More Calm

John Winkelman

Just uploaded a new page of photographs. River Ice . This is what I do at lunch.

Right now I am listening to the CD American Gypsy by the amazing Tony Furtado. The first track, Oh Berta, Berta gets a lot of play at WYCE . Based on that one track, I ordered the CD. I was not mistaken. Furtado’s stuff is kind of bluegrass, kind of blues, and all kinds of beautiful.

This past Saturday I caught the Conklin Ceili Band (website in production) at Pete Brown’s Office . I have known of them for some time, and have met the lead singer Mick, but this is the first time I have actually heard them. They put on a hell of a show. They have a new fiddle player, Natalie – lately of Fonnmhor – who plays as well as ever. A splendid time was had by all.

Cable Bastards

John Winkelman

That would be AT&T. They are raising my rates by $15.00 per month. Several of my friends are switching over to DSL and filing nasty letters to AT&T. Can’t say that I blame them.

Here is what I’m a-gonna do:

They will be charging me a large amount of money for a service which, in my opinion, should be less expensive that it currently is. Therefore, for the increased fee, I will become the Bastard- Customer- From- Hell. From now on, AT&T gets exactly 0% slack from me. Every time I get less that 100k/second, even if I am connected to a teletype machine, AT&T will get a stupendously vile email from me. Power outage? I better God Damn still be online. My cable is cut? I better God Damn still be online. AT&T goes out of business? Still goddamn online. End of western civilization? Still online.

I am paying more, therefore I will demand more. AT&T has no say in this. I am merely playing by rules they set up. I demand absolute perfection in this service. I will not switch providers. I will hound the support desk, mid-level leeches management, marketroids and owners to make sure that even if the Earth falls into the sun, for what I am paying, ATT will ensure I do not lose my connection for so much as a nanosecond. AT&T is now my $60.95/month beeyotch.

And no I will not add cable TV in order to keep my current broadband rates. The reason everyone is switching to satellite is that AT&T cable TV sucks. I will not be strong-armed by a company which I am paying to be my beeyotch.

Accidental Popularity

John Winkelman

Looking at my site statistics this morning I saw that over the weekend es.o got over a hundred hits. Egads! thought I, The cellular automata experiments must have caught the eye of the Right People. I have become Known! Stephen Wolfram himself might have stopped by while I was at the bar!

But on closer inspection all of the hits, or almost all of them, were referred here by a surfboard design website. Well, sez I in a desperate grab at fading hope, Maybe the members of the Fields Medal Review Panel surf in their spare time.

I suspect someone grabbed one of my javascript files, specifically the one which opens pop-up windows, and plugged it in over there. Plugged it in and neglected to get rid of the absolute URL reference in the code.

No, (he says on looking at the referrer logs and cross-referencing the error files). Someone found my site when searching for “surfboard design”, and maybe linked to something which caused everyone following that link to go to my discussion board. I don’t have a discussion board. Nor do I have a surf board.

Which leaves me right back here where I started: begging for attention.

What Is It With the Ants?

John Winkelman

I got the idea for the Langton’s Ants experiment from Kevin Lindsey’s experiment . The code is my own, but the results were carefully double-checked against the original.

The “ant” follows four rules:

The ant toggles the color of its current square
The ant advances in the direction it is facing
If the new square is off, then the ant turns to the right by 90 degrees
If the new square is on, then the ant turns to the left by 90 degrees

Possible future riffs on this idea include multiple ants, multiple colors, and a hex/octal grid.

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.