I have been interested in generative art (art generated by code) for as long as I remember, and Flight 404 was always one of my favorite websites. I hadn’t checked for anything new until just today. Boy am I glad I did. Amazing stuff. Read about the process if you are interested… (part One, Two, and Three).
As far back as I can remember Roger Hodgin did most of his work in Flash and Flight 404 was primarily used as his portfolio. For awhile now Roger has been dabbling in the Processing library for most of his experiments. Here’s another of his creations. Check out his blog for lots more!
I will be travelling to San Jose today to attend a week long internal developer’s conference at Adobe. In preparation for some minor compiler surgery I will be digging into the compiler guts on my flight there. I did learn this morning that a good portion of the compiler is based on Apache Velocity, so I’m snagging some research material and filling up the laptop.
While in San Jose I will also be attending a day long Hydra boot camp. If you aren’t familiar with Hydra (name to change soon), you can start here, or just Google around. Essentially though, it’s a shader language that will allow you to write to-the-metal (well, soft-metal anyways) pixel shaders for raster image manipulation. The sneak peaks making their rounds internally of potential use cases have been mind blowing.
So, lots to learn this week (and still make headway on my rework of the Flex State model).
Last week I learned:
Internet Explorer will finally nix the ‘click to activate’ behavior it’s had for years.
Sorry, I forgot to post this earlier, but last week I did receive confirmation from Microsoft that they have in fact settled their browser plugin grip with Eolas and will be soon releasing an update that finally rids the world of the ‘click to activate’ step for interacting with web based plugins (inclusive of Flash). But hey..fwiw, don’t stop using SWFKit and family, they are still a much cleaner way of embedding.
I was originally under the impression that I would have to purchases a subscription based service to make use of the GPS feature on my Blackberry Curve (either to access maps in real time or report my location to my personal site). Well, thanks to Doug McCune I found out that there is a great (and free) application from Mologogo that installs in no time flat. The app will display maps from either Microsoft or Google, and optionally feed your GPS stats (including elevation, etc.) to an URL of your choice. This allowed me to for instance embed a map of my location here. Any time you want to know where I am (and I have my cell phone with me), the map will reflect my realtime location. Doug’s inspiring post can be found here.
Some gotchas when I was trying to set things up:
The download on Mologogo’s main site wasn’t auto-install enabled for my Blackberry (.jad file), but if you go to http://bb.mologogo.com there’s a compatible installer you can navigate to with your Blackberry.
When setting up Mologogo to send data to an alternate URL it’s not enough to configure your profile on Mologogo’s site, you must also set the URL in the Mologogo app settings on the phone.
Earlier in the day Mologogo’s website was down, and I wasn’t able to log in. I ended up surfing around and found another similar service called BlackberryTracker. There app also worked like a charm on my curve, and after you’ve registered for a developer key you can use their API directly to access your saved location data - so you don’t need your own server. Works pretty good but at the time of this writing their developer site is down (so you can’t get a key). But all in all much faster (less slick) application.
For what it’s worth, the best tutorial to get you up and running and embedding your location on your own website or blog can be found in this wiki article.
Today I also learned:
There are some gotchas if you change jobs mid-year.
I ended up finally gathering up all my W2s, 1099s, 1098s, etc. and firing up ol’ Tax Cut. To our surprise it turns out we’re getting back a bit more than we thought we would. A welcome surprise, certainly better than if we found out that we owed. I really didn’t know that if you’d maxed out your social security contributions, then moved on to another employer, the new employer really has no clue, so continues to keep withdrawing social security. Good times.