Hello, World (from Wordpress, then Jekyll, then Hakyll, then Hugo)

2014-02-06

I started this post in February 2014. Actually, I might have started it in July 2013 (while sitting in a Bruegger’s Bagels on the same day that I met up with two people from Urbanalta in what would later become my full-time job, to be precise). I really don’t remember. Here goes another migration of my sparse content from the past 8 (er… 10) years. This time, I’m giving up my Wordpress instance that I’ve migrated around 3 or 4 times (from wordpress.…more

Obscure features of JPEG

2011-11-24

(This is a modified version of what I wrote up at work when I saw that progressive JPEGs could be nearly a drop-in replacement that offered some additional functionality and ran some tests on this.) Introduction The long-established JPEG standard contains a considerable number of features that are seldom-used and sometimes virtually unknown.…more

QMake hackery: Dependencies & external preprocessing

2011-11-13

TODO: Put the code here into a Gist? Qt Creator is a favorite IDE of mine for when I have to deal with miserably large C++ projects. At my job I ported a build in Visual Studio of one such large project over to Qt Creator so that builds and development could be done on OS X and Linux, and in the process, learned a good deal about QMake and how to make it do some unexpected things.…more

Context Free

2011-08-29

My last post mentioned a program called Context Free that I came across via the Syntopia blog as his program Structure Synth was modeled after it. I’ve heard of context-free grammars before but my understanding of them is pretty vague. This program is based around them and the documentation expresses their limitations; what I grasped from this is that no entity can have any “awareness” of the context in which it’s drawn, i.…more

Isolated-pixel-pushing

2011-08-27

After finally deciding to look around for some projects on GitHub, I found a number of very interesting ones in a matter of minutes. I found Fragmentarium first. This program is like something I tried for years and years to write, but just never got around to putting in any real finished form.…more

My experiences with Apache Axis2/C

2011-07-15

(This is an abridged version of a report I did at my job; I might post of copy of it once I remove anything that might be considered proprietary.) I was tasked at my job with looking at ways of doing web services in our main application (which for an upcoming delivery is to be separated out into client and server portions). Said application is written primarily in C++, so naturally our first look was into frameworks written for C or C++ so that we would not need to bother with language bindings, foreign function interfaces, porting, new runtimes, or anything of the sort.…more

OpenFrameworks, try 1...

2011-06-13

My attempts at doing things with OpenFrameworks on MacOS X have been mildly disastrous. This is a bit of a shame, because I was really starting to like OpenFrameworks and it was not tough to pick up after being familiar with Processing. I’m pretty new to XCode, but it’s the “official” environment for OpenFrameworks on OS X, so it’s the first thing I tried. The first few attempts at things (whether built-in examples, or my own code) went just fine, but today I started trying some things that were a little more complex - i.…more

First attempt at slide film

2011-06-10

Having acquired a Nikon FE and some lenses quite inexpensively and verifying on some cheap Walgreen film that they did indeed work, I picked up some Fuji Velvia RVP50 from Cord Camera in Kenwood back in April (it was expensive compared to what Amazon would have charged, but I wasn’t about to waste a trip to Kenwood over $10ish).…more

I can never win that context back

2011-06-10

I stumbled upon this: http://www.soyoucode.com/2011/coding-giant-under-microscope-farbrausch . . . and promptly fell in love with the demos there from Farbrausch: .the .product .debris .kkrieger Magellan That melding of music and animated 3D graphics grabs a hold of me like nothing else. I don’t really know why. The fact that it’s done in such a small space (e.g. 64 KB for the first one) makes it more impressive, of course. Maybe that should be a sad reflection on just how formulaic the things I like are, if they’re encoded that small (although, that ignores just how much is present in addition, in the CPU and the GPU and the OS and the drivers and in the design of the computer), but I don’t much care - formulas encode patterns of sorts, and we’re pattern-matching machines.…more

Blender from a recovering POV-Ray user

2011-02-07

This is about the tenth time I’ve tried to learn Blender. Judging by the notes I’ve accumulated so far, I’ve been at it this time for about a month and a half. From what I remember, what spurred me to try this time was either known-Blender-guru Craig from Hive13 mentioning Voodoo Camera Tracker (which can output to a Blender-readable format), or my search for something that would make it easier to do the 2D visualizations and algorithmic art I always end up doing (and I heard Blender had some crazy node-based texturing system……more