http://carsonbaker.org Thoughts on finance, robotics, embedded systems, and interactive art. Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:59:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some months ago the fabulous Jürgen Fauth contacted me to create a literary community centered around the short story. The idea was billed as "YouTube for writers" -- a venue where readers could enjoy great stories and authors could present their labors. And hopefully a place where community would grow. Today ... http://carsonbaker.org/2008/08/05/fictionaut-say-it-like-astronaut/ Watch the above video in high-definition on Vimeo. Source code is available (1.5MB): http://carsonbaker.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/thom.zip The point data set is not included. Download it from the Google project site. http://carsonbaker.org/2008/07/30/thom-york-orbit/ I borrowed Samuel Bravo Silva's excellent "cylinder_tree" sketch and ported it to my native GL framework (called CBGameworks, soon to be released). Download Octopus.zip (51KB) (seen above). Keys ESDF move the camera. R peds upward. L toggles lighting, off by default. Source code (73KB) is available for download, bundled with an ... http://carsonbaker.org/2008/07/21/processing-and-cylinder-tree/ Available to download from Google is a small part of the data set from Radiohead's recent House of Cards music video, shot entirely without cameras — just LIDAR and 3D capture. Part of the idea is that fans will be able to remix the "footage" or mash it up in ... http://carsonbaker.org/2008/07/17/radioheads-city-street/ Recently after switching from Mac OS X to Debian, I found I needed to restore a couple files from the Time Machine backup that I kept. The drive works just fine as an HFS+ mount, but I couldn't figure out how to retrieve anything within. When Google didn't yield the ... http://carsonbaker.org/2008/06/23/time-machine-restore/ Recently I came across an academic reference to Cliffard Pickover's biomorphs, a generative fractal-like art that resembles cell structures. Outside of Richard Dawkins' famous evolutionary invention of the same name, which is similar in purpose but different in design, I had never heard of Pickover's work. Sadly I couldn't find ... http://carsonbaker.org/2008/05/13/biomorphs/ These are a handful of the books I've enjoyed recently about finance. The summaries are brief because countless others on Amazon have done the job for me. The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance by Mark S. Joshi, 2003 One of the most succinct, to-the-point explanations of what finance is all about. Joshi, ... http://carsonbaker.org/2007/12/04/recently-quantitative-finance-books/ I want to highlight this particular link, "Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to follow" [sic]. Except for #10 (throw exceptions), every one of these suggestions flies in the face of what programmers are traditionally taught. The general complaint that the author makes (suggestion #1) is that design is overrated. ... http://carsonbaker.org/2007/06/10/the-scourge-of-uml/ If you're new to this weblog, you may have been redirected here from a stale link of many years ago. You see, over the past decade or so I've leisurely toyed around on the web, maintaining various websites, and experimenting with various ideas. This post marks the culmination of my ... http://carsonbaker.org/2007/05/28/redesign-for-summer/ For the past six months or so, I've been learning the ins and outs of the PIC. It's a small microprocessor that runs at 4 MIPS. One of the setbacks I've had to deal with is the lack of development tools for Mac OS X. There are many packages for PC, ... http://carsonbaker.org/2007/05/24/developing-embedded-systems-on-the-mac/ Perhaps this is obvious to most, but I thought I'd share my trick with C++ enums. Consider: enum Face {ACE=1, TWO, THREE, ... , QUEEN, KING}; If you want to step through this datatype you can't just do: Face f; f++; No, you must do some kind of conditional checking or integer-to-enum casting which ... http://carsonbaker.org/2007/05/18/looping-through-c-enums/