The Math Is Easy

Playing With Perspective.

// August 3rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Geekery

Browsing through some old photos, I noticed that there was a pair taken centimeters apart from one another, and flipping through them rapidly created that pseudo-3d effect (turns out that’s called wiggle stereoscopy). Which got me thinking about perspective, which got me thinking about stereoscopy, which got me to open Photoshop and start putzing around.

So here’s my first perspective test:

The cluster of two circles at the top is pretty straightforward. The two more subtle and uncertain things I spent more time playing with were the background and the sphere at the bottom. The background cloud has a bit of distortion that Should make the bottom clouds seem closer, but I’m not really sure if that’s happening. And for the sphere, I’m trying to play with lighting to make it seem like you’re looking at the same object from the perspective of each individual eyeball. Because the lighting is on the left side of the ball, your right eye should be seeing a little less of it. Playing with this has been weird, as the further I take the light from the same spot, the more confused the image gets. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong yet.

Ok, so I got all into the wiggle stereoscopy idea after typing all this up, so I decided to go ahead and learn a little more about Photoshop. Yes, folks, I have clearly caught up with the rest of the internet. I’m coding like it’s 1997, and here I present you with my first ever animated .gif. Enjoy.

Fibonacci!

// April 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery, Math

I’ve been toying around with some maths lately. I’ve been playing with cellular automata, the chaos game, and most recently I’ve turned my attention back to an old interest, Fibonacci art. I’m going to write a fair amount about all these eventually, but for now I’ve posted up a brief description of my two presentable toys on my other blog, Imbrickle. I’ll post more here soon as I have the time, but in the meantime, go have fun!

New Keyboard!

// March 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery

About a month ago at the office, I upgraded from a terrible old PC to a brand new aluminum and glass iMac, and part of the deal was Apple’s new keyboard, aka The Heavenly Wafer of Typy Goodness. Aside from Apple’s seemingly ridiculous decision to move around the old comfortable F key functions like Dashboard and Expose, this is the single best keyboard I’ve ever used for a desktop machine.

So after a month of agony at home, I picked one up just now, at 2:30am, at the Apple Store. The old keyboard, while neat-looking, has a really awkward feel after using this new design so much. The keys feel so deep, as if to say “Hello there. I’m going to give you carpal tunnel now, kthx.”

Here are some other benefits of the new keyboards compared to the old:

• More comfortable
• Sounds cooler to type on
• Music controls built in
• If you’re like some people, you’ll no longer have to worry about all your food spilling in between the keys
• The thin aluminum casing can make a great self-defense weapon, should the need arise. It’s better than a Ginsu.

So there you have it. Go get you one.

Oh! And as a sidenote, while at the store, I got to play a little with a MacBook Air. Before seeing it, I was pretty skeptical, thinking it was a niche machine that wouldn’t really appeal to many. But after playing with it, I get it now. The thing is tiny and light. Surprisingly so on both accounts. I’ve heard concerns of flimsiness especially pertaining to the monitor half. I abused the Air a bit to see for myself, and it’s no less flimsy than my MacBook Pro, which is to say that it’s well within the realm of acceptability. So there you have it. If you don’t have an immediate need for a DVD ROM at all times, then the Air could certainly be worth it. Apple’s done well design-wise yet again.

Eclipse Workspaces

// March 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery, Programming

Before I started at Schematic, I’d never developed in a real IDE. I coded in Flash itself. Near the end of my pre-Schematic days I began to realize that this was a silly way to do things and began searching for an alternative. I was PC-only at the time (seems like so long ago. My conversion is now complete.) and the easiest option I found was SEPY. All in all, at was a pretty good app and I found it immensely more useful than Flash. At Schematic, I still used SEPY while I saw everyone else using other stuff. This guy named Roger was doing crazy things with this thing called Eclipse, which was apparently big in the Java world. I tried installing it at some point, which turned into a colossal failure. I couldn’t just open up a damn file? I had to create an entire project? And what’s this whole workspace thing? It seems insanely cumbersome for what could have been such a simple task.

I hadn’t really grasped the full concept of what a project was at the time, I guess, because now I code exclusively in Flex Builder and I can’t really imagine doing it any other way. [Incidentally I'm playing around with the iPhone SDK, which is letting me learn XCode. From a Flex Builder perspective, XCode feels so scattered that it's quickly becoming frustrating.] As time goes on, I’m getting more and more comfortable with Eclipse’s quirks.

This is all actually just a really long way to get to the point of this post: I’ve finally starting adjusting to the concept of Workspaces, and it’s a really useful organizational tool. I don’t actually have much to say other than that. Consider everything above the paragraph as aimless fluff.

Leave me alone, I need to start making this look like a real blog, ok?