I have posted a tool (and also an ajax version) to use the imagemagick command line in a web browser. This will allow you to edit your pictures and photos and do all sort of interesting transformations.

I’ve been thinking about the classic things to put online — command line programs from long ago such as Eliza and imagemagick. These things were all put online about 10 years ago. You can kind of tell from the websites that they are on.

Now that we have faster forms and ajax, I think that it’s time to do some of these apps again.

Don’t you just hate it when you have code in lots of different files that you want to work with, but you only need one function in each file? Recently I was working on an abstract syntax tree which is constructed from XML, and the lead developer suggested that I put a function in each node type called parseXML. I suggested that it would be better to have an loader with a function for each node type — the same system, but all the loader code is in one place, and the nodes don’t need to know anything about the xml that they come from. This is a pretty standard thing in compiler design, I remember creating lots of AST visitors when I was building a compiler.

But there are a few disadvantages: you need to make public setters for object properties, even when you ‘really’ want the properties to be private. And you can’t see the code of the node while you are working on the loader. There is a way around the first thing (a true visitor implementation and pass by reference) — but the second thing is a consequence of our folder-based way of looking at code.

So I was thinking that Tiddlywiki would be an interesting way to edit code — you could call up exactly the functions that you want, in the order you want.

The big problem is getting the functions back into the correct files, and doing just-in-time parsing. I suppose that prettyprinting could be hacked into tinymce — there’s a css stylesheet / javascript for prettyprinting on google code.

We are looking into a lightweight way to track database changes in ‘raw’ php — actually not quite raw, but a pretty wimpy homegrown framework — and I just discovered that SQLyog has a command history, so I can record the alter table statements.

I have posted an ajax version of the segmentation and false coloring application here.

This application produces an artistic rendering of an image. The options are to have the image rendered in a patchwork of random colors, or to have similar areas of the image colored in the average color of that image. Looks sort of like the image has been smoothed out.

I really like digg. I just started using it on my own best content yesterday, and got 80 new visitors. Which is about 1/3 of the total visitors since the site opened on Februrary 24, 2007. Yay digg. The content is various online animations and toys.

Popular content:

[Physics simulation toy]

[False-coloring images]

I reimplemented the average color algorithm that was originally in the F&H image segmentation code. Creates neat results.

I am looking for a hosting provider with Tomcat support. I have Dreamhost right now, which I like and which suits all of my needs except my need for Tomcat (and my own JVM image) and my want for PostgreSQL. My plan is to keep Dreamhost, which is about $10 per month, and paid up for a while besides, and get another host in the same price range.

I am interested in aggregating calendars in WordPress. Mostly these will be local calendars, and I will be writing custom scraping engines and then posting the iCalendar data. (I will also import from Google calendar.)

What follows was written quickly, and all the thought that went into it went in while I was writing. Thus there’s not much thought… But in the interest of publish early, publish often, I am posting it anyway.

I realize there will be a bit of an issue with identifying unique events, but I will make my best guess. I will assign a URI. Anyway, once I have iCal feeds I am interested in adding metadata / to each calendar element, and sticking the whole thing on my wordpress blog. I want people to be able to comment on each event, so…these things will be exposed as blog postings.

I’m going to set this up at events.ithacablogs.com. The engine is going to be Bedework, for which I need to shell out for a Tomcat hosting provider. (Dreamhost is a great hosting provider with a lot of flexibility, but they don’t support Tomcat or PostgreSQL. The other problem with Dreamhost is the load on their serrvers seems high.) Unfortunately there’s no good PHP / MySQL calendar engine available, which would be a killer app.

Update: on second thought, I think that a digg-like interface is needed to seperate the really really boring events from the rest of the stuff. So I am going to work with the Upcoming.org API to create a WordPress plugin.

I am not quite sure what to make of the European interest in my website. Is it just spambots? At any rate, I have heard that digital arts are more popular in Europe than they are here. In particular I think that Ars Electronica is an interesting conference. I am tentatively going to present my research there this fall.

The other conference that interests me is SxSW, which just ended. I am interested in how the web is making inroads into mainstream media and art, and this seems to be a good place to see this happen.