Some of my news
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smlr.mp - a bit pointless
Oct. 9, 2009
When learning a new language or framework it's difficult if you're only using a dry text book. I find it helpful to set myself little tasks or projects. There seems to be about a million URL shorteners about at the moment so I thought I'd make it about 1 million and 1 in the name of learning some Django. Turned out I didn't learn that much Django as it was ridiculously simple! Nevertheless I've put the code live at http://smlr.mp.
The code will shortly appear on Github so you can have a URL shortener on your own domain, which appears to be popular at the moment.
Update: code is here.
Categories: Programming
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Let's get ghetto [Arduino styleee]
Sept. 28, 2009
Over the weekend I went to an 80s themed fancy dress party. A few days before I visited Affleck's Palace in Manchester for some inspiration and saw some old skool ghetto blasters. I thought it'd be brilliant to buy one and go as a Beastie Boy, but these things were expensive. Especially the one with loads of flashing LEDs! I thought "Hang on, I can hack one together using my Arduino kit, and a cardboard box!".
So I did.
There's a really rough and ready tutorial over at Instructables and a photo album on Facebook. The code is on Github, and whilst not brilliant, does the job. Oh, there's also a video on Vimeo (it's also embedded below).
Categories: Fun, Programming
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Lick of Paint
Aug. 28, 2009
Well ... less a lick of paint and more a rebuilding of the wall really.
I've recently been rewriting this site to use a custom blogging/CMS system written from scratch using Django. It is noway near complete, but I wanted to put something live so I felt like I was making progress. Release early, release often an' all that.
This is a work in progress.
I'm going to be implementing tags, search, comments and the like soon. And sort out the portfolio and projects pages so they have more content and look nicer.
I've pulled some of the old blog posts out of Google's cache so there is something to look at here! Have a look round and give me some feedback if you feel inclined.
Love,
Ben.Categories: News
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Geek Love!
Feb. 14, 2009
Happy (Saint) Valentine's Day!
Today I very quickly sketched an animated Valentine's card in Processing :-). The hearts jiggle about in a heart shape and return home only to jiggle about some more every 15 seconds or so.
Click the heart to start the animation.
Categories: Fun, Processing
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Dancing Circles
Oct. 13, 2008
OK, it's finally time to show my circles on here. I've tried and tried to make a video of them but the each frame render takes too much time and the video ends up being longer that the actual time I was recording for.
There are workarounds but I like playing the thing "live" - pressing buttons to move the circles about.
So .. if you can be bothered there is a 30MB download. It's because Sonia likes Wav files (Double Decker for anyone who knows the music - leave a comment :-)) and dislikes MP3s. Like I say, I wanted to stick a video on Vimeo but that was proving a pain. Each circle represents an "FFT bin" and the diameter its level.
Download:
The intention is that the user controls the visualization. Push the circles to the bottom for the quite bits, then explode them up when the music kicks in ... whatever. There's a bug I left in deliberately: after using the hard left or right controls pressing the space bar makes the circles move along the X axis quickly, then the Y axis slowly. It's kinda nice. If it annoys you reset the visualization (see controls below).
Controls (all lower case):
- wasd - hard UP, LEFT, DOWN, RIGHT
- Space - move to random location
- m - move to centre of window
- c - randomize colours
- i - reset circle positions, movement speeds and randomize colours
- r - circles run away from the mouse
- Arrow keys - nudge circles
- q - quit
Source code, created by the Processing pre-processor (?) is provided in the download. It's not particularly neat code, but this didn't take particularly long to make!
Take it easy.
Categories: Fun, Processing, Vizualization
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Something I did
Javascript Form Validation
Most of my programming career has been concerned with server side/back end web development and applications programming. Over the past year I've become more and more interested in interactive design and front end development but have barely dipped my toes in the water.
A friend recently went freelance (design) and was quizzing me about form validation - both server side and client side. I decided it was time I got to grips with some Javascript and offered to write a small, simple, reusable, retrofitable library he could use to easy validate forms on the sites he develops.
More...