Ciaran’s Random Writings

So everybody is talking about Cuil, the latest Google-challenger on the block. From what I’ve seen, they have a lot of issues at this early stage (understandably) and they might come to regret getting so much publicity so early. But more important than all that, is this:

Disclaimer first, yes I know it’s terribly unfashionable to “google” yourself, but it’s always a good test of a search engine, and everybody does it whether they admit it or not. Now, back to the subject, who the hell is this in the picture?

And, for bonus points, by what insane algorithm did his picture come to be placed there?

Etch has ejabberd 1.1 packaged but if you’re like me you’ll want to play with the new features in 2.0, in which case you’ll need to build from source. Etch’s packaged version of Erlang is apparently not up to date enough to support it (it compiles fine, but I couldn’t get TLS to work) so you’ll need to build a newer version of that as well. Luckly it’s all easy. This following is all from your home directory on a fresh install of Debian:

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It’s quiet. Almost too quiet. Mia’s gone on holiday without me.

To make matters worse, she took ‘her’ train set. And my wife. And the dog. It’s just me, the chickens and that pesky cat. Oh, and the fish - don’t forget to feed the fish. And the tomatoes, don’t forget to water those. Good thing I decided to write this.

The video below is a brilliant piece of work by Michael Ogawa - a visualisation of the commit history of the Apache httpd. It was built using Processing and the source is here, theoretically (i.e. I haven’t tried) allowing you to produce a similar visualisation for any project.

code_swarm - Apache from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I suggest viewing it in full-screen mode.

There are several other examples available at the project page. Impressive though it is, I can’t help thinking that an interactive version of this would elevate the concept from eye-candy to something extremely useful.

Update: Ok, an interactive version like this perhaps. Wow!

According to Google nobody has ever seen fit to utter the phrase “trains and grapes” on the internet before, so it’s lucky I’m here to put that right. In my defence, the real purpose is a bit of testing of video encoding and embedding. Firstly, Saturday morning fun with Duplo trains:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.