Category: Programming

C A

John Winkelman

I had a productive evening yesterday playing around with Cellular Automata, in response to Stephen Wolfram’s magnum opus A New Kind of Science . I put together a CA generator which calculates 90 generations of a 60-cell grid. That’s 5400 cells. So when you click this here link , wait for a few seconds (around four on my monster PC) for the thing to finish crunching. It shouldn’t crush your computer, although I have not looked at it on a Macintosh. The blank right half of the file is where the (self explanatory) controls will go in the next iteration of the thing. It still has a few bugs which won’t be obvious unless you know what the thing is doing.

I will post the code when I am happy with it.

This evening I got all set up to start playing in Java. I will maybe have a more powerful version of the CA demo up in a couple of months.

Launch!

John Winkelman

Just launched the first iteration of the Potato Moon site. It was kind of a rush job and there are a million little things that I want to do better. But the Midnight Water CD release party is tomorrow and they will have Important People looking for information, so there it is. Once the holiday rush is over I will dip my fingers back in and do a job worthy of such a fine, fine band.

Potato Moon has music from their self-titled first album available at CD Baby . If you have free time tomorrow, Friday, December 13, and you are anywhere near Grand Rapids, stop in for what looks to be a great evening of music.

Pro Bono Publico

John Winkelman

Well, I had to go back and edit my post from November 7. The reason? Looking at my endlessly entertaining traffic statistics page I found that someone searching for “pictures of P4m3la 4nd3r50n” (spelled in 1337 to protect, uh, me) had ended up here at es.o. Silly putty I can handle, but not I REPEAT NOT this.

Besides: I think the change makes that entry a little more…poetic.

A follow-up to yesterday’s post: The backward text , as I mentioned, works everywhere except Internet Explorer on the Macintosh. Well, IE/Mac is the only major browser that currently adds quotation marks to the quote tag, as should happen according to the w3c specification. So if you are looking to quote Hebrew text in a manner consistent with current web standards, you are out of luck.

Extinctus Ambitur Idem

John Winkelman

Today was hellish, traumatic, and unproductive. In order to take my mind from more important, worldly things I hit a tutorial site and explored some of the more obscure XHTML tags, and discovered some interesting things.

For instance, there is superscript , subscript , quotes , code , citations , even backward text (everywhere except IE/Mac)

Anything to keep myself occupied.

My Eyes Are Bleeding

John Winkelman

Started and finished marking up Tartuffe over the weekend. Took me about five hours. In prose the structure of the individual line is important so every single line had to have a start tag and an end tag. Translation: chapped eyes. An 800k document took me two hours, and a 120k (pre-markup) document took me five.

Here are links to Tartuffe and The Club of Queer Trades . Also, here is the XML Schema I am working on for Project Gutenberg.

I am also working on an abstract/explanation/tutorial on marking up PG texts in XML based on the afore-mentioned Schema. This will be insanely dull and opaque and of interest only to the kind of people who are willing to spend hours at a time converting an electronic version of a hundred-year-old book into a different electronic version of a hundred-year-old book.

And thus do I pass my time as I wait for the world to end.

Dead Souls

John Winkelman

I recently finished marking up Nikolai Gogols Dead Souls . For those of you who suddenly think I am a Satanist or something, the explanation is as follows: Nikolai Gogol , a Russian writer who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century, wrote a book called Dead Souls . Project Gutenberg has made available a plain-text version of the book, and I have taken that plain text and marked it up as XML, in the hope that one of these days I will have a formatted, readable, printable version up on ES.O.

Marking up Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades took about an hour. This one took about two. At this rate, a book a week is not only possible, but easy, relaxing and rewarding; and it makes me wonder why the HTML Writers Guild has done nothing since early 2000.

Since my inquiries have generated no replies from the folks at the HTML Writer’s Guild I must assume I am on my own on this project. When I get the new computer up and running I will slap together a couple of stylesheets for the marked-up texts, and perhaps bundle them off to the people who run Project Gutenberg.

In the meantime, make yourself a rock band .

Break Time!

John Winkelman

It has launched . And I did it for about half a year’s worth of free coffee. I love the barter system.

Next project: Battlefish!

I have this upcoming week off. I have no particular plans; I just need to not work for a week. I will read a lot, write a lot, sleep a lot… all the things I generally have so little time for. This may well be my only post for the week.

I R Ub3r 1337

John Winkelman

I have finally made it back into flash, And i have come up with an egregious hack for drawing a circle using the drawing API. Apparently using curveTo() is rather awkward for drawing a simple circle. This method uses the beginGradientFill() method:

_root.createEmptyMovieClip("grad",1);
 with (_root["grad"]) {
 colors = [0x000000,0x000000,0xffffff,0x000000,0x000000];
 alphas = [0,0,100,0,0];
 ratios = [0,124,128,132,255];
 /* adjust the 'spacing' of the middle three numbers to adjust line thickness */
 matrix = { matrixType:"box", x:0, y:0, w:400, h:400, r: (100/180)*Math.PI };
 beginGradientFill( "radial", colors, alphas, ratios, matrix );
 lineStyle(1,0x000000,100);
 moveTo(0,0);
 lineTo(400,0);
 lineTo(400,400);
 lineTo(0,400);
 lineTo(0,0);
 endFill();
 }

Put this code at the root level of your Flash file and run it. Nothing more need be done. Also, you can find a compiled version here . Sure, it’s not much to look at now, but just think of the possibilities!