A few weeks ago I got a PC upgrade at work. My new PC is pretty much top of the line: nVidia 8800 GTX, 3GB of RAM, and 8 CPU cores. It’s pretty nifty. Which makes it all the more incredible that Outlook 2007 is literally the slowest, poorest-performing application…
Helium
They say soon we will run out of helium. Most people think, “What’s the big dealium? So our voices won’t squeak When we inhale a leak – Balloons will just lose some appealium.” But balloons aren’t the sole use of helium: For industrial stuff, it’s idealium. When released without thought,…
My Experiences with Radioactive Elements
I’ve recently been reading about the elements, and particularly about the rarer ones. Radioactive elements tend to be among the rarer ones on earth. In my life, not counting glow-in-the-dark radium dials/paint, radon emissions from e.g. granite, or other household traces of radioisotopes, I’ve had two interesting encounters with radioactive…
Miscellanea
Sorry for the relative blog silence recently. Here’s what I’ve been doing lately: Buying stuff at the local library book sale last weekend. Old maths textbooks FTW! Puzzling over how to approximate spirals with Bézier curves. Or otherwise thinking of a way to draw them. Having lunch with Gary. He…
Vecto get!
Xach has released version 1.2.1 of Vecto, featuring circle arc paths, and I’m sure a whole lot more on the drawing board. (asdf-install:install :vecto)
A bit of a new look
I broke out the programmer art skills and tweaked the header image to something a bit nicer than the default, and while I was at it, made myself an icon for the site. If the icon doesn’t show up for you, don’t blame me. Get yourself a standards–compliant browser. I…
Language memage
OK, this is going to be a strange mix. WHAT DO YOU CALL: 1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks. A stream. 2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called. A trolley or a cart. Depends if the back…
Curve and Vector
Curve (com.elbeno.curve) is my common lisp package for doing cool things with two-dimensional curves. In particular, modulating cubic Bézier curves and splines, but also approximating arbitrary elliptical and circular arc segments with cubic Bézier curves. It depends on Vector (com.elbeno.vector), a cobbled together set of functionality for representing and manipulating…
Approximating elliptical arcs with Bézier curves
In doing my modulation work with curves and ellipses, I extended the vecto function for drawing an ellipse to enable an oriented ellipse. Lately it occurred to me that this didn’t go far enough in terms of functionality, and I began wondering about how to draw part of an elliptical…
Functional Fills with Vecto
I’ve been wanting to do exclusive-or functional fill in vecto for a while, so tonight I delved in. I added a pixel function to the graphics state and kept the default as the normal alpha-blending it was already doing. The pixel function signature is a bit clumsy, but it was…