30 Cards
120 Cuts
60 Joints

If I were to do it again, I would find a more accurate way of making the cuts.

Credit where it is due: I made this following Grorge Hart’s example.

My last post was dice. Tonight it is cards. Perhaps it is time for me to branch out?

My dice portrait of Albert Einstein is finally finished and hanging on my wall.

A little over a year ago, I read a blog post about creating an amazing portrait of The Madonna using dice. I loved the idea, and after some minor hesitation, decided to blatantly steal the concept. Einstein would be my subject, almost purely so that I could use this title, though it is a bit of a mis-quote. I immediately started writing code to visualize different dice images, and playing with different algorithms for picking the dice. In an effort to differentiate my project I tried using a mixture of black and white dice to give 12 colour choices.

Ultimately I decided that the resulting image looked too blocky and pixelated. I was able to generate some interesting images by adding grey dice and working with 18 shades. But that seemed to sacrifice some of the purity, fun and craziness of making an image in dice. As one of my friends said, I might as well be working in a medium that is appropriate for a portrait if I am going to throw grey dice into the mix.

An idea from the reddit discussion of The Dice Madonna was rotating the 2s, 3s and 6s to create more detail. I experimented with generating images that rotated these dice and used an error calculation to look for an improvement. I was never able to generate a result that I was happy with using this technique. I find the white space created by rotating adjacent 2s and 3s creates weird interference patterns without contributing to the image. Here is an image showing the problem.

I ultimately decided on a 4950 dice image generated with a population algorithm for dice distribution. My final image uses some rotation of 2s 3s and 6s in very limited situations. I also experimented with dithering, but decided against it.

Once I had an image, I ordered 5000 dice from Koplow Games. I chose the 12mm dice, as they are smaller, lighter and cheaper than the more common 16mm dice. However they are still large enough to qualify as what most people consider normal dice.

The next step was to build a flash program to help me place the dice. Follow the link to try it out. Click to give the program focus, and use the arrow keys to move around the image.

Actually placing the dice took about 12 hours, spread out over a week. A friend built a case from plywood and lexan, which was a huge help. Carpentry is not one of my strengths. Interestingly the assembled dice were not very square. There is enough variation in the dice that I needed to use foam tape around the inside of the frame to even the edges out. The final package weighs 53lbs, and I was concerned about hanging it from the wall. But a trip to a local framing store provided all of the needed hardware.

I took me over a year of off and on work to go from idea to art on my wall, but it was very fun. Incredibly, about a month ago I saw this link to a 10 year old web page that demonstrates just how rare new ideas are.

XKCD nicely demonstrates another problem. I constantly interrupted what I was doing to check for new and interesting things online. I was especially bad for doing this to procrastinate. When I encountered something difficult while working on a task I immediately opened a new tab and loaded a news site.

I’m happy that I don’t watch TV. But my web habits were just as bad as a TV addict’s. I find the web is a particularly dangerous time sink. I can find a constant stream of intellectually stimulating content, and I can participate in the conversation. Time on the web can easily feel like getting real work done.

All of my reading introduces me to fascinating ideas. And I’m well informed about trends, particularly in the technical areas I am interested in. But my reading was eating huge amounts of time. When I noticed how bad it was, I gave it up for a month. I decided that for the month of October I wouldn’t read any online news.

I did not intend to fully disconnect from the web. I kept my RSS feeds. If I was looking for something, I googled it. If someone sent me a link, I followed it. But I didn’t visit my standard list of sites for news and entertainment.

I don’t watch TV. I listen to the radio very little. I don’t read newspapers or magazines. And now I was giving up my online news sources. I was concerned about being out of touch with the world. It wasn’t a problem though. If the news was important enough, I heard about it via friends, coworkers or my RSS feeds. I didn’t miss being out of touch. If I had read Boing Boing and Reddit, I would have learnt far more than I needed to about balloon boy. As it is, I’m only vaguely aware of the story.

I kept to my self imposed ban quite successfully. Initially I was shocked at how often I opened a new tab, typed in http://slashdot.org, realized what I was doing, and closed the tab. It wasn’t until almost the end of the month that I broke that habit. I wasn’t completely successful in cutting out my online time wasting though. I started visiting twitter and facebook more than I normally would, checking for updates and information. In retrospect, I should have banned them as well.

The strangest part of the experience is that don’t know what I did with all the time I saved. I didn’t spend a lot of time with family or friends. It doesn’t seem like I accomplished much on my personal projects. My apartment is a mess, and I have a stack of laundry to do. I didn’t spend much time playing video games or reading books. It’s like the time just disappeared. Was I abducted by aliens? A friend suggested that video surveillance footage would show me standing in the doorway of my computer room for hours, frozen with indecision when denied the option of visiting news sites.

I know I wrote a lot of email to a friend in Afghanistan. Now I want gmail to provide analytics for my email account. How many words did I write, and to what email addresses in October? How does this compare to other months? How much time did I spend reading and writing mail? I imagine Google already logs this stuff. I’d love it if I had access to the data. Maybe I should give RescueTime a try, and track what I am doing with my computer. It might show that I am more productive than I give myself credit for.

Now that my month is up I am much less interested in constantly visiting my favorite sites to see what is new online. I seem to have broken the habit, and I’m happy I did.

On the first of November I went to Reddit and loaded the list of the top links from the previous month. The top link, with 4357 points, was titled Well that explains it [pic]. Perhaps I didn’t miss much.

The conversation starts with Joel Spolsky stating that the real reason why startups fail is because their founders give up.

The response to this is; yes, and their real cause of death is always heart failure. Why do founders give up?

Paul Graham replied:

The biggest reason founders stop working on their startups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

Then a later in the conversation he said:

There seems to be some tendency of never-give-ups to cluster, but it’s not absolute. It’s common to have one founder who’s super determined and another who is less so.
If the never-give-up is sufficiently convincing, that’s almost as good as having all never-give-ups. He drags the rest along. The dangerous case is the startup that has all middle of the road founders. These have to get lucky fairly quickly or they give up.

This struck me as really deep, important stuff. I was surprised that it didn’t receive more attention from the Y Combinator community. Apparently Joel also found the discussion interesting, and wrote about it in his Inc. Magazine column.

In a nutshell, Graham’s observation is that if you have “unlimited self-generated morale” you will almost always succeed. If you don’t, you need to get lucky fairly quickly or you risk becoming demoralized and giving up.

When I read this I immediately wanted to know what the difference was between those in the first category and those in the second. Unfortunately, the discussion thread didn’t offer much useful insight and I didn’t find an answer to my question.

I recently started Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. Her theory is that people view the world with two different mindsets. People with a “growth” mindset believe that their abilities and intelligence can improve over time through hard work and challenging situations. People with a “fixed” mindset believe that their abilities and intelligence are innate and fixed. This difference may seem relatively minor, but according to Dweck’s research it has deep implications for how a person deals with challenges.

Here are some quotations from the book. I appologise for the lack of context.

The more depressed people with the growth mindset felt, the more they took action to confront their problems, the more they made sure to keep up with their schoolwork, and the more they kept up with their lives. The worse they felt, the more determined they became!

Also interesting:

People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it.

Finally:

Students with the fixed mindset stayed interested only when they did well right away. Those who found it difficult showed a big drop in their interest and enjoyment. If it wasn’t a testimony to their intelligence, they couldn’t enjoy it.

Sound familiar? I don’t know if Dweck’s growth mindset is the key to Graham’s unlimited self-generated morale, but the dots seem to connect.

Dweck’s theories appear to be backed by sound research. Also, she claims that it is possible to learn the growth mindset, which is encouraging. I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.

Links:

• Paul Buchheit discusses Dweck’s research
• Wikipedia’s Article on Mindset
• Mindset Online
• Buy Mindset from Amazon (Not an affiliate link.)

Penguin Party

If you’d like some context, this Coke commercial might help you out.

The comic started as pencil drawings. I “inked” and coloured scans of the drawings in Flash to produce the final version. Drawing, or in this case tracing, with a mouse kind of sucks.

I should know better than to doubt the internet. In the logs for this blog I discovered a page that linked to my post. I am not the only one who has looked into this. And where I failed, others have been successful. It originated from the 1980 movie The Ninth Configuration. Follow the links to learn more:

whirlpool.net.au hosts a forum thread that lead me to this information.

Not The Wilhelm Scream is a page dedicated to the sound effect. It has lots of detailed info.

Wikipedia had an entry on the topic, but it has been deleted. Wikipedia knows many things, but it is not all knowing.

Continuing with the topic of doubting the internet’s knowledge, I once failed to find information on the etymology of Cottage Cheese. Searching today though, I discovered multiple links claiming that the term came from American colonial times when it was commonly made in Cottages (country houses). Which seems obvious in retrospect. I also learned that the word cottage has origins in cot, which is related to hut. Neat.

At one point I had considered creating a category on my blog for things the internet does not know. I’m starting to think this would be a waste of time. If the internet doesn’t know the answer today, wait a couple of years and ask again.

Using the Apple Education store, the back to school iPod rebate, and some upgrades from a local shop, you can get:

• 13″ Macbook, 2.1Ghz Core 2, 4gb ram, 160gb 7200rpm Hard Drive
• 120gb USB External Hard Drive.
• 8gb iPod Touch

The total price after rebates?  $1260 Canadian.  The only downside is the integrated video chipset that the macbook uses.  It’s a good deal if you are in the market for a laptop.

Download the Windows Version.
Download the Python Source.

This was approximately my seventh time participating in an ld48, and the fifth time I have completed a game.

What went right

• Simplicity. At one point I considered a more complex game concept where players had to minimize the junk in their house with platformer gameplay. I think sticking with the dots concept was the correct decision.
• Gameplay. Early on I focused on creating a good feel with the player movement. Then I spent a lot of time getting the physics of the bouncing dots working well. Finally I implimented the “power pellet” mechanic. I really focused on the details of the gameplay, and I think this is why such a simple game idea turned out to be reasonably fun.
• Completion. I’ve learned that with a 48 hour competition you very quickly reach a point where you need to stop thinking about adding missing gameplay features, and start working on pulling what you have together into a finished product. Simple things like intro screens go a long way to helping people play your game.
• SXFR. Creating some minimal sounds couldn’t have been easier. This really is a great tool. I kind of regret the high pitched power up sound that I put in, but no one else has complained about it, so maybe it isn’t so bad.

What went wrong

• Losing Motivation. I started strong on Friday, but for a good part of Saturday I wasn’t excited about my concept, and my productivity suffered. Fortunately on Sunday as the game started to come together my motivation picked up again.
• Lack of Polish. The final game took shape quite late into the competition. I got some nice elements into the game, but more polish is always better. This also meant that I didn’t have time for people to test it, and I wasn’t able to put much work into balancing the game play. Fortunately I think I did pretty well with the settings. It’s a bit on the difficult side, but it’s meant to be a quick game.
• Python Problems. I had major last minute headaches packaging the game with py2exe. As well, it seems that several people had problems running the game. This turned out to be the sort of game that would be perfectly suited to run in a web browser, and in retrospect I should have used flash.

Conclusion

I’m reasonably happy with the game. In the judging I recived very middle of the pack scores from the other participants. But what I was happy to see was positive feedback from several participants that are tallented game developers that I respect a great deal.

Here is a link to ratings and full details for dots.

Last month there was an informal weekend long game development competition that Jay and I were planning on participating in. One of the themes chosen was “anti-text”. The voting was happening in IRC, and Jay suggested that we create a textless IRC. The idea of making something like a web based pictochat was kicked around, and after spending the weekend working on it we ended up with imageboard.net.

We built a site that is like a web based discussion form, except that you draw low resolution pixel art instead of typing text. I made the pixel art application in Flash, and Jay did the backend in Python, as well as the HTML/CSS/Javascript. Our icons on the web interface were contributed by users.

The site has resulted in some awesome pixel art, as well as some really clever image threads. For example, chickenz is one of my favorites.

Here are the top voted images, animations, and threads.

Here are the images that I have signed.

Now that you are done reading this, go draw something. The site is more interesting when more people are playing with it.