My Latest Procedural Art
More math-based art, but I really like how this came out a LOT better than my experiment with Fibonacci. Check them out!
Tight Cornell Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr A really tight Archemedean Spiral featuring my photos tagged with Cornell
Portrait Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr An Archemedean Spiral based on my Portrait Photos
The Ego-less Desktop vs The Commercial Desktop
In the most recent LugRadio episode was a feature about how the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) states that applications should be named in the applications menu not as the program name, but as what the program does. This is something I’d like to explore a little more in another post. But during the discussions, they mentioned an interesting point: Gnome follows (or tries to follow) the paradigm of the ego-less desktop. This means that it’s not important who coded your program, it’s important what it does. And this got me thinking about one of the HUGE annoyances I have as I read the blogs and news pages about Linux. Everyone complains about how Linux isn’t quite there yet and how it needs to fix this or that before it’s easy enough for the proverbial Grandmother. Let’s take a look at some use casse and see how Linux is precisely the opposite - it’s MUCH easier to use than Windows.
My latest Procedural Art Experiment
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
What I'm Up To - Animation-Wise
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working on Nick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
Hello Kitty Hell!
Recently, a coworker of mine showed me the website Hello Kitty Hell. This is a website created by someone who’s wife sells Hello Kitty items. If there is a young girl or, occasionally, woman in your life who is into the Hello Kitty Phenomenon, you doubtless know how much crap there is that can be branded with Hello Kitty and her various companions. Well, you probably haven’t seen many of THESE products. These are, as far as I know, REAL Hello Kitty items and all of them were featured on the Hello Kitty Hell website.
Joining the Digital Television Revoultion (but not through Cable)
As you’ve no doubt heard, the US will be discontinuing Analog TV transmission in February 2009. They’ve actually already auctioned off the analog spectrum (and I’m not too happy about who ended up buying it, but that’s for another post). So, if you have cable TV you don’t need to worry about this and if you have satellite TV and you get local channels via satellite, you also don’t need to worry. If you currently get the nice, free, over the air (OTA) channels, then you need to worry - unless you have a new HDTV. But, for some reason, I don’t see the HDTV crowd overlapping with the OTA crowd. If you bought an HDTV, I assume it was to watch your cable or satellite provider’s HD sports package or HD HBO or HD Discovery Channel (which is beautiful, by the way). So you probably need a converter box.
Philosophizing on the Move can lead to trouble
The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:
This'll work for now...
I found a Wordpress theme that I mostly like called Hal 5.0. I think the top image is a little over the top, but the overall theme is ok. I edited the font size up from the default - the font designer must have amazing eyesight. I also added in tag listings into the blog posts. Overall, I’m much happier with this look than with the previous one. I still think that, someday, I’ll make my own theme so I can be completely happy with it instead of finding one that’s good enough on the Wordpress site.
Changing themes again
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
Quotes
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
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Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.” Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
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“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity” “What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse” -LugRadio