saturn return to sender

I had an idea for a little visualizer toy and started playing with Quartz Composer over the weekend. I’m always blown away at the power of that tool whenever I dip into it.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.

The beta version of a Javascript app I built is now available at wiki.name.com.

You can filter the names in the spinners by origin, meaning, gender, popularity, length … it’s a fun way to learn about names or—if you happen to be looking for a name for your baby—to find for a name for your baby.

The interesting programming challenge here: there are around 3000 names in the wiki, and the user should be able to spin through all of them by clicking and dragging (or “throwing”) the spinners. No browser could be expected to cope with a list of 3000 names, so the trick is to only display the subset you need at any one time, and do as little work as possible to add and delete list items on either side of the current set, and only add or delete when necessary. It’s similar to how google maps works: they only load the bits of map that you need to see at the moment, and not the entire world.

It’s conceptually pretty easy to visualize, but add in filtering by properties on the names, type-to-jump to a name, and various weird edge cases, and it’s not entirely trivial to implement. (And there are still a few glitches, particularly when using the arrow keys to nudge the list up or down.)

There’s also the issue of synching the names in the baby naming wizard with the wiki data. Rather than asking the wiki to output its entire database on every page load, we periodically run a server-side script which JSON-encodes the data into a single file.

The app was built with the most excellent jQuery and the plan is currently to open source the core spinner code and release it as a jQuery plugin. It’ll probably be a little while before that happens. In the meantime, congrats to name.com for getting this out there, and if you’re reading this, I encourage you to support them by checking it out, playing around a bit, and contributing to the wiki!

Such a geek.

This is an rss feed of stars within my personal lightcone*. That is, the stars with which I could possibly have any causal relationship, since my birth.

12 Ophiuchi is only 2 weeks away! It would be physically impossible for the good denizens of 12 Ophiuchi to have any idea what’s on its way right now.** In two weeks, though: a sudden onslaught of geeky causality, baby!

OK, actually my birth probably didn’t make much of a dent in the fabric of geek spacetime.

Here, put in your birthdate (as, eg, 1981-12-09) to get your own lightcone feed:

(w/kudos to interconnected.org.)

I can’t explain it, but some specimens of the Star Trek TNG photoshop meme are unbearably hilarious to me. Especially when they involve silly hats.

If you haven’t seen it, the new trailer for J. J. Abrams’ Trek has been out for about a week. Looks action-packed for sure, and I’m glad the franchise is getting a facelift and some fresh blood. But I can’t shake the sense that they’ve given the bridge of the Enterprise to a boy band. Kirk and Spock look like they’re in high school. Maybe I’m just getting old.

My reading of the Wikipedia entry (and with Karl Urban’s McCoy completely missing from this poster) suggests that the traditional tripod of character dynamic among Kirk, Spock, and Bones will be reduced to two: Kirk’s and Spock’s fragmented personalities. (This along with with the boyish casting will undoubtedly get the K/S culture all atwitter … er … FYI, that link is safe for work, but potentially unsafe for your world view.) So that’s something of a departure from the standard Trek framework …

Also I have wondered if Abrams’ Trek won’t be so bleak as to violate the spirit of hope that was so important to creator Roddenberry. Based on Cloverfield and Lost, Abrams’ work—to me—reads dark and fatalist. But, according to Wikipedia, “[Abrams] does like Star Trek’s optimism though, being an optimist himself, and [he] felt the film would be a refreshing antidote to films like The Dark Knight.” So that’s good, I guess.

Anyway. Here’s my contribution to the meme. Not so funny, but oh well.