Shameless Plug to my Other Blog

I have another blog where I am sharing other folks' photos (found at flickr) which show pretty islands and shorelines. It's a kind of geography that I'm just in love with.

http://islandsandshores.blogspot.com/

Hair in povray 3.5 with Mike William's "SweepMesh.inc"

zfixirishh10c
Originally uploaded by pterandon.

I made this with Mike William's include file. Each strand of hair is of pentagonal cross section and travels along a path defined by a spline. It should be even easy to make the tips of the hair bob up and down as he walks!

Fixed the butt.

zfixirishh47b
Originally uploaded by pterandon.

When I originally created this one, I had forgotten how my code worked for construction of the hips. And thus, at one point, there was a disconnect between the lower torso and top of the legs that I filled with two spheres. It gave an oddly exaggerated buttocks.

With some other tinkering, I remembered exactly how it worked and came back to fix this one.

More formidable robots

Compared to the less formidable original:

A Different Kind of Evangelical?

In a blog entry entitled, A Different Kind of Evangelical, Steve Bush paints a vision of a version of evangelicalism that is refreshingly free of indifference to ills like imperalism, war, and slums. This articulation however makes an error of unnecessarily surrendering the flag of traditional Christian doctrine to its "conservative" friends:

"Conservative evangelicals tend to see salvation as an individualistic affair, postconservatives emphasize the communal dimension. Conservatives tend to see hell as a place of eternal, conscious torment after death; postconservatives are concerned about this-worldly hells of genocides, slums, and diseases."

This doesn't sound "evangelical" in the sense of being true to old-time doctrines, having a common confession-- a definition IIRC Ron Sider has used, but I could look it up.

The vision I have is one where social sins-- such as wishing torture on an Al Qaeda accountant (or worse, blindly agreeing with our system, which in reality is torture of adbucted Muslims who have nothing to do with carrying out acts of terror) -- is sin. Sin in the sense of a "personal" sin that one must either pay for in something called "hell" if one rejects Christ's payment on the cross for it.

To capitulate the old-time doctrines is major uncool.

Gosh, will someone turn up the lights?

Happy Couple ready for action

New lake image

Feigning a sun over to the right side

ffmpeg can turn PNG's into MPG-1

Here's a dump of my command and the resulting output:

greg@kan_one:/home/greg/images# ffmpeg -i zfixirishd07%02d.png file.mpg
ffmpeg version CVS, build 4758, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
configuration: --prefix=/usr --libdir=${prefix}/lib --enable-shared --enable-mp3lame --host=i486-linux-gnu --enable-gpl --build=i486-linux-gnu --enable-faad --mandir=${prefix}/share/man --enable-vorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-faac --enable-xvid --enable-dts cc --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-pp --enable-shared-pp --enable-libogg --enable-a52 --enable-a52bin --enable-x264
built on Jul 16 2005 18:28:59, gcc: 4.0.1 (Debian 4.0.1-2)
Input #0, image2, from 'zfixirishd07%02d.png':
Duration: 00:00:01.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Video: png, rgb24, 320x240, 25.00 fps
Output #0, mpeg, to 'file.mpg':
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg1video, yuv420p, 320x240, 25.00 fps, q=2-31, 200 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame= 30 q=0.0 Lsize= 116kB time=1.2 bitrate= 819.2kbits/s
video:114kB audio:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.492690%
greg@kan_one:/home/greg/images#

Golf, anyone?

After investing considerable effort getting two boxes up and running with kanotix linux, I'm finally ready to start tinkering with povray again.