The turn amounts are now randomized and the tolerance for deviation from the path is lower.
September 2007 Archives
I've switched back to Debian.
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"I wonder, is this going to be a landmark trial case for CC? To see how bulletproof the licenses really are? Hmm..." Yes. But no pro-NC propaganda from this case please...
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"In the United Kingdom, two prominent blogs went dark this week after publishing accusations regarding the Uzbek billionaire, Alisher Usmanov." Drink Soaked Trots are covering this well...
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""Several British MPs' personal websites and blogs (including that of the popular London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson) were forced offline earlier today" Fuck Usmanov.
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Lessig is as classy as usual in his honest, insightful and coherent response to the silly lawsuit that has dragged in CC. I have massive disagreements with him but respect him at least as much, a point I should make more often.
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"The Harvard Coop bookstore had the police remove students who were writing down the ISBNs of textbooks"
As well as being Free, Loca Records are producers of particularly wonderful music.
I wish they would hurry up and release their next album: "Pirate This Music!".
I have money. I have brown paper bags. Non-sequential notes could be arranged.
Click here: Loca Records
Buy some of their other records while you're waiting. "Affectivity" by Meme is transcendently wonderful.
Technorati Tags: free culture, music
In 1994 I was living in a student house with a psychopath. One of the other people resisting this suggested we go and see "The Lion King" at the cinema and I said yes.
My favourite song from a cartoon that John Kricfalusi will never convince me is not excellent was "Can You Feel The Love Tonight". The core of this song is, y'know, mush, however well Elton and Sir Tim may have constructed it. But oh, the intro and outro. The comic relief, Timon and Pumba, can see precisely what the lead characters falling in love means. And they frame the song with this in a way that...
This is not irony and it does not ironize the song. But, my God (and here I would refer you to Lestat's apology for using the phrase), it gives the most jaded cynic no excuse. Timon:
"I can see what's happening, they don't have a clue, he'll fall in love and here's the bottom line: our trio's down to two.
The sweet caress of twilight, there's magic everywhere, and with all this romantic atmosphere, disaster's in the air."
The problem with ideologies of resistance to "the culture industry" is that sometimes surplus value bites both it and you in the ass.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, music
defparamterer seems to be better than defconstant for lists in Common Lisp. defconstant causes an error on recompiling, defparameter redefines the value properly.
I wish I knew why this is. :-)
Technorati Tags: lisp
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Conference with contributions and art from Art & Language.
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Michael Moorcock takes Science Fiction's favourites to task for their paternalism and conservatism.
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"Consumers and companies increasingly depend on a hidden mathematical world"
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Good link to a 2D regex paper.
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"You design your object (from furniture to jewelry), specify materials and upload the files to the site. Five to ten days later, your laser-cut pieces arrive in the mail and you snap them together like a 3D jigsaw."
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Now why does 'forget the revenue, build the audience' remind me so strongly of the dot.com bubble? Could it be because I worked for one of the many companies that were destroyed by it?
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"Besting Creative Commons 1967 by a mere 1099 years is the Diamond Sutra"
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draw-something gets blogged at the excellent Crystalpunk. See their archives for more drawing software, psychogeography and other cool stuff.
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"we've burned 100 CDs with mp3 from our debut EP, the All On C Ep, and we're stapling / taping to them poles throughout the city"
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"The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players."
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"The SCO Group Files Chapter 11"
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"Well, the search is on hold for now. At least until either a) Michael is located or b) we can recruit someone else to help (any offers gratefully received)."
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"The Flea's ongoing commitment to the explication of goth culture finds new heuristic promise in the form of these video illustrations."
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"If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs"
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"market sectors depending on copyright's limitations and exceptions (like fair use) represent one-sixth of the GDP of the US. CCIA's study found that these industries contributed $2.2 trillion to the economy and accounted for more than 17 million jobs. In
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"stage magicians protect the secrets behind their tricks, and continue to come up with great new ideas, without getting caught up in the insanity of intellectual property law" But they are a closed social network...
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"I like this advice for the obvious reason (encouraging CC licensing, especially under a liberal CC license), but the remarkable thing is that following this “Search Engine Optimization” advice contributes to the greater good."
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Every good comedy needs a blooper reel at the end.
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"I've decided to put up my own Common Lisp examples"
Click on thumbnails for full size images:
Images from the start, middle and end of the run. There shouldn't be any mathematical differences. I've been selective for variety more than quality.
Technorati Tags: art computing, artificial intelligence, draw-something, generative art
1987 images since Friday evening. 2048 shortly...
I'll put some of the good ones on Flickr when it's finished.
Technorati Tags: art computing, artificial intelligence, generative art
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"A growing collective of global “hackers” as they're called are dismantling products and re-aligning the parts as they see fit."
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CC find a forty year old example of an alternative licence.
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"This "contract" creates a you that is already guilty. And you didn't even ask for this thing to show up at your door!"
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How to write good emails.
const I const don't const like const C++ const. const
I use Lisp or JavaScript for my own work. I also use C, scheme and PHP occasionally. I have taught C and Java, and hacked Java and C++ professionally for years at a time. I have also done a lot of BASIC, Dylan, Objective-C, AppleScript and Python at one time or another.
I can honestly say that C++ is the worst programming language I have ever used. Worse than Python, worse than AppleScript. There are a number of reasons for this:
- The standard libraries require complex, irregular code to use and have many gotchas. Smalltalk, Java and the scripting languages are better.
- The best thing you can say about the strings is that they are not as bad as Lisp strings. Even C strings are better.
- The class and function system is complex and encumbers the user with premature design decisions. Java or Objective-C are better. Lisp's CLOS is heaven.
- With C code, you know what will be created by any given code construct. C++ makes this random, polluting the namespace and codespace with random nonsense that may or may not include defaults.
- C++ streams are a bit sucky. Using overloaded bitwise operators is funny for the first two minutes, but is a pain for the next few decades.
- C++ is often sold as a systems programming language but it mangles exported symbols and has no shared library system. So it isn't any good as a systems programming language.
- Idiots claim that C++ is fast. It is not fast unless you discard vtable dispatch, exceptions, RTTI, and new/delete. In other words C++ is fast if you use C instead.
- C++ re-uses keywords like const in unpredictable and silly ways.
- Const correctness is about as useful as Hungarian Notation.
- If you have ever declared something to be a friend, you have discovered why C++'s encapsulation is not as good as CLOS. Or C.
- The new coercion operators add complexity without making things any safer. You just have an extra four bad choices you can make.
- No garbage collection but don't worry, no good memory management either.
- References. Just everything about them.
- A static typing system that will stop you doing only useful things.
- The STL being value based. If you don't understand why that is bad then congratulations, you are one of the original authors!
Don't believe me? Here's Linus answering a C++ booster:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643/focus=57918
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if
the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out,
that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles
Bader jokingly said "to piss you off", but it's actually true. I've come
to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be
in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really *would* prefer to piss
off, so that he doesn't come and screw up any project I'm involved with.C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using
the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other
total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes:- infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me
that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full
of BS that it's not even funny)- inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road
you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all
your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you
cannot fix it without rewriting your app.In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and
portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are
basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people
don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that
do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any
idiotic "object model" crap.
Technorati Tags: hacking
It's up to 700 images. A 400 Mhz G4 takes a couple of minutes to create a drawing. I may just run it to 1000 rather than 2048, which will probably take until some time tomorrow.
So far the images that work are reasonably diverse. The images that don't work tend to be just a few dots or lines on a plain background. The colours aren't working as well as they seemed to in the test application so I'll have to find out why that is.
Technorati Tags: art computing, artificial intelligence, generative art
Last few episodes of Where Are The Joneses?:
90: http://wherearethejoneses.com/2007/09/05/
91: http://wherearethejoneses.com/2007/09/06/91-road-movie/
92: http://wherearethejoneses.com/2007/09/07/92/
The Joneses are off to a film premiere in Manchester.
Things are getting a bit strange.
There are some guest appearances and some more siblings.
But will they find out who their father is?
And will that be the end of their problems?
Technorati Tags: collaboration, comedy, copyleft, free culture, where are the joneses
I've just started a version of draw-something running that is going to generate 2048 images. I wonder if it will be finished by Monday?
I'm going to go through the images and see what works and what doesn't. I'll modify draw-something to make it more likely that it will produce images that work and less likely to produce images that don't.
The first results indicate that just dots on a plain background really doesn't work. ;-)
Technorati Tags: art computing, draw-something, generative art
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"when complete, the BBC will put the IPR of Olinda under an attribution license–the equivalent of a BSD or Creative Commons Attribution. "
http://www.dragcity.com/news.html
SIGHS MATTERSLately, Mayo Thompson and The Red Krayola have been thrilling us to the extreme. The level of musicianship, surprise, deep thoughts, hot and cold running humor and really, all-round entertainment found in their Introduction LP/CD and “Red Gold” CDEP releases of 2006 might have represented a one-two punch for some – but damn if The Red Krayola don't intend to push their luck with a bit of the old three-four here in 2007. First (and finally!) was the return of Soldier-Talk, their 1979 punk-pop uber-work – a reissue nearly 30 years in the making, a classic slab never before compacted to disc. Now The Red Krayola have re-allied with Art & Language to produce an all-new work. Art & Language, as you may recall, are an arts collective whose lyrics provided The Red Krayola with a springboard to several of their classic songs – “A Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock,” “Black Snakes,” “Born In Flames,” “Future Pilots” and of course, all of the Kangaroo? and Corrected Slogans albums. For many, these recordings represented the epochal The Red Krayola contribution...but for those many, the new album Sighs Trapped By Liars will force extreme revisionism (or as the more stiff-necked may assert, revulsionism!). That's just how good the new album by The Red Krayola with Art & Language is. The cast of Tom Watson, John McEntire, Noel Kupersmith, Jim O'Rourke and Mayo Thompson roll out a deep-pile musical carpet for chanteuses Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang, who share lead vocal duties throughout the entire record. That's right – no signature vocal presence from Mayo, who contents himself in arranging vocal lines for the ladies straight out of his private libretto. They acquit themselves magnificently to the complexities of the Art & Language lyrics, which are as ever caught up in social and aesthetic conflicts – though a new and different wave of issues than the 70s and 80s lyrics addressed. To unravel the Gordian knot for yourself, you'll find great enjoyment in hearing Sighs Trapped By Liars, which will be available everywhere that the world is envisioned as a better place (and sells records) in the waning moments of September!
Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music
Matt Lee - Open letter to Adobe - release Flash under the GNU GPL today | Exploring Freedom
Make Flash free software, specifically, release Flash - the player, the editor, the server, for all platforms, including embedded stuff, under the GNU GPL v3 and do it quickly. As soon as you do this, we can start to win.
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A network for conceptual artists in the UK.
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"There are few questions that suck the joy out of a room faster than this one:
“What good is it?”"
....are all potentially fertile areas for Artificial Intelligence research.
Mediumship, conjuring and marketing all require an understanding and manipulation of human beings that contains a great degree of knowledge and understanding of the human condition. AI implicitly requires this as well, at least in its strong form or in forms that would recognize the Turing test.
So if you would make a machine fool a person into accepting that it has knowledge, look at how people fool people into accepting that thet have knowledge...
Technorati Tags: artificial intelligence
Art & Language and The Red Krayola (nee Crayola) have a new album out this month, around the 25th depending on where you are in the world.
Previews indicate that the sound is a very contemporary 1960s retro and as unlistenably brilliant as ever. The Art & Language work the title and cover draw on is a decade old, so I don't know how long this has been in the works. But I am absolutely stoked that this is coming out now
More details from Drag City here (scroll down to September).
Order from Amazon US or Amazon UK if you must. But it would be better to order it through your local record shop.
Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music
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Algorithmic psychogeography.
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GPS trace of a psychogeographic walk.
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"programming .walk for dummies"
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Does what it says on the tin.
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"Here is a map of East Dulwich Estate, yet again absent from most maps. " OpenStreetMap wins again.
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One commenter says: "Nice piece. I recognise the dodgy maths from my days writing financial training for an e-learning company. The equation that popped up over and over was the dividend discount formula"
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"The recipe and branding of FREE BEER is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-shareAlike2.5)."
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"Mighty impressive considering that it's Ford, and the first time a global brand is using a Creative Commons open license on a commercial media project. But not surpising, since the mastermind behind the idea was David Bausola of Zero Influence."
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The death of incidental inclusion.
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"Free the church!"
