My genetic algorithm example from the nature of code has been translated to Finnish and posted at http://www.nokturno.org/index.php?poeetta=shiffman. What a great site! Lots of interesting text-based digital work there.

Had a chance to experiment a bit more. Created a very basic particle system, where particles are born via motion detection (simple webcam) and displayed as blobular things on the lighting fixture. Graphics, network lighting control, and motion detection all done in Processing. Hooray, the possibilities are endless. . .

(This post uses the wordpress video comments plug-in.)

(testing the new video comments plug-in)

Nicholas Street, a recent MEng Computer Science graduate from Imperial College London, posted last week to the mysociety maps mailing list about his final year project work, TimeContours: Using isochrone visualisation to describe transport network travel cost.

His work includes a comparison with my own maps, which he says are “effective prototype implementations, but the unfamiliar unlabelled layout makes it difficult to relate to the underground”. Touché! To his credit, Nicholas addresses almost all the deficiencies of my tube maps with his own software and goes significantly further in implementing the same kind of analysis for other transport networks (even including an example of using street data from my friends at OpenStreetMap).

His approach and background reading are covered in detail so the final paper will be a great resource for people working in this area in the future. I do hope he finds time to release the software for us all to use too. As well as the more traditional academic and print references, it’s nice to see a hat tip to people putting their thoughts and experiments online such as myself, Rod and Oskar. Whilst a blog is no substitute for peer review and academic rigour, I strongly believe that the more of these ideas we share then the better all our work will become.

Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview

Adobe has released a public preview of ActionScript 3.0, which will be part of Flash 9. This follows the release of Flash Player 9, which will support AS3 features. At a glance this release seems to reinforce the evolution of Flash and ActionScript into a serious application development. Runtime types, non-dynamic classes and runtime exceptions brings AS3 in line with regular programming languages and hopefully simplifying the process of debugging Flash. In the past, grown programmers have been known to break down and cry at the thought of figuring out what is wrong with a complex Flash app. Perhaps now they will only sigh deeply.

The real reason for these changes is that run-time types and non-dynamic classes give a major performance boost. Flash Player 9 contains a new ActionScript virtual machine, the AVM2. This VM is expected to boost Flash performance up to 10-fold, to a point where the VM can run complex applications at reasonable speeds.

And guess what: Flash now has a revolutionary new primitive type: The "int". The fact that this was missing in the first place is mind-boggling. My apologies if this sounds snide, but I remember wondering why Macromedia didn't "professionalize" ActionScript over 4 years ago. Ok, so AS2 had OOP but it felt like a kludge and the willy-nilly handling of pointers made you cringe.

More good news: There are indications (see overview, search for "DisplayList") that AS3 will ditch the MovieClip class in favor of more logical DisplayList and Shape classes, as well as doing away with the hopelessly outdated layer system for deciding depth of objects.

The recent developments are good, but my suspicion is that they will still fall short of making Flash a real application environment without relying on obscure tricks and guru knowledge. I understand the desire to keep Flash accessible to non-hardcore coders, but surely it would be possible to make the language scaleable without sacrificing consistency.

Don't get me wrong, Flash is invaluable as a platform for rich media content that can actually be seen by the majority of Internet users. And this new version is inching towards a better Flash world. But if Adobe allows Flash to continue the "fix a kludge with a kludge" tradition that has always plagued Director, they'll eventually have to scrap the whole platform and build something new from scratch. Let's hope that doesn't happen.

Links:

• Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview
• Adobe: ActionScript 3.0 Overview
• ActionScript 3.0 Cheatsheet

(Via Create Digital Motion)

Shadow Monsters! New software from Philip Worthington added to the exhibit
ion.

I finally found some time to put together a small portfolio site, which shows some of the more creative work that I have been doing for the last few years. The interface is a bit experimental - as usual I just didn't have the heart for a simple HTML page. 

I'm also busy putting together materials from my FlashBelt 2006 presentation - I'll have the Evil Machines That Want to Take Your Job and the smart rockets up with the source very quickly. I'll also put together the example that was suppsoed to have worked in my Processing workshop. I promise.

David Dessen: Supa formula destrukt / Math surface destrukt

Some exciting news about VVVV, the "multipurpose toolkit" from the best boys at Meso. They've launched a redesigned and much improved VVVV site, combining Wiki and blog functionality into one user-friendly setup. VVVV has never been the most well-documented tool and the previous site suffered slightly from geek tendencies, but this time they got it right. The documentation page should now have something even for those with no visual programming experience, and if not they can just head over to the Fan Club to look for answers.

And for anyone who is unaware of the powers of VVVV, have a look at David Dessen's new blog, Sanch TV. David has been producing some amazing results using VVVV's built-in support for vertex shaders. Shaders run directly on the GPU of your graphics card, and so get a major performance boost compared with CPU-based methods. That feature alone should be reason enough to start experimenting with the VVVV toolkit (Windows only.)

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It’s not everyday that you find yourself sitting alone at night in a cloud of smoke on an abandoned military airbase in the middle of nowhere writing Python code, but that is exactly where i found myself last night while setting up for the project that I am doing with my friend Stephen Spyropoulos and his brother Theodore for the Faster Than Sound festival outside of London. The project they’ve come up with is quite amazing and I was happy to lend a hand.

“Smoke Signals is based on one of the oldest forms of communication in recorded history dating back over 5,000 years. The project works as a hybrid system that explores the dynamic and spatial capacities of smoke and light in relation to contemporary mobile SMS technologies of messaging today.The project examines a dynamic real-time interaction that writes space. Smoke and light setup the condition for developing a typographic ambient / responsive environment.”

http://www.minimaforms.com/smokesignals/

Cheers!

Usually when people don’t post is because they don’t have anything to say, but to be honest this wasn’t definitely the case, probably just the wish to say/show something more interesting but this time I rekon it is worthy to post.

As you can eventually notice from my recent delicious bookmarks I finally started using the […]

Well it looks like I’ve got me a 1st class honours degree. I extend a hearty thankyou to all the Processing folks (seeing as I started getting 1sts on projects just after I started using Processing). I also extend a hearty thanks to my parents for supporting me throughout the past three years.

Creating a package as opposed to a standalone sketch takes some serious thought on my part. I hope to get an outline of the A* part of my A.I. library done soon, but this is all new territory for me.

A friend alerted me to Fluxus a scheme based graphics programming environment. It boasts the advantage of letting you drop code in whilst it’s running. I’ve wanted to learn a Lisp style language for some time, it’s just a pity there isn’t a Windows release.

The tragic condition of Patrick O’Brien prompts me to link one of his favourites of mine. The Man With the Smallest Penis in Existence and the Electron Microscope Technician who Loved Him.

And there’s the Art of Science Competition results.