spot blog

Interview Archived

The interview of me by Heather Dewey-Hagborg is archived by IndyMedia. The first couple minutes are music, just skip ahead. Thanks to Tamara for moral support ;)

050505

The 2nd Thursday from today will be May 5th and the Berkeley Center for New Media and Intel are sponsoring a conference: 050505: Zoning and Grinding. I'll present Electric Sheep in the 2nd session between 11:15am and 1pm, and also do VJ-style visuals for the concert and reception 5:30pm to 10pm. The event is free and open to the public but you must register in advance.

The program looks great. I feel honored to be in such company.

Sheep 2.6b6 for linux

tarball with improved configuration from nix at esperi dot org dot uk, plus some random bugfixes. be sure to also install this hacked version of xscreensaver if you have not already (it has not changed).

We really need new voting icons! Anyone with decent graphic design or drawing skills please lend me a few minutes of your talent! In particular I am looking for icons used to acknowledge the votes. Each is a 256x256 grayscale PNG with transparency, one is a "happy sheep" for when you vote positive and the other is displayed for negative votes. If you install and run you can see the current icons are just placeholders... No need to be fancy or creative, a quickie will do.

IP#s versus Users

One of the new features of the 2.6 sheep client is that each installation uniquely identifies itself to the server. That means I can finally count the number of users, rather than estimate it by counting unique IP addresses. After a couple weeks of beta activity I have some preliminary results: 2197 IP addresses to 1113 users. That means counting addresses is off by about a factor of 2 in the long run. When measured for one day (April 18th) it came to 505/472 = 1.07. I assume the difference results from users getting new IP#s as the days go by.

So when the 2.5 server was clocking 10000 addresses per day, it was really only getting 9300 users, if these numbers hold.

Monday 8pm Interview on Web Radio

On Monday April 25th at 8:00pm PST I'll be interviewed on Different Bits on Enemy Combatant Radio. Tune in here.

The Text of Oxyrhynchus Papyri Revealed

According to this story in The Independent, scientists are using infrared light to read the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. This collection of what appear to the unaided eye to be rotting scraps is so large their revelation is expected to increase by 20% the number of extant ancient Greek and Roman texts. In just the few days since they began reading they've already discovered new works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod. From Monkey See, Monkey Do.

Plugged in Keyboard Magazine

The April 2005 issue of Keyboard Magazine has a paragraph, photo, and side-bar about me. The photo is from the WorldSpirit Afterparty. The paragraph says:

Scott Draves has written two programs that generate abstract visuals, and they're both open source. One is Electric Sheep a distributed-computing application that generates mind-blowing MPEG2 movies of evolving fractal "flames." You can download the client, which runs as a screen saver, use the resulting movies in a show, or edit the code for your own purposes. Electric Sheep doesn't sync to audio, but its smoothly-morphing eye candy works behind almost any kind of music. Bomb is an earlier program of Scott's that runs a variety of artificial life algorithms in time to beat-detected audio.

The sidebar has links to SPOTWORKS, Electric Sheep, and Bomb. Thank you Carl &co!

Cybertrash

In Grasse I met Remy Tassou, creator of Cybertrash, beautiful and original scultpures and "paintings" made from scrap technology. Just think if this guy had access to the dumpsters of Silicon Valley!

Three Weeks of Francophilia

Sheep Nominated for Webby

I am honored to report that Electric Sheep has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Arts category. The decision is made by the Academy, but the you can vote for it in the People's Voice category. Thanks you so much!