Graffiti Personal scrawlings

I drove to the Rockies last week (to visit the Burgess Shale!) and I listened to the CBC Ideas Climate Wars podcast on the way. I really enjoyed the hypothetical scenarios, so I've transcribed them here.

It's been a while since I added anything here but del.icio.us links. Looks bad :) This is something I wrote last summer for Ellen Moffat, a Saskatoon artist. It's a very lightweight Java component that uploads files to a Gallery 2 photo album. (I really wanted to re-use the "official" Gallery 2 Java client, but it was impossible to use without launching the UI, so it turned out to be easier just to write this little doo-dad.) If you run it as-is, a button pops up that lets you select one file at a time to upload to my test album. It's meant to be integrated into other Java apps, though, so if you want to use it in your own project, extract the source from the jar and use GalleryExample.java and UploadObserver.java as a model of how to control and handle events from the uploader. Compiled for Java 1.5+.

• gallery2.jar

I originally built this for Ellen's twicescore project. With Ellen's permission, I offered this code to the Gallery folks, but I never heard back, so I'll just distribute it here. Use it as you like.

Listens to keyboard and mouse events and uses Java to Runtime.exec() ivtv-tune based on the input. This works well with VLC, a much lighter alternative to MythTV. Compiled for Java 1.3+.

• remote.jar

Note that it listens to KeyEvent.getKeyCode(). I'm pretty sure the codes will be keyboard layout dependent, so if you're not in North America, this might not work for you. The source is included in the jar if you want to play, or contact me and let me know what kind of keyboard you've got and I'll look into it.

A while ago I was fiddling with the paleo maps by Dr. Ron Blakey at Northern Arizona U and I discovered that his Rectangular Global Maps wrap very easily around Google Earth.

• tectonics.kmz

This .kmz file sets the images in a time series converted from Ma to years BC. In Google Earth. you should see a Time slider at top right that lets you play the series or drag the slider back and forth to see the continents move through time. Set repeat and bounce for maximum coolness.

You might have to turn off other layers to see the tectonics maps properly.

Here's a little Java program that plays a compressed (~30 minute) Sivananda sequence. It pops up a little window to show a picture of the current pose, counts a timer down for each pose and dings three times when each pose is complete. It also dings once within some poses so I know how time is passing.

• yoga.jar

Use this program at your own risk. I'm not a yoga instructor and this sequence is my own interpretation of the Sivananda asanas. Note in particular that this sequence is significantly compressed from a proper full Sivananda practice.

To launch, click the link above, download yoga.jar and double-click it. If it doesn't launch, probably you're screwed. If you know what you're doing, you could always issue java -jar yoga.jar from a command prompt to see what the problem is and go from there.

Requires Java 1.5+. (I like generics.)

The images and the basic sequence are taken from the Proper Exercise pages of the Sivananda Om Site. If you're the copyright owner of the images and you object to their use in this program, please contact pete in the user part and graffiti.graceland.ca in the domain part and I will remove the program from my web site.

The sequence:

• Warmup - 5 minutes. Warns with 1.5 minutes left. I like to sit and breathe until the warning, and then stretch my arms up, out and then twist lightly to either side.

Here's a useful little data-mining script to extract the del.icio.us tags most often used against recently posted items. Put the script on your web server, change the value of the $ID variable to your del.icio.us identity and you'll get a list of tags the del.icio.us community has used to describe the stories you've posted. Note that it uses PHP's built-in JSON parser which isn't available till 5.2. You may have to strip slashes from the page body before parsing the JSON data on line 100 depending on your magic quotes setting.

• The script: my.icio.us.php.zip
• The script working on my del.cio.us posts tagged with "quovadis": my.icio.us

It would be simple to get the script to extract the identity from a query on the request URL, but I'm afraid of how useful providing such a service could be to people. Probably the right way to do this is to distribute the HTTP GETting and data manipulation to the browser with JavaScript instead of doing this on the server side. This works fine, though.

I've been reading Steven Jay Gould's Wonderful Life lately, and I think I've finally found something worth traveling to see. The The Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation offers Guided Hikes. Here's a .kmz file containing the location of the Burgess Shale in Google Earth. (Like so many places I'm interested in, it's just outside a high resolution area. What is that, anyways?)

In an ideal future, I'll get laid off early next year and spend the summer traveling on my package while I wait for pogey to kick in. (I fear my employer will require my services until at least fall of next year, however.) Another destination on the grand tour will certainly be the Colorado Plateau. For a while now I've noticed, without knowing the source, the mapping work done by Dr. Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology at Northern Arizona University. I think I might finally understand the attraction. I need to see the Grand Staircase.

Download A History of Violence, a PDF file containing a March 2007 Steven Pinker article from The New Republic Online about how we kill each other less now and feel worse about it when we do than at any other time in human history. The article is full of pithy stuff:

European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others.

We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it.

This material is copyright The New Republic Online, and it's probably not meant to be distributed without their permission, but I think the article is so worthwhile I'll take the risk. If the copyright owner wishes me to stop distributing this, please contact me by email at pete in the user part and graffiti.graceland.ca in the domain part, and I will do so.

There's a short narrated version (5 min) and various edits of a longer version (7.5 min and huge files). Either of the long versions (narrated or labeled with music) is worth the download.

The animation is part of a collection at the Scientific Visualization Studio of the Goddard Space Flight Center. As of this writing, a search by animation ID shows that one of the animators posted something as recently as last Monday, so they're still getting funding!

I've just decommissioned an old weblog I'd filled with links to arty stuff (and redirected the traffic here). For about three years I collected stats to rank the links by hit, and of all the arty (and otherwise) stuff I posted, these 15 got the most hits.

If you're looking for Yeti Sports, you want ..:::YETISPORTS:::... For whatever reason, I posted five Pingu/Yeti Sports links and three made it to the top 15 at #2, 5 and 8.

• #1 webart link: Bloody Pingu. Bloody Pingu is hosted by #11, flabber weblog.
• NSFW has The Dildo Song (#3), Toilet Monster (#6), Silicon Challenge (#7) and Kinky Breakout (#15)
• Viridian Room (#4) is in A list of arty Flash puzzles in increasing order of complexity
• Music Videos has Dirty Kuffar (#9) and Apache Helicopter Attack Video (#14)

Strangley, community site Nordinho.net made the list at #10. Two viral ads squeaked in near the bottom. Splinter Cell (#12) is a Flash video game teaser and Make-a-Flake (#13) seems to be an ad agency's marketing experiment.

Also see Cows and the del.icio.us Webart feed.