Monthly Archives: February 2009

Hearty Friday – BeMyValentine



BeMyValentine

Originally uploaded by Flowermouse Design


Valentine’s Day is a blessing and a curse to Hearty Friday. There are a lot more heart-related photos posted to Flickr, but most of them are uninteresting to me. There’s never really a low volume of heart photos in the first place.

Anyway, I thought this one was pretty cute and visually appealing. Nice sold colors and good depth of field.

Happy Friday! Hope it’s as warm (relatively speaking) where you are as it’s going to be here today.

Extracting text highlighted with Acrobat Pro

As mentioned here and here, I typically do my reading and note-taking-on of academic papers in Acrobat Pro these days. I then typically record my comments in a FreeMind mind map. Until today I’d been creating a content summary in Acrobat, highlighting, and then dragging and dropping each comment individually into the mind map.

Today, while doing this, I noticed that there’s an “Export comments to Data File” option in the Comments menu. “Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder how easy it would be to read this data file?” It turns out that it’s just some ASCII text with a bunch of (to me) useless information, and the highlighted comments in parseable “Contents([highlighted text here])” containers.

I wrote a quick and dirty Perl script that pulls the comments into a text file. I can then just copy and paste that file into FreeMind, and it creates all of the leaves for me. This will save me hours carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing mousing and frustration. The perl script, for your perusal (improvements welcome) is available here: extract_comments.pl.

Kindly Let me know if you get any use out of this, and if you find any parsing bugs. It’s in the public domain.

Rabbit Right-Ventricular Free Wall Cross-Eye Stereogram

We deal with 3D models all of the time, and when it’s possible to manipulate them in a viewer program, it’s relatively easy to get a sense of 3D objects from a 2D screen. It’s a lot harder with static images. That’s where cross-eye stereograms come in. All you need to see 3D are images from two perspectives, and your eyes and brain. I’ve mentioned these images before, here, with a link to some nice photographs using the same technique. Today while making some figures, I decided to do this with my very-high-resolution model of the right-ventricular free wall. I think it turned out pretty well.

RV Wall Cross-Eye Stereogram

You’ll want to click on the image and look at the full size rather than using the thumbnail. There’s a really large version that you can download and try here. The idea is just to cross your eyes and make the images line up. Sometimes it helps if you sit back from the computer a bit.

Note, this requires doing the opposite thing with your eyes compared with how you view a random dot stereogram.