#xquery

Mary Holstegemathling
2025-07-11

interlude

Looping through a grid

A dense rectangular grid of circles of varying sizes. The circles are connected with a series of zigzagging paths that may loop back to their own beginning, but do not otherwise overlap each other. The circles and paths are in various shades of grey with a black outline. They create shadows against the background.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-26
Lines consisting of little more-or-less perpendicular strokes of various angles, lengths, and hues (teals and yellows). Squint and it is some odd alien manifesto or tally. There is some correlation from across and between the lines, but also sharp discontinuities. You almost start to see a rhythm to it... and then you don't.

Colophon: several frothy noise functions drive the pattern with intentional large shifts from line to line so avoid too much line-to-line correlation.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-23

interlude

A tearing of the sky

Purple and blue boxes, coloured in a rippling billowing sweep. The boxes clump in places, pull apart in others. There are large tears in a few spots, ragged failing threadbare patches in others. Behind it all: the endless cold dark.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-18

interlude

The glass football, at the moment of impact

A roughly spherical arrangement of glassy segments -- hexagons mostly, but some with different numbers of sides -- over a deep blue slanted gradient background. There are more pieces towards the left and slightly more towards the bottom. The glass sphere was moving from the right downwards right before it broke apart.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-10
Coloured rectangles of various sizes and hues (oranges, reds, yellows) explode out from several foci on a black background. Where the explosions from two foci meet, the rectangles generally avoid overlap.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-06

interlude

Computational colour

Sines and cosines of coordinates and shading and smooth mixing of two colours

A series of bands of wave with a mix of a vibrant green and a rusty orange. The waves shade brighter and darker. The inner waves of each band look tighter. One outermost band of each wave looks like a series of teardrops; the other looks like a series of curved bumps -- it is hard to see the thin arc connecting them.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-06-02

interlude

Chopping up cubes

An array of translucent cubes, oriented at various angles, with fractures running through them, and fractures through some of the fractured pieces. The fractured pieces are set slightly apart from each other, like they were just now smashed and are starting to fall apart. The cubes are white over a slanted tan gradient background.
eXist-db XML Databaseexistdb@fosstodon.org
2025-06-02

Hey, fellow XML nerds & tag lovers!

If you happen to be at Markup UK in #London this week, and got questions about eXist-db, want to talk about XQuery, native XML databases, or just rant about trying to force hierarchies into SQL tables?

Juri and Duncan from the eXist-db core team will be in the house! Come say hi — we’d would be happy to talk 💬😄

#MarkupUK #existdb #XQuery #OpenSourceLove

Original picture by Elliott Brown (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/6447506387/) - Remix by Juri Leino - The original picture shows the Bush House - Aldwych, London where Markup UK takes place. Juri added the phrase: "London Calling"
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-29

interlude

How well does the hachure algorithm stand up to various complex curves?

In general these are not closed curves; the algorithm will close them off and treat them as such. (Hence the stray crosslines.)

A modulated torus knot

1/5

A broadly symmetrical (top/bottom and left/right) twisting shape with regions filled with irregular dark-grey cross-hatching. It isn't exactly symmetrical from left-to-right once you focus on the details of the shape. It is pointed at the top and bottom and flares out in broad curves on the sides, rather like a top.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-27

interlude

More fun with crosshatched tilings

What if we applied a mutation function to the tiling?

The background is a crisscrossing of light caramel lines, irregularly spaced and slightly thicker in the middle, creating a rippling mesh. The forreground is formed of similar crosshatches in black and silver. The crosshatching is twisted around a circular focus on the bottom left, and a secondary focus just off canvas to the bottom right, becoming large towards the top and small towards the bottom. An arcing vault of trusswork ahead, around, and over us.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-26

interlude

What if you took a regular tiling pattern and filled each tile with random cross-hatching?

1/5

A regular array of triangular tiles. The tiles meet in groups of twelve, creating six-pointed stars. Or you could parse this as groups of three little triangles forming larger triangles that alternate between upwards pointing and downwards pointing. The crosshatchings are in a deep rusty red colour and have different densities and slightly different angles. The variation between dense and loose weaving creates an illusion of depth, although given the lack of regularity in the alternations, it is hard to place a consistent interpretation on that impression. Looking at different parts inverts front and back: what is projecting towards us and what is receding.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-25

interlude

It was just the background for something else, but gosh it came out pretty

Criss-crosses in tan, unevenly spaced with different thicknesses, and some extra thickness towards the middles of the strokes, creating a rather hypnotic rippling effect.
eXist-db XML Databaseexistdb@fosstodon.org
2025-05-22

New -slim images for duncdrum/existdb!🚀

Now available for 6.4.0+, these come without stockapps in /exist/autodeploy — perfect for minimal base images or lean XQuery-only setups.

All distroless variants have a -slim twin 🧱

e.g. duncdrum/existdb:6.4.0-nonroot-j8-slim

🔗 hub.docker.com/r/duncdrum/exis

#Docker #existdb #XQuery #FOSS #DevOps

Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-20

interlude

More luminosity mapping

We saw circles yesterday. What if we mapped to spirals? Tighter spirals being darker. Here I alternate the orientation of the spirals because I think it looks better. Again, mapping colours as well as it makes it less boring.

Caging the Saints, Toulouse

Looking up though the cage protecting the sacred relics and such, rendered as blue and gold spirals in various tightnesses. The granularity is fine enough that we can see the strong lines from the bars with a strong perspective narrowing as they head towards the ceiling, and ghosts of the arches on the far side of the cathedral. The granularity is too coarse to see much more behold light and shadow.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-19

interlude

Luminosity => radius

I also map the colour, because it makes things less boring

You've seen a million of these, probably, but I've been playing around with variations

A picture of a lake viewed through the arch of a bridge, with some fairly steep hills on the far side. The image is rendered as an array of circles of various sizes: small in the bright areas, large in the dark ones. The colours are mapped too: yellows for the dark areas, blue for the light.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-17

interlude

Bonus content

Halki in her bowl
Luminosity of sampled pixel => zagginess of the zig

A white cat curled up in a cat bowl, zonked out completely. The image is rendered as a series of zigzagging lines. The zigzags are flatter in lighter areas and more bend in darker ones. That's doing all the work here.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-14

interlude

Textures

8x8 grids with colour and density of symmetric pattern driven by fractal noise

Black background covered in patterns of teeny squares in various shades of purple and blue plus tan. You see some regular repeating motifs, a little like Space Invader forms. Overall we get a somewhat cartoonish topography with two atolls arranged diagonally from top right to bottom left.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-12

interlude

Nothing like a nice little mutation function to liven things up

A curved X shape is broken into subregions large and small. Each subregion is filled with striations of various widths and colours, with narrower cross bars between striations which are also of various widths and colours. Different regions have different slants and slightly different colour palettes. The lines are all in various shades of yellow, over a soft slanted yellow gradient background.

Colophon: The canvas is broken into regions via a recursive procedure. An edge is introduced joining two existing edges to create two new polygons. The striations are irregular hachure lines to create subregions that then have perpendicular irregular hachures applied. Colours are yellows from Werner's Nomenclature of Colours. A "pillow" mutation is applied to make the final result.
Mary Holstegemathling
2025-05-11

interlude

Textures

Dunno where I'm going with this, maybe nowhere

The canvas is broken into areas along straight lines. In each region are irregular striations of various thicknesses and colours, connected by finer perpendicular striations, also of various thicknesses and colours. Each region has a slightly different colour palette and granularity. The colouring is shades of rusty browns and tans. The overall vibe is a little like old pine wood.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst