Alice did it, and from there I’ve found some more interesting people doing it. So to throw myself aboard a bandwagon (and break a long dry spell without posting), here are 5 things I’m thinking about right now: Apps (especially games) targeting a specific device could be coming to an end soon. Google’s announcement of Chrome being able to run …
Dear Meg Hillier, As a constituent whose career and majority of personal communications are conducted across the internet, I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate. The Bill contains measures that favour the protection of commercial interests at the expense of an individual citizen’s …
PyPlants has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few days (well, evenings), and now from its new home as PyPlants on bitbucket sports a completely rewritten rendering backend which is more modular, should be really easy to plug into, and now supports POV-Ray out of the box. What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer? Yes …
In the previous part of this article we looked at the background to L-Systems, and how they could be used for describing self-similar biological systems. In this part we’ll look at a sample implementation of a very basic 2D L-System in Python, together with a basic PNG renderer using PyCairo. This is an implementation of a deterministic, context-less L-System, …
For a fledgling project idea, I’ve recently needed to work out how to draw plants procedurally, and of course Python is my language of choice for some rapid prototyping. Whilst some richly-featured professional applications exist for generating flora in a procedural fashion for high-end rendering, there are precious few systems available for the kind of bulk task …
Ten things I’ve learned as a developer at WooMe: Be clear what your direction is. Identify your key proposition and focus on it. Don’t get distracted by unrelated features — somebody else is probably already doing those better than you. Be merciless with features that don’t cut it. No matter how much you like it, if your audience …
Every now and then someone at TED presents a technology or an idea that’s so utterly amazing, or ridiculously simple that it can’t help but change the world. David Merrill shows off an MIT project called Siftables in this talk, and even though I’ve been messing around with computing for 25 years my jaw is still dragging …
Fri February 13, 2009 – 23:07
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By seb
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Posted in ideas, programming, science
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Tagged computing, ideas, programming, science, talks, TED, tubed, video
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Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the 2006 best seller Eat, Pray, Love, and in this year’s TED talks gave a fantastic talk on the nature of creative genius. In a room full of scientists, this talk on being possessed by a creative muse, a spirit of genius, raised a standing ovation. This utterly enthralling talk is an interesting perspective on creativity.
This video presentation from Siggraph 2007 has been popping up all over the internets the last couple of days, and the implications are truly astonishing. Algorithmically this is a remarkably simple technique, and easily implemented in real-time. It should be pretty straight-forward to write an implementation in ActionScript 3 (for Flash 9) or in IronPython (for …
Basic premise: Players in a persistent virtual world inhabit two states — two parallel lives. When not active in the world, players take on the role of NPCs, their bodies under the control of basic AI routines that go about daily life in any of the towns and villages that scatter the world. The fulfil the roles …