List of awesome Turing Machine Drawings:
Luki hat sich eine weile mit den zeichnenden Turing Machines beschäftigt und schreibt mir: Nach einigem ausprobieren, habe ich mal ein Pad gemacht mit besonders schönen, ungewöhnlichen, seltsamen, interessanten Turing Drawings. Ich habe sie etwas geordnet nach dem was passiert. Nice Patterns erzeugt nach einer weile meist ein stabiles Bild. Die Longtime stable dinger erzeugen ein sich veränderndes Muster, dass aber nicht ‘chaotisch’ wird. Teilweise dauert es recht lange, bis sie ihr Endstadium erreicht haben.“
Turing Machine Music:
Gestern hatte ich Maxime Chevalier-Boisverts zeichnende Turing Maschinen gebloggt, jetzt hat sie dasselbe Prinzip auf generative Musik angewendet: „Turing Tunes uses randomly generated Turing machines to produce sequences of musical notes, as a form of generative art.“ Turing Rave, anyone?
Turing Drawing Machines
Toll: Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert hat ein Spielzeug gecoded, das zufällige Turing Maschinen erzeugt, die generative Kunst ausgeben und denen man beim „Zeichnen“ zusehen kann. Ich klick da jetzt seit rund einer halben Stunde auf random, hier ein paar der hübschesten zeichnenden Turing-Maschinen, die dabei rausgekommen sind:
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,2,1,1,1,2,2,0,1,0,1,2,2,2,1,1,3,1,1,1,2,1,3,2,1,3,1,1,3,1,2,2,1,2,1,1,0
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,2,3,1,1,2,0,1,0,1,1,2,1,2,2,0,1,2,2,2,0,2,1,3,3,1,1,3,2,2,0,1,3,2,2,3
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,1,3,3,2,0,1,2,3,2,1,2,0,2,0,0,1,0,3,2,3,2,2,2,3,1,2,0,2,3,3,2,0,1,1,2
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,1,1,0,2,1,2,0,1,1,1,2,3,3,2,2,2,1,0,2,2,3,2,1,3,0,1,2,1,1,2,1,2,3,1,1,1
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,1,2,0,2,1,0,1,2,3,1,3,3,2,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,2,2,1,2,1,1,1,1,2,3,2,1,2,1,3
http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,2,1,1,2,2,3,3,2,3,0,1,0,2,1,1,1,2,1,1,2,0,3,1,3,3,1,0,0,2,0,2,2,0,0,2,2
Aus ihrem Blogposting:
After watching a documentary about Alan Turing, I started thinking about Turing machines again. They’re a very useful tool for computer science proofs and an elegantly simple computational model. Beyond this, however, Turing machines seem relatively useless in terms of “real-world” applications. […]
One possible application for Turing machines is to use them as programs to generate data procedurally. Their simplicity makes it possible, for example, to create working programs randomly. Generating a random stream of x86 instructions that doesn’t crash could be tricky, but with a Turing machine, it’s quite easy. I decided to try something like this to produce so-called generative art. The program I wrote generates random Turing machines that operate on a two-dimensional grid instead of a one-dimensional tape. The symbols written on the grid can be interpreted as colors, and voilà: we have procedural drawings.
Turing Drawings, auf Hacker News gibt’s noch mehr Links zur tollen Patterns…
Character Encoding Poetry
Ich hasse Type-Encoding! Spätestens, seit ich wegen Datenbank-Blödsinns vor ein paar Jahren fast sämtliche Sonderzeichen „verloren“ habe und mit viel Gefrickel wieder herstellen musste. Jedenfalls: Ich hätte dem Thema damals auch ein Gedicht widmen können, wäre aber wahrscheinlich nicht so grandios geworden, wie diese Ode an einen Adressaufkleber. Fantastisch! Und den etwas holprigen Rythmus lassen einfach mal unter Latin1 fallen. GO LÓPEZ!
ODE TO A SHIPPING LABEL
Once there was a little o,
with an accent on top like só.It started out as UTF8,
(universal since ’98),
but the program only knew latin1,
and changed little ó to “ó” for fun.A second program saw the “ó”
and said “I know HTML entity!”
So “ó” was smartened to “ó”
and passed on through happily.Another program saw the tangle
(more precisely, ampersands to mangle)
and thus the humble “ó”
became “ó”
Algoraves: Dancing to live-coded Music
Youtube Direktrave, via Boing Boing
Algoraves sind ‘ne halbneue Partyreihe, auf der Musiker Tracks live vor Publikum coden, mit Fokus auf Tanzbarkeit. Veranstaltungen gab’s bislang vor allem in London (und einer in Karlsruhe).
Algorave is made from “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals“. […]
This is no new idea, but Algoraves focus on humans making and dancing to music. Algorave musicians don’t pretend their software is being creative, they take responsibility for the music they make, shaping it using whatever means they have. More importantly the focus is not on what the musician is doing, but on the music, and people dancing to it. Algoraves embrace the alien sounds of raves from the past, and introduce alien, futuristic rhythms and beats made through strange, algorithm-aided processes. It’s up to the good people on the dancefloor to help the musicians make sense of this and do the real creative work in making a great party.
Pong in CSS
Alex Walker hat Pong in purem CSS ohne JavaScript hingekriegt. Funktioniert eher so halb, ist aber auch nur „An exercise in the futile but fun“.
This is a playable version of Pong complete with working scoring system — built entirely with CSS. Not a line a Javascript to be seen.
All game logic is built using hover state and sibling selectors.
DRM-Oscar delivered in Style
Pünktlich zum gestrigen Anti-DRM-Tag haben Defective By Design dem W3C einen Oscar (und die Unterschriften ihrer Anti-DRM-Petition) überreicht, für die beste Nebenrolle in den DRM-Plänen von Hollywood. Hintergrund: Es geht um die Pläne des W3C in HTML5 einen DRM-Mechanismus einzubauen, eine Petition dagegen kann man nach wie vor hier unterzeichnen, aber die Signaturen werden dann wohl nicht mehr als Oscar überreicht.
Your signature opposing DRM in HTML5 has been officially delivered to W3C — in style. Because W3C’s consideration of this freedom-destroying measure is backed by Hollywood, we thought it fitting to recognize W3C’s role in this disastrous affair in true Hollywood style. We rolled out the red carpet and presented W3C with an award for “Best Supporting Role in ‘The Hollyweb’,” accompanied by over 22,500 verified signatures from people who want to stop W3C from weaving Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the fabric of the Web. […]
The petition delivery took place on International Day Against DRM, while people all around the world showed their opposition to DRM with protests, online action, and making DRM-free purchases. Today’s delivery is just the beginning. We’ll leave the petition up, so that concerned Internet users can continue to voice opposition to the proposal — although we delivered a large batch today, signatures continue to come in by the minute.
Oscar awarded to W3C for Best Supporting Role in “The Hollyweb”
Unreal Engine in your Browser, now online:
Mozilla haben die Demo zu ihrer Unreal-JavaScript-Engine online gestellt: Unreal Engine in JavaScript/HTML5 – Citadel demo. Läuft wohl am besten mit Firefox Nightly, Chrome stürzt definitiv ab, am besten vorher die FAQs durchlesen, die Comments auf Hackernews klingen schonmal ziemlich begeistert.
20 Years ago, the WWW went Public Domain
Vor zwanzig Jahren gaben das CERN und Sir Tim Berners-Lee bekannt, dass sie ihre neue Technologie des World Wide Webs als Gemeingut kostenfrei zur Verfügung stellen. Ohne diese weise Entscheidung gäb’s das Netz in seiner heutigen Form nicht oder wäre lediglich ein trauriges Abbild davon.
Zur Feier des Tages rekonstruieren sie grade die allererste Website des WWW unter http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html:
On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.
On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web (“W3″, or simply “the web”) technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.
Info.cern.ch: Twenty years of a free, open web (via The Verge)
First-website.web.cern.ch: Restoring the first website A project to restore info.cern.ch – the world’s first website
Comment-Spam Template revealed by Accident
Ein Spammer auf Github-User Shanselmans Blog hat aufgrund eines Fehlers sein komplettes Comment-Spam-Template gepostet, aus dem Teil kann man 4,3 Millarden unterschiedliche Spam-Varianten basteln. Auf Hackernews haben sie ihren Spaß damit:
It looks like this factors out to 4,351,250,624 unique comments.
How did you calculate this?
The set of strings is isomorphic to a Cartesian Product of sets of the same cardinalities as the set of options (for example, if the template was “{I,We} like {HTML, CSS, Javascript}”, you can make a set {0,1}x{0,1,2}, where each element in the product set maps to one string and vice versa. For example (0,0) might represent I like HTML, and (1,2) might represent We like Javascript).
Because there is a one to one map (bijection) between the Cartesian Product set and the set of strings, the size of the product set is the same as the size of the set of strings. The cardinality of a cartesian product AxB, where A and B are sets, is |AxB|=|A|x|B|, so to find the size of the set of strings, you just need to multiply together the number of options at each point in the template where you have a choice.
Here’s _why.
Vor vier Jahren hatte Coder-Legende Jonathan Gillette aka _why aka Why the Lucky Stiff die Schnauze voll und beging „Infosuicide“, zog sich komplett aus dem Netz zurück und vernichtete alle Spuren. Ein paar Jahre später hatte ihm ein Journalist von Slate nachrecherchiert, bis auf seinen bürgerlichen Namen aber ebenfalls nichts herausgefunden. Jetzt ist er wieder da, irgendwie. Auf seiner Website postet er seit gestern Drucker-Befehle, die kryptische Buchseiten und handgeschriebene Texte ausspucken. Kafka-Reviews, verschlüsselte Illustrationen, Texte über Oprah Winfrey. Nerd-Mystery-Crypto-Netzkunst, oder so ähnlich. Crazy stuff.
_why’s three years of self-imposed Internet exile ended on January 6, when his old website suddenly returned, bearing nothing but this cryptic message:
“Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z”
And that was it—until earlier today, when the site suddenly began spitting out more network printer commands. Some clever readers at Hacker News figured out that perhaps _Why was sending messages in Printer Command Language. They were right. Soon enough, their printers began spitting out pages. Put together, they appear to be pages to a book: A novel or an autobiography, a combination of typed-out pages and hand-scrawled notes.
We’re not going to parse the writing. We don’t know _why, and we don’t know why he disappeared, though this does seem to be, at least in part, an exploration of that question. (“This reads less like a return and more like the goodbye he never made when he left,” one Hacker News commenter wrote.) We’re happy to follow along, and read his writing as long as he’s willing to share.
Hacker News: _why’s site updated again (whytheluckystiff.net)
Daily Dot: The cryptic return of programming legend Why the Lucky Stiff
Scribd: _Whys Return
Scribt: _why’s complete printer spool as one book
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Where’s _why?
DIY-Webcam Video Magnification
Vor einem Jahr bloggte ich über die Eulerian Video Magnification, das Video ging vor ein paar Wochen nochmal rum, dürftet Ihr mitbekommen haben. Kurzversion: Das ist eine Art Vergrößerung für minimale Bewegungen in Videos, damit kann man beispielsweise Puls sichtbar machen. Und jetzt hat Github-User thearn eine DIY-Variante davon online gestellt, die dasselbe für Webcams bietet. Ich bin gespannt, wie lange das online bleibt, die hatten sich ihre Eulerian Video Magnification damals patentieren lassen.
This application uses openCV to find the location of the user’s face, then isolate the forehead region. Data is collected from this location over time to estimate the user’s heartbeat frequency. This is done by measuring average optical intensity in the forehead location, in the subimage’s green channel alone (a better color mixing ratio may exist, but the blue channel tends to be very noisy). Physiological data can be estimated this way thanks to the optical absorbtion characteristics of (oxy-) hemoglobin (see http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-16-26-21434).
With good lighting and minimal noise due to motion, a stable heartbeat should be isolated in about 15 seconds. Other physiological waveforms, such as Mayer waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves), should also be visible in the raw data stream.
Once the user’s pulse signal has been isolated, real-time phase variation associated with the detected hearbeat frequency is also computed. This allows for the heartbeat frequency to be exaggerated in the post-process frame rendering; causing the highlighted forhead location to pulse in sync with the user’s own heartbeat.
Pre-Processor for CSS in Oxford English
Schönes Spielzeug für Webdesigner mit Monokel: Ein CSS-Preprocessor für Stylesheets, die man damit auch in Oxford Englisch runterschreiben kann. Das $dictionary kann man freilich anpassen und sich so seine eigene CSS-Syntax basteln, BroCSS mit „fucking margins“ etwa oder ein Psychedelic TSS (Psychedelic Tripping Style-Sheet) mit Styles wie „Colors:#WHOA“ oder „Position:Flying In The Sky With Diamonds“.
Brits, take control of the web. Spiffing allows you to write your CSS and stylesheets in conformance to proper British English (also known as correct English) grammar and spelling regulations.
While admittedly, Spiffing doesn’t have the variance and extensive amount of features as other preprocessors, it does one unique thing, missing in any other existing solution: fixes the grammar mistakes prevalent throughout the CSS language.
Celebrate your well-spelt stylesheets with some tea and scones.
Spiffing CSS: the preprocessor made for Brits (Warning, annoying Autostart-Music, via Hackernews)
AprilFools.css
Wie man per Custom-CSS seine Kollegen am Montag für ein paar Sekunden aus der Fassung bringt. Mir gefällt ja „Hide every 2nd paragraph element on a page“ am besten, die sämtliche Websites auf ‘ne subtile Weise zu einem Haufen wirres Zeug zusammenstreichen.
Simply add the definitions to the computers Custom.css file, and watch the fireworks begin. These styles will be applied to every webpage the computer visits in Chrome.
The Custom.css file is usually located here for Macs:~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css
And here for PCs:C:/Users/YourUsername/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css
/*Hide every other paragraph element on a page*/
p:nth-child(odd) {
display:none !important;
}Co-workers that come in and read a few articles on the internet will wonder what is wrong with writers when none of the stories they read make sense. They might even think the whole internet is in on some prank! Little do they know that they’ve been reading stories with every other paragraph missing.
April Fools Pranks for Developers, hier das AprilFools.css auf GitHub
