Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, March 19, 2004

Ordering music from the net -- Comment()
Today I ordered a cd of Fado Em Mim by Mariza. I must say that ordering a cd, waiting it to arrive, and importing it to iTunes and iPod is a nuisance. I hope Apple opens the iTunes Music Store soon in Europe!

Modeling dissipative acoustics with Elmer -- Comment()
I made an animation (using Snapz Pro 2.0) of Elmer displaying the solution to the tutorial example 9, which discusses modeling dissipative acoustics. The model describes propagation of sound waves in a circular tube. Here are the results (in QuickTime format):

I'm wondering if there is a Mac OS X tool for making movies out of still images. Snapz Pro works ok, but it would be nice to be able to compose the movie from still images output directly from Elmer. So, you could do something like the following in Elmer:

do i 100 301 {math s=2*pi*($i-100)/200; 
  math p=cos(s)*Flow.7-sin(s)*Flow.8; 
  display; screensave t$i.ppm;}

Here we generated 201 pictures into files t100.ppm ... t301.ppm.

Update: GraphicConverter can generate the animation easily. (Command File/Export Slideshow to Movie...) I re-generated the movie with GraphicConverter, using the highest quality and 24 pictures per second (see here).

-- Comment()
Updated version of Elmer is now available. The update corrected a problem in ElmerFront: when rectangle elements should have been used, the software generated triangles instead. Now this is fixed.

Getting broadband (sort of) -- Comment()
I today ordered a 512/512 kbit/s broadband connection to my apartment to replace the current 128 kbit/s ISDN connection I have used for two years. Broadband is not cheap in Finland, but I finally decided that the benefits are greater than the price.

I do hope the broadband prices start falling soon. In any case, 512 kbit/s is not really broadband. Nothing less than 10 Mbit/s should be called broadband. But "broadband" is really a marketing term, not a technical one.