23:50: My Centenarian Grandfather

We celebrated my grandfather's 100th birthday with him and the rest of the family, this weekend.

Pam just found the photographs that he took after liberating the Dachau concentration-camp: they're in the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, which is online at http://www.yadvashem.org/. Unfortunately, I can't link to them, because yadvashem.org us using some sort of session-cookie system....

[Reply]

23:29: "I work for MIT"

My wife just wanted me to tell the world that. She's very proud. I think she's very silly.

[Reply]

13:40: Paper Dolls

Here's a JavaScript/CSS2 example of my painting-process. It's a little like making paper dolls: the white `buttons' indicate layers that are active, and the black onesindicate layers that are inactive. Click on the links to toggle the visibility of the layers. I have a script that produces these from a GIMP XCF file, but I'm probably generally just going to post links to XCF files, when I get my gallery back online.

[Reply]

21:45: Turing Tar Pits.

I dug up both major incarnations of my web-site from when I was in high school & they're both... much more interesting than what I currently have; & even on an absolute scale, still intriguing.

I had image-galleries with links to source-code for the POV-generated ones, poetry-compilations, extravagant CSS styling everywhere, including on every poem like Blake would have done.

But what blows my mind, now, are the parts that are the same--

• the menu-system that was manually replicated through every page--no CGI or SSI or anything.

• the multipage galleries with every page generated by hand. & cross-page consistency checkd by flipping back & forth between buffers in Emacs.

The weblog maintained manually as one big HTML file is particularly interesting--with a comment-form that would e-mail comments to me so that I could moderate & hand-integrate them.

I wouldn't even think of doing that kind of manual labour, these days--which could be good, but /isn't/ when the result is being stuck in the turing tar pit where, if something cant be automated, it sn't worth doing--where the primary task is the automation & the task being automated is of only secondary import.

What am I to do, now?

[Reply]

04:30: OMFG a TURTLE!

I got over the initial hurdles of learning Cairo and figuring out basically how I should structure my code to work with it, and now I've got about half of the VisualID `generators' working: radial, spiral, line, figure, and scribble; I'm still working on the `along a path', `around a shape', `relaxed inside', and `symmetry' generators. Oh--Pam has also asked that I add a `butterfly' generator, but I wonder if some butterflies might just fall out of the existing shape-grammar. On a test-run, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the randomly-generated icon for one of my files was... a turtle?

[Reply]