Again this weekend I found myself digging through ancient files on my hard drive. I resurrected an old MIDI recording for The Slipping from 1998. I popped it into garage band and messed around for an hour or so.
Here’s my quick and dirty remix: The Slipping [GB Remix].
Here’s a followup hi-res rendering suitable for a desktop wallpaper of the ‘Space Lotus’ variant of the Buddhabrot. This is simply replacing the constant ‘2’ with ‘-2’ in the y-value iteration formula. This is essentially all I manipulated over time to create the Buddhabrot Cycle animation. I created the pulsating fluctuations by using a sine-wave function with an ever increasing magnitude, until it explodes and then cools down linearly to -2. Then I just cooled the RGB exposure thresholds to do the funky fade-out at the end. When the value is right at -2, you get this gorgeous flower image:
I have so many toys of late. More than I know what to do with.
My new work phone is a fancy new BlackBerry with GPS in it which is super cool. It’s really a marvelous phone. With the data connection and GPS, I can pull up live maps of my location — basically, as long a I have the phone on me I cannot get lost! Knowing that gives me a strangely empowering feeling. Email, web, phone, and location all at my fingertips!
Then, last week, Christine surprised me with an iPhone for my birthday! WOW! The thing is ridiculously marvelous. I’ve hacked it and got it to work with my vodafone SIM card. I don’t yet know if I’ll end up using it as my primary phone. The BlackBerry has much better integration with the office (Exchange) than the iPhone. The Blackberry’s full keypad is a lot better for typing text than the iPhone’s touch-screen, which lacks the tactile feedback. On that note, the iPhone is not as good an iPod as a regular iPod — again because it lacks the tactile feedback of real buttons. I often listen on shuffle, and when I want to skip a song, I can just fumble the button for next track in my pocket. This isn’t possible on the touch screen. Besides that issue, everything else about it is super cool.
I’ve been playing a ridiculous amount of XBox lately — almost exclusively Call of Duty 4, with a bunch of coworkers. Before CoD4 it was Gears of War, Halo3, BioShock, NHL2008, and PGR4. Some buddies gave me Mass Effect for my birthday, which I don’t think I’ll even touch until the new year as it will need my full attention. Right now, I just can’t stop playing CoD4 on live, as it’s just too much fun.
Christine surprised me with a big geeky xbox birthday party over at Kevin’s place. We all got sauced and played xbox ’til the wee-mornin’ hours. I know, big xbox party and an iPhone. She’s a super-wife 😀
Another update is ready for CRON-o-Meter today.
- Updated to USDA sr20, which includes many new foods and more values for Choline.
- Fixed Search Focus Bug in Max OS 10.5 (Leopard)
- Ability to track multiple users at once, includes the copying servings between users and common recipes.
Finally, I found out how to make my movie. I dropped 30 Euro and bought a QuickTime Pro key. Using QuickTime Player, I was able to create a movie with my frames and compress it down to 6.5mb with an acceptable amount of compression artifacts. I present:
I’ve just installed Leopard today. Whilst poking around at the new features, I noticed the ‘movies’ filter at the bottom of the new finder window. Spotlight was still busy indexing, so movies were slowly trickling in. It was dredging up all sorts of ancient media I had nested deep in my user folder. There were many things I had completely forgotten about.
A particularly interesting find was this little time-lapse movie from September 2001. At the time, I had a web-cam hooked up to take a shot every minute. Every frame went live to my website, and also got appended to the time-lapse movie file.
This 17 minute video spans a very memorable time in my life. I was 22 years old, living in a small one-bedroom apartment next to the University, where I was working on my MSc. degree. Captured is the morning of September 11th, where you can see my stunned look as I stare at my television set. Later, Darse “I don’t even own a TV” Billings drops by to see what all the fuss is about. J makes a few appearances, hanging out on the couch. Shortly after 9/11, I met my dad for a overnight backpacking trip at Mount Robson (the Northern Rockies, near Jasper). Afterwards he came back to Edmonton for a further visit. My cousin Jessica and her husband also make a brief visit for a few frames. Ahhh the memories. Thanks for finding that Leopard!
It’s a long weekend here in Ireland. I got in a pretty full day yesterday; Woke up, played a few hours of Halo 3, showered, went out and bought some socks, lunch, and coffee. I ordered a copy of Leopard from the Apple store, caught up on some overdue emails, and had an iChat with the folks. My dad was showing off the new blue-screen iChat effects in Leopard, which was good for a giggle.
I put in a few extremely productive hours coding some work related tournament features. I really don’t like the open-office style we have at work. That noisy environment, coupled with constant interruptions in the form of meetings, emails, requests, questions, means I rarely get any actual productive coding done. Coding requires so much deep concentration. You have to hold a lot of abstract context in your head, and interruptions effectively wipe that all away. In just a few hours of quiet focus I wrote more code than I probably would write all week at the office. I really ought to find a way to work a day a week from home.
In the evening, Christine and I went out and saw Stardust, an entertaining, if predictable, fairy tale.
Today I think I will make an attempt to get that pesky movie made, and when I tire of Halo 3, I just might dig into some CRON-o-Meter work. I’ve got a bunch of feature submissions from other coders to integrate. Unfortunately, the multi-user code has a bug in it and it doesn’t upgrade people’s old settings properly. So I’ll have to track down and fix that before I can let it loose in the wild. I would also like to track down the elusive bug that can cause people’s food history to become erased. I’ve only had a few reports of it happening, so all I can do is try to make the saving more robust to errors and make automatic backups. It happened to Christine the other day, and I think it was because she was out of disk space.
With the release of Halo 3, I finally broke down a few weekends ago and bought me an XBox 360. I’ve now got a big blister on my left thumb, I’m affectionately terming ‘Gamer Thumb’. Because of the promotion at the store, I ended up getting Gears of War thrown in to the bundle for free, which was very impressive. Better than Halo 3 in many ways.
We alo picked up EA Sports NHL 2008, which is frighteningly realistic — playing it looks and sounds remarkably like watching hockey night in canada, complete with realistic, meaningful commentary. Quite impressive. It’s helped as a salve on Christine’s homesickness for Canadiana.
I’m still trying to perfect my fractal animation. I have about 352 frames rendered as PNG files. I’m trying to find some decent software that will take those frames and generate a quicktime movie out of them. I found one called Framed, which works, except there are no quality or compression settings. It turned my 130 MB of lossless PNG frames into a 200mb movie of poor quality and full of compression artifacts that ruin the whole experience.
Anyone know of some simple software to take numbered PNG files and generate movie (flash, mpeg, quicktime, I don’t care) that looks good? Or am I going to have to write one myself?
It’s been a long while since I last posted — in August, Christine’s mother & sister visited us for two weeks, which kept us quite busy. Then my parents just visited for the past two weeks as well — they just left for home this morning. Consequently, I’ve been too distracted of late to bother posting. I’ll try to rectify that pronto.
I’m messing around with a cool Buddhabrot animation project. I’m making a little movie while walking arond parameter and dwell space. I’ve been tweaking the path for days now. Even making a very low quality preview takes hours. Once I’m happy with the animation, I’ll set it crunching the high-quality rendering, which may take a few weeks…
I’ve been doing some serious travelling the past few weeks — Paris, Berlin, and Prague. I am touristed right out. Visiting all these big cities with their throngs of tourists makes Europe feel like one big museum. It will take me a little while now before I feel like I need to see another old building, museum, or hop-on-hop-off tour-bus. Nevertheless, it’s been fun to see what all the fuss is about and soak up some cultural ambiance and history.
Paris was lovely. I had fun practicing my broken french (10 years of French classes and I still can barely string together a sentence with my petit vocabulaire). We didn’t see any of the anticipated ‘rude parisians’ you hear so much about. In fact, all the locals we met were very friendly.
Berlin was very modern and industrial. Many parts felt similar to Edmonton, probably because a lot of the construction is of the same era. The Skinny Puppy show there was great, except for some sound problems that put the band on tilt a little. I also got me a Berlin hair cut.
We took a four hour train ride to Prague, which is such a nice way to travel. Prague was really cool looking, but seemed to be brimming over with tourists, to the point it felt a little suffocating. I found it very hard to learn the basics czech language — both hard to remember and tricky to get the pronounciation right. It wasn’t necessary since everyone spoke great English, but I feel like a douche if I can’t use at least some basic pleasantries as a foreign visitor. It was awesome picking up the bill at restaurants — so cheap! A pint of beer costs about €1, and a full three-course meal for the two of us, including drinks could be found for €20. In Berlin, I paid €25 for a Skinny Puppy t-shirt. At the Prague show, I bought three t-shirts and a cap for €50. The Prague show was better than the Berlin show — the sound still had a few glitches, but the volume was better and the show had more energy. It was a bit shorter than the Berlin show. They didn’t play Ugli for some reason, and the Encore was shorter too.
Good times. As per usual, check Christine’s blog for more in-depth notes and pictures. I’m too lazy. Here’s a few of my favorite pictures:
