Ambient Techno is my Friend.

Visually Addicted

Two or three weeks ago, I somehow got obsessed with watching. Movies, telly series, anything I can put my hands on. Some of it I watched twice, a few even thrice.

For my personal public documentation only (oh teh ir0ny):

• Adaptation.
• American History X
• Brokeback Mountain
• Butterfly Effect
• La Cité des enfants perdus
• Corpse Bride
• Donnie Darko
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Garden State
• Jarhead
• Matrix
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Ocean's Eleven
• Pulp Fiction
• Serenity
• Sideways
• Sin City
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
• Teach
• A few South Park episodes
• The whole Firefly 'season'
• A few Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes
• A few Malcolm in the Middle episodes
• All of The IT Crowd episodes
• The (leaked) Global Frequency Pilot

Say it! Get a doctor! Say it!

…

I totally forgot about it. Guess why!

Think Local Blog Global

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.

Hello, I'm back.

And I'll honestly post more often than last time around.

Wheels

Observing Content Management meetings in Viennese cafés. Halt doch bitte die Schnauze, das interessiert doch keine Sau.

Reinventing the wheel is known to be loved among IT slaves. (Will ever be picked up by the IT Crowd?) While I agree there are sometimes huge differences that matter when developing an application, every single time I was forced to listen to the technical ideas of bobos (especially if Flash is mentioned various times) that want to Get Rich Quick™, I feel the need to nuke a small island in the pacific ocean.

It's such a waste of productivity, time and money to be working on rigid content management apps that have been done so many times before. Why don't you take your favourite language, look a popular framework, and adapt it to your needs? (From-the-ground-up-new-concept-apps-that-do-not-integrate-with-existing-frameworks excluded.) There's plenty out there.

I'm aware that my comments here are about as redundant as what I'm talking about. My justification: This is an ego-entry. I complained to the world once for all, and my mind will keep its peace.

The photo of the side is one of my fathers tyres.

Music Is Math

How much variation can you suck out of a simple idea?

Yesterday night Ryan (whom I seem to mention quite often here) asked me what I think of one of his ideas. A pattern used for the production of music:

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
 2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  
  3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   
   4    4    4    4    4    4    4    4    4    4    
    5     5     5     5     5     5     5     5     
     6      6      6      6      6      6      6      
      7       7       7       7       7       7       
       8        8        8        8        8        
        9         9         9         9         9         

It's quite simple (and apparent) how this works: character c plus whitespace multiplied with the line-number. Every character or whitespace maps to samples, frequencies or if you want PD objects/patches. This is most certainly not new per se — turning visual patterns into sound has been done a lot, for example with a spectrogram. And the combination of mathematics and music has a rather, uhm, long tradition.

But this is not so much an idea that interests me because it's new, but rather because I think there's a lot of space to explore. Omit lines, switch variables/frequencies/samples when two or more rows lines up vertically, etc.

The thought of all this makes my head all itchy, and I want to push my creative output a little. Since there's a PD external for python script objects available, I spent a little time on this:

x, y, l, ls = 1, 0, '', ''

while x < 16:
    while y < 80:
        l+='X'+' '*x
        y=len(l)
    ls=ls+'\n'+l[2:]
    l, y, x = '', 0, x+1

print ls[1:]

… which creates the following:

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 
 X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  
  X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   
   X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    X    
    X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     X     
     X      X      X      X      X      X      X      X      X      X      X      
      X       X       X       X       X       X       X       X       X       
       X        X        X        X        X        X        X        X        
        X         X         X         X         X         X         X         
         X          X          X          X          X          X          X          
          X           X           X           X           X           X           
           X            X            X            X            X            X            
            X             X             X             X             X             
             X              X              X              X              X              
              X               X               X               X               

It's easy to modify so it tosses out the linenumber instead of the X, but of course it would stop to work properly if you go beyond 10. Or just add a little bit of magic to use random single characters, if you want more visual variety.

So let's see how long it will take me to put this into PD, or even a spectrograph.

Thank you Ryan for getting me into this again.

An Elegant Game

Desires created by the marketing industry – must obey…

I want a Nintendo DS. And once it's out a Revolution too. And I'm not a gamer at all. Just about every one of my male friends (Hi there, Philipp, Bernhard, Tom) plays more than I do. The only console I ever owned was a NES (which I had to sell for 500 Schilling! Dammit!) and I borrowed my friends Gameboy Color quite a few times.

The ideas behind these machines are way too cool. It looks as if it takes a little bit to get used to it, but that makes it more interesting in my opinion. After all games are supposed to be a challenge, aren't they?

I should probably wait for the DS Lite?

But… I admit, I was addicted to Quake Ⅲ and The Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Not for long though. My brother said he thinks I'm the best videogame player in the world. He said so because I helped him with Mario 3 and some version of Rayman. I do not agree with him, but he insists for he never saw anyone better. He's 8, please understand.

If only I could have the 500 Schilling back now. (PS: Spot the musical reference in this entry.)