Will Knott

Every so often you discover that some programmers are cool.

I don’t mean in the really skilled (can write a million euro application in 10 lines of code) but actually cool.

For example Luis be Bethencourt Guimerá one of the presenters at OSSBarcamp. No only is he a talented coder and software designer (who worked on the forthcoming Ubuntu release), but he also wrote his own VJ software (being released in the Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu Studio) and digital DJ software, complete with intuitive interface, to help his gigging around the world.

That is cool! I’ll cover more on this later.

This OSS Barcamp was less like most other Barcamps I’ve been to in that the schedule was locked down in advance. It made an interesting change, but it didn’t stave off everyone’s technical difficulties.

OSS Barcamp has its worthy side too. Éibhear Ó hAnluain took the opportunity of a number of skilled and focused minds to look at “How to present a political party’s FLOSS-friendly IT policy to the electorate” or rather, what are the benefits to the country for using free and open source software. What I loved about this talk was actually Enrico Zini and the impact that open source software had on the Italian political scene and its civil service.

The lightening talks were fun, I missed part of James Larkin’s “Intro to CSS Frameworks”, but there should be a video of his talk (and I’m sure he’ll release his slides). One other thing which stood out is the effort to translate or localize Ubuntu to Irish. If you are a native speaker, talk to them.

I’m also fascinated by the formation of TÓG, hackerspaces in Dublin. In the same way that co-working has benefits, I can see similar benefits with co-hacking. And folks, this is the old style of hacking as in making things work, work beter, or creating something new out of other products. Not cracking which is breaking in to things. Think more of an organised “voiding your warranty”.

Due to the lighting talks I ended up missing David Coallier’s “Get Ready for web 3.0 talk”

Now, back to Luis.

First off watch this video.

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Looks pretty good. Not too fancy and suits the song.

Now just think that this video was created with

• one $160.00 disposable pocket video camera
• one batch of Free Software, most of which is in Studio Ubuntu
• two hours of shooting
• four hours of production

Cheap? And good looking too.

And then there is “Big Buck Bunny” created by the open source Blender tool. Now it took a long time to put together, but the Peach Movie Project Team include tutorials on how they did it.

Just remember kids; software is an art as well as a science. And artist in one field tends to have skills in other fileds.

Take care, and enjoy the short movie below,

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Jaime Hemmett for putting the whole day together.

Will Knott

If I have the timing right, this will be uploaded while I’m at an interview, so it seems timely.

My CV as a tag cloud…

Robin Blandord came up with the idea to run his CV through Wordle.net to see what it would look like as a tag cloud. It’s been repeated by Ellybabes, Sinéad Cochrane and Paul Browne. Sorry that it’s in simple black & white and not visually pleasing as the others; I thought about adding it to my physical CV or embed it in the files to see if there was a change in uptake. Given that most (if not all) recruitment agencies parse the résumés they recieve through something similar, it might make sense. Wordle is a Java application which parses text, ignores common words, and creates a tag cloud. The size of the word is proportional to the how often it occurs in the CV.

Putting something like a résumé through it might take a bit of tweaking. Plurals are (currently) counted separately, and other common phrases show up. I needed to tweak my CV to stop my address showing up in the tag cloud for instance.

The other thing is how “management” looms large over both “software” and “database” (with “sql” peeking in there). I didn’t expect that, nor expect to see something similar on the other technical people’s clouds.

Does it give an accurate picture which should be used as a reflection or consideration for employment, or is it really easy to “game” the results to create an artificial profile?

And given the full social media treatment, does a tag cloud of a persons delicious account cast a different reflection than their résumé?

So then,
You hiring?

take care,
Will Knott

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As much as I love old games I just can’t love the flash based retro games brought to the web by Paul Neave (but I will admit to being impressed by his flash planetarium) . The games include Space Invaders, N-blox, Asteroids, Simon, Tic-Tac-Toe, Hexxgon, Frogger and Snake (as in the mobile phone game that Nokia phones had so as to spend many hours not talking on a bus). At the moment I’m smitten by Chain Factor.

Source: WikipediaChain Factor is an apparently simple flash based game. You are dropping numbered (and blank) discs on to a grid. If the number on the disc corresponds to the number of touching discs in that row or column, then all the discs of that number in the row and column vanish and the remaining discs drop down. The blank discs reveal their number when a 2 discs touching it has been removed from play. Levels progress with a new line of blank discs sprouting up on the bottom row. Seems simple, plays hard and is a touch too addictive. So be warned.

And while I’m typing about games, I want to bring up a recent discovery… Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of “Zero Punctuation” game reviews fame created “The Art of Theft” a 2D cat burgular stealth adventure which is an awful lot of fun, a little ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 / Vic 20 ish fun. No wonder tape died.

take care,
Will

I like listening to thing I shouldn’t. Sometimes I get things for “overheard” posts (which I really ought to do more of) and sometimes I hear interesting things. Like Bernie Goldbach talking to his students about the work of Flight 404, who is also known as Robert Hodgin.

Image via Wikipedia

As well as the ubiquitous day-job, he also spends time playing/working with Processing. Processing is an open source, multi-platform programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is also a visualization programming language. One for creating images. However it uses Java as its base, so it might be correctly described as a programming extension library (Processing code can be exported as Java) and IDE for Java.

I know, another programming language library. Ho-hum. However this one is, well, bloody beautiful. Take a look at what you can do with it (I’d advise using full screen).

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo

The language is designed for work like this. I’d love to see it mixed with a physics engine. Robert goes through the details of how he created the above demo and it seems a little intensive, but fun. Given that unless things change I might be back at programming school soon, now is probably not the time to start a new language (or is it exactly the right time?). I would love to play with this visualization method on a couple of mashups. I’m thinking about music, but I can see it working on time related information such as relative population sizes or economic data.

What can I say, my mind moves in odd places sometimes.

take care,
Will

A long time ago, at MashpCamp I thougth about combining a Google Map with the geodata of pubs and a ratings system to generate a “Rate-my-pint” type application, which I’m sure a brewery could use for customer support and ensure that their product is being served properly. This is probably more useful.

Image via Wikipedia

I have no idea who made the Dublin Pub Crawl map, but I’m impressed. Essentially it’s a Google map with route calculations which allow you to create your own own pub crawl through Dublin City. However I’m not too sure how to get the data off the computer and in a format which would survive a “12 pubs of Christmas” tradition.

Choose an area, like Temple Bar or Dublin 15, pick some pubs you’d like to include, if you like. And you can edit the maps and add other pubs.

Like those outside of Dublin?

I suppose it’s all about how intelligent the routing code is, but would adding a bunch of Cork, Limerick and Galway pubs just mess things up, or make the map more useful for those who don’t want a pint of plain in the pale? And it it works, then we could have “centres of excellence”, in drinking.

take care,

Will

LOL cats have been doing the rounds… now a .NET compiler for the LOLcats language

Oh dear….

What would Rabbit do? Do Rabbits and cats get along?

Still, I have my spleen

Will

“Only through perfectionism can we convert the non-believers who are content to mark up sites like MySpace.” — Lisa Price on Carsonified

overheard, code, web standards

A CD being unveiled today will showcase some of the world’s biggest artists in aid of Amnesty International’s Darfur campaign… blah blah blah, the full press release is available at Ireland.com.

However that’s not entirely why I’m typing…
Springwise reported on a widget and affiliate programme called GoodStorm. In theory you can create a virtual mixtape of “new” musical acts, pick songs from GoodStorm’s collection tracks (or upload your own if you own the copyright) and visitors can listen to clips and purchase downloads via the widget and iTunes (and others, evenually). Essentially its an affiliate sales program built around widget technology.

And the widget for the album based on John Lennon’s songs… Instant Karma is available below… (you can get the code here). Just wondering if anyone has used it. Should I?

Will

tags : Music, Amnesty International, Darfur, Springwise, widget, affiliate programme, GoodStorm, mixtape, John Lennon, Instant Karma, code