Today I found this movie on YouTube. It is pretty old now, but won an Oscar in 1963. It is the first movie Mel Brooks made and can be considered a classic.

Part 1: Why Program?

Processing is a language created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas of MIT, designed to make computer programming accessible to people who might imagine it will always be beyond their grasp. Processing makes it easy to create beautiful, interactive graphics.

The principles of computer programming are surprisingly simple and powerful. They also provide an easy way in to understanding some very important concepts in mathematics and science, by making them into things you can play around with. Messing about with stuff is one of the ways that humans learn best, as well as being hugely enjoyable!

For scientists and engineers, it is crucial to be able to be able to solve equations, to apply the methods of mathematics to practical or theoretical problems. For the rest of us, that might be less important but there is still great value in having an intuitive understanding of the way the world works. Often, this is much easier if we have a handle on the mathematics expressing scientific laws.

This is only one of the reasons almost everyone should be exposed to the fundamentals of programming. Another reason is that there is huge practical value in even quite simple programming. Most web sites, for example, are built using one or more scripting languages. In general this makes them far easier to maintain, but since many people imagine that programming at all is beyond them, they get put off trying to make fundamental changes.

The biggest reason for everyone to have a go at programming is also the simplest: Programming can be tremendous fun, and you’ll never know how much until you try it. It’s a toy, a tool, and a tool for making toys.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to get started with Processing, and a taste of what beautiful and seemingly complex forms can arise from a tiny amount of mathematics, I have included below a very short program to draw a fractal - a mathematical form which shows similar structures at many different scales, in this case spirals of spirals of spirals. The comments within the program should give you some clues what is going on, but do not worry if you are not able to follow all of the steps in it, especially if you have never programmed before. Soon, it will all make perfect sense!

I would encourage you to download Processing from http://processing.org now and install it following the simple instructions there. Then paste in the code below and hit ‘run’.

//Double slashes indicate this line is a comment that Processing can ignore.
// Comments in your code make it easier to follow.
// The first thing to do is declare all the variables we will use.
float x=50, y=50, seed=420, f=0; // Each seed value gives a different fractal.
double df=0, ddf=TWO_PI/seed;
int i=0;
void setup(){ // ’setup’ is called just once, when the program is run.
size(200,200); // Tell Processing how big a window it should use.
}
void draw(){ // ‘draw’ is called every time the program draws a frame.
background(255); // This fills in the frame with a white background.
while (i<9000){ // Repeat the next block 9000 times.
i+=1; // This means ‘add 1 to i’. We could also write out ‘i=i+1′.
f+=df;
df+=ddf;
x+=cos(f);
y+=sin(f);
point(x,y);
}
// We need to reset most of the variables every frame.
x=100;
y=100;
i=0;
f=0;
df=0;
ddf+=0.00000005; // This causes animation to happen.
}

Feel free to play around with this code, setting the variable named ’seed’ to different numbers, changing the size of the window and so on. You might also like to start looking at some of the examples that come with Processing. Next time we will start looking in more detail in what’s going on here.

Thinking about organisations, people, mindsets, businesses, change, added value and social media. At least it is about creative exercise. And about test- and feedback-driven development.

(via)(via)

source code

A cloud in a box.

Some weeks ago google announced O3D, an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser using an plug-in. Programs for O3D has to be written in Javascript.

As I’m using Javscript for many years in my daytime job, I though about how difficult can it be to convert my surfaceLib for processing, written in Java, over to Javascript. I’m a big fan of mootools cause it provides OO class structure that is  similar to Java. So after all, using mootools, it was harder to figure out the 3d stuff, like drawing an triangle mesh, or adding color to it than the whole mathematical stuff to calc the coordinates of the surfaces. As the project is at a very early state there will be no code hosted in the moment, but it will be in the future.

I found a very simple way to generate isometric graphics in processing.

click here to see it as an applet (and get the source)

the trick is to rotate the image by 45 deg and scale it with scale(1, 0.5).

this way the graphic can be draw as always, only the z coordinate has to be substracted from the x and the y coordinate

...
void draw() {
  pushMatrix();
  translate( width/2, height/2 );
  scale( 1, 0.5 );
  rotate( radians( 45 ) );
  translate( -width/2, -height/2 );
  background(255);

  line( x1 - z1, y1 - z1, x2 - z2, y2 - z2 );   

  popMatrix();
}
...

Cologne Commons Compilation Vol. 2

In less than four weeks our first conference and festival on free music, creative commons and new cultural markets - the Cologne Commons - will take place in Cologne (12. - 13. June 2009). It will feature an exhibition showing ten years of netlabel-culture, an conference, where media-experts and musicians from Germany will talk about the changes and chances of the ongoing cultural and technological shift. At night of this two days a full equipped festival program will showcase music-talents from all over the world, who use the internet successfully as tool and promotion platform. At least, they are good at their instruments, too!

To celebrate and to give a tribute, we released a second mp3-compilation with tracks from artists, that will play at the festival. It contains music from Rktic, Goto80, Comfort Fit, Entertainment for the Braindead, Backwater Planet and more. Be sure to check it out. Head for a listen and a download at the Cologne-Commons website. Feel free to spread the word. Little more info in English here.

In Bb 2.0

Music-Experiments on YouTube seem to get more and more popular. Today mo. from Phlow gave me the link to this little experiment. In Bb 2.0 is a loose collection of various “tracks” in for of YouTube videos, that can be played in any order. The results surely are not synchronized and therefore the sounds have to be more orientated on ambient-music. The project is also connected to an open call. Here are some of the rules:

- Sing or play an instrument, in Bb major. Simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or groove. Leave lots of silence between phrases.
- Record in a quiet environment, with as little background noise as possible.
- Wait about 5-10 seconds to start playing.

Uh, an don’t forget to use nice video-footage as well!

I somehow like the idea of extending this popular video-platform to new music-instruments, or more generally new music concepts. I am sure, that most of you are already familiar with the brilliant YouTube MashUp “Thru You” from Kutiman.

Share, the thesis project of Yannick Assogba in the MIT Media Lab Sociable Media Group, is an interesting idea in coding: it’s basically a peer-to-peer sketchbook for creative code. All of your sketches are synced to everyone else’s sketches, and Share tracks the connections between users.

http://share.media.mit.edu/about

You get more from Share than you would from simply, say, sharing a Subversion repository. Share not only syncs code and changes, but also tracks each time you copy and paste code from elsewhere, so that code snippets borrowed from others can be traced through the people using the system.

Up to 30 people are now invited for an online competition using the tool.

The Share Experiment is an online competition/design-a-thon/hack-a-thon and exhibition that invites 30 participants form to use Share to make new creative works over the course of ten days. The theme of this competition is “Inspired By Pong”. Though the final result need not be games, artists/hackers are invited to reinterpret and remix the concept of pong while at the same time being open to reinterpretations and sampling of their own work as it being created. The Share Experiment will run from June 5th - June 14th and we are inviting applications. There will be some prizes awarded to winners (including iPod Touch[es] and Arduino kits) and we have some interesting ideas about mechanics for awarding prizes!

http://share.media.mit.edu/participate (via toxi on Twitter)

What is the Best Way to Share?

It’s a very cool idea, but this does raise some questions about implementation. It’s too bad that Share can’t run as some sort of plug-in; it loses some of the functionality of the bare-bones Processing editor, let alone the capabilities of an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans. If it used a standard IDE, too, it’d be easier to be “language-agnostic” as the creator suggests. (OpenFrameworks or Flash or Processing, it wouldn’t really matter.)

But as a concept and an experiment, this looks really fascinating. It should be interesting to see how people use the code. And will users in a “competition” do a lot of copying and pasting, or focus mainly on their own work?

Part of the reason I bring up this is that we’re interested on CDM in doing some shared work. “Share” I think would be too limiting; it’s back to the old-fashioned Subversion approach.

So, for instance, we’re organizing a hackday around tangible interfaces in June, the first of what I hope will be many more. We’ll have people working on it in person in New York, but also folks collaborating around the world online. I’ll post more details, but just to kick off the discussion:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

(Note: that page mostly talks about using LusidOSC and Trackmate, but I really like their physical design ideas – you can easily substitute reacTIVision and TUIO if you like, and I’m definitely looking forward to the TUIO2 update soon. One advantage of the Trackmate tracker itself is that it’s built in OpenFrameworks, if that’s an environment of choice for you.)

Part of the idea is that we’d like people to contribute shared code and experiments, whether they’re advanced users or novices. I think a tool like Subversion can be ideal for that – students at NYU’s ITP, for instance, work with Subversion for Processing very early on, even though many of those students are pretty new to programming.

A traditional solution like Google Code or Sourceforge for hosting Subversion seems like not a bad idea in this case. I was likewise interested to see Project Kenai support built into a recent version of NetBeans, another example of how these sorts of things can be integrated with the IDE.

So, how would you prefer to share code – for the hackday, or any other reason? Subversion vs. Git? Google Code vs. Sourceforge? And what would an ideal tool do for you in terms of facilitating collaboration?

Ohh, the music from the Yellow Magic Orchestra is still magic. Even years and years later being ported to two Nintendo Korg DS-10 does not narrow anything of this eternal tunes.

More Rydeen:

(via, thx!)

Pixelgames are keeping coming. What are all this shaders, 3D-worlds and multi-user platforms worth, if you can have instant, bloated fun with games like Underworld Trip? The gameplay is most easy (walk through the level, avoid obstacles), the style pixly and “interlaced”. The soundtrack very minimal but highly functional atmospheric. There is a narrative as well, but this you better explore for yourself. Be ready for a real small-scale trip! (via)

“Us Now” is an interesting full length documentary about computer-based social technologies, trust, bottom-up and self-organisation. Finally “wisdom of the crowd” appears and all connected to the question, if we all together could govern? The leading question of the movie is: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?”

“New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.”

Author: dwarfling
Keywords: multitouch TUIO MSAfluid processing.org
Added: May 17, 2009

Karl Kliem made this 3rd price awarded video from Lithops new album Ye Viols!, which I can recommend. It was released on Thrilljockey. For the people who do not know: Lithops is the solo-project of Jan St. Werner, one of the Mouse on Mars members. I really really appreciate their work.

iCorrect EditLab Pro 4.52?
software oem cd line business Buy Cheap Portrait Professional Max 6 adobe cs2 photo shop total training
microsoft office 2003 oem Buy Cheap Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium for Mac locate software oem files
widows oem software Buy Cheap Nero V 6.6 Ultra Edition CD/DVD Burning Suite window 2000 upgrade download,
quark xpress 6 crack Buy Cheap Macromedia Captivate v1.0 oem software bundle,
software oem italiano Buy Cheap Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 adobe photo shop element
oem software cds? Buy Cheap Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional microsoft window 2000 professional oem software
cheap software downloads Buy Cheap Macromedia Fireworks 8 for Mac oem Microsoft Office;
adobe standard encoding Buy Cheap Macromedia Studio 8 for Mac oem office 2000 software
Upgrade window 2000 to xp upgrade window 95 to 98 600. Buy Cheap Adobe Acrobat V 6.0 Professional PC dvd to pocket pc 1.2.4
inkjet definition oem software Buy Cheap Adobe Encore DVD 2.0 “The Logo Creator MEGA pak 3.6″
financial planning software australia Buy Cheap MS Windows 2000 Professional - Full Version Buy cheap PhotoShop CS 2!
iCorrect EditLab Pro 4.52? Buy Cheap Microsoft Visio 2003 Professional (DEUTSCH) software oem cd line business
adobe cs2 photo shop total training Buy Cheap Adobe InDesign CS V 3.0 PC microsoft office 2003 oem
locate software oem files Buy Cheap Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition widows oem software
window 2000 upgrade download, Buy Cheap Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 quark xpress 6 crack
oem software bundle, Buy Cheap Adobe Font Folio 11 software oem italiano
adobe photo shop element Buy Cheap Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 oem software cds?
microsoft window 2000 professional oem software Buy Cheap Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate cheap software downloads
oem Microsoft Office; Buy Cheap Adobe Soundbooth CS3 adobe standard encoding
oem office 2000 software Buy Cheap Adobe Illustrator CS V 11.0 PC Upgrade window 2000 to xp upgrade window 95 to 98 600.