Google Reader

I keep an eye on a lot of blogs, mostly design/science/art focussed. Typically I’ve got about 100 feeds in my feed reader, but I’ve had a bit of a purge recently, and chopped it down to about 30. I use Google Reader to keep track of them all, sorted in to various tagged groups (Graphics, Science, Paper Craft, Comics etc..).

I tend to read through one group at a time, toggling the Expanded or List views depending on which group I’m reading. Expanded view is best for the graphics feeds making it easy to quickly scan through the images, picking out interesting pics. I prefer List view for text articles where I tend just to scan the headlines.

Tumblr

For a while I used to keep a photo album as a scrapbook of various images from magazines and what-not. As I tend to browse more articles online than off these days the photo album has become a bit redundant. For a while I kept printing off images and sticking them in, but this process was too cumbersome to keep up with.

Now I use Tumblr as my scrapbook, combined with a Firefox plugin and an Android app, I can quickly and easily add inspiring images to my collection.

In Firefox I use the Tumblr Post plugin. With this I simply right click an image and select ‘Post photo to my Tumblelog’. I copy and paste the page link (for reference) in to the comment field and hit upload. Easy as.

On my mobile phone (HTC Hero running Android) I have the Asuka Tumblr app, which allows me to send any image on my phone straight up to Tumblr. I can use this to take photos of things I see and stick them straight in to my scrapbook.

Twitter

I love Twitter. It’s awesome. However, managing followees and keeping an eye on conversations takes a bit of work. Lists and Saved Searches are the answer. I’ve got a number of lists grouping the different people I follow, and I take a gander at each on a semi-regular basis.

I’ve also set a few custom searches for words and phrases I’m interested in. Twitter search accepts logical search constructs, so I can search for "paper engineer" AND "paper engineering" in one go. This is a good way to find other people talking about things I like to talk about.

Incidentally, I’ve tried, but not really got on with any of these social network aggregation programs, I’m much happier with the good old Twitter site itself.

Follow me on Twitter
Check out my Tumblr Scrapbook

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to configure the default template so you don’t have to do this.

1. Open Inkscape
2. Set up your blank sheet however you like
3. Save the file in /home/username/.config/inkscape/templates/default.svg

That’s it!

for i in {1..100}; do
	I=$[i*i]
	for j in {1..100}; do
		J=$[(j*(j-1))/2]
		if [[ $I == $J ]]; then
			echo $I
		fi
	done
done

Not the most efficient solution, but still a fun exercise.

You know when you hear something and it sends ideas pinging off in different directions like a particle collision? Reading about this gave me one of those moments.

Think about any scenario where you’d want real-time location specific information pushed to you. There’s the obvious stuff, like retailers notifying customers of up-to-the minute promotions and offers. Imagine getting a message from the Deli round the corner, telling you that there’s only two peri-peri chicken baguettes left?

This could really take off for events organisers. Wouldn’t it be great getting info about bands in the signing tent right now? But more importantly not getting the info if you’re on the other side of the site?

But what about calling for help when you need it? In disaster situations, spreading information is essential. You can be told, not where all the heath centres are, but the nearest one to you, right now. This could make managing resources much easier. Messages directing people to the better equipped centres can be sent out over a larger area than the less equipped ones.

These are a few thoughts from a few minutes thinking. My brain’s going to be chewing on this for a while…

I wouldn’t expect that apps made using App Inventor would be better (faster, more efficient) than their hand-coded equivalents, but I can see that this would be useful for quickly knocking up a demo or for scratching out ideas. It’s clear from the blabber that Google aren’t trying to put developers out of work, this is aimed squarely at educators as a platform to teach about programming concepts. A good thing in my books.

Google will be granting access to App Inventor over the coming weeks, you need to register to get an invite.

Custom Post Types

The introduction of custom post types is a feature that many WP users have been waiting for for a while, now it is here it is awesome. I’ve created a custom post type (‘papertoy’), and extended it with custom meta fields, to make managing my paper toys far easier than before. I may write a post with more detail on this some time.

Editable Menu

WP 3 allows menus to be managed in a wonderful interface in the admin console. Posts, pages, categories, etc, can all be dragged and dropped around to create a menu hierarchy. And it is incredibly easy to code in to a theme.

Widgets

Ok, these aren’t new. But as of WP2.8 there has been a new widgets API, which makes the creation of widgets a billion times easier than it was before. I’ve created two widgets for this new theme; one with links to my social network accounts, and another to display my latest paper toys.

The paper toys widget basically pulls an image (stored in a meta field) from each of my ‘papertoy’ posts and displays it with a link to the page itself.If you’re planning on doing something similar yourself, you may to check out this problem (and fix) when using the WP loop with the new widgets API.

The social networks widget is pretty simple, I may publish it in the future, but right now I’ve got other things going on. Oh, the icons I used are from here.

The title of the project is…

An Investigation in to the Relationship Between Lower and Higher Order Cellular Automata Problems when Solved with Evolutionary Search Heuristics

Basically I’m going to be looking at how search methods inspired by Evolution can be used to solve problems in Cellular Automata and how different solutions to similar problems are related (if at all).

What the frig are Cellular Automata?

Cellular Automata are systems built up of many simple individual cells. Each of the cells is in one of a small number of states at any given time. A cell decides which state it is in by following some simple rules based upon the current state of its neighbours. Cellular automata are interesting to computer scientists (among others) because the simple rules at the micro-level (individual cells) can lead to very complex behaviour at the macro-level (the whole system).

One of the most famous cellular automata is Conway’s Game of Life, this simple model of a population of cells has demonstrated many interesting global behaviours. Earlier this month, the first replicating creature was demonstrated in the game. Previously the game has been shown to be able to model a Universal Turing Machine, meaning it is potentially capable of computing anything that can ever be computed. Not bad for some blinking blobs.

What the double frig is an Evolutionary Search Heuristic???

Evolutionary Computing is a field of computer science that looks at ways of solving problems inspired by biological evolution. Consider all the organisms in the world as being different solutions to the problem of survival. Every plant, animal, snottite and what-not, manages to survive using different strategies all developed by evolution. In computing, there are problems that cannot be solved using traditional, algorithmic, approaches. Perhaps the number of possible answers are too many to search one-by-one, or the solution is not very well defined. In cases like these, we can search for a good answer, not necessarily the best answer, but good enough. This is a Heuristic.

A simplified model of biological evolution can be applied to computer search problems. We can model potential solutions with a series of parameters, analogous to DNA. The potential solutions are tested against one another, the best are combined to produce another set of solutions. As the process is repeated, only the best solutions ‘survive’. this is known as a Genetic Algorithm. A similar process can be used to develop computer code to perform some function, this is called Genetic Programming.

Oh, I see. So what are you doing?

I’m going to be applying Evolutionary Heuristics to Cellular Automata, to find a set of simple micro-scale rules that can produce solutions to macro-level problems. Then I’ll look at whether or not these rules can be applied to other, related problems.

Evolutionary heuristics are known to produce good solutions to problems, but it can take a lot of effort to get there. For every new problem, you have to search from scratch. I’m interested in finding any ‘shortcuts’ between solutions, which would save time.

I’m going to be working on this over the next year or so. I’ve every intention to keep this blog updated with my progress and other related bits and bobs. But we’ll see how that pans out.

Laters…

When using the following code, inside a widget, to return posts from a custom query, you’ll find that the post title and perma-link are returned, but the post ID is not.

<?php $loop = new WP_Query($query);
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post(); ?>
	<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php echo $post->ID.' : @; the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Adding a global call to the $post variable at the top of the loop fixes this issue.

<?php $loop = new WP_Query($query);
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();
	global $post;?>
	<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php echo $post->ID.' : @; the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

while read LINE; do
   echo $LINE
done < $0

Rather handily the highlighter script has been wrapped in to widget (several actually) for easily jamming in to WordPress.

Laters!

P.S. That script is my attempt at a Quine, a cheat I know, but it was the first code sample that jumped in to my head while I was writing.

Enjoy!