And my web browser of choice is Safari 3.0 for Leopard. Unfortunately this makes viewing TIFF images of the Patent Office’s website an absolutely abysmal experience.

So today in CS421 I found GreaseKit, a Safari Plugin that allows one to run Greasemonkey-like scripts on web pages in Safari. So I wrote a userscript: usptofix.user.js to change the <embed> tag to the <img> tag, resulting in success.

(original left, modified right)

I simply scale the TIFF to the page width, and everything is okay.

Unfortunately, it crashes Safari half of the time I load this page; I’ve reported a bug against GreaseKit.

It is probably better to just use Google Patents, but at least I learned something.

After a bit of work over Thanksgiving break, I was able to get the laser projecting Asteroids well enough to play. I apologize for the quality of the photos, but we were really interested in doing it BIG, so the beam was dim and my camera didn’t capture it especially well.

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I was happy to see a number of ACM folk braved the extreme cold weather to play Asteroids on exterior walls at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, an excellent venue which I intend on visiting again next Friday, when my good friend Erik will be playing Cello in the last orchestra concert of the semester.

This whole event turned out to be a quite a success with a Hot Cocoa + Helvetica reception afterwards, despite the fact that the software is still mostly a quick hack. I look forward to further development of additional laserware on the Mac.

Now just to write the real optimization code to make it work well… : )

So, the status of “LaserMAME” has always been kind of up in the air. Links to one associated site, NightLase laserMAME, are currently down. There was that excellent video that circulated the net under the filename lasermameNTSC.mpeg, but I don’t really even know who created that. I’ve played Asteroids in color on a Pangolin system, so I’m not sure if that was a complete clone or what–(ask me about that story sometime in person)–and finally, there has been some discussion on the LaserFreak and Pangolin Forums that seemed as if there was some question about who did the work and who has the rights to LaserMAME. I think a system was even commercialized and available for rental at some point.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in getting in to those politics. But one recent event got me–uhm…motivated–to enter the arena of playing classic vector games on a laser projector. It seems like a most natural thing to do and looks completely awesome. Even the high end graphics people at SIGGRAPH this year loved the ultimate saturation and archaic wireframe visuals generated by a laser projector playing vector games from ‘79 and the 80’s.

When Paul Debevec introduced the Electronic Theater showing we were fortunate enough to have at the NCSA building on November 8th, he excitedly highlighted the laser enabled MAME setup that they had installed when first showing these videos in San Diego. I was excited to hear this and even more pleased when he put up the photo of the renown laserists and others involved with getting the system working; Steve Heminover (who I’ve been lucky enough to meet), Matt Polak, and others.

I have an extreme amount of respect for the people involved here. They’re the world’s experts on laser display, and the production quality was fantastic, but I must admit through the whole video demo, I was thinking, “Hey, it can’t be that hard–everything is already in vector format. What’s the big deal.”

So last night after we got some ice cream at Cold Stone, despa and I got to coding. It took a good 2 or 3 hours to get MacMAME to compile. After that, in another couple of hours we hacked up a prototype of laserMAME using the EasyLaseUSB on Mac OS X. I know we’ve got the math wrong (we didn’t know the range of the x and y coords–and the documentation is temporarily unavailable on the MAME website), but we got Asteroids working with some display bugs.

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I think another couple of nights of hacking could make it really beautiful.

I apologize for the poor quality of the projection, images, and video, but I was so excited we got something working, I wanted to publish right away. I expect we’ll have much better results before, say, March 2008. More to come.

So, when I came home from WWDC this summer, excited about all the new technologies, I quickly got started on a Quick Look Plug-in for ILDA files. I was super excited I quickly got it working, but I couldn’t tell a soul due to that NDA thingy. : ( But Leopard is out now, so I can reveal it. It isn’t very stable now, mostly due to an out-of-date version of ILDAlib that it is using; but I’ve added it to the LaserLine source, so anybody with a free afternoon can debug it and add colors and things. The drawing code should be pretty much verbatim to that in ILDAInspector, but it needs error checking and stuff on loading the files. Further, the project should reference the shared code portion of the source tree, not it’s own copy of ILDAlib.

ILDA Quick Look Plug-in

I recently was informed that the Justin.tv dashboard widget isn’t working properly with the latest versions of the website. I’ll be taking a look at this soon and getting a patched version out. Doesn’t look like it will be too tricky. The new version will also be able to access all available streams.

Sorry about the inconvenience, but I was unaware of it’s problems for some time.

Upgraded:

• WordPress to 2.3.1
• Gallery to 2.2.3
• wpg2 to 3.0.2

Note, that images just got fancier with Lightbox. When you click on them now, they do fancy things, rather than take you to a new page.

Enjoy

As an avid reader of xkcd I was of course excited when the author Randall Munroe came to speak at our annual ACM Reflections | Projections conference this October. According to Wikipedia, Randy previously spoke at MIT and WPI, though I can’t say I knew about the WPI event before researching this. At those talks it has become a bit of a tradition to play some sort of prank or disrupt the talk with a thematically appropriate display of some element present in his comics.

It was not original, but compulsory to create some [citation needed] signs–just like the Wikipedian Protester displays. I used the CS Department Plotter, some scrap Foamcor, and spray adhesive to build them.

I got mine signed

But the signs were just for starters. Mo thought it would be a good idea to drop several thousand spiders from the ceiling of 1404, ideally more impressive than the meager number of playpen balls dropped from the ceiling at MIT. So she bought them, and several of us spray painted them red. Unfortunately at this point we did not know how to drop them. A Thursday night investigation of 1404 Siebel informed us that there was no way to access the ceiling. Blueprints didn’t help find any service catwalks, there wasn’t any way we could get a ladder up there. Let me give you the play by play from here on out:

• Thursday - Start painting Spiders red.
• 
• 12:00 AM Friday - Discover there isn’t a good way to reach the ceiling.
  Consider attaching something to the projector screen. Infeasible.
• 2:00 AM - Build the whole crazy remote controlled box thing. Extract some magnets from a hard disk, find and get a Futaba R/C Radio working. Apply duct tape liberally.
• ~Insert some sleep, things get fuzzy around this point. I think I took an exam in the interim as well.~
• 2:00 PM - Purchase balloons, fishing line, batteries
  
  • Add twice as many hard disk magnets to hold box to ceiling.
  • Rebuild latch mechanism, as we found it didn’t work with the weight of the spiders.
  • Head to ACM Conference Room and build crazy balloon rig to get a wire over the rafters in 1404.
  • Get very worried while trying to eat dinner, afraid there won’t be enough time.
• 6:15 PM Yahoo Hack Day Competition finally clears out. We begin hanging box in front of a few people still left in the lecture hall. Everything goes to plan, except the cable that we pulled it up with doesn’t descend as planned. Nobody notices.
• 7:00 PM finish hanging up box
• 
• 7:15 PM Yahoo Awards begin
• 7:45 PM Talk starts
• 7:56 PM Randall mentions something about what would be interesting to drop from the sky on unsuspecting people (in the context of a kite flown 2km high with a dangling string from the line).
• 
• 7:57 PM 2000 red spiders fall from the sky controlled by radio.
• 
  

More Pictures

I think it was a success. We all had fun, and the crazy contraption held up all right. Perhaps the most interesting part of it was getting the wire over the beam in the lecture hall. I’m not quite sure how to illustrate it, perhaps a cartoon is appropriate? I’ll get sketching.

I here announce the release of Subjectivity 1.0. Subjectivity is a Mail.app plugin that helps prevent against accidentally sending e-mail messages from Mail.app that lack a subject line. It is pretty simple, but hopefully quite valuable.

This first version is written in PyObjC, following the guidance provided by the author of the of the Mail Attachment Scanner. It works well, but hopefully a future version implemented in Objective-C will reduce file size and add support for Mac OS X’s summarization services.

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Download Subjectivity v1.0 (Universal):

Subjectivity.dmg.