Monday, May 31, 2010

The secret of happiness is freedom...

OMG Beaver Nuggets!

Nick Cross created this video demonstration of the animation process from storyboards through final production drawings for one of his cartoons.  Here's a relative comparison of Disney character size from 1937's Snow White through 2009's Princess and Frog.

Oh how I loved the 1970s TV show UFO.  And don't get me started on the gals with the purple hair.   Here's the trailer to the upcoming movie Predators (and not an Alien in sight!).  The 10 weirdest films ever made?  Brazil (#4) isn't so much weird as it is jumbled.  Eraserhead (#7) is disturbing, not weird.  And Fantasia (#10)?  Somebody must've run out of ideas.

The periodic table of the elephants.  And the periodic table of sentiments.

These 30 photos of Saturn taken by Cassini are truly amazing.  Here's what is supposedly the highest resolution composite image of the Milky Way.  And there's a lot of astrophysics in this article, but apparently astronomers saw something and have no idea what it could possibly be.  Closer to home, this world map has been color coded by number of photographs on Panoramio to come up with a measure of touristiness.

Perfect examples of what teh interwebs is good for: a collection of found bookmarks, a collection of vintage lunchboxes.

Norwegian software company Webnodes makes a counter-argument to Joel Spolky's dire warning against rewriting your software product from scratch.   While there's no doubt that some of the factoids are true (it'll take longer than you think and one reason the original code is such a mess is that it has decades of fine tuning that works) the investment can pay off.

In defense of Phil Collins

If efficient CSS rendering is important to you, your web development skills are more finely tuned than mine.  On the other hand, even I can appreciate the palettes, patterns, and colors at COLOURlovers.   If you're more interested in typography, try the Google Font API.  Is Firebug truly the most popular and powerful web development tool?

My golf swing (last seen in 1989) never did this to a golf ball.

Google provides this list of the 1,000 most visited web sites including nfl.com (#993), hilton.com (#782), boston.com (#456), and weather.com (#73).  (Yes, Facebook was #1.)  Smashing Magazine presents a how-to guide for implementing your web site's archive page (or as we call it "What's Old").  And Hubspot offers tips for your landing pages.

Only you wordies will enjoy this brief animated evolution of the alphabet

What type of developer are you?  The Ninja?  The Experienced Old Man?  Intel confirms that it won't compete with NVIDIA and ATI.  Hidden features of Perl?  The language is so eclectic I thought all the features were hidden.  Formula 1 racing returns to America in 2012 with the United States Grand Prix to be held in Texas.

This video of the world's largest airship being inflated is strangely arousing.  Here's a titillating video demonstration of fluid-structure interactionFart facts (including the daily average of 14 farts.  Hooray!  Overachiever!)

Tecplot released Tecplot 360 2010WindSim is a CFD-based wind farm design tool.  Ceetron can help you postprocess your CAE results.  Generate airfoils on-line using the JavaFoil applet.  Marechi from the folks at Vcollab is a new (currently in beta) social site for exchanging 3D models and animations.  Optimal Solutions' Buzz is their blog for the latest news about Sculptor.  If you've never seen Sculptor in action, here are some videos.  Here's Part 5 of Symscape's CFD Novice to Expert series.

Hubspot presents some examples of great presentations and the ones by Presentation Zen's Garr Reynolds are especially great, perhaps because I like his use of famous jazz musicians.  I especially like the quote from Charlie Parker: "Master your instrument. Master the music.  And then forget all that bullshit and just play."

"XYZ Scientific Applications, Inc. has made a critical theoretical break through in automatic hexahedral mesh generation. Due to this theoretical break through, XYZ Scientific Applications, Inc. has embarked on a three year program to build the first truly automatic general purpose hexahedral mesh generator."

This news is about 6 months in the making but Tech Soft 3D has acquired from Adobe all the 3D technology that Adobe originally obtained from TTF only a couple years earlier.   This technology includes the CAD readers and PRC technology at the core of Adobe's 3D PDF.  In their news release, Tech Soft 3D looks forward to providing the technology in pure library form.

Constant Contact, the ubiquitous e-mail marketing people, acquired NutshellMail in order to more fully integrate with the social media experience.  We use Constant Contact but I'm not sure how this acquisition will impact us.  This article from Mashable provides a bit more insight about the "why".
 
Fast Company makes the case that information visualization is the next frontier of design.  And Business Week pays homage to infoviz guru Edward Tufte.  If you think infoviz is all about making charts in Excel and PowerPoint then you might want to take a look at Hans Rosling's talk from TED 2006.  The folks at Juice Analytics put a fun spin on it with gems like "chart-based encryption - data goes in but no information comes out."  If the world had a population of 100, what would those people be like?

Hours of fun await you at Ball Pool.  Bizarre app of the week: use IS Parade to create an animated parade of all your Twitter followers.

...and the secret of freedom, courage.  --Thucydides

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