And my processing version…

Infocow connects young people with useful stuff to help take control of life - sites, stories, information and inspiration.

Worked on the front end code and UI design with Nicolas Alpi and Ed Davey developing the back end on this project for Futurelab. Was a great experience with lots of brilliant feedback and user testing done by Futurelab feeding into the Agile development methodology we use here at Jiva.

During the recent stint I did making audio reactive visuals for the recent Peter Gabriel tour we had to create a track for Apres Moi. For part of the track Marc Bessant suggested creating a 3d Battlezone style landscape from the audio loosely based on the Unknown Pleasures album artwork created by Peter Saville for Joy Division. This is something we’d seen flight404 doing before and it seemed to fit with the pace and tone of the track.

I figured it would only be a short step away to use a variation of the code to recreate the cover itself as an audio reactive piece. Turns out I’m not the first to have thought this but hey, originality is overrated.

The song used is the first track from the album, Disorder.

For reference here is a fan shot video of the version created for Apres Moi…

Was pleased to be able to do a design based on Conway’s Game of Life. The pixel shapes in the logo are two examples of patterns that are either static (survive) or create exponential growth (thrive) using the standard rules of the game.

The private beta is now live and we are looking for students and tutors to start testing.

An expansive video screen that spanned about two-thirds of the Bowl’s stage, enough to obscure the orchestra behind it, displayed a sequence of horizontal lines moving up as the screen itself raised. Soon a batch of vertical white lines joined, moving gracefully in tempo with the music, only Gabriel’s voice indicating his presence on stage until the screen was high enough to reveal the humans — all wearing black — behind it.

Reed’s “The Power of the Heart” nodded to “Ol’ Man River” as he sang “You and me we sweat and strain” in that wonderfully gritty, soulful voice of his. The accompanying imagery on an additional triptych video screen on the wall behind the orchestra was at its core supremely simple: two columns of swirling white dots resembling active molecules, each with a red dot, presumably the nuclei, at the center. As the song progressed, the nuclei moved from their respective outer screens toward one another in the center screen, an extraordinarily moving image in conjunction with Gabriel’s song about the difficulty of two hearts finding, and staying, together. It’s going to make for one killer concert DVD.

Read it in full here.

The visor screen from “Boy In The Bubble” (Fan shot video)

The visor screen from “Mirrorball” (Fan shot video)

The rear vertical screens on “Apres Moi” (Fan shot video).

The rear vertical screens on “My Body Is A Cage” (Fan shot video).

And some stills from the original renders..

And the visor screen from “Mirrorball”

At about the same time that article was published I started a transition from a maker to a manager that is still ongoing and surprisingly hard to navigate. The usual expected problems of being promoted from within a team were minimized by virtue of the fact I was primarily the designer and front end guy working with a team of pure developers and so was always slightly apart from the crowd anyway. That and the startup I work for is small and has a pretty flat hierarchy.

Surprisingly my main problem has been the redefinition what I expect of myself. My expectation used to be that at the end of the day there would be a small pile of code or images that are production ready and in the git repo. And suddenly my output is my thoughts, opinion or influence sometimes in wireframe form and sometimes verbal so how can I as an employee measure my own performance when I have nothing to show for it? We are a tiny company so of course I still cut code and I still photoshop production images from time to time but that only appears to confuse my poor addled maker brain and skew the teams agile velocity.

Part of navigating this transition will affect this journal as well. Not sure how as yet, it may increase the frequency of code and imagery as I’m no longer getting my ‘maker’ fix at work but the more text based output may well increase as I practice the art of expressing an opinion with words rather than through a medium such as music or design.

import rwmidi.*;

MidiInput input;
MidiOutput output;

int sx, sy;
float density = 0.5;
int[][][] world;
int note;

void setup()
{
  size(8, 8, P2D);
  frameRate(5);
  sx = width;
  sy = height;
  world = new int[sx][sy][2]; 

  input = RWMidi.getInputDevices()[2].createInput(this);
  output = RWMidi.getOutputDevices()[2].createOutput();

  // Set random cells to 'on'
  for (int i = 0; i < sx * sy * density; i++) {
    world[(int)random(sx)][(int)random(sy)][1] = 1;
  }
} 

void draw()
{
  background(0); 

  // Drawing and update cycle
  for (int x = 0; x < sx; x=x+1) {
    for (int y = 0; y < sy; y=y+1) {
      note = y * 16 + x;
      //if (world[x][y][1] == 1)
      if ((world[x][y][1] == 1) || (world[x][y][1] == 0 &amp;&amp; world[x][y][0] == 1))
      {
        world[x][y][0] = 1;
        set(x, y, #FFFFFF);
        output.sendNoteOn(0, note, 127);
      } else {
        output.sendNoteOn(0, note, 0);
      }
      if (world[x][y][1] == -1)
      {
        world[x][y][0] = 0;
      }
      world[x][y][1] = 0;
    }
  }
  // Birth and death cycle
  for (int x = 0; x < sx; x=x+1) {
    for (int y = 0; y < sy; y=y+1) {
      int count = neighbors(x, y);
      if (count == 3 &amp;&amp; world[x][y][0] == 0)
      {
        world[x][y][1] = 1;
      }
      if ((count < 2 || count > 3) &amp;&amp; world[x][y][0] == 1)
     {
        world[x][y][1] = -1;
      }
    }
  }
} 

void noteOnReceived(Note note) {
  println("note on " + note.getPitch() + ":"  + note.getVelocity());
  if (note.getVelocity() > 0) {
    int nx = note.getPitch() % 16;
    int ny = (note.getPitch() - nx) / 16;
    output.sendNoteOn(0, note.getPitch(), 100);
    println(nx);
    println(ny);
    world[nx][ny][1] = 1;
  }
}

// Count the number of adjacent cells 'on'
int neighbors(int x, int y)
{
  return world[(x + 1) % sx][y][0] +
         world[x][(y + 1) % sy][0] +
         world[(x + sx - 1) % sx][y][0] +
         world[x][(y + sy - 1) % sy][0] +
         world[(x + 1) % sx][(y + 1) % sy][0] +
         world[(x + sx - 1) % sx][(y + 1) % sy][0] +
         world[(x + sx - 1) % sx][(y + sy - 1) % sy][0] +
         world[(x + 1) % sx][(y + sy - 1) % sy][0];
}

One thing I noticed straight off the bat is the note numbers are not incremental. Each row starts 16 higher than the last - I assume to allow for the same firmware to work in a 16 x 16 layout model - and there is a very simple way that reminds me of the technique of bitshifting I used back in the bad old days of DVD authoring to convert from one to the other.

// To go from XY to the note number
noteNumber = y * 16 + x;

// To go from the note number to the XY
x = noteNumber % 16;
y = (noteNumber - x) / 16;

Hopefully that will save someone ten minutes of head scratching.

But there’s one bit missing to get it working if you’re getting the 403 errors.

You need to run the following command to tell Plesk to use your spanking new vhost.conf

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=<domain>

From davidhorvitz.tumblr.com/

Simply put the following code at the bottom of your environment.rb and SASS will munch away happily.

Sass::Plugin.options[:template_location] = {
   RAILS_ROOT + '/your/base/directory' => RAILS_ROOT + '/public/stylesheets',
   RAILS_ROOT + '/you/theme/directory' => RAILS_ROOT + '/public/stylesheets'
}

(((https?|ftp):\/\/[^\.]|www\.)[^\s]*[^\s\.,])

Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, ?identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.? The only difference was that one machine?s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

So now we?re left with this question: why did the more attractive but otherwise identical ATM perform better?

A List Apart

It’s available to buy online from Analog Industries

My obsession with the Monome and the Tenori-On continues unabated but I can get my virtual fix now thanks to Andre Michelle and his Tone Matrix

New set of experiments from Flight 404 are surfacing on Vimeo. As always they are stunning. Reminds me that I really need to look into GLSL shaders in Processing

1. Despite all the music on here being electronic wonkiness I used to play guitar in an awful instrumental band inspired in equal parts by Ozric Tentacles and Pantera called ‘Little Silver Goodchild’. Thankfully there are no surviving recordings of us ‘performing’ that I know of.We arrived at that clumsy name because the band we were in before was called Mortimer’s Cross (equally awful) and as Mortimer was the drummer’s surname the rest of us thought we should have a go the second time round. We used to do a stonking cover of the Starsy & Hutch theme tune however.
2. I am rarely able to burp audibly. Which made making friends difficult at scout camp.
3. When I was 15 I fell ten feet from a platform above a stage and landed on my head. When I came round about two minutes later all my ‘friends’ were still up on the platform I fell off laughing.I then proceeded to spend three days in hospital having my blood pressure taken every fifteen minutes. The concussion and lack of sleep combined contributed to one of the strangest three days I’ve ever spent.
4. When all around me had Spectrum 48ks and the like my parents decided to take a different route and bought me an Oric Atmos. I have never met anyone else who had one, or in fact even heard of it. It was shit.
5. I used to be a DJ as part of the fledgling Breakbeat scene. When I released my (only) album my publishers somehow managed to swing it to be the first DJ on the Dance Tent at Glastonbury on the Friday morning. I was expecting to play to a few hundred folk who for some reason decided to chill out in the tent but due to a freak rain shower I ended up playing to about 5000 people. It was fucking amazing and petrifying in equal measure.
6. A few years back I was deep into work and on my own in the office. I let out a sneeze and was nearly scared out of my skin by someone saying “Guzuntite” just behind me. I leapt out my chair with my usual highly offensive exclamation of fear and span round to see who it was. I was then even more startled to discover the wisher of good health was none other than Led Zepplin front man Robert Plant. I have a feeling that one encounter knocked about 3 years off my lifespan. I would say it left me Dazed and Confused but that would be too easy.
7. Despite my average stature (5’9” and a bit) I became part of the High Jump event at my final years school sports day. I hadn’t trained, it was simply the only event that was under subscribed and the teacher made me do it under threat of physical violence. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I equaled the school record that day.

As part of the meme I have to tag some friends with blogs to get them to do the same… Soo.. I’m going to tag…

• Helen
• Liam
• Reebs
• Neil C
• Claire L
• Chrissy G