Weave The fifth piece in my Generative Art Practice series is called Weave. I briefly mentioned in a previous post that the mechanism by which a blank canvas is transformed into passable art is through iterative development and embracing unexpected deviation with each iteration. (more)
Nett The fourth piece in my Generative Art Practice series is called Nett. As usual, I started with a small seed of an idea and grew things from there. In this case, I started with a simulation of the flocking of birds…! (more)
Square Wave The third piece in my Generative Art Practice series is Square Wave. Square Wave was born after I (finally!) read the book Metamagical Themas, an assorted assembly of articles written for the magazine Scientific American by the cognitive scientist, computer scientist, and polymath, Douglas Hofstadter. (more)
Quad Crystals The second piece of artwork in my Generative Art Practice series is Quad Cystals. I began by drawing a set of quadrilaterals radiating out from the centre, and in fact, the piece started off life being called Quad Ray, but as the piece developed, the quads look less like rays emanating from the centre, and more like crystals. (more)
Crimson Sun Crimson Sun is the first piece of artwork in my Generative Art Practice series. The initial seed of the idea was a sunflower rather than a sun. I had planned to create a circle and fill it with triangles which would represent the sunflower’s seeds and see where that took me, but very quickly, especially as I started to colour the output in reddish tones, I realised that it looked less like a sunflower and more like a sun :) (more)
Koch Snowflake In September 2024 I attended the amazing Heart of Clojure conference. Lu Wilson gave an inspiring keynote talk about the rewards of an “open practice” of sharing openly, early and continually, no matter how scrappy the work. (more)
“My name is Bond… James Bond." James Bond is a fictional British secret agent created by Ian Fleming in 1953. Originally the subject of novels and short stories, James Bond has featured in a hugely successful franchise of films spanning decades. (more)
Although it has been several years since I wrote my last personal blog post, the prospect of writing about a centuries old mathematical problem involving goats, and my solution to it in Clojure, was too tempting to resist! (more)
An interesting feature of several widely used Asian languages is that they’re tonal. In tonal languages, changing the intonation of what seems to be the same word (at least to the Western ear) can markedly change the meaning of that word. (more)
A couple of days ago I visited the beautiful John Rylands Library in Manchester with the family. Within the library is a document recording the honour of “Freedom of the City of Manchester” awarded to Enriqueta Augustina Rylands, third wife of John Rylands, when she founded the library in 1899. (more)
Whenever I learn a new word in any language, I often find myself comparing that word with equivalent words in other languages. I was recently thinking about words for days of the week in various languages. (more)
Programmers spend more time reading code than writing it (a fact well known by most programmers who tend not to publicise this to their employers). It therefore stands to reason that (most? (more)
Front cover Django JavaScript Integration: AJAX and jQuery is a book about the building of Ajax-enabled web applications using Django and jQuery. Django has rapidly shot to fame as the most popular web development framework for the Python programming language. (more)
Front cover A recent thread on the Python Northwest mailing list asked for opinions on Marty Alchin‘s book, Pro Python. I thought I’d reproduce the answer I gave and expand on it a little. (more)
The recent freeze and thaw of the canal beside where I live has produced a beautiful natural phenomenon. Cracks in the surface ice reminiscent of neurons with pronounced dendrites have appeared in random locations. (more)
What motivates us to get a job? The instinctive answer for many might be: “To earn money!” And what motivates us to stay in that job? A member of the developed world might then pause for thought and mutter enlightened words such as “fulfilment” and “sense of worth”. (more)
About The django-hessian library serves objects via Django using the Hessian RPC protocol. Requirements The django-hessian library requires a version of the mustaine Python Hessian library >=0.1.3 which includes a Hessian WSGI server implementation. (more)
Over the last few days I’ve been playing with Hessian, “a compact binary protocol for connecting web services”. In my previous company we used Hessian extensively for communicating between a Java thick client and a Java Apache Tomcat HTTP server with good success. (more)