A month ago I announced Fictionaut, a writer’s community I co-founded back in April. Since then there have been over 200 stories posted and hundreds of interesting comments. If you’d like to take a peek, we’re now actively soliciting new users. To see what it’s all about, simply request an invitation.

Carolyn Kellog of the LA Times Jacket Copy recently had this to say:

The site has a sophisticated, clean design, one which seems to assume that its members will plunge in and begin reading with little hand-holding. With its integration of social networking and magazine-style content, Fictionaut might just take off and be the next best version of Zoetrope’s Virtual Studio or NaNoWriMo.

So when’s the official launch date? Well, we’re still watching the way the community works — if everything is running smoothly then it shouldn’t be too much longer.

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 undocumented and symbol-stripped version of my CBGameworks library.

It’s truly amazing what Ben Fry’s little framework has done to the demo scene in the past two years. Despite having made no real technical achievement, Processing has become the de-facto engine for interactive art — exhibiting itself in galleries, on magazine covers, and all over the internet. Its success lies in its simplicity, its elegance — the shared value among artists and programmers that connects both sides of the brain. And while it’s true that more powerful tools are available, nothing else comes with such a clear methodology, extensible design, and fanatical community.

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Check out the processing group on Vimeo. Stunning. The top two producers, in my opinion, are Marius Watz (watz) and Robert Hodgin (flight404) of The Barbarian Group.

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 some way.

This is tremendously cool and very thoughtful of Radiohead to copyleft this part of their work.

Unfortunately Google or Radiohead has only provided a one minute sample of the animation data, which isn’t much to work with. Of the 14,000 data downloads and counting, I think this probably explains why no one has come up with anything too striking on the YouTube Remix Group.

Still, I grabbed the data and got to work. First step: better tools. Personally I feel the Processing code is just too slow and painful to work with. OpenGL really needs to be run through native code.

So the first app I wrote is a Obj-C based first-person browser of the city street landscape (which includes 1.3 million vertices). It’s intel Mac-only and completely untested, but if you’re daring it might be fun to play with. It takes a couple seconds to load all the points, but then runs surprisingly fast. I get 30fps on my first-generation MacBook Pro.

You can download it here (21.6MB):
http://files.carsonbaker.org/hoc/HOC-CitySceneViewer.zip

Or watch a quick demonstration on YouTube.

Two more apps are on their way. One just displays the other landscape; the other is a facial animation viewer of Thom. These projects are layered on top of a custom OpenGL threaded graphics framework I built four years ago — just something that comes in handy from time to time. In a way it has kind of evolved into its own mini-version of Processing, without the performance penalties.

So, what about source code? Well, if Radiohead releases the entire data set then I’ll post sources for everything, including my graphics framework and the client code. I don’t know how hard it is to prepare the data, but I don’t think that’s too unreasonable of an idea. I think it’s win-win — more people could put together better montages with a more capable tool.

If Google decides to release more of the data, one thing I suggested is not distributing the vertex points as CSV data. It makes it much bigger to download and slower to parse. Why CSV anyway? Hopefully people aren’t opening this stuff up in Excel. Save it as binary! We can handle it. Here’s some code to do it:

http://files.carsonbaker.org/hoc/csv_to_binary.c.txt

Also — for anyone that might know:

It’s not clear to me how the Geometric Informatics capture hardware works. What’s the technology behind it? How much does their GeoVideo system cost? I’m having a hard time finding this out.

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.

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 answer, I began to explore on my own. Turns out Apple does a couple slick things with the file system to make incremental backups work.

So for anyone that needs to access their Time Machine from something other than its associated Mac, here’s how you do it:

1. Mount the drive. On linux it should automount if you have gnome-volume-manager installed. If you don’t see it in /media then run nautilus and check the desktop. Still don’t see it? Read man mount. And then don’t forget the -t hfsplus flag.

2. Change directory. My mount point is /media/Time Machine/. Within that path I find the directory Backups.backupdb/. This represents the directory layout of your backup system. Inside that directory is the name of your disk. Inside that are folders labeled with dates corresponding to each incremental backup that was made. Pick the one you want, or choose the Latest symlink. For example, my path is now:

   /media/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/Drive\ 1/2008-06-05-073745

3. Find your file’s folder. Within that path is a complete representation of your filesystem. Navigate to the location of your file. If it’s not too big or nested too deep, it may be plainly visible. However there’s a good chance that its parent directory doesn’t exist. Instead you’ll see a zero-byte file for the parent that takes its name and acts as a pointer. Run ls -l and take note of the first numbered column. Example:

   ...
   -r--r--r-- 2155704 root 5791966       0 2007-06-25 02:54 Wallpaper
   -r--r--r-- 2155725 root 5791967       0 2007-06-25 02:54 Web-Identity
   -r--r--r-- 5441953 root 5791968       0 2007-06-25 02:54 Windows
   -r--r--r-- 5511926 root 5791969       0 2007-06-25 02:54 Work
   

   After the permissions you’ll see the directory number that typically refers to the number of directories within that folder. For a file it should always be 1. Here it is not. What Apple has done is adjust the information in this file’s inode to use it as a pointer to the directory that contains the actual file. That way multiple revisions of the same drive can coexist without duplicating data.

4. Find the data. So in my case I want to grab something out of the Wallpaper folder. First I make a note of the directory number, 2155704 and then cd /media/Time Machine/.HFS+ Private Directory Data. This is where the data really lives. From there just cd dir_2155704 and voilà!