I’ve been watching with a morbid curiosity this blog written by someone who used to do the radio with me back in the day.
As I was scrolling through I found myself disagreeing with pretty much every article on the site – none more so than this post which came with an invitation to write back. An invitation I’m about to accept.
It would seem the general premise of the article is thus:
- You’re lucky to have what you have.
- And maybe you shouldn’t have that anyway.
- Get back to work, you dirty fucking socialist.
Continued…
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: politics, words
By daniel
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January 4, 2012 at 5:48 pm
You wouldn’t know it by looking at my blogs posts but I sometimes do actual work for my actual job over at Homeflow. I highly suggest you give us a bell if you like writing feel good code and dealing with some difficult problems.
So yes – we get a whole load of visitors looking at houses all over the country via one of the numerous websites we run. The nice thing property pages, from my point of view, is that each one comes with a latitude and a longitude – which means we can do maps. And, I ask you, who doesn’t love maps?
Using the lovely Pusher api, we rigged up push event in our already existing Page view Recording System™ which finds it’s way over to your browser as your visiting the new Homeflow Live page and plonks down a google maps marker.
Yeah, I got a mac. And yeah, I had to google how to do a print screen.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: api, javascript, work
By daniel
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October 18, 2011 at 7:55 pm
I’ve been thinking lots recently, for not so secret project about boids. I’ll let you know more about that, dear reader, when it’s all confirmed.
So, all this boid thinking gave me a bit of an itch to do something boid-ey. It was fortunate, therefore, that I got to go up to MetaBroadcast HQ for a bit of a hack day. They’ve got a bunch of interesting data and they wanted to expose some frequency graphs. Kindly, they agreed to let me have a play about with boids, and the fine implementation from the people at coderholic.
After some frantic typing, some pretty decent pizza and a guided tour around the world of eclipse keyboard shortcuts I came up with this.
We replace the ‘move to the average point of the swarm’ function in the classic Boids simulation with a simple ‘fly towards this point’ function. This causes all our boids (although by now they look a little bit more like fireflies) to rush to the point, rush out because they’re all too close to one another and then rush back in. By fiddling with the numbers and the targets, I think, we’re able to make a pretty cool way of showing frequency data.
The code is, as ever, on github.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: boids, javascript
By daniel
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September 4, 2011 at 10:43 pm
As promised threatened, here’s part two.
I’m on the worlds worst wifi connection at the moment, so I’ve been terribly lazy with the linking. But Google is your friend – even if it isn’t mine.
A Framework for Measuring Creativity
On top of the contexts in which creativity is appreciated, scientifically or artistically, we must also consider what defines something a creative action and attempt to define a framework – a series of check lists – so we are able to test if something is truly creative.
Creativity is a multi-faceted and complex thing to attempt to define, so we must not confine ourselves to a definition only from the fields of computer science, a wide and broad range of different approaches must be considered with the hope that some common agreement can be found.
Continued…
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: digital-art, words
By daniel
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July 19, 2011 at 8:45 pm
Daniel, you can’t just go around claiming you like to make digital art without, firstly, giving it some real thought and secondly, publishing anything. You sound like a dick.
Well, yes – I know. I will eventually get around to putting more things on the Internet, but for now you’ll have to make do with Tweet Chimes and I Hope I Don’t Fall In Love With You. More is on it’s way – but I’m a terribly lazy man.
I did a wonderful course at University which originally got me interested in the whole it’s-not-really-art-but-look-at-this-thing-I-did-with-a-computer thing and it was called “generative creativity”. Part of this excursion into the humanities had me writing an essay about whether or not computers can be creative and, although I’m very much a programmer and very much not a writer I was pretty happy with it. So I thought I’d post it here, on my blog. Hopefully it’ll fill the time between the last picture of a cat and the next. Anyway, I’m going to post in a few parts and here is the first… Continued…
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: digital-art, words
By daniel
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July 19, 2011 at 12:03 am
“I Hope I Don’t Fall in Love with You” is a Tom Waits Song.
Welcome to the Internet.
I was thinking about about what an odd thing “I Hope I Don’t Fall in Love with You” is to say to someone – I suspect given the right context it might be ok, but that context is lost on me. Since I’m doomed to never know, I thought it might be interesting to take the line and use it inappropriately. Running around Brighton saying it to people I don’t know sounds like a good night but, in 2011, this sort of thinking should really be automated.
So I made an Omegle bot to bother people on the internet. It sits on Omegle repeating the title of this song and writing down what it sees.
You can see what it’s been up to by going to hope.14lines.com. At the very least I hope you find the thought of this being what I spend my spare time on amusing.
Oh, and if you’re into that sort of thing – the source is here.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: bot, digital-art, omegle
By daniel
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June 15, 2011 at 7:46 pm
It’s not often that I get to write a gem – since I’m fairly convinced that pretty much everything that needs to be on the Internet has already been made and subsequently forgotten about. It was with great excitement, therefore, that I noticed the Atlas-API had only a solitary client library and even that it was in Java.
The Atlas API provides all sorts interesting data about audio and video on the Internet – with BBC, Hulu and even Youtube feeds available the life of a audio-visual application developer couldn’t be made much easier.
To get started with Atlas and Ruby I implore you to install Ratlas
> gem install ratlas
Ratlas is a thin wrapper around the functions listed in the atlas api documentation. It provides 4 classes: search, discover, schedule and content which expose a find method that you can treat a little like you would the ActiveRecord find method. The arguments for the conditions hash are identical to the api docs – but we use underscored symbols rather than camelCased strings.
Ratlas::Discover.find(:all).where(:genre=> "drama", :media_type => 'video')
It also supports method chaining so you can define a search:
mysearch = Ratlas::Schedule.find(:all).where(:from => Time.now.to_i, :to=> Time.now.to_i + 3600)
and fiddle with it later on.
mysearch.and(:channel => 'bbcone')
Then when you’re feeling up to it calling #each or #to_a will execute your query and give you a nice Mash to play with.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Tags: api, atlas, audio, gem, ruby, video
By daniel
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May 18, 2011 at 7:49 pm
