Today, the number is missing from the first day.
And-oh.
Early afternoon, the evening came from bytes.
In the evening, leaving its victim, said
Normally, why? And listen. Of course I heard.

- http://www.bluetrees.org, as translated by google translator

I have in the back of my head that it would be really interesting to combine writing and computer science, especially literature. I finally got around to thinking hard about this, and why it’s easy to combine art and computer science. Computer science can be used in art as a tool; most of the current art that uses computer science either generates visuals or is used to make a custom interface (e.g. motion sensors etc). Computer science can also be used in the understanding of art, as it has been used in the understanding of music.

I’ve been told that this is a good time to get into digital art — there’s just not a lot of artists who are skilled in computer science.

So that brings me to literature. There have been programs to generate literature, in which words are combined with some attention paid to grammar and the compatibility of the words. But this approach takes the artistry away — all that’s left to do is for the artist to look through the output and select interesting texts. On the other hand, there are ways to use computers to enhance the study of literature — researchers claim to have a program that can distinguish male and female writing. There’s the innovation of hyperlinking and easy text chatting. There are helpers — word processors, grammar checkers, word processors, etc.

I could imagine being able to input plots, themes and emotions into a computer and have it output a story, but this seems a long way off and how much fun, and how much a personal expression, would it be anyway. Perhaps such things already exist.

I think I will give up on the idea of a connection between literature and computer science.

I am helping out for a dance concert Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 4:30pm at the Henry St John Gymnasium at the Corner of Clinton St and Geneva St, Ithaca NY.

See ya there.

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 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.

I am hoping to get a job working for Photo.net and Philip Greenspun. I started applying in December, but got derailed. My hard disk died, I started getting a lot of consulting work, and I didn’t get back to the project.

I noticed they took down the ad for a programmer at the beginning of March, and I got incredibly upset and sad. But I am still hoping to get the job and I am going to be completing the application. Stay tuned.

Now that I’ve finally put this post up, I am just going to complete the job application (which involves creating a small web service) and hope that I get offered a job. I have been in correspondence with Philip and I guess that they would still consider hiring me, even though they have found programmers in the interim.

Where I am at now: I got my Fedora bootloader back and am able to run Fedora on my laptop. I started learning Ruby on Rails, which I like a lot. I am going to take some time this week to work on my project for them and see where it goes. I am a bit intimidated by the 253 tables in the ACS, a lot of which see to have to do with managing ad content. It certainly seems like this system was written 10 years ago.

I like Ruby on Rails, there are a lot of neat things about it. db:migrate, scaffold, testing…

I gotta admit, this is one of the few web designs that really makes me feel happy. Perhaps because I like Calder. Seriously, I like how the image of the mobile is not contained by the box formed by the image, and cleverly the designer has made the mobile image open to the background of the page, a sort of knowing nod to the effect of the image.

[Guggenheim Venice]

The charlesdietrich.com website has gotten a new look. I expect to asymptotically approach the ideal template, so there are future changes in store. However, I think this is a big improvement. Though not as big as an improvement as the previous change, from the WordPress default theme to the Connections theme…ah, asymptotes!

The current theme is equiX, with a few customizations. There’s a blog that I visit sometimes that uses this theme, so I hope I don’t look too similar.

The image is a current screenshot from my research project…I’ll probably use a photograph later, like I did for Julie (I designed the website, but the excellent photo is courtesy of Luke Walker).

You come up with neat images whilst doing computer vision. I just came across this one which I produced as part of my Detecting Repeated Shapes in Images Project:

Would you like to take a guess what it is?

When I was at TelekomNet, I was teaching the graphic designer Alex Fedorov to write some code. He was recursively creating nested tables, and forgot to close a tag. The result was something like this: