February 4, 2010
In its final days now, Project Prime is my attempt at combining art, poetry and maths in a funky little collaborative weave. Hopefully, the result will be a collection of people’s opinions of my poetry in a dynamic visual form… I’m still to be convinced that it’ll work well though! I’ll probably end the work this weekend, and work on producing the final piece… stay tuned

In its final days now, Project Prime is my attempt at combining art, poetry and maths in a funky little collaborative weave.

Hopefully, the result will be a collection of people’s opinions of my poetry in a dynamic visual form… I’m still to be convinced that it’ll work well though! I’ll probably end the work this weekend, and work on producing the final piece… stay tuned

1:14pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zxt1byM5TM5
Filed under: poetry art code cy densham 
November 15, 2009
Its Been A While…

Well, its been a few months since I posted last - the genuine joy of interesting/difficult work in my final year as a Physics undergrad - but there’s a fair amount I should probably put up here for posterity:

  • I’ve become very interested in Playdar - an old friend of mine, James Wheare, is a ket developer - and the possibilities music resolution has to offer. As a consequence I released quite a few libraries and a program that helps some of playdar’s features become a little more tangible.

    Voici DAAPlaydar: a script that will resolve playlists of yours (using playdar) and make them available to you via DAAP share. A very cool concept (even if I say so myself!) but it falls short because iTunes is very picky about the DAAP servers it talks to, Songbird works well though :) I hope to be ablet o work a bit more on this in the near future - if you have any expertise with DAAP, you know who to get in touch with!
  • In order to get DAAPlaydar working I had to build a few libraries, one to decode Apple’s DMAP object encoding method (now a ruby gem on gemcutter called (drumroll please) dmap - woop! There’s also PlaydARR, a ruby library for interacting with the Playdar server (also now a gem on gemcutter). So named because pirates help combat global warming. True story.
  • My dashing alter ego Cy Densham has released some more poetry, your opinions are more than welcome.
  • At some point some of the many photos I took while traveling Japan will arrive on Flickr (I’m fighting with FlickrUpload for Aperture at the moment) some of the photos are already up, and of course they’re geotagged so you can just browse to Japan in Flickr to see them.
  • I’ve also realized that one of the projects I enjoyed working on the most isn’t mentioned on here! Shock horror. irotoku is a (very basic) way of hiding information in images - ie. Stenography - the implementation of the decoder I wrote in C here is quick enough that if you hide MP3 data in a (big!) image you can pipe directly from the image through irotoku to an MP3 player and listen to your heart’s content. Good fun.

So that’s pretty much all for now, Cy has some interesting ideas so there may some more stuff up here soon, but he might be pushed down by this newly inspired Physicist and such tedious things as job applications. Yay.

11:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zxt1byEdiIm
Filed under: irotoku code ruby github poetry iTunes DAAP Songbird gem 
August 31, 2009
Geo Tumblr

Well, I’m back from Japan and while I was there I kept an online journal (Tumblr, you rock) to let everyone at home know what was going on. To make things even cooler I vowed to keep the posts tagged with where I was while I was writing them, of course tumblr has no functionality for this so I hacked up a geotagging solution using javascript.

After making a formal request for geotagging features on their getsatisfaction pages someone asked me how I got it done, so I created a (very sloppy) tutorial as a github gist. If you feel like getting some rather hacky geotagging features in your tumblog, this is one way to do it with google maps and plenty of time!

The Cons:

  • You have to find your lat and long in decimal format in order to tag your post with a geo:51;-1. This was very annoying when my iPhone doesn’t really have this ability. (I used tweetie when it was offline, which posts the google map link of your position when you ask it to)
  • Many of the posts I wrote in more than one place (long posts, written in the evening about a place I’d left, or about more than one place) which meant there was no obvious single location for the post.
  • There’s a painful javascript yank on any system visiting the site, due to the amount of computing that needs to be done to work around the tumblr system, which was never designed to do this. (Its not that bad really, but just irks me as it shouldn’t be necessary!)
And yes, Japan was amazing.

3:45pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zxt1byAWT4y
Filed under: code geo 
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