I saw this article on PhysicsWeb. Negative index of refraction materials that operated with visible light were just announced a few weeks back, and already there is a lens that can focus images smaller then the wavelength of light. The really amazing thing is that these materials are made just by building a nano structure with standard materials rather then requiring any new exotic materials.
Superlens
Paul is an ex-developer turned photographer in South Africa. It’s amazing to me how the Internet and forums have opened up worldwide communication. I know more about people like Paul situated half way around the world from me then people I work with or some of my neighbours. He has a del.icios.us feed and a photography feed on flickr that I follow, along with a website.
I really respect anyone that peruses the things they love to do like that. As much as developers are complaining about international competition and outsourcing are killing IT, I’m thankful I don’t have to deal with the level of competition that photographers and other media professionals do.
I ran into a little problem with the blog jet ftp configuration settings. The configuration requires both a server name and a directory name. I struggled for almost an hour testing the configuration trying to get it to work because I left an open slash at the beginning of the path field. /images/blog instead of images/blog. There would have been a few ways to resolve this more quickly:
- Show the actual path generated. The brummerfamily.com//images/blog would have clued me in.
- Do a smart join and strip both ending and beginning / characters from both strings and manually adding one in. This is what the .net Path class does and I applaud the developers that put that in. It makes it easy to do the right thing, though not as easy as straight concatination, but better then hand coding the if statement every time.
Now I know why the admins cursed scripts that did this, and thanked me when I would take the time to code this behavior in VBScript.
Things are finally starting to settle down with the new house and I have more time to work. I’m finishing up the updates to the type system to support objects. I have the garbage collector integrated with the type system and the run-time type of the objects. Now sub-objects are collected along with the objects. I had to separate the globals and functions from the stack, which is something I should have done to begin with. Overall the application is much cleaner now and easier to work with. The next step is making all the display elements objects, this will give the users a lot more power and simplify the code alot.
In the mean time, a Half Price Book store opened up within walking distance from our house. This is going to be a constant drain on our time and money. I just can’t resist cheap books. On the other hand our shelves for the library just got in. We are going to have a whole room dedicated to books and reading, something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. How cool is that.
One of the books I’ve picked up, along with books on Python and Haskell, is Digital Lighting & Rendering by Jeremy Birn. I won’t ever need the level of detail that he goes into, to create realistic effects, but the section on basic lighting techniques made a huge difference in appearance. I’ve posted a couple of the better looking results. Three directional lights look so much better then “ambient” lighting, there is no going back.