I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object. The script is written in Python and runs within the Golly cellular automata simulator. Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices in a text file that can be opened in Blender, an open source 3D graphics program. Because the script inefficiently renders every individual cube into a text file, I’m currently unable to render objects that are much larger or more complex than the images below. Optimizations to the script like combining faces, eliminating hidden faces, and switching to a binary vector file format should eventually reduce this problem.

Download the script here.

To use the script, you’ll need Python, Golly, and Blender. Run Golly, load or draw your starting pattern, then choose Run Script in the File menu and find my script. Enter the number of layers to render; initially try around 10 for large patterns, 100 for small patterns. The script will create a file called 3dlife.raw which you can import into Blender with File->Import->Raw Faces. On my computer, Blender will struggle or crash if the raw file is much more than 150MB.

examples rendered with LuxRender:

This book looks good.

I use primarily open-source apps, but I still use Windows because I think Linux is way too far behind to be reasonably cost-effective for personal use. This is a pretty good summary of my gripes against Linux, and also against open-source development in general.

I’ll add that this is one of my primary problems:
2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.

This is how open-source developers’ poor understanding of UI design and user experience are embedded into Linux design. To get a taste of this, install GIMP on Mac or Windows, and notice how the dialog boxes (particularly the open/save dialogs) are different from what you’re used to. In fact, GIMP open/save dialogs are vastly inferior to Windows WIN32 API open/save dialogs. I’m not willing to take such a major hit in usability just to save $100 on my operating system.

http://worldtv.com/blog/guides_tutorials/flv_converter.php

Why didn’t I know about this?

Create Flash online:
http://antimatter15.110mb.com/ajaxanimator/build/

or

Ming is a C library for creating Adobe Flash (.swf) files. It is often packaged as a PHP module; this allows for the dynamic generation of Flash animations by the web server based on input from a database. In addition to PHP, the library can also be used in the programming languages C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby.

http://mamedev.org/legalfaq.html

awesome. It took a while, but I’ve grown to prefer GIMP over Photoshop. Release notes here.

[ps: props to hopper]

I finally took the time to figure out AVISynth, and it is by far one of the coolest programs I’ve found in years. It’s a free, open source, script-based video editor. (Sorry, PC only, but apparently the next major release will have a Mac version.)

So you edit your videos by writing a textfile script telling it to load video files and then do various operations on them. And it can do pretty much anything I’d ever need to do: crop, resize, splice, denoise, titles, mix, fade, adjust color levels, etc. And if it doesn’t have the filter you need built in, somebody’s probably written a plugin filter that does it.

But what’s even cooler is that it doesn’t output the videos as files — it installs itself as a codec so that the script files are seen as video files to other programs. So you can open a script with Windows Media Player and it will play as if it’s a video file, since AVISynth just executes the script and feeds the edited video frames to the program. This can save a lot of disk space since you rarely will have to save actual video files of edits you do. But if you want to create a video file of your edits, you can open the script in VirtualDub and then encode it into whatever format you want.

The other really cool thing is that any edits you do are self documenting, since the script is already a list of all the editing you are doing. And I love that it’s such a small program that uses minimal resources. I suspect it will run on pretty minimal hardware that you wouldn’t even think about trying to run Premiere on.

[re: image above, Watching all six Star Wars movies simultaneously, an internet sensation you may remember from a while back, was made with AVISynth]

Firefox 3 alpha 1 is out. It has a new graphics engine, which means that images sized using img size= tags are now scaled smoothly. It’s not quite stable enough to switch over completely (it crashes on Myspace sometimes), but it doesn’t wipe out Firefox 2 when you install it so you can use both.

I’ve been using 3 for reading blogs since a lot of the art blogs use images size tags, which looks like crap in Firefox 2.