Archive for August, 2007
Political ads on mattnelsen.com
At home this morning I noticed that one of the Google Adsense banners that I have on my site was a political ad for Barack Obama. Then later on I noticed a banner for John McCain. I have no idea what keywords would trigger political advertising on my site, though I suspect that since politicians are not known for being too bright, they probably just selected “*.*”
Just to be clear, I am not at this time ready to endorse any candidate. I am quite willing to take their money though, so feel free to click away on all the patriotic flash code I’m sure that you will see on this site over the next year and a half.
Thank you, and God bless Liechtenstein.
The last step in copying your movie to an iPhone
There’s lots of good info out in intarwebland about how to go about encoding video for the iPod or iPhone, but amazingly I couldn’t find anything about the last step - moving the damn finished file to the device. Turns out I really haven’t learned how iTunes works even after a few years of use.
It’s really pretty simple:
- Save your encoded video to any convenient directory.
- In Itunes, go to “File” and select “Add File to Library”. Find your file and click.
- When you attach your device you can go into it’s video settings in iTunes and select the title you wish to sync.
Much easier than I was thinking - sometimes the solution isn’t as hard as you think it should be.
Attractors
I’ve recently been playing with Chaoscope, software for rendering 3D strange attractors. Here is an example of a render of a type A polynomial as rendered by Chaoscope:
If you are interested in replicating this image, use the following factors: p0=0.271, p1=1.594, p2=1.122.
While the images that Chaoscope renders are quite interesting, they are based around an orthographic camera model - there is no vanishing point perspective. I decided that I should try to replicate these attractor systems in Blender. I modified some python code that I found here with the formulas that Chaoscope uses to produce this:
Later I want to modify this by adding more of the formulas that Chaoscope uses, especially the “Unravel” one, and to animate, both by moving through space, and by changing the attractor’s coefficients through time.