http://alecjacobson.com/art/digital/
http://alecjacobson.com/art/
Archive for December, 2009
new confirmation number, math notes, most of a nude lady, some blue
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009Find this in quotes #1
Sunday, December 27th, 2009“felt good to david byrne”
two
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Vi(m) tip #6: save a file with digraphs as utf-8 plain text
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009I took all of my algorithms notes this semester in vim using digraphs for math symbols. Today I wanted to cat all the files and print the results. However, I had overlooked that when vim inserts a digraph it’s subtly displaying a UTF-8 character in your terminal but not necessarily saving your file with this encoding. To be sure issue the following commands from command mode in vim:
:set enc=utf-8
:e
:wq
When I want to view or print my notes, I insert them into a <pre> tag in an html document, using my converter script to take care of escaping wakkas and being sure to declare utf-8 charset in the content-type meta attribute:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv='Content-type' content='text/html;charset=UTF-8' >
</head>
<body>
<pre>
Paste escaped UTF-8 plain text here
</pre>
</body>
</html>
two nudes with ball
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
sixteen
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Super Transformation wins G4LI Game Design Challenge 2009
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Super Transformation won the grand prize ($1000) tonight at the Games for Leaning Institute’s Game Design Challenge 2009. Fellow designers Murphy Stein, Yongming Hong and I are super excited about the honor. It was a fun night seeing the competition and letting people play our game. Almost better than winning the competition was seeing a young boy get so into our game that his father had to pull him away from it. We also got to show our game at the Fall 2009 NYU Computer Science Department Showcase.
Play Super Transformation in your browser right now with Silverlight
Open an applescript display dialog via command line bash script
Thursday, December 17th, 2009I wrote an rsync based backup script for my parents’ Mac. I set it up as a cron job that backs up their hard drive to an external once a week. The only problem is that if they don’t have the external plugged in then the script has no way of letting them know that no back up took place. Since the whole point of the script was to make backing up something that just happens in the background without necessary thought I can’t expect them to read a log file etc. Instead I came up with a way for my bash script to talk to them through the GUI. So here’s my little bash script that takes a single argument which gets turned into a display box using applescript.
#!/bin/bash
# ./display-dialog.sh "Hello, world."
# Opens dialog using applescript saying "Hello, world."
#
temp_app="/tmp/$(basename $0).$$.app"
osacompile -e "display dialog \"$1\"" -x -o $temp_app
open $temp_app
Know in my script or from the command line, I can issue:
./display-dialog.sh "Hey, the back up external drive is not plugged in!"
and my parents will see:
Turn off rm, mv interactive prompting when ssh-ed into access.cims.nyu.edu
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009When I ssh into access.cims.nyu.edu and issue a rm or mv command I am bombarded with prompts for every file. For example if I issue:
rm *.pdfI have to type yes <ENTER> for every pdf in the current directory.
I have tried the -f option listed in the rm man page, but I’m still prompted. I wondered if there was a way to turn this prompting feature off. It would
be very convenient if rm-ing and mv-ing acted the same way in access.cims.nyu.edu as the other unix and linux machines I used, use and will use.
I emailed the Courant help desk and got a solution:
That’s because in the system-wide .bashrc, the mv, cp, and rm commands are aliased to “mv -i”, “cp -i”, and “rm -i”. To unalias these commands in your environment, you just need to add the following lines to the end of your ~/.bashrc.
unalias rm unalias mv
I did just that and now everything works fine.
Super Transformation (new Silverlight/XNA game)
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
Super Transformation is a new in-browser XNA/Silverlight game written by Murphy Stein, Alec Jacobson and Yongming Hong with music by Midicent. The player draws gestures with the mouse to drop transformation portals into a 2D world. The player must use these portals to navigate to each level’s exit door.
We submitted this game to the Games 4 Learning Institute Game Design Challenge 2009.
Super Transformation aims to teach 2D transformations as they appear on the New York State 8th grade Standardized Math Test. Through demonstration and experimentation in the first few levels of Super Transformation, players become aware of the effects of simple horizontal and vertical reflection and clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation. In later levels — as the game play becomes more challenging — the understanding of and familiarity with these transformations builds. Players reinforce their own learning because 2D transformation (aka the learning task) is not only built
into the gameplay, it is the gameplay.
This game uses animations I posted earlier: dude and worm.
Play it now!
Leave suggestions etc. below this post.