Month: April 2005

Categories
Satire

How To Write Net Poetry

string of contentious vaguely poetic fragmentary every day another
markov chain me to a desk a substitute for a machine one in fact
orphan drift tedious by hand atrixo and rhythm but never read whole
democracy inverted a negative space better by association better buy
sleevehearted ribbon on your breast alone the wind dragged sand
pounding rhythmic three days blue-black bars over retinal lag
anyone can but only those who do are anyone to be anyone good
patti smith’s corpse between magnets drives the city lights to your words
destroy rock and earth colours everything you seep from intermittently
spinning bottle decades commodifying ignorance commodifying
hi-hat flurries salivated for all tomorrow’s arty faux fire at will you be

Categories
Projects

Holes

Evie suggests that draw-something’s shapes need holes. I agree, my drawings are riddles with holes, and it’s something I’ve put off far too long. So holes it is.

The underlying design principle of draw-something is to start with code that does nothing and extend that. 🙂 So I need a do-nothing hole maker. Then I can build on that. I think I’ll start with convex-hull outer shapes, as I won’t have to worry about how to draw inside the “tendrils” that the unsorted shapes have.

Should holes be drawn around or inside by the drawing algorithm? I think inside, to match how I draw holes, but this will require an inside/outside switch on the drawing algorithm. Shouldn’t be too hard.

draw-something can now outline a 1000 line scribble in two to three minutes:

Not bad. I’ll optimise it more another time.

Categories
Projects

draw-something CVS

The latest draw-something code is debugged and checked in to the rob-art CVS at sourceforge.

It seems a little faster. And it’s certainly easier to work with.

Categories
Satire

How Postmodernists “Think”

There is no such thing as toxicity. A toxic substance is only toxic to a given system. Therefore we are mistaken if we identify the system-given property of “toxicity” with a particular substance, or example of such a substance.

If we are to accept that the property of toxicity can therefore be culturally conferred on particular substances (or examples of such substances), then obviously the property of toxicity can be conferred on any substance. Therefore any substance can be regarded as toxic.

This being the case it is perfectly OK to drink poison, as everything is toxic anyway and most things we drink have no harmful effects, thus disproving the entire idea of toxicity.

Of course even if we accepted the ridiculous idea of toxicity, we’d have to work out what the word “poison” refers to in order to actually find some to drink, assuming that words can actually refer to anything, which obviously they can’t, except in essays by postmodern “thinkers”.

Categories
Personal

BLT

Home-made BLT sandwiches. Yum. Thank you, Marks & Spencer, for your sub rolls.

Categories
Reviews

Airport Extreme

I got an Airport Extreme brick. It’s very good. “Regret” by New Order is playing over my old speakers plugged into it at the moment. And I’m posting this from my iBook over the other side of the room.

As always, the network didn’t “just work”. It pretended to, but I had to tweak the settings. This would be beyond many users, and isn’t what I expect from Apple.

“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” – The Smiths.

I think Apple should invest in some pretty major AI. I just want to turn on Airport and have a daemon exhaustively try to make the network work. Surely that’s doable?

Categories
Projects

draw-something

I refactored draw-something to be an ASDF package. Which means it’s easier to load and debug in slime.

If that last line meant nothing to you, nor will the next few. 🙂

I used OpenMCL’s profiling to find the bottlenecks in the code that are slowing down execution when drawing around more than a few lines. No surprises: (nearest-point-on-line) and (distance) cons heavily. So I’ve changed polyline to use arrays rather than lists and moved any object creation and moved any accessor calls as far out as possible. Hopefully this will get things moving faster when I finish debugging it (Lisp’s “do” loop is horrible).

I can optimise the distance search by storing some working out each time, or I can move to a mixed vector/bitmap implementation. I wonder if AARON still uses bitmaps and cells?

Categories
Projects

Minara

I updated minara’s C code to be closer to the GNU coding standards.

I think I’m going to mothball minara. Unless I can find anyone to help on it, but I’m not even sure I have the time to look.

Good idea, too far from what I want to be doing right now.

Update: This week I have been mostly hacking Minara. It’s not mothballed, just something I’m working on as-and-when, the same as everything else. Currently I’m working on picking. Next is probably some basic UI work and then transformations.