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.

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.

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.

The concept I came up with is simple: use a particle system to generate smoke-like behaviour, but instead of drawing each particle as a simple “blob,” draw an image of a nebula. The older the particle, the larger and more transparent the image. Fairly simple, but it creates remarkably realistic effects.

The particle system I used is based on the Traer physics library (in fact, I used some of their sample code to create the smoke behaviour) but you could use any system you like.

The images I used are show below. I took pictures of nebulae I found via Google and cropped out the most interesting parts, then applied a circular gradient mask in Photoshop and saved the resulting image as a transparent PNG. The original PNG images are included in the ZIP file which is linked at the bottom of this post.

Here are a couple of videos showing the results from this process:

The Processing source code for my simple example (along with the images used to create it) can be found in this ZIP file: smoke.zip. If you run this code, you’ll first see the particles drawn as red dots. If you press the ‘i’ key, the images will be drawn. Pressing ‘p’ hides the red dots. Finally, the ‘m’ key toggles mouse following mode. Don’t forget, you’ll need the Traer physics library for this to work. I used the OpenGL drawing mode because it considerably speeds up image drawing, but it will work using the default Processing renderer.

This is just a basic sketch of how the idea works, and as I said, I have no idea if this is exactly how Robert Hodgin does it. Either way, I think it looks pretty good.

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.

I just noticed that I got linked to from Create Digital Motion, a blog about digital video production and computer animation. Cheers guys! However, the post says that there is “more at [my] personal site” and.. well, there isn’t. Or wasn’t, until now.

The post is about Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video which has been getting a lot of coverage on t’interwebs this week. I’ll spare the technical details as you’re almost certainly familiar with them by now (if not, have a look at this post). My two attempts (so far) are below, along with a little info about how they were made. You can view both the videos in higher quality by clicking through to YouTube.

The first set of experiments is based on a really simple particle system. The x, y and z co-ordinates of each point in the data cloud are turned into a particle, which is then “bounced” off a hard surface using very basic physics. The position of each particle of each frame in the video is calculated the correct number of times to produce the animation effect. By bouncing the particles at different angles relative to the “camera,” appearance of the bouncing particle cloud can be changed, creating some unusual visuals. The next section of the video is created by duplicating each point three times, to create three versions of Thom’s head. Finally, every particle is given a random velocity, creating an “explosion” effect which again is modelled as a large number of bouncing physical objects.

The second video is simpler: no physical simulation, just a set of lines. Every point is connected to another point with a line. The number of points slowly increases over the video, so Thom’s face slowly appears from randomness.

I’ve put some higher-quality stills from the videos on my Flickr account.

If you search Google for certain sites which are themselves searchable, you’ll get an inline search box right in your Google results.

So, searching for “wikipedia” gives you:

It works for Urban Dictionary too..

Using the search box doesn’t take you directly to the results, but to another Google page with an appropriate “site:” keyword added, so Google still get their advert imprints.

Nice.

Note: I’m fairly sure you need to enable UI scripting for this to work.

1. tell application "System Events" to tell process "Dock"
set dock_dimensions to size in list 1
set dock_width to item 1 of dock_dimensions
set dock_height to item 2 of dock_dimensions
end tell

This is an example of something I have often found to be a problem on many social websites (for example, online forums). The owners and operators of the website should not be responsible, legally or morally, for the conduct of its users. A social platform provides a canvas upon which people can express themselves. Asking the company behind the social platform to moderate the user-generated content is like holding a notepad manufacturer responsible for offensive messages written on its paper, or a brick manufacturer responsible for unpleasant graffiti daubed upon walls constructed from its products.

Perhaps Twitter could (and should) have been more clear in their TOS, but in the end the responsibility for moderating the content of a social network should lie with the participants in that network, not the creators. Once censorship begins to creep in, all is lost. It’s impossible to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable content, and it’s impossible to please everyone.

As Twitter employee Jason Goldman states on the support thread for this issue:

What we believe is that Twitter is a recipient-driven utility; you choose what content appears in your timeline. We offer tools like block so that users can distance themselves from others with whom they have disputes or disagreements.

So if someone offends you on Twitter, you know where to click:

Richard Stallman, Manchester, 1st May 2008.

PS.. the router is fantastic, especially with the replacement firmware. Realtime bandwidth monitoring, QOS.. rather better than my crappy old Belkin!