Archive for September, 2008

Get a Real Job

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

I got a real job! Sorry sandwiches, but I’m moving on. I will miss eating you every day. You were good and filling while you lasted. I will no longer return home smelling of deli meats. I will be working at Image Kindle doing god knows what, but probably something to do with web development. That is all. I have nothing else report, just more Web Dev EXP to level up my Wizard Class character. Zoink!

Posted in Code, Maine, News | No Comments »

Spiral Jetty

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Here is the last of these cheap shot one-off videos of me doing nothing. It’s a spiral! Yowza! SpriralDraw.pydoes, again, exactly what you think it does. I’d like to think I’m onto bigger and better things, but maybe I’m still just running around in circles too.

Posted in Code, video | No Comments »

Inky Spots

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Another in the series of stupid programs that do nothing. This time: inky.py which again behaves in a predictable manner.

Posted in Code, video | No Comments »

Hip Priest: The Game!

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

I walked through, hand held, a whole PyGame tutorial last night. It was actually quite educational, and can be found here via: Learning Python. Anyway, what I’ve created is almost exactly what this tutorial has you spit out, I just changed some values and made my own sprites. Now instead of a python gobbling pellets, it’s a maniac (perhaps Mark E. Smith) making Hip Priests disappear. Not exactly hours (or even minutes) of entertainments, but it suggests a lot: moving sprites, background images, a scoring system, collision detection, we’re close to having all the tools we need to actually make something … I was going to say cool, but I digress, to make something, we’ll just say that.

Posted in Code, games, video | No Comments »

In the "i" of a Blink

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Another brain melting video of Python Prowess here. This one of the blink.py program, which, aptly, flashes (or blinks) a dot rapidly around the screen. Notice that the Earth is still unshattered.

In (slightly) more advanced news, I finally got builds of PyGame and PyObjC configured on my machine. So hopefully I will soon be building some slightly more advanced programs.

Posted in Code, News, video | No Comments »

Uncle Andy and the Last Great War

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

I would like to take a moment to congratulate my good friend Daniel Morris for this one. We did this a little while ago, but it’s not any worse for wear. Special Fightin’ Vampire Unit. Santa Fe, NM. 1917.

Posted in Action, art | No Comments »

Rapid Ball Expansion

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

No, it’s not cancer, just another dopey block of code that I am overly proud(ish) of. Here’s the video and the source.

Posted in Code, video | No Comments »

Random Balls

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

I recently got a screen grab app so I now have the ability to make delightful little movies of my degenerate python programs. Starting today with randball.py a little belch that moves balls (orbs? circles?) around the screen in semi-random ways. I like the organic movement. I’m not yet clever enough to keep it going indefinitely with some direction reversals, but you’d better believe it’s comin!

I’ll keep posting these little buggers for the rest of the week. If you are unimpressed, just hang on, cause they don’t get much better.

Posted in Code, video | No Comments »

See the Sites

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Blugh! I am aware that 90% of my post titles are puns, and I apologize for this, but will make no effort to stop. I blame my father (who doesn’t?). Regardless of puns, I have two new websites (well actually just one, the other is just a new domain) to announce.
The first reflects this new disturbing trend in my personality towards being somewhat more professional, so it is nothing more than a somewhat more professional portfolio site for the web and graphic design work that I do on occasion. The site is altdeletedesign.com. Try it out, commission me for some work.
The second is just the domain alberttruism.com which will get you back exactly were you are. For now it is just meant to be an alternative to rotovator.net as I have no intentions of replacing it any time in the near future. Check them out… maybe in a little while. I know, for example, there are a few typos that have yet to be addressed on altdelete.

Posted in News, commercial, updates | No Comments »

Justifying the Anchients of MuMu

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

I have recently cracked into this book that I’m sure everyone was over 30 years ago, but have been deriving much pleasure and enjoyment from soon to be mentioned tome, namely, Godel, Escher, and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Among a great many other things Hofstadter posits a game to introduce the concept of formal systems he calls MU or MIU. The game is simple (in structure, perhaps you will find arriving at a solution simple as well, but that has not been my experience). The objective is to generate the string “MU” by applying several rules to the initial string (axiom) “MI”.
The rules are such:

1. If you posses a string ending with “I”, you may add “U” to the end.
2. If you have a string “Mx” where x = any combination of “I’s” and “U’s” you may make “Mxx”.
3. If “III” occurs, you may replace it (trade if you rather) for “U”.
4. If “UU” occurs, you may drop it.

Start: MI

I have at this point sunk more than a few days into what I initially thought was a simple problem. It has only gotten more dastardly the more time I have spent at it. In my naivete (the first time I thought I had solved it) I imagined that I could easily write a program that would endlessly generate solutions to the MU problem. Well with some (I thought) ingenuity, I was able to develop a quite effective program for applying the various rules, but I am presently not anywhere near smart enough to make a program anywhere near smart enough to solve this on its own. After a long evening of running numbers (on paper, not through the program mind you) I have started to grow afraid that it may be unsolvable (a possibility as suggested by the author) but I am many things, and stubborn is one of them, so I will persist for a while longer. The program I have written is called mumu.py. I couldn’t help but include the reference to Wilson (since “mumu” is actually an impossible string to generate in this system) and one of my favorite books of all time. Good luck on your own quests should you endeavor to take them. Let me know if any intriguing solutions should arise out there, but be forewarned, double check yourself, I myself have “solved” this problem four times already, each turning out to be, in the end, based upon totally bogus assumptions and/ or math.

Posted in Code, News | No Comments »

• « Older Entries