Author: ellen

Flame Painter: Sparkler effects!

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Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovič available on http://www.escapemotions.com/.

There are three brush types in Flame Painter: Flame, Follow and Ribbon. Each produces an amazing variety of results depending on the settings chosen.

The images below show the results of incremental changes in brush settings, all of which result in various fireworks or sparkler effects. In each case, the changed setting is circled in red. Click any image to see it enlarged.

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Slow Publishing in Movable Type caused by ImageValidate plugin

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This blog runs on the Movable Type engine, selected mainly because I like the fact that it publishes a static HTML file for each article.

For a long time, Movable Type appeared to be slowing down at publishing posts, particularly ones containing many images. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to five minutes or more just to publish an article! Yet when the images were not uploaded as Movable Type “assets” but simply added using HTML image tags, the publishing went much faster.

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Using the Qualtrics API with PHP and javascript to create custom reports

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Qualtrics.com is an extraordinarily full-featured online survey application that offers nearly every type of built-in report on your survey data you could ever want. But eventually, there comes a time when nothing but a custom report will do. Or you may want to integrate Qualtrics data into another application. For those times, Qualtrics has an extensive API which allows access to both data and functionality.

Qualtrics University doesn’t have many details of how to use the API, so to help you get started, I’m providing an example of how I used the Qualtrics API with a PHP proxy and Adobe’s Spry Framework to build a simple custom report.

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Date-controlled random rotating banner script

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This script text and HTML from an XML listing, based on the end date. It scans through the list, finds the first section with an end-date greater than today’s date, then pulls random banner text/HTML from that section. The example shown here uses a flat color banner with white text, but you could also use this same script to generate image or flash-based banners. I’ve also added a nice jQuery fade-in effect but that is optional.

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Flame Painter: Exploring small setting changes with big effects

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This series of examples will give you an idea of the way very small changes in Flame Painter’s settings can produce very different effects. 

The starting point for the series was the color selection: a gradient of gold, aqua, red and violet, ending in dark blue. The last session’s brush settings were still there, so I began at that point: a  fairly long (Size=235) Ribbon brush with multiple nested orbits. The looping lasso-like edge of the brush has been circled: you can see the brush tail looping off to the left and then trailing off all the way up to the top of the image. The rather chaotic image is caused because of the whipping action of the brush: there are multiple rotations going on within it, creating unpredictable results.

screenshot_2011-02-23 2.jpg

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Exploring Flame Painter’s Ribbon brush – Part 2

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In Part 1, I demonstrated some Ribbon Brush settings. This section contains a second set of Ribbon brush examples.
Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovi? available on http://www.escapemotions.com/.

There are three brush types in Flame Painter: Flame, Follow and Ribbon. Each produces an amazing variety of results depending on the settings chosen.

Continue reading