<halcy> Oh I know what you should make
<halcy> WAHa_06x36: Make a STALLMAN BOX
<halcy> WAHa_06x36: Like a buddha box except it displays cool 
        saint ignucius effects and it plays the free software 
        song

And then I went and made it myself.

It is, of course, free software. You can find the source code on github. Users of GNU/Linux are assumed to be capable of compiling it themselves (It pretty much works out to “run make”, needs SDL and freeglut and glew). GNU/Linux graphics drivers are usually proprietary and sometimes terribly buggy, so it might or might not work.

For Microsoft Windows, there is a binary version.

Download:

• Source code
• Binary [Win32]

(It requires a relatively new version of OpenGL to actually run, sorry about that)

Some audio and png code taken from WAHa_06x36 - thank you!

halcy.de was down due to unforseen motherboard breakage. Suprisingly, some people actually noticed this. The motherboard has been switched out, so halcy.de is back in working condition now. Welcome back. :3

So I got a 3DS, and after noticing that it uses an open format (“mpo”) for storing 3D photographs, I needed to play with that, of course.

As a result, I now have a version of my simple raytracer that can render a left and right image, which can then be combined into one stereoscopic 3D image for viewing on the 3DS with software such as this (It runs under wine).

I’ve rendered two small scenes, a 4D julia set and a trefoil knot of spheres! They look kind of neat, so if you have a 3DS, put them on your SD card in the picture folder and have a look!

(If you don’t have a 3DS, you can still look at them as if they were normal jpeg images, because they really are jpegs with some added exif data)

• Image 1 - Julia Set
• Image 2 - Trefoil knot
• Raytracer
• Program for converting left/right images into mpo files
• Bonus: WAHa_06x36 took pictures of his bismuth crystal, which I cropped and converted! They look neat, also!

P.S.: My friend code is 0473-7758-5435~ feel free to add me~

Four new entries and live videos have been added to the “releases” page, amongst them my favourite SVatG release thus far, “It’s 1975 and this man is about to show you the future”!

Check them out!

In the same vein as the fake twitter pages: Automatically generated pro-guttenberg facebook comments: Find ich Gutt!

(If you don’t know what this is about: Germany’s scandal-plagued defense minister must step down)

Source code, horribly inefficient.

(P.S.: The design of that page is the greatest work of art I have ever created.)

I wrote a paper for a proseminar at uni. Now that it is graded and got a decent grade, it is okay to publish it, I guess~

It’s an introduction to a medical imaging technique called “Optical Coherence Tomography”, OCT, for short, which enables us to create high-quality sub-surface images of tissue, we can essentially see “through” things and create 3D cutouts of samples. It’s fairly new and pretty neat. If you are interested about this sort of thing and/or the physics behind it (Low-coherence light and low-coherence interferometry / white light interferometry), it is probably a decent read~

• Optical Coherence Tomography - Paper (english)
• Optical Coherence Tomography - Slides (german)

“Our Daily Symphony” from Geek And Poke, this is actually quite true :/

“Our Daily Symphony” from Geek And Poke, this is actually quite true :/

So I had the idea to generate fake twitter pages from a users old tweets. I wrote a bunch of Perl scripts to do just that. It worked out well.

The process essentially consists of four steps:

1. Acquire a users tweets.
2. Train a fourth order markov model with those tweets.
3. Generate new tweets by having the markov model spew out new chains.
4. Generate a twitter page from those tweets.

Except for the last step, I’ve written scripts to do this. (Writing one for the last step wouldn’t be hard, but boring, and it’s easy enough to do by hand)

Step 1: Obtaining tweets.

Essentially, it’s a loop that gets the tweets via twitters api, page for page. Simple enough. The only real problem is twitters rate limiting, so grabbing more than one user per hour does not work.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $max_page = 200;
my $start_page = 0;
my $user = "username";

for( my $page = $start_page; $page < $max_page; $page++ ) {
        my $cmd = "wget http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$user.json?page=$page -O - >> tweets.json";
        `$cmd`;
}

Step 2 and 3: Training and generating.

This script takes json as output by the script in step 1 as the input, and outputs generated, fake tweets, one per line.

Since I was too lazy to implement a markov chain myself, I used a library off CPAN to do the heavy lifting.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use JSON;
use Encode;
use Algorithm::MarkovChain;

# Parse JSON
my @tweetsJsonA = <>;
my $tweetsJson =decode_utf8( join( "", @tweetsJsonA ) );
$tweetsJson =~ s/\]\[/,/gi;
my $tweets = decode_json( $tweetsJson );

# Train
my $user = Algorithm::MarkovChain::->new();
foreach my $tweet (@{$tweets}) {
    my @symbs = ("START", split( " ", $tweet->{text}), "END" );
    $user->seed(
        symbols => \@symbs,
        longest => 4
    );
}

# Generate 20 tweets
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
for( my $i = 0; $i < 20; $i++ ) {
    my @generated = ("START");
    my $l = 1;
    while( $generated[-1] ne "END" ) {
        @generated = $user->spew(
            length => $l,
            complete => \@generated
        );
        $l++;
    }
    @generated = @generated[1..(@generated-2)];
    print join( " ", @generated ) . "\n";
}

Step 4: Generating a fake twitter page.

This consists of two parts, making the tweets into twittery html, and adding what comes before and after the tweets in a twitter HTML page. For the former, I wrote a small script, again, which mostly just concatenates text a lot, I put it here if you want it (Save as “mktwpage.pl”).

The second part, I’ve done by hand, thus far, assisted by my browsers “Save page” feature. Too lazy to automate.

And, there you have it: Autogenerated fake twitter pages. Halfway convincing, too. Go generate your own!

Facebook released new profile layout today, and with it, a short bio on what you do. Through it, you can add what languages you speak. Nifty, I guess. In the field where you put what languages you speak, it has the normal facebookish auto complete we have all come to love.

As the curious bitch I am, I began looking for fun languages to add, seeing past the whole usefulness of telling what language you actually speak. There were some decently fun ones, but nothing that piqued my interest. I then accidentally inspected the field with firebug and noticed a hidden input with a value that looked like a page ID. And sure as hell, it was. I then changed this ID to another page and saved, and voila, I now speak gangsta.

Change value in the hidden input to any page ID

This also works for your hometown and current location! I now live at work, as the true work-a-holic I am.

Something I sort of completely forgot about.

At the GulaschProgrammierNacht 10 - the entropia ev/CCC Karlsruhes annual hacker event - I held a talk about modern OpenGL. While the talk itself wasn’t held very well (I rushed through everything aaaaaaaaah oh god), the base material is, actually, a pretty okay introduction to modern OpenGL - without fixed function pipeline, as it should be.

You can download the english version of the slides here, and - probably more interestingly, can grab a copy of the demo program I made, which is very well-commented and does nothing but simply render a rotating cube, as seen below.

If you’re the type that learns best from examples, have a look.

Also, if you need more writing and explanation, have a look at Joes blog, where a longer explanation of basically the same thing is provided. :)

(Additional links to a video recording of the talk [german] and german version of the slides after the image)

• Slides, english
• Slides, german
• Example code
• Torrent of talk recorded on video
• DDL of talk recorded on video at entropia.de
• An intro to mordern OpenGL - Joes Blog

Har du någonsin funderat på hur folk röstar där du befinner dig? Eller kanske ska du köpa en ny bostad och vill veta hur det röstas i grannskapet? Då är Valkoll verktyget för dig. Valkoll visar hur folk röstar där du befinner dig.

I Valkoll finner du:

• Info om partier
• Senaste valnyheterna
• Vad skriver folk på Twitter om valet?
• Resultat ifrån senaste valen

Läs mer på Valkoll.se

(Warning: What follows is a somewhat long political rant.)

So, since I am german, I get asked what I think about multiculturalism in germany a lot, recently, because of some ridiculous remarks made by our chanellor earlier this month.

As you might have guessed from that itroductory paragraph already, I do not believe that what Merkel said holds and water at all, and I find such claims detestable and damaging to not only germanys reputation in the world.

Merkel and her right-wing social-convervative party buddies are framing an issue that is primarily one of social inequality in education - rich parents, good education, poor parents, not so much - as a “culture” issue. This is quite obviously bullshit, as you can see by looking at your average poor neighbourhood - there’ll be just as many kids with german parents as not, all similiarily bad in school.

The reason for this is, as I (And as most students and teachers) see it, our highly selective school system where kids are seperated into three schools based on pretty much one teachers opinion at age 8 to 10. Since that age is far, far too young to be able to actually tell anyones ability at anything much, this ends up basically selectiong by social status. I’ve seen this happen live and in colour with a friend of mine getting sent to a more vocational school while I got to go to the more academic one - with us both having the same grades. On the other hand, in the school I later went to, there were people whose parents had immigrated, but had managed to make some money - some of them dumb as fuck, some really smart.

There’s also notoric underfunding of the more vocational schools and of schools in “bad” neighbourhoods, and the fact that in some states you now have to pay a lot of money to go to uni, which - as studies have shown - further discourages someone who is poor from going to uni. All in all, our educational system is set up so that the result is that for the most part, people who are poor, stay poor.

Those are all issues students have been protesting about for years. These are all issues Merkel and the CDU have been ignoring or, in some cases, been making worse.

These are very much issues that happen to affect first-gen immigrants kids - being a first-gen immigrant happens to coincide with being poor as fuck a lot, since rich people do not generally emmigrate from their home county to germany to do shit jobs for little money - they are, however, not issues of “culture” - and framing them as such only serves to isolate, which is horrible.

All these things coming up close to elections (BW state elections, in polls for which the CDU is doing very badly right now) makes me doubt Merkels honesty here - I simply cannot see this as anything else but a grab for votes from the people who are still afraid of brown people and the kind of persons that are enraged by a mosque with a minarett higher than the local churches church tower. It’s a subtle playing of the racism card in a way that makes it hard to call anyone out on it, but that really is what it is.

It’s detestable and stupid, and it makes me feel ashamed of living here that it seems to be working.

halcy.de - half a decade, and going strong.

I could probably say more, but I don’t feel like it. Feel free to have an internet-toast with me.

(Screenshot from original mail from registrar when I registered, hihi)

Today, I went to Frankfurt Book Fair! It’s a big (Really big) fair full of, unsuprisingly, books, of all types!

6:30AM: Got up. Amazingly, on time! Breakfasted, got dressed, and went off towards Frankfurt, which is only around 1:15h from here. I then managed to not find the parking lot for a while, but eventually managed to park. The first thing I saw when I got out was… cosplayers! There are loads and loads of cosplayers at FBM, I don’t even know.

10:00AM: After buying a ticket, I ran around in the “german books” halls a lot, just looking at what seemed interesting, and wrote a few books down. Sadly (Or, considering that I shouldn’t be throwing out money like mad), selling of books is only allowed on Sunday. I preordered a few, though! There was one comic that I especially liked but since I preordered it I didn’t bother writing down the ISBN, so I can’t find it anymore, which is annoying! Briefly ran into some people from Karlsruhe when passing by the manga/comic area, and saw a place selling fancy hats. Since I felt severely underdressed with all the cosplayers around, and since the hats were very fancy, I got one.

1:00PM: Went all the way to the other side of the messe area to the foreign exhibitors halls and looked around there. Also, halls, size, like whoa. It’s 5 huge halls, most of which have 2 or 3 floors! All filled with books, books and more books!

2:00PM: Checked out the comic area, where there were also a lot of manga-related things. Found out that there was a “Tips on making cosplay” workshop at 3:00PM, decided to go there.

3:00PM: Went to said workshop. It was interesting~ I really want to try doing cosplay more, because it sure is fun~ I never find the time to actually make a costume, though. orz

3:45PM: On the way back from the workshop, there were a few stands selling manga. I had a look at some, and figured I should buy some that I’ve never heard of, because there were so many cosplayers around with costumes of characters I couldn’t identify at all. Picked something that looked super gay and had “BL” listed as genre on the back. Haven’t read it yet, wonder if it is good. Bought a volume of HotD and Hokuto no Ken to compensate for this decision.

4:00PM: Ran around outside a lot and got some food.

4:15PM: Checked out a few more things I was interested in: Books on Demand, a company that will print your manuscript as a proper paperback with ISBN for as little as 39€, RoRoRo verlag, especially looking for Cory Doctorows Little Brother (I had kind of hoped the author would be there, but he wasn’t), and RosettaStone, a company that makes applications to help you learn a language - they gave me a free promotion thing to try their software for 24 hours~ <3

5:00PM: Walked around the area where a lot of manga-related things were some more, found a place that sold plushies, amongst other things. Bought a Len plushie, and a Reimu plushie for my brother, and a button~

5:30PM: Went to the area with scientific literature and educational materials, and found my unis stand, where there weren’t actually any people. Watched someone demo a smart board thing, which was pretty impressive, and looked around IEEEXplores and Springers things.

6:30PM: Messe closed, and I drove home.

Overall, it was a fun day, and I’d like to go again next year~ Maybe on sunday, then…~

On an entirely different note, a

So Otacute, an import goods store, is running a mascot character contest. A friend entered, and drew the in my opinion decidedly cutest entry (I mean, look! It even has a squirrel~! :3). Sadly, unlike many other people who entered, she isn’t very well-known, so she’d really appreciate some comments on her entry, which can be found in full http://blog.otacute.com/?p=2371 here. Please spread the word. :)

http://satf.se/2010/09/23/werp-findings/

Vintage Dr. Marten boots

Second-hand Stephan Schneider jacket

COS belt

2010-09-23T20:12:44+02:00

http://satf.se/2010/09/22/show-me-your-hands/

I went to Antwerp the weekend before last.

2010-09-22T20:45:56+02:00