Da fehlt doch ein F?

Schön zu sehen, dass es hier in Innsbruck noch Leute mit einer gesunden Punk Attitüde gibt. Mit der Englischen Sprache scheint es allerdings zu hapern.
ODER der Autor will die Persönlichkeitsrecht der Beteiligten schützen.
Wie auch immer, mir hat er definitiv die Mittagspause verschönert!

On my way to TweetMountain

I am using twitter now for quite a while. It has been a never ending source of inspiration and a great tool to implement and communicate some of my ideas. In the last few days I somehow realized that there are times in which the output of my twitter timeline just gets "somehow" overwhelming.

In the last view months I also started to dig a little into a programming language called processing (see processing.org). It is basically Java tweaked in a way that allows easy access to all graphic routines. Surfing thru the examples on OpenProcessing.org (a site built to share and exchange processing projects) I stumbled upon this cool sketch by antiplastik. I shows how simple physics and the use of OpenGL are in processing. This is a screen shot of the sketch in action:
Both inputs (the twitter overflow and the stacked boxes by antiplastik) fermented in my backbrain for a while till they came together in a small processing project I call TwitterMountain:
It uses little boxes that fall from the ceiling to create a pile of letters. The input is taken from my twitter timeline tweet by tweet, split into little boxes/letters and dropped onto the pile. Every now and the letters are lost and their boxes get deleted, but as twitter keeps on generating output the pile never vanishes.
My first implementation looked like this image above. The physics where there and I got the letters in the image. Twitter was connected and kept sending input.
Today I reworked it a little. First of all I added some limitations to box creation so the pile never fills my sketch completely. Secondly I created a nice sprite map that I can use as textures for the blocks. This way now the letters rotate correctly with their boxes.
So for now the TweetMountain is running and running, flooding my screen with an endless stream of tweets and letters.
There is some work left to do:
- clean code, write comments, use logging (gna gna gna... you know the routine)
- there seems to be a newer (and faster) version of jbox2d that I should check out (jbox2d is the library that does all the physics simulation in the background)
- build an Applet that can by used by everybody to watch his own twitter timeline

Maybe I even come up with some more ideas to put into the algorithm as well... I will keep you up to date with new versions.

Bulgarien in Karlsruhe

(Find an English version at the bottom of this post / Diesen Post gibt es ausnahmsweise auch noch in English).
Heute war vor dem Karlsruher Rathaus die Bulgarische Fahne gehisst. Hintergrund dafür war der Beschluss des Karlsruher Gemeinderates immer am Nationalfeiertag eines Europäischen Landes dessen Fahne vor dem Rathaus zu hissen (siehe dazu Meldung auf ka-news.de). Und wie ka-news weiter weiß "[feiern]... am 3. März ... die Bulgaren die Befreiung von der Türkenherrschaft. Das Land war von 1396 bis 1878 Teil des osmanischen Reiches. Erst mit dem Frieden von San Stefano von 1878 erlangte Bulgarien die Unabhängigkeit. In Erinnerung an dieses Ereignis heißt der Bulgarische Nationalfeiertag „Tag der Befreiung“."
Und weil ich und ein paar Kollegen gerade Mittagspause hatten, dachte ich mir, könnte man ja schnell zum Marktplatz fahren und ein Foto machen (siehe oben). Weil das aber nicht genug war, haben wir uns (Multi_media_im_Kreis-geil wie wir sind) auch noch von einer Kollegin beim Fotografieren fotografieren lassen (siehe unten).
Tja, in diesem Sinne wünsche ich allen Bulgaren, dass der Kater nicht zu schlimm wird und dass sie ihren Feiertag gut genießen konnten.

(English version [slightly shortened])
Today the flag of Bulgaria was shown in front of the mayor's house in Karlsruhe. It was there because today it is the national holiday of Bulgaria (celebrating their independence from 1878).
As we had nothing else to do in our lunch break, we went to the main place of Karlsruhe and took a picture of the flag (first image).
And media-crazy as we all are, we asked a colleague of ours to use a web cam to take a picture of us while we are taking the picture. This is how the second image was made.
I wish all Bulgarians a nice national holiday and hope they will not have too bad a hangover tomorrow ;-)