and right now I am listening to it!! Hehe it's called "TransferredDMB.mp3" and it is completely working perfectly. How cool is that?!??!?! So I sliced up the file into approximately 5022 chunks of about 1010 bytes each, transferred them across the network, and put the file together on the other side. Very exciting.

Hehe yes only someone who is also in Computer Science will also find this exciting. :)

Reliable Data Transfer assignment

Well friends, as expected here is a late night Networking Assignment post from me.

I am doing really well on this assignment. I started yesterday and honestly I am most of the way there already. This is nuts!!!!! I didn't expect to move this quickly on it, I've only spent maybe 7 hours yesterday, 7 hours today... so maybe 14 or 15 hours total and I basically already have a (mostly) working solution!! Oh man that is SWEET!! Usually these are 40 - 50 hour assignments at least, so I am pretty happy that it seems to be working well so far.

For this assignment I am transferring a file across an unreliable network and the entire file must arrive safely on the other side of the network as I described before. This is pretty cool and I basically setup the entire Network last night and tonight I did the entire Transport Layer, Application Layer, fixed the Routers so that they have a Static Forwarding Table, and implemented the Go-Back-N static window mechanism to re-send packets that have not succeeded. I am using RDT version 4.0, this is the protocol which has a timeout that essentially re-sends the entire set of "un-acknowledged" packets back to the receiver after a certain delay time. I didn't think that I needed extra Java mutual exclusion here but it seems that it's a good idea to use Synchronized keywords around my methods to be safe. I "think" it is Thread-Safe anyway, but I am not sure, probably a good idea to ensure for mutual exclusion otherwise who knows what kind of weird problems I might run into!!

So that's what's going on in my homework land at the moment, this is going surprisingly well. I have basically written the entire program in less than 2 days so that is AWESOME. I expected this to take me a week, so I have left a lot of time for it. Hopefully I can get it done sooner than expected and move onto the other 500,000 things I need to do before the end of term. :)

Otherwise all is well and I am listening to some good tunes while working, of course the Scrubs Soundtrack as expected but also listening to the Garden State Soundtrack now too, it's also super awesome.

Gotta get started on the next Houdini Assignment at some point, I think it is due next week as well so I gotta get going on that. I bought some garlic bread and cranberry ginger ale tonight for a snack break, man that was tasty. Looking forward to the end of term, it is coming up pretty soon!!

Networking Assignment once again!!

Well that time again! Time for another Networking Assignment and me making lots of posts about all of the crazy Java stuff I am coming across!! Haha yeah good times!!

Tonight was pretty sweet. Instead of spending tons of time finishing the last part of Concurrency, I instead started my Networking Assignment which was a VERY good move!! It worked out very well, I got CVS up and running, and spent a while changing around my old solutions to Assignment 1 and 2 to write parsing for Assignment 3 and also to setup the Network Topology required for Assignment 3. That took a fair while but I think I got everything setup in the network tonight and it should be working which is awesome. The next part I need to implement is Reliable Data Transfer - this means that the wire in the network is overloaded by one of the Routers and therefore it starts to drop packets. But my "sender" router is sending important data which needs to be sent reliably (i.e. the entire file arrives safely) at the receiver router.

This is pretty cool as it ends up that I will send a text file across my simulated Network, and the network gets heavily congested by another Router which is continually sending junk packets across the network, and my solution will handle the fact that I need to get this file across the network despite the network congestion. Very exciting!!!

This is pretty awesome and man I love this class. It's a lot of work of course (as are all Waterloo CS classes!!!) but I really appreciate the kind of work this is. Also it's much more interesting than some of my other classes, the lectures have been really fun and informative and I think I actually understand the Internet MUCH better now. I am really glad I took this class!

I still have a fair bit left to do in this assignment but I made a huge start today, so that rocks.

Otherwise all is well, there is so much to do at school and somehow I think I have an assignment due for almost every single class on the last day of term. Oy gevault.

This term is wrapping up though so it's pretty sweet that I am somehow managing to get this huge amount of work done. Good times.

I bought Shrek 2 today, for some reason Future Shop had it online for $9.99 which is super cheap, and I hadn't bought it yet so it seemed like a good time to pick up a copy.

Garden State, oh man it rocks

Today at school there was a DVD sale and since I have been talking about the movie Garden State for at least a month, and I hadn't ever actually seen the movie... I figured I had better buy it. I kept hearing how awesome it is and since I am (perhaps somewhat) obsessed with the TV show Scrubs now, I figured I'd better pick it up. (The main actor from Scrubs is the writer/director/star of Garden State) Good times.

Worked for a good 5 hours on Concurrency again tonight, and then submitted my assignment and pretty much HAD to watch Garden State. Yeah it was totally awesome. Some super good quotes from it (I'll have to add some to my rotating quotes on my website, hehe) ohhhhh man it was SO good!!

Good to get yet another assignment done and I can feel the end of term almmmmoost there. Found out today as well that I am doing really well in my Fine Arts class. Right on.

Well it's 3am again so off to bed for me. If you haven't seen Garden State yet, check it out, it's really awesome, great dialogue and Natalie Portman is really good in it as well.

Sleeping Barber's Concurrency Problem

Hehe well instead of going to bed I may as well Blog it up a bit, hehe I am really having a good time with this thing. Kinda surprised that I am making time to keep up with this during school... thanks to everyone who is still reading this!

So today was pretty nuts, my parents and my sister Norma and I went out to a bagel place for breakfast again and then I came home and continued working on my CS assignment. It took a long time but since I went to bed at a decent hour and got up at a decent hour (yeeahhh!!) I was done a whole truckload of work by 3pm. That was AWESOME. Then I headed over to the Fine Arts building for "a break" i.e. just working on something creative and artsy for a bit, that was good times. I finished my Fine Arts Assignment and fixed the rendering errors. Then I biked home, did 3 hours more of programming, biked back to school, collected my renders, compiled the renders into a video, posted it online, and then biked home! Then, you guessed it, I've been working on CS since then!! It's about 12:40am now, and I got home from school again around 6:30pm. Wow what a long day!!

Oh I forgot to talk about what I am actually doing for CS. This is my Concurrency class, and I am working on 4 different implementations of the Sleeping Barber's Algorithm. I finished the Semaphore and the Internal Scheduling implementations and it was harder to get the program actually running and compiling than it was to get the main part of it working. I had a silly error and we are using uC++ (a language that my professor wrote), so the compiler didn't quite catch my error. It was a silly mistake, and took me at least 2 hours to track down. uC++ is sweet and has some pretty awesome new control structures that we learned, but it's a bit tough to try to debug concurrent programming when you get a random runtime error and have absolutely no idea why it is happening!! Haha yeah that took a while, but I am pretty happy that I got it all sorted out now.

This makes you very thankful for the kinds of compilers that are usually used in development and how good they are to you - Eclipse I think actually has suggestions in the "Tasks" part of their compiler, like "You probably missed a semi-colon here" or something like that. I think I remember some really awesome compiler errors/warnings that made my job as a programmer much, much easier!!

I did for sure make time for The Simpsons, as is necessary for me to stay mentally stable/sane. It was really reeallllly funny tonight, oh man something crazy about Homer running for Mayor and he had this insane Salamander Suit on for almost the entire episode, it was hilarious. Ohhh man I love that show!!!

Anyway, good times as usual. I worked super hard today but it has paid off nicely and I am looking a bit more organized and prepared for all the stuff I have to do next week. School is going to be done pretty soon and then off to California again and I can't wait for that!!

Lots of fun stuff coming up after school is done for the term and I am really looking forward to it, there is still tons to do at school but it's not that much longer now. Just gotta keep at it for another few weeks. :)

3D Culvert assignment finished!

Today I finished my 3D Culvert assignment for my Fine Arts class, good times!!

Here are some of the final renders and also here is a link to the movie if you'd like to see it.
It's pretty big (85Mb) but I like how it turned out. Fun stuff.

I took some of my old assignments (rotating sphere machine, wine glasses, sake bottle, etc) and busted them up a bit and put them into this assignment!

Check out the movie at:
http://www.mikejutan.com/3D/movies/ and click on "Assignment 5".
















First scene in the culvert, some graffiti on the walls, lights, glow, fog, and my old assignments scattered along the ground. :)
















Close up of the light and light holder texture
















Sake bottle and wine glasses

Australian Tax Return dinner!

Well after several months of writing back and forth, I finally got my Australian Tax back from when I worked there! Awesome. It took a long time for it to arrive and I didn't expect to get it, so I was really happy about it. Right into the savings account for the "Mike Jutan Graduation World Trip" - but first I thought I'd take my family out for a fancy dinner at the Outback Steakhouse. It was really good!!!!!

We had a great time and we ate a LOT of food, oh man it was awesome. :)


Outback Steakhouse for dinner

Mom and Dad

Me looking kinda crazy

Sweet salad action

Psyched about the food!!

More culvert action

Tonight I had 3 hours of hardcore Algorithms work followed by 4 hours of hardcore Fine Arts work. You know I'm in school when my idea of "balancing my life" is doing some CS homework and some Fine Arts homework in one night, rather than just all CS homework. :) haha, oh man school is crazy.

Anyway stuff is good though. I got back my last Algorithms assignment and I did really really well, so that was exciting. Gotta finish the next one so I can get onto all the other assignment work that I need to do.

Here is the culvert work I did tonight, I sculpted and then smoothed the base of the culvert to make it all bumpy and crazy. I added some bent versions of my wine glasses and Sake bottle from Assignment 4, and then added electrical wires coming out of the ceiling and some rusty pipes as well. It's getting to the stage where I can just change some small details and lighting and then I should be done this project. For class we need to do a basic animation that just looks around in the culvert, so that should be fun.


Culvert and wires with rusty pipes and textures

More fog

Bent Sake bottle and cut wine glasses

Same with fog

Electrical wires

Zach Braff's blog?!!! Man this rocks!

Tonight I somehow came across Zach Braff's blog, oh man that is insane!!!
As you can see from a bunch of the previous posts about Scubs ("Man, Scrubs is awesome". "Why is Scrubs the best TV show ever", and so on...), I am now totally hooked on this wicked TV show.

Turns out the lead actor in the show has his own blog and he's posted a video post there to all of his fans, oh man that is super cool. If I am famous one day, then Zach, I will be sure to take your brilliant example. That is amazing, I am totally blown away. I've never seen someone so famous actually care this much about their fans. That ROCKS.

Check out his video post!
http://gardenstate.typepad.com/zach_braffs_garden_state_/2005/11/a_video_post_fr.html

Anyway, back to homework and daydreaming about being an actor on Scrubs. Hehe.

Light bulb glow and fog tests

Today I added some fog to my scene in Houdini and added some light glow. I spent a while getting the cone lights inside of the light bulb models to work correctly and to give the kind of effect I was looking for. I am pretty happy with how it looks now and I am going to continue working on this project this week.


Lightbulb with glow shader inside of it

Light glow with fog test

Light glow on all 3 lights, with fog test and spotlights

No spotlights, but too much yellow cone lights

Dimmed yellow cone lighting

Getting closer to the effect I wanted, pink cone lights with increased diffuse on lightbulb glow

Too much diffuse

And juuusttt riiigghhht!!

More website additions

I just added a "Stuff I like" page to my website listing some of my favourite music, movies, books, food, actors/actresses/directors, etc!!

Yes I know I should be asleep instead of spending hours on my webpage again, but oh well. It's nice and updated now, I am glad I have finally put a bit of effort into maintaining it. Sweeeet!

I should give a "shout out" to Matt's Mom, Hi!!!! Matt came over for a few hours today and his Mom and brother dropped him off, and his Mom says she is still reading my blog. Awesome. Sorry I didn't take your advice and get to bed earlier (it's 4:22am again) - I promise I will soon!! :)

Keep an eye out for more postings of my next 3D animation project. This time it is a 3D culvert with lots of interesting textures.

Added music, links, and more to my website

Yep, I'm nuts. It's 5:45am and I am still up. Tonight I worked on an essay for school, started it, researched for it, read extra articles online, made point form notes, then watched SNL on tv, then ate a snack, then completely finished the essay, then talked to my roommate for an hour, then started working on my website at 4am... thus the "it's 5:45am and I'm still up!"

I have wanted to update my website for a long time and I've been too busy so I figured I wasn't doing much else at 4:00am so I may as well do it then!!

So the website is starting to get a lot fancier, I've got some Mp3's of me playing guitar on there now, links to friend's websites, rotating images on the front page, and a setup for more pages to come. I am going to add some more info about me, a "favourite stuff" section, my resume in HTML as well as the current PDF format and a bunch of other stuff. Let me know what you think of the changes if you have some comments, thanks.

Check it out at http://www.mikejutan.com Enjoy!!

Added rotating front page images to website

My buddy Matt told me how to do some PHP programming so I just added some rotating images to my main website. If you go to http://www.mikejutan.com you will often see a different front page image every time you visit. Sweet.

I am going to use this same technology to make my "Quote of the month" much cooler, since as you can see the "Quote of the month" has been my quote for August-November. :) I am going to add some PHP stuff so that I get a random quote every time you refresh the page, to keep it interesting.

I'll be adding some more stuff to my website soon too, some Mp3s of me playing guitar, posts of my Houdini 3D Assignments in high resolution and posts of my Houdini videos. Fun times!!

3D culvert and random abstract art

For our next Fine Arts assignment I am doing a 3D culvert (one of those pipes that are usually under a highway) and I will be making a bunch of textures and modeling some rusty pipes, rocks and pebbles etc.

As a start to the assignment I had to get the culvert shape going and in the process of doing that I did some things wrong and ended up "making" some random stuff, let's call it "abstract art" haha!!!

Anyway thought I'd post these cause they kinda look cool. The last picture here is my culvert so far, I modeled some lightbulbs and lightbulb cages today. Sweet.


Wheel with hard shadows and random bump map

Same without bump map

Same with soft shadows

Crazy abstract art action

Whhhaaa?!?!

Sweet soft shadows (took 1.5 hours to render) haha awesome!!

Start of culvert tunnel (abstract style?!)

Culvert shape

Fixed culvert extrusions

Culvert with modeled lightbulbs and lightbulb cages