My girlfriend is like a bajillion miles away in Peru on vacation with her mother. I just got a wonderful e-mail from her. An excerpt

¡Fergus! […]

The keyboard I’m using right now would make you crazy. Everything is moved around. It took me 5 minutes just to figure out how to get the @ symbol. I’m having a great time […]

Tomorrow we go to cuzco! I love you, Fergus. Hug your sister for me, will you? ^_^

Cariñosamente (affectionately),
your very own personal Hannah

I really, really do miss her. Glad to hear she is having a good time, but I can’t wait her to get back.

In other news, the MIT Media Laboratory is doing a study of weblogs, if you have one (yes, that includes LiveJournal), take a few minutes and fill out the survey. At the end you get a fun comparison of your blogging habits compared to everyone else who took the survey. Take a look:

And to finish everything up, have a few mindlessly cute pictures of animals:

Chinchilla, crow, grub, isopod, kittens, porcupine, sloths

So the newest version of the LiveJournal Image Feed snuck in under the door. Read about it and all its new stuff on my LiveJournal.

Sadly, LJI3, has some problems that still need to be worked out:

1. There’s some problems with the images and thumbnailing. Specifically, the system does not fail gracefully if the image cannot be found.
2. .gif images aren’t thumbnailed correctly, although everything else works with them.
3. Comments with quotes aren’t submitted to the database and therefore aren’t for some reason. So, uh. Don’t use contractions ~_~
4. The header is the same thing for everything. Although it doesn’t break anything, some of the links like ‘Fetch Again’ are only useful for one page.

Instead of doing a workaround for those mostly piddly bugs I’m going to go ahead and get cracking on a new version. LJI3 was my first experiance with coding a WordPress-style template system, but it was only really a partial success. I’m going to concentrate on designing this new version properly from the start, instead of throwing in half-working features every so often like how I’ve been doing it.

Coding a new project from scratch each iteration has become my standard practice. Arco.Log went through three such re-codes before I switched to WordPress, each version immensely better than the last. It’s time-consuming, but since I’m not doing this on a schedule or for money (thankfully), who cares? ^_^ It makes a better program.

So, I’m not sure what I want LJI4 to be. It’s going to keep the *chan style discussion, I’m pretty satisfied with that. The main problem I see with LJI is its unclear layout, which is reflected in the nasty only-sorta-decentralized speghetti code. I think I can fix this if I develop a clear design for the code before I start actually writing it.

Exciting stuff, huh? ~_~
~ LittleZephyr

Bored out of my mind while Hannah was out of town, I found an incredibly striking tool: An application that automatically produces stepfiles for Dance Dance Revolution from almost any song*. Originally a student’s project while at Imperial College London, it’s now a publicly available open-source program.

[*] For the best results, according the student’s report, the song must have a beat, preferably computer generated (Human drummers aren’t precise enough for DDR), have no tempo changes, and must be from 1 to 2 minutes. This stuff isn’t really too much of a problem, considering all DDR music is like this ~_~

It’s amazing in that it calculates the BPM, time from song start to arrow start, and arranges the arrows in a physically possible and danceable pattern all without any human involvement. It’s not perfect: the steps are a bit too easy, and the arrows usually start too early in the song, but it nonetheless manages to create good stepfiles without requiring tweaking.

The utility even manages to place freeze arrows appropriately and detects dramatic pauses in the song. I’d like to try editing a step file the program produces to try to improve the steps just a wee bit. Honestly, the grunt work of producing a stepfile may be the best use of the program.

Download and learn about the program at the Dancing Monkeys wiki, or read the student’s final report [pdf] (Quite interesting if you are a music or programming geek, talks alot about machine processing of music theory and whatnot. Worth at least a skim for the pretty pictures.)