Processing is a programming language I discovered a few months ago - it’s a domain-specific language meant to introduce and teach non-programmers the basics of computer programming, via a visual context. It has been aimed at artists and design groups, but despite offering a very low barrier of entry to graphic programming, I think that the majority of users come from a technical background (or perhaps technical/design).

The inimitable John Resig of jQuery fame, has by some super-human feat, managed to port Processing to JavaScript, calling it Processing.js.

Here’s a pretty example to look at if you’re in Firefox/Webkit browser. Watch out for major CPU use (heaven forbid CPU’s are used for processing!).

Shortly after this ridiculousness, I discovered Obsessing.org, which is a web-based IDE and runtime environment for Processing.js. The editing seems a bit um, poor - I couldn’t get copy/paste to work - but nevertheless, this is awesome.

Some days you have to sit back and thank those tireless bearded men and women who work on open-source projects. Other days… well, other days…

On other days you’re sitting at a client’s house, pondering why the new release of Apple’s operating system won’t play nice with XP’s SMB protocol, or is it perhaps the other way round… either way, something isn’t happy and skipping breakfast was probably not the best idea. With ideas and patience running low, you idly fiddle around with the network and workgroup IDs, thinking that maybe changing this rather oddly named workgroup to something more usual like “MSHOME” or “WORKGROUP” might make it work. Wondering why Windows wants to reboot, and failing to see any reason to not let it, you agree to it’s terms, stare blankly at the screen as the shut down dialog flickers past and then out of nowhere you experience a sizeable OH FUCK moment.

Something important to take into consideration when changing Windows’ network settings, is that if the owner of the aforementioned computer used to work at a big company with the typical MS network (Exchange et al.), then the user’s user account will be of the domain user variety. And if you are now offline (in terms of this work network) then changing the workgroup and network ID is a rather unuseful way of permanently locking this user out of the machine (taking into account that the administrator password for this laptop is, well, no one is sure what it is).

So you’re sitting there, cheerful login screen in front of you, trying the same user/pass combination for the tenth time in a row, you know, because maybe you typo’d nine times in a row… I mean it’s totally possible. Eyeing the window, you begin to wonder if a full grown man can fit between those burglar bars, and what kind of explanation would that entail. At the very least you’re quite glad that not many people use EFS, because that would be totally uncool right now.

On days like these, you don’t want to thank those crazy open-source folk, the kind of people who release things like ntpasswd, you want to get down on your knees and thank the invisible wizard in the sky that there are people like this in the world.

oh nine eff nine one one zero two nine dee
seven fore ee three five bee dee eight four
one five six sea five six three five six
eight eight see oh

I found this a pretty interesting read - reminds me of Latent Semantic Indexing, extracting the general concepts from the images and using them to classify new unseen data. LSI extracts concepts from textual information and can then classify new documents with a fairly high accuracy. Basically low value words are discarded, whilst high value, relevant keywords are kept and ranked.

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=650