Author Archives: Alex

Zero to Dockerized Java, Step-by-Step

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Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with Containers and Container-related technology in AWS, and one conversation that keeps coming up over and over again is, “How do I get started containerizing my application?” and similarly, “How do I get my container running in the cloud?”

There are lots of resources available to answer these questions, but I find usually:

  1. These resources don’t take you all the way to the beginning, or…
  2. They have too many bells and whistles, with lots of “magic” going on behind the scenes.

In this post, I’m going to assume you are a developer who knows his/her craft very well. You know your code, you know how to build it, and how to get it running. (In this example, we’ll be using Java, but the example can be applied to almost any web language or framework.) Instead, I will assume that you need a ground-up example of how to containerize and start your application in the cloud, so we will focus on that.

Continue reading →

YerFace Animation in Production!

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Hey all! It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally launched my CGI “Toon-style” show! Check it out:

 

So what’s going on behind the scenes? ALL of the CGI is modeled and rendered inside of Blender which is a free/open source CGI modeling and animation tool. It was a little hard to get the hang of it at first, but (after literally years of work) I’ve gotten something that I really like.

But what about facial animation? The characters need to be as expressive as possible, but I can’t afford the time to animate every single movement by hand. So that’s where my new tool YerFace! comes into play. It’s a facial performance capture software that looks at an actor’s face with a regular webcam and listens to their spoken audio and automatically generates keyframe animation into Blender.

It took literally years to conceive and write the solution, including the all-new YerFace! animation program. But I think it was worth the wait!

PillarCon 2018 – YerFace! From Computer Vision to Cartoon Animation

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I got to speak at PillarCon 2018 about YerFace! We did a LIVE DEMO and Snufflefungus showed up!

I share about how I used applied computer vision powered by GPU-accelerated algorithms and machine learning to solve my cartoon facial animation problems for Markley Bros. Entertainment.

I also share some of the history of the Malex Minute, and our mighty struggle to bring our lovable characters to the screen.

Check it out!

s3dl

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This weekend I got curious. How lightweight could an Amazon S3 download script be?

There are plenty of AWS and S3 command line tools and libraries for everyone’s favorite scripting languages, but as I’m currently working in the IoT space, I wondered what the smallest number of dependencies was that I could get away with and still authenticate a private file download.

Here is what I came up with: Continue reading →

About Me

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Hi there! My name is Alex Markley, and this is my blog. I’ve been a software professional since 2003 and recently I’ve had a lot of interest in cloud computing, app containerization, machine learning and computer vision, the Internet of Things, embedded Linux, and lots more.

I am also an aspiring writer and comedian. (For more on that, see Markley Bros. Entertainment.)

elliotCar

Beep beep!

Last, but not least, I am a God-fearing family man: Adoring husband to an amazing wife, and loving father to three delightful little boys.

Want to network? Jump over to the Contact page and we’ll connect.