Voronoi Fractal

A Voronoi diagram is created from a set of points by dividing the plane into regions, where each region consists of the area closest to one of the points. Ken Shirriff published a paper about voronoi fractals ten years ago. Frederik Van Houtte from Belgium created a nice applet with the processing language to generate online voronoi fractals.

Click the applet to generate a new fractal.

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A description of the project and the source code are published on Frederiks weblog under a  a Creative Commons license.

There.com : 3D online virtual world

there.com

 

There.com is an online getaway where you can hang out with your friends and meet new ones, all in a lush 3D environment that’s yours to explore and help build. The 3D online virtual world “There” was created by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella. There Inc. was founded in the spring of 1998. Closed beta began in July of 2001, with various stages of beta following, and ending with an October 2003 launch date. “There.com” went live in 2003 as the first virtual world. It was such a new concept in 1997 that it took a lot of time to build the new 3D technology. In 2004. There changed its name to Forterra to reflect its expanding focus on virtual world technologies for consumer, business and government services.

In April 2005, Makena Technologies, founded by Entrepreneur Michael Wilson, acquired the exclusive license of “There” and the management of the There community from Forterra Systems. Makena Technologies, Inc., a privately held corporation, is headquartered in Silicon Valley, CA. Today, the business model is based on membership fees, on virtual currency for e-commerce and on advertising.

On April 3, 2008, Paramount Pictures announced that  their film vault is opening up in the virtual world “There.com”.

NAG : net.art generator

Last update : March 14, 2013

The net.art generator is a project of Cornelia Sollfrank, a postmedia conceptual artist and interdisciplinary researcher and writer. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Fine art at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (1987-1994). Since 1998 she has taught at various universities and wrote on issues in the nexus between media, art and politics. In 2011 Sollfrank completed her practice-led interdisciplinary research at Dundee University (UK) and published her PhD thesis with the title Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property. She has a blog at artwarez.org.

The net.art generator automatically produces net.art on demand. The net.art generator is a computer program which collects and recombines material from the Internet to create a new website or a new image. The program requires the user to enter a title which then functions as the search keyword, and to enter a name as the author.

Since 1999 five different versions of the net.art generator have been realized in collaboration with six programmers. All the programmers have chosen PERL to program the generator. Since 2003 all net.art generator scripts are available under GPL (GNU General Public License) on the project’s homepage.

Cornelia Sollfrank published several books available at her shop, one is about the net.art generator.

The nag_04 – moiNAG The Dada Generator was programmed by Richard Leopold. The result is a webpage (HTML document) based on Markov Chains, a Dada HTML structure filled with Dada text.

The following image was created with nag_05 – THE IMAGE GENERATOR. This net.art generator was programmed by Panos Galanis from IAP GmbH, Hamburg, and was a commission by the Volksfürsorge art collection.

Image created with art.net generator

Image created with art.net generator

Julia applet, object, classid, codebase, …

The tags “embed” and “applet” are deprecated and even dropped in the new browser standards like XHTML 1.1. To embed objects within a document, the tag “object” should be used. The main attributes of “object” are:

  • classid : This attribute contains a URL for an object’s implementation. The URL syntax depends upon the object’s type. With ActiveX controls (Internet Explorer), the value of this attribute is not a URL, but an object-id with the prefix clsid. The way to access a Java applet is to use classid=”java: classname.class”. The pseudo-URL java: is used to indicate a Java applet.
  • data : This attribute contains a URL for data required by an object.
  • archive : This attribute contains a URL for the location of an archive file. An archive file typically is used to contain multiple object files to improve the efficiency of access.
  • codebase : This attribute contains a URL to use as a relative base to access the object specified by the classid attribute.
  • codetype : This attribute specifies an object’s MIME type.
  • type : This attribute specifies the MIME type for the object’s data.
  • declare : This attribute declares an object without instantiating it. This is useful when the object will be a parameter to another object.
  • name : Under the Microsoft definition, this attribute defines the name of the control so scripting can access it.
  • standby : This attribute contains a text message to be displayed while the object is loading.
  • width, height : the size of the object

The tag “param” specifies the parameters that are needed by the object to run. Most attributes exist also as parameter elements, but should never be used duplicated, except for the codebase attribute. In the “object” tag, the codebase attribute represents the location from which to download the object (for instance the Java plugin) when it is not found on the local machine. In the “applet” tag, the codebase attribute represents the location from which to download additional class and jar files. To resolve this conflict, the codebase attribute is mapped into a “param” codebase in the “object” tag.

Specific parameters are the following:

  • scriptable : Specifies whether the applet is scriptable from the HTML page using JavaScript or VBScript. The value can be either “true” or “false”.
  • mayscript : Specifies whether the applet is allowed to access “netscape.javascript.JSObject”. The value can be either “true” or “false”.
  • code : Specifies the name of the Java applet or JavaBeans component witout the extension “class”. It cannot be used with “param” element “object” nested inside the same “object” tag.

Microsoft Internet Explorer handles the “object” tag differently than other browser like Firefox, mainly due to the different implementation of the “classid” attribute. To provide multiple browser support, it is necessary to program a conditional settings of the “object”  tag by nesting the tags for IE and for other browsers. An example is shown below with the tiny Julia applet (128 bytes)  created by the russian programmer Konstantin Victorovich Morshnev (alias MoKo).

A detailed tutorial about (Multiple Browser Supported) Java applet using XHTML ‘object’ tag is given by Shayne Steele. A user guide to embed applets in documents with the “object” tag is published by Sun.

My VOKI speaking avatar

Today I created my first VOKI character, a customized speaking (voice enabled) avatar based on the Oddcast-Sitepal technology. VOKI is a combination of “VOX” (for voice) and “LOKI”.
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VOKI is solely and exclusively for personal, non-commercial use only. Business users can use the commercial Sitepal-product. Visit the chatbot ALICE at the website of LESLIE’S ARTGALLERY to see an example.

A tutorial how to integrate a VOKI in the WordPress Blo sidebar is shown in Edublogger.

Apache Ant Build Tool

Last update : 26 November 2013

Today Apache Ant is the build tool of choice for a lot of java projects because the classical  “make” buildtools like make, gnumake, nmake, jam and others have a lot of wrinkles and limitations.

According to Ant’s original author, James Duncan Davidson, the name Ant is an acronym for “Another Neat Tool”. Later explanations go along the lines of “ants do an extremely good job at building things”, or “ants are very small and can carry a weight dozens of times their own” – describing what Ant is intended to be. The latest version of Apache Ant is 1.9.2, released July 12, 2013.

Apache Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, the corresponding file is named by default build.xml.

Ant can be integrated in the universal tool platform Eclipse and in other Integrated Development Environments (IDE).

FLV MetaData Viewer

Last update : January 30, 2013
FLV MetaData Viewer (FLVMDV) is a property sheet extension DLL for Windows XP. FLVMDV adds ‘FLV Details’ tab to the file properties dialog of FLV (Flash Video) files.

 

FLVMDV

Version 1 of FLVMDV was released by Manitu Group on september 14th, 2006.

FLVMDV tab displays FLV information (dimensions, video and audio codecs, frames rate and duration) and also onMetaData event data found in the FLV.

It can be used free, but it cannot be distributed.

RoboRealm : robotic vision software

Last update : December 15, 2014

RoboRealm® is a powerful robotic vision software application for use in computer vision, image processing, and robot vision tasks. Using an easy to use point and click interface complex image analysis and robot control becomes easy!

RoboRealm™ (vision for machines) costs $49.95 for a personal non-commercial license. The current version is v2.67.45, released on December 11, 2014.

A tutorial explains how RoboRealm robofiles can help a Rovio to develop a new independent personality.

Filmer V2.0 – A program for creating fractal animation

last update : august 2010

Filmer is a front-end program for Fractint that generates amazing fractal animation. Fractint is a program for calculating still fractal images (you need Fractint installed to use Filmer). Filmer uses Fractint parameter (.par) files to specify the coordinates and other parameters of a fractal. It then calculates the intermediate frames and calls Fractint to make a continuous animation. Filmer also has many options for pallete rotation and generation.

Filmer has been developed by Julian Haight.