Processing Blogs

Beth and I just got back from vacation in San Francisco on Sunday. See the photo set on Flickr.

A giant Japanese robot escapes the studio to shoplift and beat up children. Awful music, great idea.

Well I did release a new flash folio to lure prospective employers, but when I went to Newstoday for a quick crit it got such a beating I started work again. This time, no dodgy Flash components, I’m making my own. And the new one will be pure AS, I’m aiming to have only two lines instancing an external class on the .fla timeline and nothing else. Nothing smells better than pure, undiluted code. For a quick cringe at my last attempt go here. It does however boast a html parser that I want to iron out the bugs and build into the new flash.

Tomorrow I’m off to London to see a talk by Harold Cohen at the Imperial College, he’s going to reveal new developments with AARON. Phase one was the exploratory cave painter (my favourite really), phase two was the figurative portraiture maker and now he is about to unveil phase three. If it’s particularly interesting, expect a report later this week. If there’s enough material in my notes I might write it up for furtherfield (who I wrote an article for the other week).

Links of Leisure:
New Beck Video (Michel Gondry)
Walking across water at the London Design Festival
Blosfeldt Fractals
Open Code (online Processing)
OpenFrameWorks
Jeff Han about his multi-touch interface
Video music animation
Online generators
Article on design grids
ReacTIVision used for a PureData type patch jam

Links of Utility:
Color Codes Matching Chart
Essential Web Skills (pdf)
Undocumented Tween / Easing classes for Flash
Raw CSS examples
CSS Float Tutorial
Html to Xml php parser
Unobtrusive Flash Objects
Detect and embed Flash objects
Flash key combinations
Second Life models from Blender
Free Art for designers

I heartily warn oldschool Atari ST owners to stay away from Dungeon Master RTC. One shouldn’t be staying up till 3am to kill a dragon (thank god I’ve completed it and can carry on with my life). There is a Java version of Dungeon Master but the maps and graphics aren’t very faithful to the original, at one point you can’t even get a much needed key.

…which is shorthand I hear for Too Long Didn’t Read. Which just about describes my AStar first attempts and my attitude to the tutorials. I actually managed to put together some nice Best First Search routines though. So I combined my stuff with Tom Carden’s and got a new library.

AStar

Unfortuanately my Snake Charmer project didn’t work out in hyper space like I was planning. It’s a nice rehash of the old one though.

Like a new tv channel thru one’s browser.
A nice illustration magazine.
Toast art.
Mr City Men.
Some nice fine art.

Well a post has been a long time coming because I have an odd setup with computing at the moment as I’m still kinda homeless.

But that doesn’t stop me from writing a Genetic Algorithm Library. I’ve had a tough few weeks of testing as I’ve gone head-on against my own lack of common sense, publishing tid bits here and there and realising those said plans were either unworkable or just plain stupid. The final result I’m happy with though, as I am with my new print project Eye for an Eye. My next plan is to fix my dodgy Flash portfolio menu and crack on with the AStar library. I finally understand what Mr Carden was up to and with a few refinements to allow some pan-dimensional path-finding I should be able to mock up a road-test soon (I will be sure to credit Cardy-boy for the bulk of the algorithm, there’s little I can improve upon).

This has already been exhibited at the Wiring page but I repeat it here because it’s pretty cool and it reminds me that I really want a Wiring board when I have money again.

I came across this animation package in my surfs. I nearly recommended it to a friend but I realised she was still at uni so I said she better learn Flash or After Effects instead and get a job when she leaves education.

And I shall mention Tim Hunkin whose inventions and drawings I quite like.

A rather long graffitti thing. A movie of a wall being endlessly redecorated.

This AStar in Flash I intend to read when I finish sorting out my Flash portfolio (this is like the fourth re-write, but each version is looking a bit more proffesional than the last). He claims it’s very fast so I shall compare it to the library I have so far and see if mine can be improved.

A DNA logic gate computer (courtesy New Scientist). Nope, not a GA, but uses strands of DNA.

Robot swarms (courtesy New Scientist).

Some rather entertaining warning signs. Most could adorn a Processing piece or two.

Whoop whoop! Flash 9 Beta for Linux.

Like a Pen. New video by The Knife.

Triumph of the Heart. Bjork video by Spike Jonze. A pity I can’t find the video of the making of this promo, it’s really cool. It kicks off with a guy who complains that he was really looking forward to working with Spike Lee.

The Physics Whiteboard. Yes you’ve already seen it, but I’m linking it for reference purposes.

We Have Explosive. Future Sound of London. Am recently introduced to the work of Run Wrake. I’ve added him to my Artist favourites on the left.

About the Process. Many graphic artists responding on how they develop their ideas. A fatty pdf to download.

Battle of the Bands. Linked about a zillion times on Newstoday. But it is really good.

Line Rider. Linked already on P5Blogs but relinked here for my own use.

And my missing links are:

Printing on water.

Digital animation lectures at the Tate this September.

iQuit.

The full Eel movie.

And some Flash rubbish for my own personal use.
Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script.
asdg>> codedepot
Preloader Using MovieClipLoader
Using an XML file with Flash
XML In Flash

Just back from Prague where the beer is far too cheap. But I have have an array of notes on a variety of subjects that have lots of urls in them – day 1 (Julian Oliver of Select Parks), day 2 (Cyril Brom – A.I.), day 3 (Louis Bec and Christina Sommera – digital life forms), day 4 (Cory Ondrejka of Second Life and Eva Petersson & Tony Brooks – EyeToy and related work for the disabled). All in this folder.

Feeling inspired I’ve started on learning Python, I steered clear before thinking it looked too much like Lingo but I found I’d misunderstood how efficient it was to work in. Blender comes with a Python interpreter built in and can even take OSC messages. Top Dollar!

If you’re in Second Life at all I decided to set up an account. I’ll be the odd looking short white racoon in black called Robotacid Yin. From the talk we got in Prague there seems to be a whole new audience in there and Cory was quite insistent that they’re letting the users decide the direction of Second Life, and it seems to be more about creating your own objects and scripts than some version of the Sims (which the site seems to suggest).

Blprnt has linked it already but I’m linking it again for my own referencing: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Brevity has been mentioned in the forums and looks like one to watch. Everyone I think would like the option to straight code Flash.

A cheap solution to a conference camera.

An entertaining bit of 3D and After Effects usage (movie).

For those of you who use MySpace like I barely do, you might be interested in customising that dreadful layout – this is a rather good example.

I’ve had a gloriously awful week trying to program in Flash. Every time something goes wrong I have to play this little game of follow the function to find out what in hell’s name is going on. This XML FAQ for Flash I found very useful though. The result is my very hiccoughy Flash portfolio.

This post is going to be short and sweet because the internet at home has died and all of my links are back there. I haven’t done a lot of work on the AI library because I’ve been too busy learning Python / Linden Scripting Language / Actionscript. Rest assured work will start again once I’ve found a job / somewhere to live.

There’s a nice article from New Scientist on Sigraph 2006 here.

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.

As folks on the Processing forum will know, I’ve been experimenting with the A* pathfinding algorithm. Here’s a link demonstrating it and a couple of references. And from there I went back to my AI snake project because I wanted to get something ready for Transistor 2 which I’m very happy to be attending this year. I’m along for the third course – drop me a line if you’re going or if you work in Unreal Tournament as that’s the environment we’ll be making some stuff in.

I made a bunch of snakes go at it at once. Then I pushed it to 3D. After that I extended the pathfinder to tackle all the diagonals possible in 3D. That’s 26 directions.

Mr Carden put up an interesting link in the A* thread about an AI Tron project. It uses a genetic algorithm. It would be interesting to combine A* to this as it’s grid map has a limited adaptive memory. Perhaps I should start writing an AI library. Hrmm…

And now for even more links, (deep breath)…

A rather pleasant animation
A rather funny animation (especially if you work in Flash)
An interesting article about making money on the internet
A project viewing what people are browsing on the web right now (and people actually surf porn with this plugin enabled – weird)
A free SDS radiation ringtone (?!)

So today is a historic day for Java. In just a few hours (17:30 GMT) Sun will officially announce that Java is released under GPL from now on. Free at last!

Not only does this mean bugs will most likely be fixed far quicker than ever before, but now Java will also get much better support under Linux, Ubuntu and other open source OS environments. So this is an interesting bit for artsy folk too, since that might have impact on which tool/language to chose/support on these platforms. Being able to freely distribute Java yourself also removes another stumbling block for producing standalone apps.

In general it really seems this decision will help Java to “thrive” even more (incl. on even more platforms), or if you’re more pessimistic, at least give it better chances of survival. Being a programming language, it makes sense to hand over control to the people who are using it the most… That is not to say Sun hasn’t been quite good with that in the past (better than M$ or Adobe in any way). And even though you’re free to branch off and create your own fork of the language, the Java name & brand will remain under Sun’s control in order to ensure compatibility and their business. That’s not a bad thing at all.

(via ongoing)

On another slightly related note, Adobe has recently contributed parts of their AS3 virtual machine, dubbed AVM2, to a new OSS project hosted on Mozilla.org, called Tamarin.

“Source code from AVM2 being contributed to the Tamarin project implements ECMAScript 4th edition language features such as namespaces, classes, and optional strongly typed variables, and includes a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed.

The Tamarin project will result in an ECMAScript 4th edition engine that Mozilla will use within the next-generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla’s free Web browser, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript Virtual Machine.” (from the FAQ)

Safety in numbers. It’s interesting to see how both Sun and Adobe at least in parts have taken the risk to engage in a symbiosis with the Open Source world in order to protect themselves and/or even gain advantages over competitors. Microsoft’s Sparkle is posing a serious (potential) risk to Adobe’s product offering (Flash/Director). However, by open sourcing their development efforts, both Sun and Adobe have gained access to a potentially vastly increased community of contributors. It seems the repeated success of concerted and well managed large-scale open source efforts demonstrated by Mozilla and Eclipse (Callisto) is finally gaining momentum and support from other areas of the industry.