Warping it up! » Graphics

The Demo Scene – An introduction

Fini Alring — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:29:58 +0000

As an old demo group (GiGA Prod.) founder, organizer, main coder and 3D animator, I wouldn’t miss this opportunity to introduce ya’ll to the wonderful Demo Scene, a sub-culture of the Warez Scene, where people strived to outperform each other in the fields of programming (coding), graphics (2D+3D) and music (sounds and tunes).

Scene Rep – About The Demo Scene

Scene Zine Monthly

Mammatus Clouds Rule!!

Fini Alring — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 07:54:47 +0000

Looming presence

As most of you don’t know, I am a big cloud fan and it never siezes to amaze how infinite chaos can reveal such beauty. I have never seen this type of clouds before – the Mammatus clouds, remind me of melting snow, and have a remarkable dense substance that makes them very special to look at. I will definitely be looking forward to experiencing these wonders in person.

Photos of the Mammatus clouds are (c) copyrighted by Jorn C. Olsen.

See more Spectacular Mammatus Clouds over Hastings, Nebraska.

Be sure to visit Jorn C. Olsen’s Gallery.

Martian Ice Lake Found

Fini Alring — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 22:23:09 +0000

Martian Ice Lake

The HRSC on ESA’s Mars Express obtained this perspective view on 2 February 2005 during orbit 1343 with a ground resolution of approximately 15 metres per pixel.

It shows an unnamed impact crater located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars’s far northern latitudes, at approximately 70.5Â° North and 103Â° East.

The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice.

The colours are very close to natural, but the vertical relief is exaggerated three times. The view is looking east.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Source: ESA | Water ice in crater at Martian north pole

Inkscape 0.42: Scalable Vector Graphics Editor

Fini Alring — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:36:18 +0000

Ok! Why did I not know about Inkscape before today??! It looks amazing and it’s said that the new version is a major feature update, and although I haven’t tried it out yet, from the screenshots it’s pretty easy to see that this tool is also for the big boys, it works with SVG which makes even more happy, since I was about to begin some SVG experimenting anyways soon, and it’s soo boring to draw complex vector drawings by handcoding, believe you me!!

Here’s the intro text from the Inkscape Website:

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to
Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully W3C compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional planned work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and the establishment of a friendly, open, community-oriented development process.

* Inkscape.org – Draw Freely

* Slashdot | Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer

Future of KDE UI

Fini Alring — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:18:24 +0000

A slashdot reader writes: “KDE continues to grow. Early screenshots, mockups, and developer blogs show that the new Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch) will bring innovative approaches to desktop computing. On the other hand, the very first screenshots of SimpleKDE, an unofficial fork of KDE, were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated.”

* Slashdot | KDE’s future: Plasma & SimpleKDE

LCD Keyboard Guaranteed to Rock your Geek

Fini Alring — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:09:36 +0000

Ok this is the gadget, a keyboard where every key is a colour screen, allowing you to customize the keys for any application such a localized layouts, photoshop, game layouts and so on.

The product is called “ÐšÐ»Ð°Ð²Ð¸Ð°Ñ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° Optimus” on it’s russian website, but you will want to check out those neat images, I do suspect the quality is worse than depicted in real life, but I am looking forward to seeing this being standardized, or bought by logitech! Whichever comes first..

UPDATE: Added link to english product page, please note that this product is not yet in mass-production, if even in prototype stage.

* Optimus Keyboard
* ÐšÐ»Ð°Ð²Ð¸Ð°Ñ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° Optimus (Russian)

Graphics in Science

Fini Alring — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 15:08:55 +0000

BishopBerkeley writes “Nature has an interesting nugget about the second meeting of the Image and Meaning Initiative which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is about the use of graphics in presenting scientific data. I am also a big advocate of using nice graphics in scientific presentations, but I also agree with Felice Franel, the founder of I-M, that not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters (and I am ashamed to admit that I have published) images that look nice but have no scientific import at all. One very cool Harvard physics professor, Eric Heller, produces wickedly beautiful (and meaningful) images of quantum mechanical models. These images have made the covers of Science and Nature, and are featured in his online art gallery, which was reviewed in the New York Times in 2002.” And of course, any mention of graphic information should not go by without a big shout out to Edward Tufte.

* Slashdot | Graphics in Science

Also see
* Escherization

The iGun

Fini Alring — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 08:47:49 +0000

Wulffmorgenthaler presents:

The iGun!!

Soon you will wish to be shot with this handy gadget

* Wulffmorgenthaler – The daily comic strip. Great cartoon and comic books.

Coming Soon: Magic in NetBeans Form Designer

Fini Alring — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 13:55:27 +0000

Michael Urban wrote “One of the biggest frustrations with GUI design in Java is struggling with layout managers to get complex forms to look good. However, that will all soon be a thing of the past. ”

“…Think he is using absolute positioning? He’s not. That’s a new feature called Matisse. What is so magic about it? Matisse lets you design your form as if you were using absolute positioning. You simply drag your components to where you want them and set them to the size you want by dragging. NetBeans takes care of figuring out what layout managers are needed, and of writing all of the code for you to make your form look the way you design it using ‘Drag, drop, and stretch’…”

See example Flash demo and get more info on the Matisse GUI Designer at Javalobby at the link below.

* Coming Soon: Magic in NetBeans Form Designer. | Javalobby.org

Also see:
* Project Matisse is coming! | Netbeans.org

Star Wars III – My Review

Fini Alring — Thu, 19 May 2005 03:47:10 +0000

I have been a major Star Wars fan since I was about six years old, and I can tell you quite simply: It was worth the wait!
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a magnificent ending on one of the greatest sagas of all time (including future). First I must emphasize the visuals in this movie WILL blow you away, it’s just ludicrous cool quality constantly and it is very hard to point a finger at just about any of the visuals. The sound is just as good as the first trilogy, although I must admit listening to the sweet music was not the top priority when seeing it the first time. Hayden (Anakin) does a really good job of turning evil, compared to his pretty vague performance in Episode II, you can easily tell that his skills have improved, but I’m sure his script has too!
Personally I think the ‘turning evil’ part happens a little to quick, but I guess the show must go on, this movie is just like going nuts in a candy store, sweet treats everywhere. Even though this is by far the most dark of the films, it’s quite possibly also the most laugh-inducing, being filled with small jokes and silly comments especially from our droid friends. The movie puts many things in perspective and you will be given a great deal of information that will combine the whole saga in to one mother of a force-tale…
I rate it at 9.8 out of 10, were it not for a few worrying details it would be perfect, but again nothing can be that perfect..? – Thanks Lucas, I owe you one!