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 »

Do you know your PHP? If you think you do please try out the PHP quiz. This is part of a web application which I am developing. It is currently in the beta state so I would appreciate any feedback.

Fractals are some of the most intriguing shapes. The Mandelbrot set is one of the most intriguing fractal sets. To be honest with you I don’t really get what it represents and why it has such a weird shape but I know that it is intriguing to see.

For those mathematical boffins the Mandelbrot set can be defined as the set of complex values of c for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial z_n+1 = z_n² + c remains bounded. That is, a complex number, c, is in the Mandelbrot set if, when starting with z₀=0 and applying the iteration repeatedly, the absolute value of z_n never exceeds a certain number (that number depends on c) however large n gets. Read the rest of this entry »

Having recently added the anaglyph creator to my main website I decided to add some more options. Up till now I have offered bog standard colour anaglyphs. There are in fact several different ways of generating anaglyphs to get an optimal 3D image. For a full comparison see this article. The different types of anaglyphs are:

True: This but only displays the red and blue channels and doesn’t preserve any colour. The advantages are no ghosting but it does result in a dark image.

Greyscale: This creates a lighter image than the true anaglyph but results in more ghosting. Again no colour is preserved.

Colour: This preserves most of the colour but causes retinal rivalry. This is the type of anaglyph which I originally offered.

Half Colour: This preserves less of the colour but reduces the retinal rivalry.

Optimised: This uses none of the red channel from the original image so preserves none of the red colours but most of the blue and green. The advantages are almost no retinal rivalry.

I now believe that my anaglyph creator is the most comprehensive anaglyph creator available on the web. Please try it out with your own images and compare the different anaglyph types.

It’s the new year and I haven’t posted on my blog or made any modifications to my website for a long time. I’ve got around to making a few changes to my main site Instant Solve.

I’ve updated Instant Solve with two new tools. The first is the anaglyph creator which I created a while ago. Please try it out. Some fabulous images have been made with the anaglyph creator.

The second is a translation tool. It relies on the Google languages API. The translation tool is as good as Google translate but offers real time Ajax translation of text. Other features may also be added at a later date. If you do have any ideas or feedback, please leave a comment.

A few more tools are in the pipeline such as a maths tool which can help with solving equations, trigonometry, integration and differentiation. Unfortunately, this tool is proving more difficult than I first thought. Other projects are a kakuro and a griddler solver however since both problems are NP complete the solutions take a large amount of computing power. I have also yet to come up with a meaningful interface which doesn’t heavily rely on javascript.