Where there is a Will

When writing the image wrapping script, I came across a difference between Firefox and Opera. Basically, when there are small floated divs in a vertical stack, the text to the right will be aligned to the topmost div in Firefox, even if the divs underneath extend farther than the topmost div. Opera handles this situation better and places the text after the maximum extents of the floated divs. Take the following HTML:

<div style="float:left;clear:left;width:100;height:8px;background-color:#55f;" ></div>

<div style="float:left;clear:left;width:120;height:8px;background-color:#66f;" ></div>

<div style="float:left;clear:left;width:140;height:8px;background-color:#77f;" ></div>

<div style="float:left;clear:left;width:160;height:8px;background-color:#88f;" ></div> continue reading…

After posting my latest pie chart image, it occurred to me that it would be pretty cool if the text flowed around the edge of the pie chart image rather than around a rectangle. This is not something that can be done simply with HTML / CSS, but it can be done by breaking the images up in to horizontal slices so that they extend only to the edge of the image, rather than to the absolute border.

If I googled for it, I suspect I could find tools to do this for me -- but where is the fun in that? Instead, I wrote a Python script that uses the Python Image Library to scan an image and output HTML that will allow text to wrap smoothing around the image. No additional images are produced, because the 'slicing' is done with CSS to select the part of the original image that is seen. continue reading…

I've been doing a little more work on my 3D pie-chart renderer. I've added beveling and tweaked colors to a point where I can render charts that -- in my opinion -- are a better quality than those produced from Apple's Numbers. Next step is to add labels over the main image. Povray does support rendering of True Type Fonts, but it is a 2D overlay that I'm looking for (not 3D text), so I plan to use PyCairo to render the labels. Once I've perfected the chart renderer I can build a polished web interface, and a web service for the render queue. All in Python, of course!

Since I've moved to Linux as my primary desktop (I know, about time), I've been motivated in porting some of my old software. This shouldn't be too difficult, since I try to work in as platform agnostic manner as possible, and when I do use a platform specific API I keep it nice and modular. Food File is probably the most popular app I ever created, although only since I made it free. As a commercial app, it didn't do to well, probably because it didn't get noticed amongst all the diet / food applications for Windows out there, or possibly because I am lousy at marketing. continue reading…

I've just spend a couple of hours dusting off an old project of mine, that involved generating pretty 3D pie charts by combining Mako templates with the Povray scene description language. I improved the image quality by enabling radiosity, and the end result is quite appealing (see below).

Now I'm thinking that there may be some people out there who would be prepared to pay to generate such images for websites or for print, and it wouldn't be too hard to extend the idea to other forms of chart, such as bar graphs. So, dear lazyweb, is there a big enough market in such a thing to warrant sinking my valuable spare time into?