Over the last few months, I’ve been kicking around a couple of little spare-time projects, and I’ve finally got round to writing a blog post about them. Both are fairly simple, but each represents a stepping stone in my efforts to bootstrap my brain into understanding the architecture and design of web applications.
I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I decided to have a go at Project 365. The idea, in short, is to take one photo per day for a year. The claimed benefits of this vary, but boil down to improving one’s photographic technique, creating a “photo diary” for yourself, and documenting your year for the purpose of sharing with others (usually on Flickr).
I spent the weekend at BarCampLondon6 at the offices of the Guardian near King’s Cross Station. I think my brain is too full of interesting things I’ve picked up over the last couple of days (not to mention too deprived of sleep) to actually process any of it into a coherent blog post, but you’ll get an idea of my thoughts by looking at my posts on Twitter tagged #barcamplondon6, and my Flickr set from the event. Thanks to the organisers for their hard work, and to all the people who took part.
My talk was about Processing. The photos below are by Rain Rabbit.
Charles Darwin, born 12th February 1809.
“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.” – Daniel C. Dennett.
Just about sums it up.
If you have a modern browser, have a go with my Game of Life implementation in JavaScript, using the HTML5 Canvas element:
(click for the “live” version)
Feel free to leave a comment with your frame rate..
JSLint is a tool for finding problems in JavaScript programs. Unfortunately, to use it, you need to paste your source code into a textarea on a website – less than ideal. This post will explain how to check your JavaScript directly from gedit.
It is based on these instructions for vim, combined with this method to allow piping text into JSLint from the standard input.
A few months ago, I spent some time writing a MIDI sequencer for the Arduino. I finished the sequencer, wrote a couple of songs with it, and then got sucked into MSc thesis mode and had to abandon it.
Well, I’ve finally got round to publishing it as an open source project on Google Code, so hopefully others will be able to have some fun with it. I’ve also written some documentation which will hopefully make it a little easier to get started creating music with it. I’ve named it ‘Cahors,’ which is a word I found in The Deeper Meaning of Liff. See the FAQ page on the Google Code side for a full explanation.
http://code.google.com/p/cahors/
You can hear the first full piece I wrote with Cahors on last.fm here, or you can download the MP3 from the Google Code project page. I’ve not had a chance to go back and write and more music for it recently, but hopefully I’ll get back into that soon.
After almost three years, I have decided to redesign this website. Gone is the chalky blue colour scheme, gone are the sheep gently grazing on the header. Instead, a rather lovely minimalist theme based on Minim by Upstart Blogger.
I hope you like the new look. If you find any bugs, or have any thoughts on the new design, feel free to leave a comment on this post.
I was lucky enough to attend the Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton this week, and one of the highlights was Robert Hodgin of Flight404.com talking about his stunning work, including his famous Solar and Weird Fishes pieces. His Magnetosphere engine is now the default music visualiser in iTunes 8.
In passing, he mentioned that his smoke effects were created using photographs of nebulae. He didn’t give any details about exactly how this works, but I thought it was such a good idea that I decided to have a go for myself.
Continue reading How to create realistic smoke effects with astronomical photos…
This blog has been sorely neglected recently, mainly due to being extremely busy with my MSc thesis. I handed that in a few week ago, but I’ve not particularly felt like writing much since. I’ve got several things that I want to post, which will doubtless appear over the next few weeks or months. In the mean time, I’m still using Twitter quite a bit.
The EASy MSc, which I’ve just finished, was a brilliant experience. It involved lots of hard work and was very stressful at times, but was ultimately extremely rewarding. I feel like I’ve learned more (and been more excited about what I’ve been learning) in the last year than at any other time in my life. The highlight was probably my trip to the Artificial Life XI conference in Winchester, and my publication (PDF) at the conference.
I’ve decided I’m going to stay in Brighton if I can, and I’m currently looking for a job. If anyone reading this wants to employ an enthusiastic and creative programmer, please feel free to get in touch! My CV is available here.
So, hopefully I’ll post again soon with something a bit more substantial.