Milburn

Let me introduce my latest tool: ExcelOff. It cleans up badly formed tables created by Microsoft Excel and similarly bad programs.

This tool came about because I have created a site which users can edit and add tables to through a visual editor. Unfortunately copying and pasting from Excel into this visual editor results in “tag soup”! Read the rest of this entry »

The Mandelbrot Set

In my last post about the mandelbrot set I said:

I would put the Mandelbrot explorer script online however it is very computationally intense. It takes around 5 seconds to generate 1 image.

Now I have created a new explorer which you can use.

I tried to find a way of replicating my original PHP script in JavaScript. That way the processing is all done on the client computer and not my server. For a while I didn’t think it was possible until today I came across pixel manipulation using the Canvas element. Internet Explorer users will be disappointed to know that the Canvas element doesn’t work on their browser and this therefore won’t work. Read the rest of this entry »

My own anaglyph maker uses PHP to make anaglyphs from two images uploaded by a user. But I’ve found someone who has gone one step further. They’ve managed to make them using JavaScript alone. Unfortunately Internet Explorer fails miserably on this task. This is because his method uses the canvas object which so far is only supported by Firefox, Safari and Opera.

It simply loads the two images into two canvas elements and extracts the red channel from one of them and inserts that red channel into the other canvas. Hey presto you get a simple anaglyph. This method has another flaw. Modifying an images data channels can only be done from an image on the same domain to obey the same domain security policy. A small proxy sorts that out but means the solution isn’t all JavaScript. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday as you are probably well aware was April Fool’s Day. Google as ever produced a range of April Fool’s jokes, this year based around an artificial inteligence system called CADIE. My favourite joke was the 3D chrome browser.

Knowing about how 3D images are produced I knew that Google couldn’t possibly render whole pages in real 3D. Instead it uses a clever rendering effect to create two identical images of the page and convert one into the red component and the other into the blue and green component. Read the rest of this entry »