Blog > 2007

Jul 2007 - Software Update - Salary Timer

Updated the Salary Timer for 2007-08 UK financial year.

May 2007 - Software Update

Updated Raise Calculator and Tax Calculator for 2007-08 UK financial year.

Mar 2007 - Site udpate

Updated the About Me and Links pages.

Mar 2007 - MrCeri Sponsorship

A while back I began offering the opportunity to sponsor the MrCeri site, to help cover hosting and development costs. Since making the offer I've had zero takers. I think this is partly because I placed an exact monitory value on sponsorship (with monthly and annual deals), which was simply too high.

So this month I have changed the deal - from now on I'm inviting sponsors to "make me an offer". This might be:

• money
• vouchers for an online store (e.g. Amazon)
• credit at the sponsor's store (assuming they run an ecommerce store)
• complementary licenses of the sponsor's software product (assuming they sell software)
• reciprocal advertising on the sponsor's site
• etc.

And instead of offering monthly and annual deals, from now on the length of the sponsorship will depend upon the value of what is being offered.

This offer is open to anyone and everyone. Whether you have a huge online business, or just run a small personal blog, I'll consider all offers (though I reserve the right not to accept them!)

Mar 2007 - Adventures in PovRay, Part 2

If you've read my first PovRay article, you'll know how much I love this free ray-tracing program. I'm also a fan of the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, particularly his piece 'Field', which I was lucky enough to see at the British Museum several years ago. For those not familiar with his work, here's a photograph of Field:

Field is made up of thousands of small terracotta figures, most of which are not sculpted by the artist himself, but by volunteers, school children, etc. They follow a rough design, but every figure is unique; this isn't a mechanical placement of identical objects, it's a much more organic and haphazard experience, which is what makes it so compelling.

Finding myself with a few hours to spare recently I set myself the challenge of reproducing Gormley's Field, using my very limited PovRay experience. Here's the end result:

Walkthrough

Here's how I created the above model.

Step 1: Build the gallery

First I added the walls of the gallery, using a single temporary ambient light source.

Step 2: Lights and texture

I removed the temporary ambient light, and replaced it with a series of spotlights, similar to what you might find in a typical gallery. I also added a wooden floor to the gallery. Placing the spotlights, and adjusting their angle and intensity was probably the most time consuming aspect of the whole project.

Step 3: Design the figures

The terracotta figures are very simple, just one blob on top of another, with cut-outs for eyes:

To ensure the finished model looked as "realistic" as possible, it was important to make every figure individual; I therefore randomised each figure's size and colour.

Step 4: Populate the gallery

To fill the gallery with thousands of unique terracotta figures, each in a random position, I fell back upon my strongest skills: programming. I'm aware that PovRay script can handle basic language structures, but it was quicker and easier for me to write a C# program which generated each figure and its placement, and spat out the resulting PovRay code. The resulting model took a LONG time to render, but I'm pleased with the result:

Feb 2007 - AGFC website

Last year I joined a football club in Cardiff (that's a soccer club for any visitors from across the pond). I'm useless at football, but I know one end of an HTML tag from another, so I figured the best way to contribute to the club would be to build them a decent website :o)

And so is born the new and improved www.agfc.co.uk. It's the shortest time I've ever taken to build a site from scratch, and I'm pretty pleased with it. All the content is database driven, allowing for quick and easy updating, essential when a site is maintained in your spare time.

So have a look, and let me know what you think. And if you happen to play for a club in Cardiff / South Wales, get in touch if you want to organise a game! (we don't play in a league, but we tend to play friendlies against other South Wales teams most Friday evenings between September and May/June).

Jan 2007 - New site content added - General FAQs

I figured it might not be obvious just what this website is all about, especially for visitors referred here from a search engine. So this month I added a general FAQ page to help answer obvious questions.

At the same time I spruced up the look and feel of all the software-specific FAQ pages on the site.

Earlier Items...