More Light! More Light!

If you own a mac and you have a Netflix account, you should check out my short howto article on watching your netflix instant movies on your Mac.

If you are reading this post in your feed reader, you’ll want to click through to my actual website. Trust me on this one.

I was really impressed with Aza Raskin’s ContextFree.js experiment. I like how the simple rules of a context free art piece generate complex forms. See below, that text will turn into something I can’t exactly predict.
I’ve added a few comments to help you understand what’s going on there.

//all context free art starts with a single rule.  Ours will start with a rule named face.
startshape FACE
//and here is the rule FACE
rule FACE{
//a FACE rule means that we should draw the rules EYE MOUTH and HEAD.
 EYE{}
 // flip an eye over to the other side of the face.
 EYE{flip 90}
 MOUTH{}
 HEAD{}
}

//OH NO! We have two rules named HEAD.  Context free will randomly pick one
rule HEAD{ CIRCLE{}}
rule HEAD{  SQUARE{}}

rule EYE{CIRCLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {SQUARE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {SQUARE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3 r 45}}
rule EYE {TRIANGLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {TRIANGLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3 r 60}}

rule MOUTH {SQUARE{ s .8 .1 y -.12  b .5}}

And here is a randomly generated face, all made up of squares, circles, and triangles:

Want more faces? Go mess about with my face generator on Aza’s demo site.

update: in the comments Chris came up with a bunch of great mouths for an even better face generator!
The art is context free because any rule can be executed without knowing the context of the other rules - they are side-effect free. (these are the kind of problems that work well on lots of processors)
It gets much better. If you are using a modern browser, you’ll see that the heading of my website now is using this to generate random art up there in that previously wasted space.
Reload the website, you’ll see different art generated according to a handful of tiny algorithms. If you can see this, you might want to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Safari. They both support the cool stuff that I’m doing, but you can’t see right now.

Ignore this, it is just a braindump from the train.  Unless you want to help out.

I’ve started working on a project called add-art.   The idea is to turn advertisements into beauty.  It is based on the popular ad-block-plus firefox extension, but instead of leaving holes where advertisements are removed, it would insert art.  Curators could book shows on add-art.org for artists.  When you go to a website with tons of ads, they would be replaced by art images.

Great stuff!   Once we get the plugin working with add-art.org, we should look at decentralizing it.  Let the extension communicate with multiple ad block lists and multiple replacement image servers.  Then package the add-art.org server as an installable package so anyone can run it.  Let users pick up the url of other servers as a way to get art from the artists they like on their browser…

Deviantart might run something like this.
Maybe flickr/explore/interesting could be a provider.
Hell, why not use atom/rss as the provider and let any rss list of images be the provider?
Image sizing becomes an issue.  You need to stick in appropriate sized images.  If they aren’t the right size you’ll need to slice them up on the client side.  Is that cheap?  Does the browser give you a way to not only decently resize, but also slice from an image?

Google came out with a good idea a while ago called Google Gears.  The idea is to make some of these new fangled web applications able to function when you aren’t connected to the internet.

It never seemed like that great of an idea to me, but I’ve been using a personal Wiki to track household stuff with my pardner Sam.  I’ve been wishing for a wiki that I could use when I’m on the train and away from the internet.

I love the network.  When you are away from it though, why couldn’t you have a better cache - a mini net that is the last known version of what you seem to care about.  I’ve been using programs to download entire websites locally so I can read them while I commute.  It would be nice if you could just mark them as being of special interest in your browser.  Let computers hum and whir and keep it all up to date and in synch.  If we can do it with email, could we do it with the web, or at least the web I’m interested in?

Some folks think that offline and online will disappear as the network penetrates every corner of the world.  I doubt it.  Someone’s got to pay for it. More folks are interested in drinking water than BoingBoing, but it hasn’t penetrated every corner of the world.

> Hi Matthew,

>

> I’m very impressed with your rating/experience.

> At the current time, I have a few clients that are looking for experienced

> Ruby Rails developers (both contract & permanent) like yourself. There

> is

> lots of room for creativity and growth at these places.

>

> So, my contacts are below if you’re still looking. Also, if possible, can

> you pls forward me

> your current resume?

>

> Thanks much!

>

> Leslie Doan

> ******************

> Managing Partner

> MINDSPHERES, INC.

> 2570 North First Street

> Suite 200

> San Jose, CA 95131

> C: 408.386.7246

> E: leslied@mindspheres.com

> W: www.mindspheres.com

Hi Leslie Doan,

I know it's tough to be a recruiter.  Cold calling is difficult and much

of recruiting is a volume game.

But you aren't doing yourself any favors with this email.

You're starting this relationship with me by lying to me.  You say you've

looked at my working with rails profile and been impressed.  But that

can't be true.  I've never worked on a real rails or ruby project.  I have

no ratings or experience, so how can you be impressed.My resume is also clearly linked from my working with rails profile.  If I

can’t rely on you to know that, how can I trust you with my career?  I’ve

worked with a lot of recruiters, and I know that high volume folks treat

you like a tiny number. They are usually more interested in getting you

hired anywhere at any price so they can collect a commission.  I smell

that big time in this email.

If you show any level of familiarity with who I am or any of the many

links on my profile, I’m so much more likely to work with you.

Hope this helps you, and good luck in the recruiting game,

Matt

p.s. To make this letter worth my time as well as yours, I’m putting it up

for my pals on my website.  Don’t worry, I don’t have a very high

readership.

As you might imagine, I haven’t gotten a response from Leslie. I don’t think she’s interested in investing time in my career.

When you have your own domain, you can set up mailboxes on it. Since I own MoreLightMoreLight, I’ve been using it to track spam sources and have been lucky to not get any spam until today. Any time I can avoid giving someone my email address for a signup, I do. If I can’t, I just give them their domain name @ MoreLightMoreLight. That way if they get scraped for spam I can kill that particular service and email address.

I signed up for the Ziki social network because they allow openid logins and it’s supposed to be the next linkedin. I’m not very impressed. Servers are slow, nothing seems to be responsive, and they got scraped for my first spam ever.  I’m elated and unhappy at the same time!

Spam is after the jump

Continue Reading »

Nate wrote a bit on it. And then I watched this google video presentation by the VIM Guy himself, Brad Moolenaar.

I hadn’t known this, but CTRL-N is great. As soon as you are typing something you’ve typed once before, CTRL-N to the rescue. It autocompletes anything!

Once I realized my article on linking your resume in multiple formats with google docs had a fatal flaw, I figured how to really do it with zoho viewer. Yay Zoho, Boo Google!

I’ve completed work on the pdf wallet generator and put up some notes on the work under projects.

So much happened this week, without even getting into the tornado that hit Bay Ridge.

On Saturday I met with my ex-neighbor Gina Mauro - she needs a better website for her art. I think Sam and I should be able to provide one. The big part of the project is taking her requirements and picking a Content Management System off the shelf that she can use. I was playing around with Drupal and Mambo, but I think she basically just needs a styled and themed version of Gallery2, plus a contact and about page. That’s it. My biggest worry is making sure that I don’t underestimate the work involved.

Started learning to use VIM again on Monday. I just think I can get more done with it. I need to get better at it. So I’ve started trying to use it for all my basic text editing needs. Within one week of use, I’m getting pretty decent at using VIM. It seems like it encourages you to write text like a programmer, thinking about how to minimize steps as you take them.

Sent out an improved ipc batch script to my coworkers and introduced them to the wonders of autohotkey. No one really seems all that enthused by the possibility of saving some time, but we’ll see if a little prodding helps it catch on. Next week I may tell them about launchy!

The big news is that I managed to reform Ryan Stewart’s PDF Wallet into a class and an edited version of ezpdf. I’ve got the first wallet from this new page in my pocket right now and I’ll be working to migrate Ryan’s stuff with him this weekend. Most of the work was done on the subway to and from my job. All of the work was done in Vim. More on that next week!

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

No progress on Spanish. I haven’t given up on it yet, but if I don’t do some more learning, I’ll start forgetting.

Sam and I took out the stitches in my foot together. I’m walking fine and everything seems to be working.

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

Work next week should be much quieter, one of the louder folks here has gone on to a new job. I wish him luck and more happiness!