table.sample { border-width: 5px 5px 5px 5px; border-spacing: 0px; border-style: solid solid solid solid; border-color: white white white white; border-collapse: collapse; background-color: white; } table.sample th { border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; padding: 1px 1px 1px 1px; border-style: inset inset inset inset; border-color: gray gray gray gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } table.sample td { border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; padding: 1px 1px 1px 1px; border-style: inset inset inset inset; border-color: gray gray gray gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; }

I passed my Advanced Driving Test this morning so when all the paperwork goes through I’ll be a full member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists!

I played at the UK Masters Five Man this weekend and had to drive up from Essex starting a 5am in the morning. Driving conditions were very interesting as it rained at first and by the time I had arrived at 7:20am it was like a blizzard and we had 3-4 inches of snow on the ground.

Play went ahead though and by 11 the sun had come out and the snow had started to melt. However towards the end of the day we had problems with the wind and play was cut short after 6 full games with some teams having played 7.

The Peach Project, who are currently creating an open source movie only using blender and other open source tools, have finally released a trailer for their movie Big Buck Bunny.

http://peach.blender.org/index.php/trailer/

It looks fantastic, I preordered a DVD last year and can’t wait to get my copy when this is released…

We had a coding sprint for entertainer this weekend, among the things completed were:

• Lots of progress on the new ORM
• Weather and WeatherForecasts have been written and interface with the Yahoo Weather website. Locations for weather forecasts can be edited in the configuration manager and the weather button on the main menu can be hidden. We still have the Weather Screen to create.
• Eject CD button has been added, however it is disabled by default in content.conf
• Code Line Counter tool has been added
• More work has been done on resolution independance of widgets
• New tab widgets
• Video Clips menu now works
• Documentation has been updated and expanded
• Lots of work on the googlecode issues

Overall, it has been a great sprint with a lot of progress being made by all the developers.

Hopefully we will be able to get the Weather Screen completed soon to finish off the development of that area for the 0.1 milestone.

I’ve started a googlecode page for the python code I’ll be using to help manage the Blender Week Day Challenges. You can find the project page here

At the moment I’ve add Challenge, Entry and Item classes and it can now load and save challenge data in xml format.

The next step will be added a ChallengeManager class to manager the insertion of data and automatic posting to www.blenderchallenge.com and blenderartists.org