![\"pretty-pretty.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/pretty-pretty.png\")
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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<\/a> as a basis, I have made the simple circle renderer support a ‘pretty’ option.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.\u00a0 (And only using the array<\/em> module, so no new dependencies.)<\/p>\n The latter vis is just the same vis as in my post about pretty pie charts<\/a>, 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…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading ![\"mailman-pretty-circles.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/mailman-pretty-circles.png\")
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