mysteryrobot.com has a very interesting idea... Nambers. They match up a set of words to numbers between 0 and 255. So instead of having to remember 141.213.11.223, you could instead use the Nambers mapping "match.star.bank.tall"

for example...
www.umich.edu is match.spoon.mom.shell.mysteryrobot.com
www.google.com is stop.walk.dance.gold.mysteryrobot.com
www.python.org is short.hat.love.thank.mysteryrobot.com

Okay, so it may not be all that useful, but it's a cool idea and points out an interesting mechanism that can be employed when you need to remember something--take advantage of common mental hooks. I remember a while back, someone wanted to leverage human's very good memory of faces in a password system. Of course the company went nowhere, but still, it's pretty cool.
posted on 2/25/2003 09:32:00 PM

Two New Sketches

Well a smattering of particles is attracted by a central point. The particle saturation and hue varies with its velocity. There is a bit of damping on the motion, because I'm the coder and I said so. This one is kinda fun to just sit and watch for a while.

Pull is an interactive version of Well.

On the code/software visualization front, I've been doing a lot of reading and currently I have ambitions towards coming up with some code-based playthings in three areas: The first is in mid-level visualization, where actual lines of code are not represented in a great amount of detail; however, LOC for a particular method/class, references to other classes, etc., are of some interest.

The second is coming up with interesting renderings of source code by coming up with symbols/textures/whatever based on elements in the abstract parse tree. I have run across a tool/spec called JavaML, which is a representation of Java source code in XML, which is really interesting.

The third is coming up with rendering of source code at a somewhat lower level; the goal here is to come up with a more visually accessible rendering of source code.... sort of like taking source code just a few steps above the 80-columns-of-text representation. I'd like to somehow take advantage of better typography and graphics options that could make it such that even if you were sitting far back enough that you couldn't actually read the code, you could still get a pretty decent idea of what's going on just by the visual representation. A trivial example would be a sort of "visual hungarian notation" of basic types / common classes (e.g., string), where the visual representation would include not only the name, but an underlying symbol, perhaps, or a bounding box with a particular texture.

If anyone reading this has any ideas, drop me a line!


posted on 2/25/2003 09:24:00 PM

I've been thinking about a few things lately...
software simplicity (or how to write software that's easy to understand)
coding micro-patterns (possibly a way to figure out common bits of code / idioms that are easily digested by the programmer's mind)...
visualization of code/software systems (how to turn a completely cognitive task into one that is more perceptual)...
useful vs. beautiful images.. and the intersection thereof...
but right now I'm just a little too tired to say much more than that. Stay tuned.
posted on 2/20/2003 12:16:00 AM

New sketch: DecoPlanes

This is another simple one, and my first foray into using 3D with Proce55ing. They have taken a really nice and simple approach to the 3D stuff... just turn lighting() on, and suddenly everything is lit. Anyway, when the triangles have stopped spinning, the end result looks sort of like a cubist painting if you squint really hard. Click the image to give everything a kick.
posted on 2/13/2003 08:04:00 AM