Return of the SIlvereyes

The bottlebrush outside my window started flowering again a few days ago, and that means one thing: silvereye season is in full swing again (even if not all the flowers are open, or even fully open yet!)

Double Rainbow

Last night we were treated to a double rainbow!

Themeable Axis Colours

It is now possible (as of r.52026) to customise the axis colours as part of your theme. The main benefit is that now you can tweak these colours so that they are more visible than the old hardcoded ones (a bit of an annoyance of mine with the old colours used). For example:

 Default colours - Note how badly the dark blue tends to fade into the background.

A "softer" set - These are all a bit more visible (and are in fact closer to some of the ones I've seen in other software)

Growth and Renewel in Christchurch

Over the weekend, I spent time out getting some exercise and time away from screens. Heck, I even spent time in a supermarket for the first time in months XD. Here are some pics from around the city of things that have been popping up around the place.

A mural and makeshift garden that's popped up along Riccarton road after a cluster of shops were abruptly demolished a few months ago.

Free at last!

From October 2012

Finally all of my coursework and my honours project thesis are all completed!

Multithreading dependency graphs... (LibEE Paper)

Woah! I've just finished reading through the paper Dreamworks published at Siggraph this year about their new fancy multi-threaded dependency graph.

dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2370919.2370930

Some seriously cool stuff here with some interesting insights which we should take into account when working on our own revamp. Having said that, even without worrying about multi-threading (it's still an area I'm not that familiar/comfortable dealing with yet... and it'd certainly be worth having some multithread gurus around if/when we go down this path) we still have a lot of design issues to tackle to even get a basic system that tackles most of the issues that we're currently facing with our old antiquated beast.

Maker's Schedule vs Manager's Schedule

A while back, I wrote a post in response to one of Paul Graham's essays regarding how it's important/necessary for programmers (or in fact, anyone doing some form of creative activity) to hold a mental picture of all of the relevant parts of a project at hand (i.e. all of it in many cases) to do a good job very productively. As I've been slowly plowing through the writings of many other productive people, similar trends emerge time and time again: being able to hold a mental picture of an entire project when working on it appears to be a contributing factor to how we can achieve "flow" (i.e. that magical state where you're able to absolutely massacre your todo-lists, steamrolling through item after item with barely any effort, while growing manically happy at getting things done in this way).

LuxCity @ FESTA

Last night, the city hosted the "LuxCity" event as part of the inaugural Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA). Since it's a long weekend, naturally, I headed off to take a look with my camera. Here are some of my favourite shots:

 

Mmm.... Cake!

Colours of Spring

During spring, the weather can be quite fickle...

But we also get some colourful sights...

Distortion-Free Flip Operator for Lattices

There's nothing quite like a feature written to a scratch a particular itch... especially one for one of your own itches when actually working on stuff (vs thinking through how someone might work on stuff ;)

I've just committed such a feature for lattice editing. It's an improved tool for mirroring lattices, without the problems of the traditional mirror operator

Poor Tweedle...

A little character model and render I put together in a few hours this evening, based on a little doodle from a few nights ago. It turned out quite well I reckon, though it's still lacking a bit of the energy/organic feel of the original sketch. I'll try to upload a scan of that sometime at a more reasonable hour of the day ;)