Friday, May 25, 2007

Can't believe it

It's either I'm lying to the quiz, or I guess good on multiple choice, or I rank as high ianalis.



I am nerdier than 98% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to find out!

New Energy on Research and Development --MFudolig

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Gnuplotting


Figure 1. FDTD data plotted with Gnuplot

I realized how nice my data can look with Gnuplot (even when it's wrong). For instructions on how to visualize programming data using gnuplot, this article might be of help.


Pathetic recreations
After trying out all the keyboard letters (lower case only), I eventually verified (on my Linux "work" station) that the letter q has the least number of linux recognized commands that start with (loose sentence structure). I scanned a QWERTY keyboard, pressing "Tab" after each letter, and looked at the suggested commands starting with that letter.


[pathetic_user@work_station]$ q
qb-help qm2ts qrttoppm qtcups
qiv qmake qtconfig quanta
[pathetic_user@work_station]$ q


As it can be seen, there are only 8 commands starting with q. Some of them (if not all), like quanta, the html editor, are not even basic commands. Some of them are commands I never knew exist. There might be more if I used the root account.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

3 years of digital graphics (at least)


This is the comic strip I created around 3 years ago (2004) when I was still the graphics editor of Scientia. Back then I was just experimenting with Photoshop (although I was ahead enough to volunteer for graphics editor). I started with version 6. I still remember when I was frustrated with layers. I eventually appreciated layers when I enjoyed altering photographs, putting people in places, faces in clouds, creating ghosts etc... And then came GIMP. It lacks some features of photoshop such as layer blending options, but it had filters that allowed me to do more things. For a time I tried 3d graphics with POVRay, but I immediately lost interest. And now, the latest addition to my list is vector graphics. I started out with Corel Draw (version 9), when Sr VRD had a copy of it installed on my work station to assist on making my SPP 2006 papers and posters. What I like about vector graphics, is the option to save images with embedded text (such as wmf format). This makes the text 'readable' (in a software sense) when the images are inserted to documents which eventually are converted to pdf format. It is also much easier to use when the images are not photo-realistic in nature; examples include: diagrams, experimental setups, flow charts ... figures that usually appear in geek texts.

...

Ok. Enough mental wandering.