This is a model I recently built in Maya. As I’m fairly new to Maya it took a couple of weeks (part time). Modelling Lego is very satisfying, and a good place to learn modelling techniques, it helps when you can use their instructions for reference… MUCH FUN!

This is a simple function that returns yesterdays date. Simple but handy.

function yesterday()
{
 $yesterday = date("Y:m:d",mktime(0,0,0,date("m") ,date("d")-1,date("Y")));
 return $yesterday;
}

In a recent project I needed to capture how long the user spent on the application, it was not expected they would spend days on it so it return hours minutes seconds which can be saved to a database.
So basically here is a function to do that…

//
echo getTimeDifference("2010-02-26 18:35:36");

function getTimeDifference($start_time){

 //convert $start_time into a usable string
 $tempStart = preg_replace('/(\d{2})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})(.*)/', '$1:$2:$3:$4',$start_time);
 $tempStart=explode(":",$tempStart);

 $year = $tempStart[0];
 $month= $tempStart[1];
 $day = $tempStart[2];
 $hour = $tempStart[3];
 $minute = $tempStart[4];
 $second = $tempStart[5];

 //set the end time as current time
 $timesEnd = date("Y:m:d:H:i:s");
 $tempEnd=explode(":",$timesEnd);

 $year1 = $tempEnd[0];
 $month1= $tempEnd[1];
 $day1 = $tempEnd[2];
 $hour1 = $tempEnd[3];
 $minute1 = $tempEnd[4];
 $second1 = $tempEnd[5];

 $countdown_date = mktime($hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year);
 $countdown_date1 = mktime($hour1, $minute1, $second1, $month1, $day1, $year1);

 $diff = $countdown_date1 -$countdown_date ;
 if ($diff < 0)
 $diff = 0;
 $dl = floor($diff/60/60/24);
 $hl = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24)/60/60);
 $ml = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24 - $hl*60*60)/60);
 $sl = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24 - $hl*60*60 - $ml*60)
 );

 $timeDifference = "$hl:$ml:$sl";

 return $timeDifference;
 }

This is just done for fun to break up a day of coding…. Needed a little colour in the day! desktop size avaiable on my flickr page

Logo Design I created for a friend in London.

Stupid me I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard the other day, for some reason I thought everything would be ok, but the last week has been somewhat frustrating, so much that I am going to do a fresh install back to Leopard. Whats frustrating, well I’ll tell you, most programs I use now suffer a huge reduction in performance, photoshop and illustrator have hard times even starting up, if you can get the to start up. Firefox has probably halved in speed, forcing you to use Safari, which they say is fast but still seems slower for some reason!

However the speed is one thing, but its all the day to day software I use which has suddenly disappeared, and looking on forums there doesn’t look like updates to support Snow Leopard will be anytime soon… DOH! Annoying… my Canon printer driver will apparently be released sometime in October, GREAT!

Apart from the easy upgrade process, it looks like I’m going to have a painful downgrade process over the weekend!

My recommendation to anyone thinking of upgrading to Snow Leopard is DON’T JUST YET! Give it 6 months or so!

Recently desgined a logo for Canopy Artspace up in cairns, tropical North Queensland. Canopy is devoted to contemporary indigenous art and encompasses three organisations under its umbrella.  The logo symbolises a  ‘mosquito coil’ with the smoke from the coil forming the lettering, the 3 rings of the coil represent the 3 different organisations, this concept was orgianlly created by Theo Tremblay who runs Editions Tremblay Print Workshop housed at Canopy Arts.

For a project in the pipeline I needed to create a map of the UK in a 3D, which included a realistic elevation data. I thought this would be pretty easy, just search in google for UK displacement map… well nothing much came up, not the greyscale kind of image I was after. After much research I stumbled across what I needed Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data. There are a few website out there that supply this data there are a few links on terrainmap.com, however it very difficult to extract and you need to assemble patches.

After much deliberation I managed to get a pretty good map (see image) with a resulting render. Its not perfect but it’s ok.

Render

Displacement Map

Funny that everytime I’ve been to Sawtell, just south of Coffs Harbour it’s been overcast or raining, hence I’m not sure why the sign as you drive into the town quoting ‘Welcome to Sunny Sawtell’

I’ve just finished off a little project for CBDigital a small video production company. The project was a multi-media DVD containing over 40 presentations and discussions on spinal research and development for the SSA (Spine Society of Australia) an abnormal sort of client, but seemlingly familiar in the way that I have spent a lot of time with orthapedic specialists and had numerous x-rays over the past 15 months.

The project intself has taken roughly 50hrs flash development time, also included a day of layout and design. Built with AS3 it was the first time I have incorporated FLV’s in a project since using AS2. To be honest it was a breeze working with the flv using net connection and net stream… just loved it, listening for cue points worked seamlessly and I have fallen in love with Custom Events…. shit I sound boring! HA.

Well the other good thing about this job was it was running locally so no bother really with pre-loading, although there is still a time delay on loading images so loading still needed to be taken into consideration. The project as always had the additional functionality added towards the end and the job is done and dusted all alterations can now be made in the xml, something the client is more than happy to do…. unless more functionality is needed. NO WORRIES.

Anyway good fun job as it went smoothly and the client as always was happy!

L.