Edit0r’s Bloog

I used to use a program called UltraFractal to make fractal images. I had a look on the site and there’s a new version out. It is pretty damn amazing. I downloaded a copy and spent a few hours playing with it last night. After making a nice blue fractal, I took a screenshot, because the demo won’t let me export images without “made with the evalution version” plastered all over it, which I then fired into GIMP. A few carefully considered filter later and I came up with this:

It was originally meant to be a top down view of a series of catwalks, but I started playing with lighting and bump mapping and, well…

So, all well and good, apart from I the fact I can’t export images, and thus can’t make bigger backgrounds. This really gets at me. If a software company is going to provide a free demo of their product, for the purposes of evalution, they should either make it time limited or functionality limited but not both! My reasoning for this is that if you’re considering buying the product, then more often than not it’s hard to give it a good evaluation if you can’t do half the stuff you intend to do if and when you decide to purchase it. Also, if a software developer is going to limit the features, it seems pointless to have it time limited. Sure, the program might be of some use to someone with it’s limited features, but is the developer really going to lose money over people using the demo instead of buying the full thing? I think not, as most developers take away so many features that the program is practically unusable. To impose a time limit after that is just adding insult to injury.

Speaking of insult and injury, we had our bunnies castrated on Wednesday. Despite my extreme reservations about this, I finally concede it had to be done, as from Sunday onwards they started tearing chunks of fur out of each other (literally). I think Sunday was the precise day that the younger bun, Nybble, reached puberty. He started mounting the older bun, Pixel, and All Hell™ broke loose. They are currently recovering seperately; we’ve put them on 12 hour rotation in and out of the bunny cage for seperation. They also seem a helluva lot more scared of us now, which is very understandable, since taking them to the vets scares the absolute bejesus out of them. Especially when dogs are around. Which they were. Also, Pixel scratched Nybbles left eye and caused an ulcer on his cornea, but this is healing nicely now and we’ve got some cream to put on it.

So I think that’s it for now apart from to say I’m stressing about exams, the eBay seller I ordered the new motherboard from sent me the wrong one, the TV tuners I ordered are no longer being made and *no-one* has any in stock, I had the most amazing musical acoustics lecture EVAR yesterday, and a big shout-out to anyone who came over from the xkcd forums. You guys rock!

Ps. I’ve noticed that uploads from my server are being hellishly  S L O W  and would like to apologise for that. I’m looking into it, and suspect it has something to do with incorrectly set up rate limiting on our router, though Other Andrew will almost certainly disagree with me…