josh giesbrecht

Processing is a neat little language that I discovered recently.  It looks like a great little environment to prototype ideas in.

According to the website, "Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound."  It's built on top of Java, but abstracts away a lot of the annoying details, and is combined with a clean, minimal IDE that keeps things simple and fun.

The language is syntactically Java, but lets you write only what you need to write.  If all you want is to draw an ellipse, you can just tell it to draw an ellipse in one statement, no mucking about with setting up graphical output or classes or whatever.  If you want to do some simple animation, just put your per-frame code into a draw() call, set the framerate, and let 'er rip.  The website has a great set of tutorial code that not only teaches, but makes little things that look pretty cool.

At the same time, if you need to step outside the bounds and get a hold of some Java library, you can write a full-fledged Java program that can still use the additional Processing function calls.

The IDE is beautiful in minimalism, designed clearly for the task of letting people program without having to worry about details.  Open a new "sketch" (Processing's name for a program or project), type your code, press Play, watch it run.  If it looks cool, with a single menu option you can build standalone executables for Windows, MacOS, and Linux; or export it in applet format, complete with a nice clean webpage that contains it for easy viewing. 

The syntax highlighting and autoformatting is good enough, but if you really want to write your code in another editor, you can switch the Processing app to a non-editing mode where it simply runs the code as it is currently saved.  No re-opening needed, if you save a new copy elsewhere and press Play in Processing, it will auto-refresh and run the new code.

While the language was initially aimed at programmed media projects, it has been used for interesting data visualization experiments, a-life experiments, and other more "computational" tasks.  There are also a bunch of additional libraries, including OpenGL support, networking, and a controller interface.  (See the Exhibition, the forums, or the examples at Codetree.)

Give it a try, if nothing else it's a great way to have fun making some bouncy little unusual animated toy over a lunch break.  If you're trapped in legacy code, gotos, and/or layers upon layers of interfaces to trace through, it's nice to take a deep breath and play with something that reminds you that coding is fun! =)

I really should point people to this one on Evangelical Christian groups promoting clean air.

I feel a little better about the world now.

In this article on rioting in Paris, I found this incredibly timely quote:

"We see among the rioters kids of 13 to 15, who are swept along, who are encouraged to take all the risks, and the others, the ringleaders, who are used to creating trouble, they terrorize everyone, and don't want to stop," said Franck Cannarozzo, a deputy mayor of Aulnay. "Rather than playing on their Playstations, they attack the police."

In the interest of promoting conflict resolution, I think it would be in the French government's best interest to issue a PS2 to every household, along with a "Peace Voucher" that's redeemable for two new release games.

Keep violence off the streets and in our videogames where it belongs!

Go read this now, and BE AMUSED.

It's tragic that Practical Common Lisp isn't even on the first page of results when you google for Lisp tutorial, so I'm doing my part to correct that.

(Hey, if it works for 'failure', it should work for this.)

For the record, I would prefer that this guy not be what comes to mind when people think of Christianity, thanks a lot that'd be great bye.

Anyone who complains about the parentheses in Lisp has not had to read and debug an XML-based build config file.

No pun intended. And he hasn't actually done it yet, but it's an interesting idea. Following the passage of the same-sex legislation last night, Ralphy is saying that Alberta might stop solemnizing marriages altogether. For those readers who are also ifMUDders, you may remember miseri suggesting this same thing not too long ago.

Why should government define marriage, anyway? If we (crazy churchfolk) are serious about trying to "defend" marriage as a sacred thing, why is the secular defining our sacred? (Of course, that raises the question of how much we should really care what the government defines marriage as, anyway.)</b></a>

I've never been all that amazed by Wikipedia. Sure, it's the collaborative knowledge of thousands upon thousands of geeks - great, so I finally have the definitive reference on Klingon, but can it be trusted to be reliable when any would-be editor can alter or add facts? How do I know that there isn't a mistake in an article that hasn't yet been corrected?

But apparently the CBC doesn't mind the ephemeral nature of facts found on Wikipedia. This in-depth look at the Sudan crisis has the following sources:

SOURCES: US Department of State, Wikipedia, Arab Net, CIA World Factbook.

Wikiwha? Okay, so I'm sure that the other sources did a good job of confirming the Wikipedia's accuracy, but this still makes me double-take.

What's next, news reporting with blogs as the sources?

From a mailing list email I just received comes this excellent quote:

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament."

- Soren Kierkegaard


I really need to finish reading that Kierkegaard collection that I've got around here somewhere.