KODA

After neglecting my bike for a few seasons, I decided to take a look at it over the last few days. Bad idea. Apparently from my neglect, I’ve got some terrible bicycle voodoo on my back. It was an exciting weekend.

Late friday afternoon I was checking on the rear tire. I’d pumped it up a few weeks ago, only to find the next day that it was flat. So I pumped it up to 55 psi — the normal pressure I keep it at — and waited. I figured there was a leak somewhere, and thought I could feel a small amount of air coming out around the valve. So I leaned close to the valve and listened. Stupid idea. After a second of listening and with no warning, the tire blew. PAFF! Right in my face. Thankfully all it did was leave my ears ringing for about a half hour, and things were fine…

Tonight I read an article off reddit by alluringly titled: Common Benign Dog Tumor May Actually Be Ancient, Immortal Dog Turned into Virus. After reading the article completely, I am stunned… what a concept, cancer cells mutating and propagating into a communicable disease of their own! The real clincher is that the article suggests that this “transmissible tumor” has distinctly different DNA from its host body, which is proposed to have originated from a single dog or wolf several centuries ago! Do check out this article, because it is truly fascinating. This is a concept in biology I had neither heard nor concieved of before.

However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species [...] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

I love hiding secrets in things
Just for the thought that someday
Someone special
Might care enough to find them

Here’s a fun little game I’ve been playing today. You might remember Flash Earth, a flash interface to the satellite imagery available through Google and Windows Live Local. While nifty, the one great limitation of this application is the almost complete lack of labels and location input in the interface. But this provides the perfect challenge for a game.

Take this app and find your home on Earth, from the completely zoomed out position, using only the imagery as your guide. Can you find it? Try to think of landmarks, find your city, and follow the streets. Pretend you’ve been abducted by aliens and are now trying to show them where to drop you off. Because heavens, you never know when such a skill could come in handy.

Now zoom out again and find the Empire State Building. The Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Eiffel Tower. Your old school.

I did a considerable realign of the chromakode.com front page today while chilling online with Whatah. We both decided out of the blue to redesign our websites, and after hours of tinkering, we both managed to overhaul them in an afternoon. There’s all sorts of new delicious markup-y goodness for you and your web browser to enjoy, as well as huge bandwidth wasting backgrounds a-plenty.

I decided to be a little bit risky this time and do some subtle transparency over large swaths of the layout… it shall be interesting to see the browser compatibility fallout from this one (I laugh at how badly this breaks now in IE) . Here’s a screenshot of it on my desktop for your comparison/reference. Also, here’s the original mockup I made when first envisioning the design. All in all, I’m really happy about the update. The typography is something I fussed with the most on this, and I finally feel like I can be satisfied with the lettering looking good on-screen. Yay! Well, I’m excited and exhausted.

You’re looking at a little experiment tonight with fluid dynamics in Blender. I had an idea to use the fluid dynamics in the new version of Blender to simulate the grungy paint splashes that are the staple of many modern vector art styles. The premise was, if Blender will let me simulate throwing a bunch of fluid at a wall, it will hopefully come out looking pretty neat. This technique eventually gave some results, but turned out to be both time-consuming and cpu-consuming. Unfortunately, the computation required to achieve the level of splash detail I desired proved difficult to manage. The image above is one of the most balanced and detailed images I got, and yet is still very simplistic and lacks the fineness that makes the style appealing to the eye.

I hope that with some more tuning I might be able to achieve flattened results with the detail of these examples. For now however, it seems that the fastest, easiest, and most beautiful method is also the most simple one — scanning in real paint on real paper.

Download:

192kbps OGG Vorbis

128kbps MP3 VBR

Way back when in April, I wrote about a little song I composed and recorded on my laptop and an iffy vocal mic. It was a frenzied effort at making it work after an hour of mixed success. There were obvious technical flaws in my recording: the micing was mono and sounded terrible, there’s was buzz throughout the piece, and I played it like a new and unfamiliar piece.

Recently, my father acquired some really cool home recording equipment. This meant a chance to try things again and get it right technically; also a chance to test out the new stuff with a song I’d had months to play and practice.

This afternoon we sat down and tried things out. Micing up the piano was very exciting, as we finally had two mics and so were able to do it in stereo. Sitting down and playing was a bit stressful, though this time I was much more used to playing with the mics running. The version I settled upon was the 3rd or 4th rendition — many others were stumble-filled as I was often jarringly aware of being recorded.

A little while ago I told Whatah about a little obfuscated Python toy I had hatched together about a year before. Unfortunately, this hack was extremely version-dependent, so when I brought up the code (from the era of 2.3) to send to him, of course it did not work with Python 2.4. Well, I wanted it to work. So I got to tinkering again and this evening, with Whatah’s help, we have made this little critter much much more evil. Consider it a programming puzzle, a riddle written in Python. There shall be no hints, though if you are willing to run code before knowing fully what it does, you are a braver fiddler than I…

# Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
_=lambda _, __:getattr(_.__dict__, "values")()[__];__=__builtins__;___ =['\'<BZh91AY&SY', 'e3', '93', 'd9', 'e6', '00', '00', '12', '9f', '80pe', '00', '08', '08@@\\n.g', 'dc', 'a0 ', '00P', 'a0', '00h', '00', '00j', "9bS&\\'", 'a9', 'a7', 'a9', '906SH-f', 'c1', 'f6', '8cS', '12', 'a9', 'ad', 'c1', '08', 'ee_', '0b', 'd9d', 'c1', '17', 'd7', '93', 'bc', '9e', 'ceI', 'c0', '1a', '87guj', '0cc', 'aadF', '18', 'ec', '89', '12', 'fc]‘, ‘c9′, ‘14′, ‘e1BC’, ‘8eOg’, ‘983\”];_one = _(_(__, 92), 46);_1=lambda ___:_(__, 96)(___);_2=lambda ___: _one(”, ___);_3=lambda ___:_(__, 112)(_(__, 0111+2), ___);_4=(98, 122, 50);_24=_1(_2(_3(_4)));_6=lambda __:_(_24, 4)(__);exec _6(eval(_one(r’\x’, ___))[1:-1:1])

That red paint got everywhere

Today I went up to the Butte for the first time in a while with a friend. What a great day. We walked down to the field at the bottom of the park, only to discover that it was filled with huge, towering wheat! In some places, the stalks were as tall as I am. In all of the times I have been there, I’ve never seen it like this. It was amazing. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but here are two that I think came out the best.