Redfern Place » Tech Life

Fractal Art with Apophysis

kevin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:10:53 +0000

Most people may not be aware that I’ve been fascinated by fractal arts since I first discovered the Mandelbrot Set over 20 years ago. OK, I didn’t discover it. Benoit Mandelbrot did. But I was fascinated with it nonetheless and have played with it and other fractals ever since. I recently discovered flame fractals and a software tool call Apophysis that is used to design and create these amazing flame fractals. There are some exceedingly talented artists out there that are creating awe inspiring images with this tool. I’ve been playing with it for a few days now and have created these images.

Using the program is not exactly straightforward, and understanding the math and algorithms behind it is only for the utterly twisted math geniuses out there. I certainly don’t understand it very well yet. There are several tutorials available (here and here for instance) to help get you started and I highly recommend reading some of them. Getting the first good looking fractal out of the program can be challenging.

FireFox 3 Add-ons

kevin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:37:06 +0000

I made the switch from Internet Explorer to FireFox a little while back. I’ve also spent some time tweaking my FireFox 3 configuration. Since I work on several computers, I wanted to make a record of the tweaks so that I could easily keep the computers in sync.

I’ve added a new page to the site detailing the list of FireFox 3 add-ons that I have installed. I’m not one for clutter on my desktop (my computer desktop that is, my real desktop is a complete disaster most of the time) so I keep the add-ons limited to only those that I really use. Some of them are even designed to eliminate things I don’t use. Check it out. Aren’t using FireFox 3 yet? Better download it.

Back from EclipseCon…

kevin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 08:00:40 +0000

EclipseCon was a big success. I surely learned a lot about the Eclipse Community and how open it is. I have a whole new respect for the open-source community in general. I don’t know if it made my job any easier, but it definitely made my vision clearer. Three great keynote speakers presented this year, one each morning. First up was Scott Adams, very funny. Second was r0ml, also very funny, but also insightful on the open source business model. Third was Dr. Herbert H. Thompson, also very funny, and speaking about how we can think differently about software security in this day and age.

EclipseCon 2007

kevin — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:12:45 +0000

I’ll be attending EclipseCon this coming week. Should be a good time to geek-out. Hopefully I’ll learn a lot about making Eclipse a more useful tool for embedded developers. I’ve created a recommended track of discussions and seminars focused on developing tools for embedded developers.

Path Editor

Kevin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:15:43 +0000

This weekend I had some alone time so I decided to write this small utility to manage the Path on Windows computer systems. This isn’t exactly a high demand utility. But if you need to manage your Path, and you’ve had to use the built-in tools in Windows, then you know why I was motivated to write this utility. In my “real-life” job I have plenty of opprotunity to manage the Path. This is being released as freeware and comes with no warranty what-so-ever. This utility will modify two keys in your registry. You can get it from the Software Projects Page.

My Software

Kevin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:39:58 +0000

I’ve added a new page to the site called “Software Projects”. You’ll find it over on the sidebar. On this page you’ll find a summary of the software projects of mine that I’ve made available to the community at large.

New Links Added

kevin — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:27:37 +0000

I just added a couple link to my other project pages. CellPlanWizard is a tool I’m writing that will assist you, the user, look at historical call records from cell phone companies to determine if you have the right plan or if maybe another plan is better. RegEx Builder is a small utility that helps developers (are you a developer?) build regular expressions quickly and painlessly. Both links are permanently list on the sidebar.