Hey! It's Drawing Day!

Have you drawn today? If not, you should :P After all, it's Drawing Day. In case you want to know, it's every first Saturday of June. It started last year, in 2008. So now is the 2nd edition. And may I say, I think this year's entry of mine is better than last year's.

I made a nice vid of my drawing:


If you want to see my drawing a little better, you can do so on deviantART.

OH! And if you have participated this year, do comment here and give me a link to your drawing :)

Drawing Day 09

It's coming! Remember Drawing Day 08? Well this year, it'll be same, but better! Personally, I hope I can find the time to draw something too, so this year we'll get even closer to the goal of 1 million drawings made for Drawing Day.

Oh yeah, did I mention it will be held on 6 June 2009? Yes, that's this Sunday. So get your gear together and draw!

Also check out this cool video:

Be amazed. Be very amazed.

I'm terribly excited right now. In just a few hours from now (May 15, 10 pm CEST), Wolfram|Alpha will open its doors. The extra cool thing is they'll be doing a live webcast of the behind-the-scenes process. So yes, I'm sure you'll be jumping up and down with excitement as you're reading this too, right?

If not, you may not realize the potential Wolfram|Alpha (I'll be calling it Wolpha from now on for convenience) possesses. Although I obviously haven't been able to try it out myself yet, I'll try to explain why you should be on the brink of falling off your chair now.

I'm pretty sure you're familiar with Google. Google is teh awesome, because it's a very powerful search engine. Theoretically, it has all the knowledgde that's publicly available in the world and then some.

But consider this. I want to know how far away from Earth the Moon is. Ok, let's Google it. [try it yourself!] Let's see... It doesn't give me the answer right away... There's some pages that seem to hold the answer though. Let's click one. Answers given on that page: "(...) about 384,403 kilometers/238,857 miles", "The average center-to-center distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 kilometres (238,857 miles)", "average distance is 238,857 miles". Ah now, that's obvious, the Moon is on average 238,857 miles away from Earth.

Now that's very nice, but as you may have noticed, that is the average distance. So it is not a constant. And so the question remains, how far away from Earth is the Moon right now! No problem, I can add 'right now' to the search query and it gives me the proper result on another webpage.

But what is its distance for example "tomorrow at 1 am CEST"? And right there, Google lets us down. But it's ok, we can't expect a webpage to interpret our human thoughts and come up with the right answer.

Or can we? As far as I understand it, Wolpha is going to do exactly that. It will tell you the exact distance of the Moon at a specific time. Or if you want, it will tell you the weather on Chuck Norris' birthday. Or it makes graphs of mathematical functions. Or it will tell you the popularity of the name "Bill" in the US over the years. Or it will compare those thingies on the stock market I have no knowledge of (if it's able to predict, I don't know). Or it will give you pi to 128 decimals. Or it calculates the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Still not convinced? Check out this screencast. But let me tell you: Wolpha is going to be HUGE!

Spammed Life

So when I wake up in the morning (or usually, afternoon) and go check my e-mail to see if that cutie finally answered my Valentine's Day card (sent back in 2007, but you have to keep hoping), I usually see something like this:



All received SL Group Notices while I was offline. It's been like this ever since I joined SL over 2 years ago. By now it's part of my daily routine to simply click the 'Select Unread' button in my Gmail, deselect any *real* e-mails and then click 'Delete' to get rid of all the now useless Group Notices. Most of them have no meaning anymore anyway, I mean "Come on down to see the show right now!" is a cool Notice, but when it's sent 12 hours ago, why would it still be relevant to me?

So on the happy day of 24 February 2008 (yes, 2008), I pointed my beloved Opera browser to jira.secondlife.com and created the issue that would haunt Lindens until today and beyond, titled: Separate 'IM to e-mail' and 'Group Notice to e-mail' options.

Yes, the dreaded issue VWR-5132, there wouldn't be a n00b that hadn't heard of it! It would gloom in the WindLight skies, making Gorean turn pale. Coders from all over the world would be flown in to fix this nasty bug. Oh yes...

But no, the Issue is still Unresolved, not to mention Unassigned, more than a year after I created it! It has but 4 votes, however I can not imagine everybody else is quite happily reading 100 obsolete Group Notices each morning. There must be more of you out there who still want to receive IMs in their e-mail, but don't want the Group Notices anywhere near it.

It is you I'm asking: Vote! Log on to SL's Issue Tracker if you need to and head over to VWR-5132 and click that Vote button! Together we can work to keep our e-mail inboxes clean!

I thank you.

I made a Quality Image

I really hadn't expected this. I just made a simple, quick animation and thought it'd be cool already if it'd just be put online somewhere. Of course I put it online myself, but I've done that before, so I knew what to expect, what would happen. And that it should take months to see if it had any effect. But now this all happened in a week.

But what happened, you may ask. You see, I was a bit bored the other day and was looking to do something constructive on Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia). I knew a few pages on the Dutch wiki, listing pages that needed attention. Whether they needed wikification or have their external links checked or anything. So I was browsing those and came across a page asking for images. Well it was all stuff I couldn't deliver, but way at the bottom was a section for animation requests. And there was the request, posted something like two and a half years ago.

I read the article in need of the animation and agreed it needed one. The text described how the object in question functions. But that was so much text, it was very unclear. I could make up from it and other images how it works, formed an image in my mind, and went ahead to make the animation. A mere 20 frames, it took me more time finding a good GIF animator for Mac.

I uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons, so it can be used in other wiki projects too (Dutch wiki, English wiki, wikibooks, wherever they want it). And put it on both the Dutch and English page where it was needed (btw, also has a French and Finnish page, but I don't speak the languages, so I'm letting somebody else add it there).

This wasn't new to me. I've done it before with photos and an animation of a movie camera shutter and film transport. So I thought what'd happen was people would put the image on other language pages and maybe their userpages. I even found my movie camera animation on somebody's blog (of course with attribution, the Commons images are generally free to distribute or edit). But all that took a long time, so I didn't expect much happening soon.

But when I checked it later, I noticed somebody'd put it on Commons' Quality Image Candidate list. And not much later, somebody else promoted it. And just a few days later now it's on the Quality Images page (and on the French Image du jour for 26 November 2008).

So now I hope you're curious about the image. And in turn I'm curious of course about what you think of it. So opinions may be posted in the comments here.

See the image on Commons: [[Image:Lever tumbler lock animation.gif]] ;) .

Out Of Order & Love Hurts - short films

I recently did on-set sound recording for two short horror films, both produced by Media Republic. I got them both on dvd, but I never knew they were online, until now. I thought it'd be cool to show them on here too, hopefully you enjoy them. As they're scary movies, they should be just right for Halloween.

I'd like to add today's my 29th birthday. That's completely off-topic though.

Oh, and the playback of these Vimeo things is terribly choppy on my machine, I hope you can see it somewhat ok. It's extremely annoying though. Don't you just hate Flash?!

Now without further ado, here's the first short film, Out Of Order, starring actress Hanna Verboom.



And what's behind door number two? Or should I say, what's film number two? Well, it's Love Hurts, starring the lovely Medi Broekman (and others, just read the credits).



Opinions and questions can be left in the comments. :)

GraphJam, I'm on it

You may have heard of GraphJam. Especially if you regularly visit sites like ICHC. Then you know what it is. If not, let me try to explain.

GraphJam is a site with, as the name implies, graphs. Afaik initially started out as graphs about songs, for example lyrics breakdowns. But the song chart meme became a bit lame, after the 8th Doo Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo graph.

So people also started making graphs about other pop culture phenomena and general things (like: Time needed to buy jeans; Women: 4 hours; Men: 4 minutes).

All graphs on the site are user-submitted. So after my Creation of a universe video, I got this idea for a graph about the LHC, made the graph and submitted it. It got listed on the Vote pages on GJ, where people can vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on graphs. If they're good enough, they'll be featured on the main site. And after a few days I noticed my graph had 95 votes, of which 91 thumbs-up and only 4 thumbs-down.

So today my graph got listed for real and people generally seem to like it, with 4.5 pies in 144 votes currently. And comments like "love it", "sexy graph" and sparking discussions about the fate of the Earth (linked to Ghostbusters). Is it really that good? Well decide for yourself. Anyway, I'm proud of it :D



Oh yeah! The GraphJam people have put an interesting video about the LHC on the same page, be sure to watch it!

Creation of a universe

Big Bang - a universe is born.

We travel through space and time, to a planet called Earth, where in Switzerland at CERN a particle accelerator known as the LHC shoots two protons into eachother. And deep within that LHC...

Big Bang - a universe is born.

We travel through space and time...

What if -we- are living on a yet undiscovered particle deep within an enormous LHC?



(If you don't get it: this is not the destruction of a universe. What the video shows is an artist's (me :D) interpretation of what goes on inside the LHC, at subatomic level. We keep zooming in, the second Big Bang is the size of a pea or so. It looks like it's as large as our universe, but it's not. We zoom in further and further. Could we go on endlessly? If we can have a tiny Big Bang, could our Big Bang also appear to be as tiny to somebody millions of times larger than our universe?)

User Generated Content Database

I once found a link in the Revver forums to the ugcDb. I was told I should register there. I followed the link, but couldn't easily figure out what it was and how it worked, so I left it, thinking I'd check it out sometime later.

As it turned out, 'later' was now. I registered yesterday and that already made it clearer to me what it's for.

First, the name. User Generated Content Database. Is that a Content Database generated by users? Yes and no. Mainly no though. It's a Database containing User Generated Content. Think about YouTube. The site itself is quite small really, just a few pages. But it's the content that makes it popular and that content is generated by users.

But one person may also have a Blogger account and a deviantART account. Of course people often use the same username, but there are most likely more people called Daedalus out there. So, if you want to know, how do you find out what one person actually made and what he appeared in?

So there's the ugcDb, which links all the accounts for one person together and even lists what the person did for the content. For example, I can appear as my avatar Daedalus Young in a photo made by Torley. I personally am in no way connected to Torley's flickr account, so I did not create his content. Rather, I am an actor in his content. So I can now be linked to that photo. Anybody interested in me (I know, I know, but it's a nice fantasy to think someone actually is) can look me up and see not only my mad art and video skillz, they can also see I can pose an avatar in the 3D Virtual World of Second Life, owned by Linden Lab, but Content generated by Users (disclaimer in the left sidebar plzkthx).

In this way, the ugcDb is much like IMDb, only not for Movies, but for online content. I think in this world, focussing more on the internet, with things like Creative Commons becoming more popular, user generated content becoming more professional (for example lonelygirl15, also on ugcDb), this database could become a very useful resource.

Their search could be improved though, if you search for my full name, I'm not found, search for my first name only to find me.

If you want, you can add yourself, but it's also possible to add other people (and works). I currently only added myself, I think it's up to everyone to add themselves. What if I add someone who doesn't want to be added?

Oh, and the cool part is you can put up a button on your blog or site :D See:

24 hours time-lapse: A day in the life

I was playing and experimenting with iMovie's built-in time-lapse function and decided it'd be cool to make a 24 hour recording with it.

I did some testing (among which a 5 hour cloud movement recording compressed to 5 minutes) and paid attention to the weather forecast as the camera would be partially outside and I didn't want rain on it. 16 August seemed to be the perfect day, so I set it all up and got ready for the recording.

I should however point out I didn't yet wanted to record 24 hours, I first wanted only the part of the day when it's actually light outside. Therefor I started the recording somewhere inbetween 2 and 3 am, just before I went to sleep, to edit out the dark part at the beginning later. The next morning (or afternoon ;) though I figured I would just let it run until 3 am to have the full 24 hours anyway. This is why it starts and ends at 3 am, rather than midnight.

After the recording it needed some more tweaking. The video initially was 48 minutes long, I squeezed that back to 24 minutes (for a technical reason: the time-lapse records frames with adjacent fields (as delivered by the camera), rather than frames with fields 30 fields apart. Recording twice as much and squeezing that back fills in the correct fields for smooth motion). This meant one second in the video represents 1 minute of the day. But 24 minutes really is too long and too boring for one shot, so for internet use I sped it up even more to its final 4:48 minutes (that's 4.8 mathematical minutes, which is 1/300th of 24 hours, so the video is sped up 300 times). I also increased the contrast in the clouds and in the shadows a bit.

I think I was lucky with the weather too, the clouds didn't move so very fast, so even at 300 times the speed you can still follow them. I personally like the part where you can actually see the sun rays underneath them most :D

The time in the upper right corner should be fairly accurate. I ended the recording at 3 am on my Mac's clock exactly, which is fed by a timeserver. The times for various positions of the Moon and Sun are taken from various internet sources and seem to be correct. Fun to see how it's light before the Sun is up and after it's set :)

Music is the song Nucleus from Epiphany, it can be found on Simuze.nl. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

So I hope you enjoy as much as I do the video 24 hours time-lapse: A day in the life! :D