Somewhere in this Google map is my new apartment. I will leave it up to the motivated stalker to figure out which window looks into my bedroom. It took quite a bit of leg work and quite a few sub-par viewings before I found this place, and I look forward to the ‘9′ that will start my soon-to-be zipcode. 28 days to go!

3 things.

1. I am out of shape.
Granted, I had a couple neat Laphroaigs the night before and hadnt yet eaten before setting off, but Fillmore street is a son of a bitch. I made it half-way up before having to take a seat for fear of passing out. I look forward to the sculpted calves that a few months of hill climbing will afford me, but crap, whoever decided San Francisco should be laid out in a grid was off his nut.

2. The Redwood Room at the Clift Hotel is fantastic.
I thought it was another Schrager, but the website says Philippe Starck is responsible.

The highlight would have to be the living portraits on the walls. Shown on six vertically-oriented plasma displays are portraits of distinguished and well-dressed men and women in typical portrait pose. A quick glance shows nothing special, but prolonged viewing will reveal that you are looking at video footage and not a still image. The facial expressions change, the eyes move about the room, and they even seem to be looking at each other. Word has it a story is played out by the characters in the portraits over the course of the night, but my view was generally blocked by hotel-bar drunks which leads me to the lowlight.

Hotel bar patrons certainly like their beige sport jackets and gold bracelets. There was even a black cowboy hat at one point, and I believe I saw Ugg Boots. Just keep looking at the pretty people in the portraits and you will do fine.

3. Song Airlines rules! Kinda.
I am too tall to fly. They haven’t actually come out and told me, but I have my suspicions. So how thrilled was I when both legs of my round trip to San Francisco from Boston were nearly empty. I felt a little bad for them because there couldnt have been more than 30 people on each 757. I got a whole row.

Also, each seat has a touch screen entertainment center in the back of the seat in front of you. You have your pick of 10 feature films. They do cost 5 bucks a pop, but relax, you can use your credit card or opt for one of the dozens of satellite television channels. You could also just play a few games, one of which is a trivia game against other passengers in the plane.

But don’t get too excited. There are still drawbacks. You would be surprised how hard people think they need to push on touch screens. The old lady behind me decided to play ‘Bejewelled’ or some such shit and was thumping my seat every couple seconds. I had to move. But the many many empty seats made that quite easy to do.

Oh, and the interiors… horrid! Someone thought it would be a good idea to combine blue, purple, orange, and lime-green pleather. It was surprisingly disgusting. But I forgave them as soon as the flight attendant, describing what to do in the case of a depressurization of the cabin, said ‘Simply stop screaming and place the mask over your face.’ Classic.

This is an interesting website I found. It’s for people interested in Ruby, that never had the guts to try and researching after it (like me). It is a quick “hands-on ruby” tutorial for the - guess - ruby programming language. It makes the first steps really easy. It somehow gives me a good feeling of vintage commodore system homecomputers.

http://tryruby.hobix.com/

This is an interesting website I found. It’s for people interested in Ruby, that never had the guts to try and researching after it (like me). It is a quick “hands-on ruby” tutorial for the - guess - ruby programming language. It makes the first steps really easy. It somehow gives me a good feeling of vintage commodore system homecomputers.

http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Lavalamp meets camouflage. A little Flash sketch which creates random textures that morph and move. Did someone say “Perlin Noise”?

Klick the area once and then press any key to create different patterns and color schemes (some of which are really ugly I must admit - but well, that’s the nature of randomness).

I’ve been researching neural networks for the last month or so and have finally gotten down to building something. neural.network.soundtoy is the first implementation of my brand-spanking new NeuralNetwork class. By clicking and holding the mouse, you can create independant neural networks with random connection weights between nodes. When nodes reach their activation threshold, they play a sound.

Mousing over individual nodes will activate them, and by clicking on a node you can turn it so that it is permanantly on. You can get some interesting sounds going on if you activate multiple nodes at once.

Fein, fein. Ich habe unsere Aktion “Hard bloggin’ scientists” auf Phlow nochmals etwas genauer erläutert. Daraus:
“Wissenschaftliches bloggen ist daher mehr als nur das Auffinden interessanter Quellen oder dem Festhalten von unfertigen Gedanken. In diesem Fall tritt eine Haltung hinzu. Wissenschaft tritt durch ein kontinuiertliches, partielles Hinaussickern in die Gesellschaft hinein und damit die Möglichkeit zu einem Dialog.”
Ganzen Artikel auf Phlow lesen.

Fein, fein. Ich habe unsere Aktion “Hard bloggin’ scientists” auf Phlow nochmals etwas genauer erläutert. Daraus:
“Wissenschaftliches bloggen ist daher mehr als nur das Auffinden interessanter Quellen oder dem Festhalten von unfertigen Gedanken. In diesem Fall tritt eine Haltung hinzu. Wissenschaft tritt durch ein kontinuiertliches, partielles Hinaussickern in die Gesellschaft hinein und damit die Möglichkeit zu einem Dialog.”
Ganzen Artikel auf Phlow lesen.

New toy tool! Santa came early this year.

I just received my Wiring circuit board from Hernando Barragán. I couldn’t help myself, so I just plugged it in to see what it does (ok, I checked the circuitboard first to make sure I wouldn’t blow anything). As promised, it’s really well designed, so it works right out of the box. There’s an onboard power light, and an on-board debug LED (very handy, that), so you immediately get what you need: the power LED lets you know you’re on, and after the bootloader delay, the debug LED starts flashing to let you know the program is working. Yes, it comes loaded with a simple flasher program — very cool: plug it in, and it’s already blinking the electronic equivalent of “Hello World!”

There are a lot of things I like about it, number one being that it uses Atmel chips, which means that I can compile off of my Mac with an open-source solution (GCC). Number two, it uses the same FTDI USB chips I’ve been experimenting with on the Gameboy Advance. These chips aren’t all that expensive, and come with free drivers for MacOS9/MacOSX/Windows/Linux that allow you to create a virtual serial port over USB. Using serial ports is easy from a programming perspective, and building USB drivers is not. On the other hand, USB is very handy, especially since you can power the board for light usage over USB. In fact, the “Hello World!” program I mentioned works directly off USB, no need to plug in the power supply; although if you want serious power consumption you’ll have to switch the jumper and plug in an external power source. Most importantly, Macs haven’t had serial ports for years, and about a year ago my Windows junkies over at LOEIL stopped laughing at me when they discovered that their new laptops don’t have them either.

But obviously the key is the Wiring software. And here Wiring is amazingly simple. Download software, load up a sample LED program, plug in the board, push compile (the same “play” button as Processing) and then load it to the board. Reset the board and your program is running in hardware. Wiring takes care of linking to GCC as well as sending the program over to the Atmel flash rom.

After some more fiddling, I was playing around with a servo motor, stepper motor, etc.

At the LOEIL laboratory, we mostly use PIC chips, which are great because they’re cheap. So whenever I’m free, I’ve been learning the PIC chip over the past year, and what I’ve really come to hate above all is the complicated setup process, and the lack of any open-source compiler. I have to do everything on my PC, or on my Mac with patchy emulators. Until now the only serious Mac circuitboard work you could do was with the expensive BASIC Stamp. Some of my collegues also use Basic for PIC development, but I prefer C. Hence my joy in discovering that the Wiring project uses the GCC compiler. It’s C, so it would be a little bit harder for the students than Basic, but I’m not so sure about that, as the real problem is always getting the electronics right and setting up the compiler. Wiring makes all that simple.

In the past, I’ve used a similar prototype board, called the EZIO. (When he was here in Aix a few years back, Chris Csikszentmihályi told me that he had something to do with the development of that board, but he wouldn’t tell me exactly what.) Over the years there have been several other input/output boards like the EZIO and Wiring. The difference here is that you’re learning to work with a real microcontroller, which you can control at whatever level you want. Just like Processing, you can branch off into your own code if you want, or use the pre-cooked functions. It’s up to you.

I’ve been researching neural networks for the last month or so and have finally gotten down to building something. neural.network.soundtoy is the first implementation of my brand-spanking new NeuralNetwork class. By clicking and holding the mouse, you can create independant neural networks with random connection weights between nodes. When nodes reach their activation threshold, they play a sound.

Mousing over individual nodes will activate them, and by clicking on a node you can turn it so that it is permanantly on. You can get some interesting sounds going on if you activate multiple nodes at once.

Nodes can have both inhibitory and excitory action on nodes which they are connected to, so any given network can play a variety of tunes depending on which nodes are active.

This is just the start of what I want to do with NNs; next step is to build some learning networks and see if I can figure out some interesting ways to apply them.

I’ll be putting the source code up at CodeTree.org in an attempt to be better at open sourcing.

Merry Christmas.

Thesis finished and working on a little something involving animation. I’ve made a prototype but am musing over whether to carry on in Flash or Processing. Flash makes more sense but it limits me to what I can do with the animation (seeing as the animation is going to be purely generated from code).

I’ve finally appeared on Hayvend.

Rock On.

I always wondered when I would find a use for MovieClip.transform.concatenatedMatrix - finally I’ve found one. It becomes very useful when you try to detect if you’ve hit a BitmapData object under your mouse pointer - especially if that bitmap is nested inside one or more movieclips that have been scaled or rotated. Think of it like the localToGlobal for bitmaps - just a little bit more elegant.

Here’s a code to do that:

var m:Matrix = mc.transform.concatenatedMatrix;
// mc is the clip that holds the bitmapData Object

trace(”bitmap hit”);
}


And here is a demo:

Codetree is a new project that uses tagging and open-source codes for processing and flash sketches. The intention is, that you can browse examples and codes and enhance them. The basic idea is that the codes are evolved by various people.

I really think, that the website do need some enhancements. The upload-sequence for sketches is a little too complicated (so much things to to: making thumbnails, zipping the code, etc.). I also see no tracking system or something, that follows the creation/evolution of codes. And as far as I understood this project, it is this that makes the main goal. Also other details are some kind of messy. For example: why can’t I browse the coders alphabetically?
Nevertheless, I think codetree is a great way of browsing and finding suitable code for your next project. Or simply to linger in the codeboutique.

My profile on codetree.

Codetree is a new project that uses tagging and open-source codes for processing and flash sketches. The intention is, that you can browse examples and codes and enhance them. The basic idea is that the codes are evolved by various people.

I really think, that the website do need some enhancements. The upload-sequence for sketches is a little too complicated (so much things to to: making thumbnails, zipping the code, etc.). I also see no tracking system or something, that follows the creation/evolution of codes. And as far as I understood this project, it is this that makes the main goal. Also other details are some kind of messy. For example: why can’t I browse the coders alphabetically?
Nevertheless, I think codetree is a great way of browsing and finding suitable code for your next project. Or simply to linger in the codeboutique.

My profile on codetree.

Does this come from the heart, the mind or the belly?