Synposium

The Library of Congress has an online exhibit of Prokudin-Gorskii’s three-color photography, an amazing collection of photographs made with color filters and panchromatic negatives before the invention of true color film. The Lumière brothers also made trichromatic photographs of the First World War.

New job! I’m now Principal Algorithms Engineer in the Endovations division at Boston Scientific, developing imaging systems for endoscopy.

Once again, Google makes life better; their new Pages service provides free hosting of a small website, currently up to 100 pages and no more than 10MB. It doesn’t insert lots of garbage that breaks HTML and CSS validation, and there are no ads, at least for now.

PowerPoint is very special. The behavior of shadowed text over shapes with fill effects is incredibly non-obvious. The second color in the fill effect determines what color the text shadow should be. If you put shadowed text over a fill where Color 2 is black, the shadow on the text is black. However, if Color 2 is not black, the shadow on the text becomes white. Harrumph.

This is what software development office space should look like for maximum productivity. I’m just thankful I have dual 21" monitors and am far enough from a window not to squint through glare all day. Oh, and here are some ideas for modern management.

Blender is fun, but has some really annoying warts. The lack of infinite planes means you must add atmospheric haze with the World:Mist option. After much experimentation, I found that setting the mist color to match the horizon color of the skymap (you are using a skymap, aren’t you?) and a quadratic falloff with Start 0, Distance 1000 and Height 100 works well. Make sure you set Mist Intensity (Misi) to 0; contrary to intuition it sets the intensity of the mist at the camera rather than scaling the mist effect as a whole.

Particle systems are fun, but static particle systems for e.g. grass do not obey deflection properties. They do obey fields and vortices. It’s very special.

Spent the weekend poking at robot parts and found I had quite forgotten how much fun random electronics can be. We diagnosed a number of faults, including a dead Ni-Cad battery, de-soldered the previous owner’s hack, and replaced a voltage regulator. Good stuff.