SPOTS media facade berlin
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:28 PM - Beautiful Code
Well, this is one of those things that make this city so desperately awsome isn't it. The SPOTS media facade opened today at 17:00 on the frozen Park Kolonnaden building. As you can see in the pics, a few series of curated art projects will be delivered for free to a hopefully delighted walking audience for 18 months. You can also buy little postcards with changing images on them. The installation was designed by Realities:United, a Berlin-based architecture studio, also responsible for the amazing BIX facade at the Kunsthaus (Graz).
This selection was curated by Andreas Broeckmann, the big man at the Transmediale, but will include works by Jim Campbell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Carsten Nicolai and Realities:United in collaboration with John Dekron. Visitors to Transmediale 06 will have a chance to see them all together, one per day, in a special show.
via generatorx
6 comments Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:19 PM - Robots
You know you need it: Roedy Green's guide To Write Unmaintainable Code. Become irreplaceable. Ensure a job for life.
In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!
You don't want to overdo this. Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way. Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.
blink!
Owning ideas
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:17 PM - Sound
The boom in the intellectual property market will not reap rewards for us all: Andrew Brown for The Guardian, November 19, 2005:
The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms.
Ideas such as one-click shopping, getting customer reviews on a website or even putting classified ads on the internet are now patented, which is to say that somebody owns them - Amazon.com the first two, Google, the classified ad patent - and anybody else who wants to make use of them must pay a rent to the owner. Last week, Amazon was also granted a patent that covers getting shoppers to review the things they have bought on its website. BT has tried to patent the hyperlink, Microsoft is trying to patent XML, a way of writing computer files that is fundamental to the operation of modern business.
Keep reading Owning Ideas, one of the most brilliant articles I have read on the topic. If interested, read also Patent Absurdity, another beautiful by a very inspired Richard Stallman.
The Texturize plugin for GIMP
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:15 PM - Apt-get Install
Textures are probably one of the most undervalued elements in 3D modelling. That's why, among other reasons, this plugin is so awsome:
Imagine that you have an image with a small sample of a texture, like a few strawberries (out of a plate full of them), a few square inches of grass (from a large grassy field), or a few dozens of your cat's hairs (your cat really has more than that). If you want to generate a larger texture with this small image, you could just copy-paste it, and put the copies (or "patches") one next to another, but that wouldn't produce a very good result, since the right (or top) part of the image usually doesn't correspond to its left (or bottom) part, when two copies of the image are assembled.
The Texturize plugin allows you to get all the strawberries, the whole grass field, or your whole cat (well, it doesn't guess you cat's shape, but you can at least get a lot of his hairs!). Moreover, Texturize lets you actually create tileable textures (which is great for game design). Have a look at the examples section to see what it looks like
The Texturize plugin is available under the GPL license and is multiplatform. Blink!
a terminal everywhere
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:10 PM - Beautiful Code
Have you ever wanted SSH or telnet access to your system from an "internet desert" - from behind a strict firewall, from an internet cafe, or even from a mobile phone? ANYTERM is a combination of a web page and a web server module that provides this access - see the demos .
Anyterm can use almost any web browser and even works through firewalls. There is experimental support for mobile phones using WAP. If you join my.anyterm.org you can access your systems straight away via our server with no software to install anywhere. Alternatively, you can run the Anyterm software on your own system - see the deployment examples.
anyterm.org
download it!!
onedotzero berlin
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:07 PM - Copyfight
Better late than never: onedotzero returns to berlin for a selection of free screenings in the temporary gallery space Cocobello on Potsdamer Platz. Architecturally- inspired short films from the 'graphic cities' programmes will play to an outdoor audience. bring your bobble hats!
And it's free!
onedotcero
cocobello
Joyce Sequence
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:02 PM - Beautiful Code
;)
The sequence of numbers
{j_n} giving the number of digits in the three-fold power tower n^(n^n). The values of n^(n^n). for .n==1, 2,. ... are 1, 16, 7625597484987., ... (Sloane's A002488; Rossier 1948), so the Joyce sequence is 1, 2, 13, 155, 2185, 36306., ... (Sloane's A054382). Laisant (1906) found the term j_9., and Uhler (1947) published the logarithm of this number to 250 decimal places (Wells 1986, p. 208).
The sequence is named in honor of the following excerpt from the "Ithaca" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses:
"Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers."
via (TY Cliff)
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