click for larger image
Just awesome. Congratulations. (Photo: NASA)
The photo was taken from the Spirit rover on Mars looking back at it’s landing module. As someone who tries to build things that work without much assistance, this is incredible. It’s not a person’s foot, yet, but something people built is right now rolling around on Mars.
Below are a few styles I created to mimic those XML and RDF buttons found on a lot of sites. Since the icon is so simple, there’s not really any reason to use a GIF instead of CSS. The number of bytes transferred is basically the same, but you do save one server connection. (text-shadow only works in Safari so far as I know, it’s ignored everywhere else but nice if you have it.)
.xml_link, .rdf_link {<br />
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;<br />
font-weight: bold;<br />
font-size: 11px;<br />
text-decoration: none;<br />
padding: 0 5px 1px 5px;<br />
color: white;<br />
border: 1px solid #555;<br />
}<br />
.xml_link<br />
{<br />
background: #ff6600;<br />
border-color: #ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57;<br />
text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #c25004;<br />
}<br />
.rdf_link<br />
{<br />
background: #0000ff;<br />
border-color: #7b7bff #00005d #00005d #7b7bff;<br />
text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #000099;<br />
}<br />
.xml_link:hover {border-color: #ee5500 #000 #000 #ee5500;<br />
text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #7d3302;<br />
}<br />
.rdf_link:hover {border-color: #0000cc #000 #000 #0000cc;<br />
text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px #00005d;<br />
}<br />
| XML | RDF |
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Those pretty much matched the most common graphics I found, but I thought they were a big chunky, and I couldn’t convince the height to scrunch down to 14px while remaining an inline element. So changed the font-size to ‘9px’ and the padding to ‘0 3px;’ which creates these smaller stylings:
Of course, I don’t have a feed yet, but a lot of other people do.
These are free to use. (as if…)
Update:There are a bunch of these floating around online, here are some others:
Ah well, I only wasted about 10 minutes re-inventing the wheel this time. I’ve done far worse than that.
The new FXScript Reference is open.
2:3:3:2 *giggle* (victory lap)
Black Rattle – heavy metal for toddlers. (or is it Baby Rock, Toddler Metal, Diaper Rock…) Too funny.
(1.5mb MP3, mirrored from Greg Behrendt’s site with ID3 tags added.)
Boyd Ostoff posted an illustrated comparison of adaptive de-interlacers showing Joe’s De-Interlacer side-by-side with DVFilm Maker. Both de-interlacers yielded excellent results on his test footage. Unfortunately, rendering times were only cited from FCP 3, De-Interlacer renders more than twice as fast in FCP 4.
Here’s my reply to Boyd’s original post on DVInfo.net:
Boyd Ostroff: “So I ran a controlled test with a 30 second clip. It took Joe’s de-interlacer 378 seconds to render the clip, while DVFilm Maker only took 128 seconds, a three-fold speed difference. As noted above, both programs used their default settings (Joe’s de-interlacer was set to “fast interpolate”… can only guess how long it would take at “normal” speed ;-)”
Thank you for posting that Boyd. I’m curious what your numbers would be for Joe’s De-Interlacer with FCP 4.02. In my own highly unscientific testing, I’ve found De-Interlacer is more than twice as fast in FCP 4 as it was in FCP3. (and I was happy about the speed in 3!)
I just did a 10 second test at default settings (NTSC DV):
- FCP 3: 217 seconds
- FCP 4: 104 seconds
Multiplying that difference against your numbers, I’d expect FCP 4 to render De-Interlacer in about 181 seconds. That puts DVFilm Maker at only about 1.4x faster, much better than 3x faster. At any rate, the time savings of working inside FCP and not having to import/export and possible reconnect all your media should also be considered.
The ‘Normal De-Interlacing’ method uses a very precise field-preservation algorithm but I’ve been moving away from that since the difference is basically non-existant.
Any FXScript effect is going to be at the mercy of FCP’s rendering engine regarding speed. The benefit is that you don’t have to manage clips in and out of FCP, the disadvantge is speed and not having access to the unlimited tools available in Carbon or Objective C. Thankfully FCP is only getting better and faster.
