Yesterday, I published ScalePlanets, an interactive model of the Sun, planets, and moons of our solar system, all to scale.
See it here: http://planets.wthr.us
» Read more: ScalePlanets – WebGL Experiment for Planetary Comparison
ScalePlanets – WebGL Experiment for Planetary Comparison
April 30th, 2013 by kevin.gill No comments »A Day in the Life of a Living Mars
March 11th, 2013 by kevin.gill No comments »Animated. Finally.
Back in January when I first posted the Living Mars images some folks asked if I would be able animate them and do a spin around the planet. After a lot of reworking to get the render time down and improve the quality, here it is.
jDem846 Update Post-Living Mars
January 18th, 2013 by kevin.gill No comments »It’s been a couple weeks since I released the “Living Mars” images, which took on a life of their own which I never expected. I expected maybe a few +1s or “likes”, but for it to go viral was amazing. I was sincerely humbled by the way the images were described by most of the articles, reshares, tweets, etc. A lot of the comments were very constructive, allowing me to learn a lot about what it takes for a planet to harbor an atmosphere, ocean, or even life.
Since then, I’ve continued to make changes to the rendering software I created, jDem846 (Java Digital Elevation Modeler then my son’s date of birth, or just “jDem” for short). » Read more: jDem846 Update Post-Living Mars
Google Native Client – Overview and Performance Experiment
March 28th, 2011 by kevin.gill No comments »
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The use of native instructions to supplement a web application is nothing new, but engineers at Google are attempting to bring a fresh, and secure, perspective to the concept. With a novel architecture and security model, Native Client makes for an interesting project with promising results.
» Read more: Google Native Client – Overview and Performance Experiment
Adding an Auto-incrementing Build Number to a Grails Application
July 8th, 2010 by kevin.gill No comments » Print This Post
The development cycle of a web application (or any software for that matter) always requires tons of builds and deployments to servers allowing the testers to do their thing. One thing that comes up often during this part of the application lifecycle is knowing which build is currently live, especially when reporting defects back to development.
» Read more: Adding an Auto-incrementing Build Number to a Grails Application
Generate Wire Protocol for Google Visualizations in Grails
March 30th, 2010 by kevin.gill No comments » Print This Post
Let’s say, hypothetically, you have a bunch of data, say, from a database resultset or a csv file and you’d like to display it in the browser using Google Visualizations. To properly display it you need to output the data in a format compatible with Google’s Wire Protocol, preferably in JSON.
» Read more: Generate Wire Protocol for Google Visualizations in Grails
Preprocessing CSS in Grails
February 16th, 2010 by kevin.gill No comments » Print This Post
While generally a static resource, CSS files sometimes require custom tuning. Whether it be to support different browser “standards” (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*), static resources, or even color themes, it often helps to have the logic build right into the CSS files themselves.
» Read more: Preprocessing CSS in Grails
Simple Grails Browser Detection
February 3rd, 2010 by kevin.gill No comments » Print This Post
Web Developers love it when browser vendors (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) don’t follow standards, either through incompetence, laziness, or whatever other reason. In addition to that, each browser has their own selection of specific “improvements”, additions to css styles, element types, etc.
Either way, it’s often helpful for a web application to know what browser it’s dealing with so as to specially tailor content, whether to maintain a standard look and feel, or to offer extra eye candy.
Groovy Fun With Intregrals. Part 1 of n
February 1st, 2010 by kevin.gill No comments »Just for fun, I put together the code to calculate the area of a region with a curved boundary (Yes, I do things like this for fun). I figured I’d share it since it involves calculating a whole bunch of numbers and slapping them in a graph like throwing eggs at a wall…
As a programmer, I’m a lot more comfortable with algorithms expressed in code rather than a incomprehensible jumble of Greek symbols, but for the task of translating between the two I’ll use both here. The code in the example is of very little actual practical use as it stands, but it demonstrates the commonly encountered problem. Though I comment the code to a certain degree, I’m not going to teach anyone calculus, so don’t expect a full explanation.
» Read more: Groovy Fun With Intregrals. Part 1 of n
Improve Grails Performance With Static Resources
January 25th, 2010 by kevin.gill 2 comments » Print This Post
A simple concept: offloading static resources (images, javascript, css, etc) to a separate web server than your Grails application. The idea is that these resources don’t change (often) and tend to make up for a significant percentage of the actual browser requests. Sooo… why bother Tomcat (or whatever your favorite web container is) with serving things that Apache HTTPD can handle quite efficiently.
» Read more: Improve Grails Performance With Static Resources
