Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Take a look at the URLs used to make the charts at the bottom of this page.
ithankYouGodformostthisamazingdayfortheleapinggreenlyspiritsof
treesandabluetruedreamofskyandforeverythingwhichisnatural
whichisinfinitewhichisyesithankYouGodformostthisamazingday
fortheleapinggreenlyspiritsoftreesandabluetruedreamofskyand
foreverythingwhichisnaturalwhichisinfinitewhichisyeseecummings
It’d be even cooler if the chart was at all attractive..
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
Forever ago, in the glory-days of Napster and Kazaa, I discovered Radiohead (hurrah!) and amidst the 28.8kb/s hunt for b-sides and rarities on other people’s computers found myself in possession of a song called Cogs. It was a weird and haunting song that seemed to fit right into the Kid A/Amnesiac theme but didn’t fit with GreenPlastic’s suggestion that Cogs was an alternate title for Last Flowers.
It became this anomaly in my collection, Radiohead but not, and I forgot about it until today, when I thought I’d scan it with Last.fm’s command line fingerprinter which told me:
<track confidence="0.245223">
<artist>Ennio Morricone</artist>
<title>Man With A Harmonica</title>
<url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ennio+Morricone/_/Man+With+A+Harmonica</url>
</track>
Which wasn’t what I expected at all.
But now a six-year odd mystery has been solved and I’d love to know how the fingerprinter works. Probably some hairy maths .. it’s impressive it can figure these things, especially now they’re automatically redirected.
It’s still an excellent song.
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
He’s standing there on Platform 5 of London Bridge station. He always is. Always in the same spot, always in the same outfit, always staring at me, always. And I’m always here, watching him.
We started forty years ago. Little has happened since. Every day we are here, staring.
I know his eyes.
They’re dark blue and jealous and bitter. I tried to decipher what had happened to make them once, but their glare intensified and I was scared so I backed down.
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
Just so I don’t forget.
Directories only: find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
Files only : find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Should be alleviated – an unindexed query called for each track in a chart list was returning close to a million rows = ouch and hurrah for indexes.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Stumbling through a load of OpenGL documentation I came across a demonstration of Conway’s Game of Life using the stencil buffer, which is simultaneously awesome and horrible:
Life in the Stencil Buffer
One way to create this game using OpenGL is to use a multipass algorithm. Keep the data in the color buffer, one pixel for each grid point. Assume that black (all zeros) is the background color, and the color of a live pixel is nonzero. Initialize by clearing the depth and stencil buffers to zero, set the depth-buffer writemask to zero, and set the depth comparison function so that it passes on not-equal. To iterate, read the image off the screen, enable drawing into the depth buffer, and set the stencil function so that it increments whenever a depth comparison succeeds but leaves the stencil buffer unchanged otherwise. Disable drawing into the color buffer.
Next, draw the image eight times, offset one pixel in each vertical, horizontal, and diagonal direction. When you’re done, the stencil buffer contains a count of the number of live neighbors for each pixel. Enable drawing to the color buffer, set the color to the color for live cells, and set the stencil function to draw only if the value in the stencil buffer is 3 (three live neighbors). In addition, if this drawing occurs, decrement the value in the stencil buffer. Then draw a rectangle covering the image; this paints each cell that has exactly three live neighbors with the “alive” color.
At this point, the stencil buffers contain 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and the values under the 2’s are correct. The values under 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 must be cleared to the “dead” color. Set the stencil function to draw whenever the value is not 2, and to zero the stencil values in all cases. Then draw a large polygon of the “dead” color across the entire image. You’re done.
http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~jciehl/Public/OpenGL_PG/ch15.html#id5553768