brainwagon

Josh over at tinyscreenfuls is digging some of the fancy “pencil sketch” effects that the Mac can do with its internal camera.  Back in 1998, I experimented with writing some filters that did much the same, with some examples that I generated shown on the right.   Macintosh?  I don’t need no steekin’ Macintosh.

And now, for your next project, render an entire feature length film.   Beneath your desk, you’ll find a pencil, a yellow pad, and a C compiler…

This is just completely nuts, an 8 bit computer constructed entirely from 12 volt relays. It consumes 12 amps at 13.5 volts (160 watts). Hilarious.

[tags]Retrocomputing,Hacks[/tags]

Last night we had a screening of Hoodwinked, the new animated feature by director Cory Edwards and co-directed by Todd Edwards. It’s a retelling of the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood, and features the vocal talents of Glenn Close as Granny, Ann Hathaway as Red, James Belushi as the Woodsman, veteran voice over master Patrick Warburton as the Wolf, David Ogden Stiers as Flippers, a suave investigating frog, and Andy Dick as Boingo the rabbit. The plotline is a fractured fairly tale: the story you know isn’t the real story…

I’ll get the negatives out of the way right off the bat, because I’m not really sure how to be nice about this. In terms of visual effects and art design, this movie is not exactly going to knock your socks off. The characters have a very wooden look to them: the characters have an extremely limited range of facial motion and the animation on the whole appears rather stiff. The net result of this is that the entire movie reminds you of some of the old stop-motion Rankin-Bass features you’d see around christmas. The lighting overall is, well, as near as I can tell, there was no lighting. It really bothered me for the first ten or fifteen minutes, especially when I realized that the highlight in Red’s eyes was actually painted on, and stuck to her eye as she looked around. Bleh. There was a couple of times when Granny was center stage and you could literally see some strange polygonal effects around her mouth. Double bleh. And you should never have a roller coaster like scene without motion blur. Yuck.

Oh, and the music? Mostly terrible, although the villain’s song (mercifully, the last in the movie) was somewhat better, and didn’t seem contrived.

Okay, it’s not the prettiest movie, what’s to like?

The vocal performances were on the whole quite good, although I couldn’t really understand what accent Jim Belushi was trying for. Stiers does an amazing job as Flippers, I never would have recognized him as the urbane frog if he hadn’t been listed in the credits. Andy Dick and Glenn close also do well, as does rapper Xzibit as Chief Grizzly.

The story is actually pretty good. Early in the movie I thought it was going to be dreadful, but I think that may have been more of a reaction to the problems I had with the visual look of the film, and that’s probably something that’s fairly unique to people like me who work in the industry. Once I sort of got around that, I began to find quite a bit to like about the story, and by the end, I thought it was actually pretty fun. If you spent $10 to see it, you might feel a bit cheated, but if you got in on a cheap matinee, I would think you might be pretty allright with that.

I stuck around at the end to watch the credits, and it’s pretty clear that they didn’t spend the kind of money that studios like Pixar and PDI spend: their credits are remarkably short. For them to release a movie like this at all and get a national distribution deal is a credit to them.

Overall, I’m going to give the movie a B-, but I’m probably being mean because I stare at computer generated images all day long. Read some user reviews on Yahoo! or whatever if you’d like to get a glimpse at a more well-rounded view. It’s rated PG: some very young children at our screening found the growling wolf pretty intense, they did not like him at all but I suspect most kids over the age of eight will be fine.

[tags]Movies,Movie Review,Hoodwinked[/tags]

Well, Steve is still up there, but the big news (as yet unreflected on the Apple website) is the announcement of a new Intel based iMac. It will apparently come in the same sizes and prices as previous G5 iMacs, but will use Intel’s new CoreDuo processor that was plugged by Intel so heavily at CES last week.

There is also some nice improvements to their existing iLife suite, including the addition of the (somewhat predictably name) iWeb: a web authoring suite that includes the ability to create and publish rich media websites using premade Apple templates. Notable for podcasters, GarageBand will also include a Podcast Suite: a set of features designed to make the creation of podcasts simple and easy.

Addendum: Two new laptop models will be available in February: the MacBook Pro, also with the Core Duo Processor, $1999 and $2499.  It will include the iSight camera, Front Row, all that kind of stuff.  Neat!

[tags]Apple,Podcasting,MacWorld,iMac,Intel[/tags]

Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white images. You basically scribble hints into the image, and it propagates the color to nearby pixels that it determines should be the same color. At right, you can click and get my version of It’s a Wonderful Life, appropriate for the holiday season, if somewhat garish overall.

Okay, I’ve goofed around enough this morning. Off to Christmas shop.

I remember playing around with xlife and thinking it was a pretty good implementation of Conway’s cellular automata, but it’s got absolutely nothing on Golly, a stupendously fast version. Using hashing, it can run patterns for 10⁶⁰ steps in just a few seconds. Amazing.

I’ve been interested in cellular automata for a very long time, dating back to when I was a kid. One of the first BASIC programs I remember writing was a version of Conway’s Life that would run on my Atari 400 computer (very slowly I might add). But I’ve also been intrigued by a very simple cellular automata called “wireworld”. Unlike Conway’s Life, each cell in wireworld can be in one of four states:

1. insulator: cells in this state are always insulators
2. electron head: heads always become tails in the next time step
3. electron tails: electron tails always become copper in the next state
4. copper: copper will remain copper unless there are precisely one or two heads adjacent to the cell, then it will become a head.

If you play with this, you might see why it would be called wireworld. I’ve known for sometime that you can create all kinds of logic gates with this automata as a basic technology, but today I found this very cool website which implements The Wireworld computer, a complete computer that computes primes, simulated in a Java applet. Very, very cool.

Addendum: I left the java applet running overnight on my machine at work. It computed primes up until 31, pictured at right (click on the image for a full resolution image of the computer state).

Check out this video on Google showing an overclocked AMD Duron vaporizing. They clocked it up in both frequency (3.8ghz) and I believe also significantly over voltage, but still, pretty amazing. They just didn’t let the magic smoke out, they literally destroyed the chip.

The most daunting challenge facing computing isn’t speeding up computers, it’s controlling heat. Cool stuff.

Metamerist has linked to me before, it seems only fair that I should return the favor, especially since he came up with this terrific Computational Photography Link Roundup. I’ve linked to some of the articles listed before, since I’m generally interested in the topic, but there are some new bits here too.

Good stuff.

Linksys has sold a bazillion of the old WRT54GS routers. It’s probably due in some small part to the many alternative firmware upgrades you can put on the device to increase its capabilities in a number of innovative directions. The most recent versions of these devices are somewhat less hackable though. The series 5 devices have shifted from using Linux to using VxWorks, and have cut memory down to 2MB of Flash and 8MB of RAM, instead of 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM for earlier Linux based devices. But to placate the hacker market, Linksys has released the WRT54G”L” which retains the larger memory spaces of earlier models. How long will it last? Hard to say, I’ll be watching this experiment to see how it goes.

Matt Blaze and company have a new paper just out entitled Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems, which details a number of problems with the methods and equipment normally used by law enforcement to tap phone equipment. These include vulnerabilities that allow the surveilled party to make it appear to call numbers other than the one reached, to disable recording of specific calls and to just generally make it hard for tappers. Interesting stuff, and using relatively straightforward ideas and methodology.

Matt is a remarkable guy, I particularly liked his paper Safecracking for the computer scientist.

A group at Stanford has created an interesting new camera using a combination of conventional camera and a microlens array to form a “plenoptic” camera. This link hit our photography mailing list yesterday, and I spent some time reading it. It’s really quite clever. Basically it uses the microlens array to serve as thousands of tiny lenses. Each of these “sub-lenses” images the target scene over a narrow field of view from a different spatial location. Then, computer software can take these individual images and recombine them in flexible and clever ways: allowing you to refocus images, shift perspective, and all sorts of other cool ideas.

Very neat stuff.

Xerox printers use a watermarking technique to insert codes onto all printed documents from their Docucolor color laser printers. These identify date, time and printer serial number with a grid of yellow dots which appear in the printout. Presumably these codes are inserted to make the job of the Secret Service simpler in tracking their use in creating counterfeit money. What’s kind of cool though is that the EFF has figured out how to decode them. Interesting bit: the dots are simple to see when viewed under an intense blue light, like one of those blue Photon LEDs.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Windows isn’t what whas broken. Windows DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES were what was broken.

The two are intimately related. Can you honestly say that you have an example of a program which worked well, despite the development process being completely broken? It just doesn’t happen. The article that Scoble quoted quoted Microsoft VP Jim Allchin:

“It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. ”

That is a broken development process, producing broken software, and only a little over a year ago. We are in the third quarter of 2005 now, and only now are we hearing of the sweeping changes that Microsoft thinks are necessary to become innovative.

It is absolutely startling to me that a multi-zillion dollar mega-empire like Microsoft only recognized last year that perhaps they should work toward “developing a solid core for Windows”.

Longhorn/Vista was broken. Clearly. Whether it is still broken when it ships remains to be seen, but it seems like in a few years, someone is going to have enough material to write a suitable sequel to an old software engineering standby.

Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD on. Wackiness!

What’s even more wacky is that it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, maybe that isn’t so wacky, after all, would you pay money for a Microvax?

Basically, I’ve been on a bit of a retro kick lately, what with the Atari 2600 programming and all. While goofing around, I noted that you could run the latest NetBSD 2.0 release on simulated Vax hardware. So I compiled the simulator port, downloaded the vaxcd.iso file, and did it.

Et voila! It works.

Probably even runs faster in emulation on my lowly 1ghz Via C3 box than the real thing.

I know, this is one of the more useless things I’ve ever done, I just had to share.