by Earl on May.13, 2012, under Art
There is a subtle difference in this one. This one is based on the formula c*cos z instead of the traditional z*z+c. It does not make much difference, but notice that the thorns poking out from the spirals are longer and sharper.
URLs in comments
by Earl on Apr.30, 2012, under website admin
I have changed the settings for comments. Comments will be held until an administrator approves them.
There have been a few comments with links to unrelated, off topic, pages. I removed them. If you have a web site with a related topic, please let me know and I will get you a link in a more prominent place than in a comment. Heck, even if your site is on a totally unrelated topic, if it is legitimate and something you believe in, let me know, and I will be happy to write about it.
Fireworks
by Earl on Apr.30, 2012, under Art
z^2+c escape time fractal. I used the black and white pallete with a little bit of rainbow. I am going to call it my cosmic pallette, it reminds me of a space scene. There is something disturbing to me about this image; it seems upside down. The big black corner should be on the bottom with the fireworks shooting up. I rotated and then I felt much better, everything was as it should be. That feeling only lasted a little while, something more important was bothering me. Art is not supposed to be peaceful and compliant with expectations. Art should challenge expectations. So, I rotated the image back to the original position. I leave it to you to decide if and why it is upside down.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Night
by Earl on Apr.28, 2012, under Art
Moving on from the bright colors. Here is one featuring my favorite color, black. You can see small hints of the rainbow colors near the transtions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The Hippie Palette
by Earl on Apr.25, 2012, under Art
Fractals images often use bright primary colors. Here is my contribution to that style. It reminds my of 60s psychedelia. Perhaps this could have been a Grateful Dead or Jimi Hendrix album cover back then.
Produced by the same program with the same basic formula, with the palette optimized for rainbow colors.
Also, learning how to embed YouTube in the post. This is not my video, just something that matches the theme.
Day Two
by Earl on Apr.22, 2012, under Art
I posted this fractal on Facebook on April 17. This is a conventional z^2+c fractal, with escape time coloring.
I wrote, I should say I am writing, the program that generates these images. I have been writing the program for a long time, off and on. I have other programs for generating computer art. The other programs are written in C, C++, even some assembly language. I started out writing the current program as an exercise to learn F#. F# works well for the math part. But, the user interface portion is difficult for a F# beginner, so I switched to C#. I will eventually make it a dual language program with a C# based UI hosting a F# computations.
Looking back, all of the false starts were for silly stuff. My other programs had many cool features, and I wanted to make sure the new program had all those features. So I would focus on one thing for a while, get bored, work on a different feature. Nothing got finished, and I would throw away a lot of the old stuff because it did not fit with the cool thing I am working on now.
So last week, I started over again, this time with the focus on actually producing a fractal image good enough to share. The program is very bare bones right now. I started out with a single formula, z^2+c. I added a second formula last week, c*cos(z). Coloring is escape-time coloring. The color palette is generated by normalizing the escape count to the range 0.0-1.0, and feeding the normalized value into three sine functions, one for each rgb color component. The sine function for each rgb component has programmable frequency and phase.
Escape time coloring produces discrete integer values, which produces undesirable (IMHO) color banding in the image. So I stick with deep-zoom images that have high escape values, and use the normalization and sine functions to produce very small incremental color changes which hides the color banding.
One missing feature is saving the formulas. It is kind of like working in Photoshop or paint. I do work to get the image the way I like it, hit save, and I have a jpeg of the image, but I have not saved the steps to reproduce the image.
It is a start. Now that I made the commitment and reactivated spyke.com and started a portfolio on facebook, I need to keep going.
WordPress
by Earl on Apr.22, 2012, under website admin
I am using WordPress software for spyke.com. WordPress generates blog style web sites. The blog style works well for spyke.com now. It is easy to get started, and easy to grow. When there is more content, I can look into other ways to organize it.
Check out some of the features. Be sure to sign up for the RSS feed and get updates delivered directly to your browser.
Also try out the comment section. Go ahead, just say hello. You can create an account to use for posting. Use an alias if you want. I have set up the site to accept anonymous comments, so if you prefer, you can comment without signing in. Comments are not moderated. So no privacy concerns, and no censoring. I may have to change that when the spambots find the site.
Also, if you want to say a lot, and you do not want to be limited to comments, let me know. I can set up your account so you can create the main blog entries.
One important advantage with using WordPress is how easy it is to add a page; all I have to do is start typing. Presto, a new head page, and all the old pages get moved to the archive and indexed by date. Back in the day I used to hand edit html. Besides the content, I had to add html formatting, and re-arrange the internal links. It was much more effort than just saying what I wanted to say. That extra effort was enough of a psychological barrier that I would just not bother. (Perhaps that filter was a good thing?)
Another advantage of WordPress, or for that matter, any canned web site content management system over roll your own html is compatibility. The WordPress generated pages contain special code for each browser brand and revision. It used to be a constant struggle to make the web pages look good on all browsers with homespun html. It is nice that someone else has figured those compatibility problems. Other advantages include the aforementioned RSS feed, user registration, and comments. Those features are standard, out of the box, with WordPress. They are things I would never attempt on my own.
Of course, not everything is perfect. On the old spyke.com I used an art gallery motif. I will probably move to a gallery design in the future. For getting started again, the blog approach is perfect. It is a low entry barrier, and I can enhance it later when necessary and motivated. WordPress has several themes, or skins. There are themes that come packaged with the distribution, and others themes available from third parties. I wasted most of the day yesterday trying to create a custom theme for spyke.com. Everything I touched made things worse. I am going to have to read the manual before trying that again. For the time being, I am limited to the themes that others have provided. I will probably be changing skins frequently. So, please help me, when things change, please comment on what your like and dislike about the different layout / colors / fonts.
