All you evolution doubters shield your eyes as we have, evolution in action™:

Press the left mouse button to change the environment to black, the right mouse button to change the environment white and the middle mouse button to assign a random colour to the environment.

Evolution Works!

The applet demonstrates evolution by natural selection as explained by the great Charles Darwin. The grid of 100 squares are entities that live in their environment (the background colour) trying to survive while being hunted by their predators. Luckily for the squares their predators do not have very good eyesight and as such find it much harder to catch squares that blend in with the environment. This means that more often than not the squares that don't approximate the environment colour will not live long enough to breed and hence will not pass their genes on into the next generation - 30 of the worst camouflaged individuals suffer this fate in every generation. Conversely the squares that best match the environment are much harder to catch and so survive long enough to get a chance to be picked for breeding and to pass their genes on into the next generation. These "winners" don't have it all their own way though, as a further 20 random individuals are removed from the population to simulate sheer bum luck. More...

I am definitely not an artist, but I have dabbled with 3D Studio Max and Photoshop in my time. Since I am quite busy with exams at the moment and don't have time to package up any of my code, I thought I might crop some of my old renders to allow them to act as decent iPhone wallpapers.

Here are all three zipped up: iPhoneWalls1.zip (92.63 kb)

If I get any positive feedback I might be convinced to release a few more...

I am now in a position to release the extension that packages up LaTeX markup and submits it to a MathTeX server for rendering. Though with some small caveats.

The public MathTeX servers mentioned in the previous post are strictly for testing purposes only. You will need to setup a server of your own to ensure that you don't find that one day you no longer have a service to use. This may well be a problem for people using BlogEngine.net since MathTeX currently will only compile under unix/linux. By way of a solution I will be looking into getting my own public server up and running to provide a latex rendering service to the community (don't hold your breath for this). In the meantime a permanent solution for people who can't setup their own server would be to wrestle with the Windows build of MimeTeX. Sure it doesn't output .png's and the quality of the rendering isn't as good - but it works...

The Extension

Download: MathTeXExtension.zip (3.23 kb)

To install the extension simply drop the MathExtension.cs file into your App_Code/Extensions folder. Setting it up for use on your blog could not be easier - the extension makes use of the new extension manager to expose UI for the parameters.

To use it simply enclose the portions of LaTeX you want processed in BBCode style "math" tags. As with my other hastily released code for BlogEngine I can't make any guarantees about the code - it was definitely written on the fly in the dead of night, so your milage may vary. The most beautiful mathematical equation:

For a tutorial on MathTeX specific syntax see the MathTeX homepage. If you are new to latex then this LaTeX tutorial will help you get your feet wet.

Any issues, leave a comment and I will see what I can do.

One of the goals when I set this site up was to start to integrate it with facebook, initially just for the status updates and hopefully later on to auto-post items to my minifeed. I know most people use Twitter for status update purposes, but I have a lot of friends on Facebook and would prefer to keep everything in one place.

Instead of building a generic control I figured this would be a great time to have a play with the experimental widget system currently making its way into the development builds of BlogEngine. What became of this can be seen in the Facebook panel over on the right. I should add that this widget should not be considered as production level code - it was created in a very short space of time late at night to "get something working" on this site. This said, I have yet to see any issues with it so it should be OK.

Update: It seems I was not the only one to want to integrate status update's into BlogEngine - Mads has already done a widget for Twitter so check that out if Twitter is your site of choice.

Installation

Grab a copy of the code : FaceBookStatus.zip (4.52 kb)
Install by unzipping to your /widgets folder and taking a read of the readme.txt included. Any issues please leave a comment and I will take a look.