The Math Is Easy

SWFAddress

// May 11th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Actionscript 3, Flash, Programming

Holy sweet jesus deep linking is easy with SWFAddress. It’s criminal that all Flash sites don’t implement it.

Body, It Aches

// May 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Thoughts

Seriously, the two greatest things on the planet are rocks to climb and suicidally-envisioned transportation devices. Just spent the evening rock climbing at a midtown gym which pretty much ensured that my arms would be putty and my fingertips would ache from slowly being rubbed raw as I attempted to climb things my body physically is not ready for. And to cap that off, I went back to the office to pick up my Ripstik and ride that home. So now my legs, too, are putty and my feet are still tingly from that long (hah!) journey over rocky pavement.

I’ll sleep well, no doubt, and it feels pretty damn good! You all (do two readers count as “you all?”) should engage in the same. With me if you’re local. (Uh, I meant the rock climbing and ripstikking with me, not the sleeping. Weirdo.)

The iPhone Influence

// April 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts

Just a brief thought, I’ve grown increasingly used to the iPhone’s UI. As with most others, I took to it immediately, but I’ve found myself growing more and more frustrated with the tired old point-and-click idea of the mouse in many circumstances by contrast. The latest example is that I’m constantly frustrated when I have to go into my gmail and delete a message. When I’m checking my gmail through the phone and I want to delete a message, all I have to do is swipe over the title then press the big Delete button that appears. This feels so much quicker than finding the little check box next to the message, clicking it, then going up and finding and clicking the delete button above.

I guess I really just want a touchscreen computer. Get on that, Apple.

Fibonacci!

// April 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery, Math

I’ve been toying around with some maths lately. I’ve been playing with cellular automata, the chaos game, and most recently I’ve turned my attention back to an old interest, Fibonacci art. I’m going to write a fair amount about all these eventually, but for now I’ve posted up a brief description of my two presentable toys on my other blog, Imbrickle. I’ll post more here soon as I have the time, but in the meantime, go have fun!

God Vs. Nature

// April 6th, 2008 // 8 Comments » // Thoughts

This has been written so much more eloquently elsewhere, but I just want to get this out.

This world, this existence, indeed the entire thing we call reality is beautiful. On every scale wonderful things are happening. Fascinating things that boggle the mind. We exist on the lower end of this scale of scales, experiencing the world in meters, and here we see beautifully intricate and emergent patterns everywhere. From fairly simple rules we get to see shapes of tremendous apparent complexity, such as the arrangement of leaves on a fern or the golden ratio expressed in the spiral of a seashell, or the self-organizational properties of animal cultures. We see the swarming nature of flocks of birds, the ultimate efficiency of a trail of ants, even the selfish nature of a world of humans has led to so many examples of this wondrous self-organization, a la The Wealth of Networks and Six Degrees and the like.

From here we can go up or down the scale and see similarly amazing things. The point here is that at every scale, there is a vast diversity of structures and interactions, and they all follow certain rules that themselves are vast yet connected. They are consistent, understandable. It is obvious that this universe of ours hangs on these rules, exists necessarily because of these rules. It hurts my brain to try to imagine the magnitude of this universe. These rules that have allowed the path from quarks to atoms to cells exist everywhere! Not just here, on this planet at this point in time. It’s not terribly difficult to extract this out to the rest of the solar system, but imagining the true distance of things beyond that is actually pretty tough. The scale between the size of an atom and the size of a human body, that’s the sort of scale between the distance between that human body and the sun, and the sun and other heavenly bodies.

So here we have all these things, all these beautiful rules and patterns that have allowed growth, that have introduced what we almost arbitrarily call life, that have led to what we almost arbitrarily call intelligence. These things, too, follow rules. We have genes that replicate, and replication being an imperfect process (in that it doesn’t copy 100% accurately 100% of the time), we get mutations. It is through these mutations that animals change gradually over the course of millennia. (There’s also a social aspect that influences this as well, which harks back to my comments on the beauty of self-organization, but that’s another tangent from which I’ll try to refrain for now.) Naturally from these mutations, from these changing animals, we get this thing called evolution. And at this snapshot in time, somewhere between primordial ooze and who-knows-what’s-to-come, there lies a species better able to communicate itself than any species before it. Here we are, with big heavy brains, those brains doing what brains do: accepting raw sensory input and fleshing out patterns, plugging it into a constant simulation of the world, modifying that simulation as needed, and allowing us to interact. Somewhere in that simulation is a representation of Self, and a realization that there are others with the same representation of Self inside them. It’s through this self referencing that we become what’s called “conscious,” all thanks to these relatively simple rules of nature itself.

Considering all this, considering everything that the laws of nature inevitably allow and lead to, it’s strange to think that this historically new thing called “consciousness” can come up with ideas that totally undermine the wonder of nature. It seems an insult to Nature itself to wash it all away with the idea of God, a concept that came into existence at a time when the rules of nature were completely inaccessible to an ancient, lesser people. With God, man is able to completely ignore the vastness of this universe and place himself squarely in the center, where this god has for some reason decided to focus all his love and attention, and is apparently able to completely ignore the laws of this universe to just plop down spankin’ new animals that mysteriously share so many similarities with other unrelated animals. This, of course, is the meaning of faith, as it completely violates all common sense from a scientific standpoint. Instead of rules of nature that apply everywhere, God gives us an arbitrary being, a fickle experimenter. While I’m the center of my own little universe, I am capable of understanding full well that I mean just as much to this incomprehensibly vast universe as a chunk of rock hurtling from one galaxy to another. What doesn’t fit into the tidy laws of nature is the idea that I’m special in any natural or supernatural sense. That is the sole domain of a self-obsessed mind that allows delusions of God to control it.

I’ll craft this later. But for now, the wondrous laws of this thing called reality that ultimately have led to the existence of me, have also led to the constant mining of chemical resources, allocated all of them to necessary part of my body, and supplies are running low. I’m hungry and shall now go eat.

New Keyboard!

// March 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery

About a month ago at the office, I upgraded from a terrible old PC to a brand new aluminum and glass iMac, and part of the deal was Apple’s new keyboard, aka The Heavenly Wafer of Typy Goodness. Aside from Apple’s seemingly ridiculous decision to move around the old comfortable F key functions like Dashboard and Expose, this is the single best keyboard I’ve ever used for a desktop machine.

So after a month of agony at home, I picked one up just now, at 2:30am, at the Apple Store. The old keyboard, while neat-looking, has a really awkward feel after using this new design so much. The keys feel so deep, as if to say “Hello there. I’m going to give you carpal tunnel now, kthx.”

Here are some other benefits of the new keyboards compared to the old:

• More comfortable
• Sounds cooler to type on
• Music controls built in
• If you’re like some people, you’ll no longer have to worry about all your food spilling in between the keys
• The thin aluminum casing can make a great self-defense weapon, should the need arise. It’s better than a Ginsu.

So there you have it. Go get you one.

Oh! And as a sidenote, while at the store, I got to play a little with a MacBook Air. Before seeing it, I was pretty skeptical, thinking it was a niche machine that wouldn’t really appeal to many. But after playing with it, I get it now. The thing is tiny and light. Surprisingly so on both accounts. I’ve heard concerns of flimsiness especially pertaining to the monitor half. I abused the Air a bit to see for myself, and it’s no less flimsy than my MacBook Pro, which is to say that it’s well within the realm of acceptability. So there you have it. If you don’t have an immediate need for a DVD ROM at all times, then the Air could certainly be worth it. Apple’s done well design-wise yet again.

Eclipse Workspaces

// March 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // Geekery, Programming

Before I started at Schematic, I’d never developed in a real IDE. I coded in Flash itself. Near the end of my pre-Schematic days I began to realize that this was a silly way to do things and began searching for an alternative. I was PC-only at the time (seems like so long ago. My conversion is now complete.) and the easiest option I found was SEPY. All in all, at was a pretty good app and I found it immensely more useful than Flash. At Schematic, I still used SEPY while I saw everyone else using other stuff. This guy named Roger was doing crazy things with this thing called Eclipse, which was apparently big in the Java world. I tried installing it at some point, which turned into a colossal failure. I couldn’t just open up a damn file? I had to create an entire project? And what’s this whole workspace thing? It seems insanely cumbersome for what could have been such a simple task.

I hadn’t really grasped the full concept of what a project was at the time, I guess, because now I code exclusively in Flex Builder and I can’t really imagine doing it any other way. [Incidentally I'm playing around with the iPhone SDK, which is letting me learn XCode. From a Flex Builder perspective, XCode feels so scattered that it's quickly becoming frustrating.] As time goes on, I’m getting more and more comfortable with Eclipse’s quirks.

This is all actually just a really long way to get to the point of this post: I’ve finally starting adjusting to the concept of Workspaces, and it’s a really useful organizational tool. I don’t actually have much to say other than that. Consider everything above the paragraph as aimless fluff.

Leave me alone, I need to start making this look like a real blog, ok?