spot blog

Electric Sheep Seeks Interns

update 12/6/2007: we have enough now, thanks for applying!

Electricsheep.org seeks programmers and web developers for internships starting ASAP. A new version of the evolving distributed screen-saver is approaching, and the time is now to make a difference. Get paid to do open source, part time! After two weeks of 8 hours each at $20/hour and a warm-up project, we'll negotiate hours and rates for the main course. We are looking for people skilled with DHTML, Drupal/php, Mac OS X Objective-C programming, and Windows C++. Especially exciting are candidates ready to jump into Android, OLPC, Laszlo, pd, Miro, or GPGPU. Or you tell me what you always wished the sheep could do and we'll make it happen. Location: NYC and online. Please submit your resume in text or PDF by email to the address on the bottom of my homepage. Thanks!

Blip.TV Sheep

thanks to blip.tv for contributing bandwidth to the electric sheep!

yay Dina and Jared!

Sheep v2.7b1 Client for Linux

At long last: the tarball, just tested on Ubuntu 7.10. It needs the latest beta of FLAM3 and ffmpeg and mplayer and curl (apt-get-able).

It's at 1/10th quality until we have about 10 users, then I'll crank it up. (Update 10/31: done, see the new server here. Update 11/16: undone, back to draft.) Bug reports and compatibility issues most welcome.

The protocol design wiki.

FLAM3 2.7.6 released

FLAM3 2.7.6 released, download it here. The changelog:

Fixed action string overflow when many xforms are present. Added 'print_edit_depth' env var to control how many levels of edit tags are saved when using flam3-genome. Fixed wrong placement of random improve_colors code in flam3-genome. Go to five digit filenames. Fixed bug in supershape variation. API cleanup, thanks to david bitseff.

HiFiDreams at Horizons

Next Saturday Dreams in High Fidelity will be shown at Horizons, a conference on contemporary perspectives on psychedelics. Speakers include Ethan Nadelman and Rick Doblin. Artists include Leo Villareal, Anakin Koenig, and James Vogel. Deets:

Saturday October 27 2007 12pm - 8pm
Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

Advance tickets recommended.

Hope you see you there!

Electric Sheep Mac OSX client v2.6.9 released

get it here. release notes:

Version 2.6.9 updates by Jeff Sickel and spot

Principally supports having a cache directory that consists of subtrees from bittorrent downloads. Instructions for the torrent feed can be found at http://draves.org/blog/archives/000379.html. Just have your torrents moved into the cache directory on completion.

Cleaner loop selection instigated from commentary issued by: Michael Hohimer in http://draves.org/HyperNews/get.cgi/flame/2506.html Tom Lane in http://draves.org/HyperNews/get.cgi/flame/2506/1.html

Code base cleaned up in preparation for 2.7--much of the source closer to reference C code by Spot.

Animation frame selection now controlled by ScreenSaverView's -animateOneFrame method instead of using additional timers for MPEG2View's control.

Additional updates for Apple IR Remote.

Replaced CURLHandle with NSURLConnection api to support proxy configurations. Depending on your site configuration\ , you may need to add /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app to your http\ proxy keychain.

Exposed a prior developer options from build 2.6.4 for saving generated flame frames. Settings can be found in the\ Desktop & Screen Saver preferences under "Render".

Added support for Apple's Remote on the new line of machines with the IR device. Code pulled from http://www.marti\ nkahr.com/source-code and supports:

- kRemoteButtonVolume_Plus votes 'yes'
- kRemoteButtonVolume_Minus votes 'no'
- kRemoteButtonMenu displays status
- kRemoteButtonMenu_Hold hides status

and when iTunes is enabled:
- kRemoteButtonPlay play/pause iTunes
- kRemoteButtonRight next track
- kRemoteButtonLeft previous track

Qosmic Recursive Fractal Flames

I am pleased to report a native Linux Fractal Flame editor has finally appeared: qosmic. Thanks David! I look forward to seeing how this software develops. It uses the Qt UI toolkit, links with FLAM3 2.6 (an old version), and is inspired by the windows editor, Apophysis.

warning: back up your flock

With the conception of sheep 202.99982, the flock is rapidly approaching unknown territory: the file format only supports 5 digits so sheep 100000 will roll over to 00000. The previous record was generation 198 which lasted until sheep 198.31923.

It's possible the server or your client will crash, possibly resulting in all your sheep being deleted. So now would be a good time for backups :) i've slowed the generation way down to give a chance for word about this to get out. if all goes as planned you won't even notice that anything happened but you never know... my fingers are crossed!