Pretty Polish

pretty-pretty.png

As part of a continuing effort to make visophyte’s byproducts look attractive, I implemented a bit more shiny today. Using this aqua sphere effect photoshop tutorial at skdstudio.com as a basis, I have made the simple circle renderer support a ‘pretty’ option.

Unfortunately, this took a lot longer than I was hoping. Cairo lacks a Gaussian blur mechanism, PIL only supports 5×5 image kernels (iterative application is too slow), and using SciPy was absurdly slow and didn’t even work right before I gave up on it. Thankfully, in my googling it turned out that box blurs can be used to approximate a Gaussian blur. So visophyte’s cairo renderer now has a home-grown “box blur” filter using a boxcar average to keep the iterations and redundant calculations down.  (And only using the array module, so no new dependencies.)

mailman-pretty-circles.png

The latter vis is just the same vis as in my post about pretty pie charts, but with the pie visualizations replaced with circles. A net loss in information, but perhaps a net gain in prettiness? (Utility probably stays about the same…)

2 thoughts on “Pretty Polish

  1. Eyecandy+1

    Looking good. Congrats!

    Regarding speed though, I don’t have reference basis since we’re looking at pngs here (unless they’re generated on the fly?). I’m not sure what the best way to convey/define such a performance metric is, although I know convolution is typically one of the more expensive operations.

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