January 29, 2004
optical nanoguides
a new, extremely tiny light guide is designed quite differently. Instead of holding the light in, this nanoscale fiber lets about half its light energy flow outside in a glowing, evanescent field. It acts "like a rail for the light," said Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University who led the research team that developed what are called optical nanowires.pant pant pant, gulp
Well that was an adventure. 100 minutes ago I opened my calendar to drop in an event for this Saturday and Lo and Behold: siggraph art deadline was today! er, make that yesterday. Fortunately they are set up for online submission and I had 90 minutes to midnight. I had plenty of material ready but they wanted 400 words... I had 200 and 1600. And they wanted a 400 word artist statement. I had 70.Why does this still happen to me? I remember seeing the deadline in there just a couple of days ago. But then I was focused on the DVD and all I could say was later. It would help if my calendar were accessible from all my machines, not just the portable.
January 27, 2004
win sheep 1.1
Bugs fixed in this release: handle proxies that require a login/password, and handle empty urls. Get it here.January 26, 2004
The DVD is done!
I just burned a CD with the artwork for the package and the DVD surface. The easter egg has been hidden. All my ducks are in a row. Now onto the web site. Then the release party (yea!). Then the hard part begins: selling it. ow.January 24, 2004
blacklisting blog comment spam
Since I installed Jay Allen's Blacklist plugin to MovableType it has blocked 106 spam comments, and in the past week only 2 comments have passed through the filter. Thank you Jay!January 20, 2004
January 19, 2004
win32 sheep 1.0 final!
At long last the windows version of Electric Sheep is ready for public consumption. Get it here. Thank you Nick Long for starting the port, for persisting to completion, and for humoring my many nitpicking requests. And thank you to the beta testers who put up with so many versions. Source code zip is here. I've also made a release of the server code, now up to v2.4, also on the code page.January 15, 2004
NYE
About to wash off the make-up after NYE party at False Profit.
kunstformen at burningman
Josh Goldbergs just sent me some photos of the Kunstformen Dub playing on the Reorient dome at Burningman 2003. Thanks josh, and thanks to sasssh for hooking us up and delivering the DVD.
sheep beta 8 for win32
nick fixed the proxy bug and made a proper installer. get it hereJanuary 14, 2004
windows beta 7 without installer
This has a lot of bugs fixed: it's more reliable, it supports multimonitors, it behaves if you are disconnected from the server, and it deletes the sheep in the right order so you keep seeing new ones. It's got a bit nicer GUI in the config boxes too. Something's wrong with setup though and I can't build the installer so I'm going to release a bare scr file. Should work fine, just drop it in c:\windows\system32 or wheverever.Efros Links Back
After I gussied up my fuse page I sent mail to Alexei (Alyosha) Efros. He was kind enough to link back to me from his Texture Synthesis page, and acknowledged Fuse as prior art with the wry comment "Turns out, these ideas have been around for decades". There was an even earlier paper about the same idea (Garber in 1981) but he didn't implement it. Thank you Alyosha, you restore my faith in academia. There are four ideas in Fuse 1) texture reconstruction by markov model (non-parametric sampling). 2) using rectangles to accelerate instead of per pixel (quilting) 3) matching a target image (texture transfer), and 4) using a filtered low-resolution image to further accerlate the search. The first 3 of these are on Efros pages. An important idea that Fuse is missing is using dynamic programming to minimize the blocky effect that comes from the rectangle acceleration. Why didn't I publish this stuff back then?? Well, gotta do the screensaver version.... not to mention get it back into the GIMP.January 13, 2004
sheep in tokyo
I am pleased to announce that electric sheep was selected as "Jury Recommended" in the 7th annual Agency of Cultural Affairs (ACA) Media Arts Festival in Tokyo Japan to be held Feb 27 - March 7 in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Commandos 3 uses Sheep
As an astute reader pointed out, I'm in the credits for Commandos 3 the new game from Eidos Interactive. I haven't seen it myself yet, but I think they used some sheep animations in their splash/logo.
I think some flame/sheep animations would make really good magic/explosions/sparkles etc and I wonder if it's been used like that. I know of several movies but I don't follow the game industry... Please let me know if you see it!
YLEM presentation
Wednesday Jan 14 7:30pm I'll be giving a presentation and demo at the YLEM Forum at McBean Theater in the Exploratorium on my artwork featuring the content of the forthcoming DVD Spotworks. More on that soon!