Personal blog entry from Assembly 2010

Hellos from Assembly 2010. We just called it a day at the booth and I rushed home to change clothes as we head to the center of Helsinki for some well deserved R and R. Things are certainly looking up again as the BOINC/BURP side seems to be happily crunching away again. Unfortunately the account view and animation view will need to be rebuilt (will be done in 1-2 weeks time for sure), but apart from those, it seems that we survived the meltdown pretty much intact. Thanks to the great efforts of both our visiting star Janus Kristensen and the Renderfarm.fi developer guru Olivier Romand. I also need to again thank our ISP Otaverkko (especially Tuomo and Jani) for their help in bringing the server back up. Thanks guys.

The day itself went super nice, we started off the day at the ArtTech seminar with myself and Janus Kristensen holding the floor about BURP and Renderfarm.fi, finally going on to getting Kalle Max Hoffman, the German producer of the collaborative movie Snowblind on stage with us. We had some cool news to tell to the world: Renderfarm.fi is integrating it's services with the collaborative movie creation platform Wreckamovie.com from the makers of Star Wreck - the most viewed Finnish film of all time. I'll post a more official announcement about this integration in the coming days, but it promises to be the beginning of a very interesting relationship. This integration was planned 1,5 years ago, but took some time to actually surface as we were still bogged down with a lot of other development issues.

After the announcement we all went live on AssemblyTV to speak more about the future. The day then went on feature Kalle Max and Hannu Hoffren showing off Blender and how it was used in the making of Snowblind at the Renderfarm.fi booth. We actually also had the priviledge to meet with John Buckman, the chairman of the board for EFF and founder of Magnatune and got some really nice ideas for the future from him. Nathan Letwory (jesterKing) presented current Blender 2.5 developments and we finished off the day with the first ever BURP developer meeting, where we talked about what should be developed next. The whole day the #blender.fi community was very much in place and we were, by estimation, some 20 strong.

PS. It was really cool to see that many of the short film productions shown at Assembly actually featured Blender as a tool. I mean some of this stuff is amazing. I will put a link up later. Now to the city with the rest of the crew (phewh it's 25c here during the night - eat your heart out Central Europe)! Here's a picture of the us (not in full force, but definitely worth the post anyway).

The Assembly 2010 Renderfarm.fi / Blender.fi Crew