I made a new applet, I'm calling it 'Shimmia' and it's based on distorting an image using trig functions.

I'll probably make it better later, there's loads of fun stuff you can do with distorted images and I haven't played with them for years.

I'm feeling quite a lot better after a good hearty supper, but still not great.

I guess I felt well enough to improve this applet I'm calling 'Zoobie' (which is somewhat loosely based on caustics, as cast by things like swimming pools) enough to share it with the world at large.

My computer's behaving really weirdly today, so um, if my applets have that effect on yours, you have my apologies.

Incidentally, I've set up a WordPress blog to keep track of my PhD, if anyone's interested. I've probably tried to explain to a few of you what it is I'm doing, and very likely haven't had much success; it's possible this might do a slightly better job, particularly the introductory entry, but I'm not making any promises.

I also made another entry in my other blog a little while ago, about skywatching. Scottish skies are among my favourite things about living in Edinburgh, and one of the top reasons I almost always carry a camera.

Lots of stuff happening in my life lately, and not much journalling for quite a while, so here's a long post with multiple cuts (behind which there are quite a lot of pictures, so apologies now to anyone on dialup)...

( Old Job )

( New PhD )

( New Sculptures )

( New Applet - Variation on Old Theme )

For anyone who might be interested, I've made a sort of stripped-down version of Resonata for mobile phones and put it online, together with Rosaly, at oolong.notlong.com - again, point your Java-enabled phone there, click the 'Download Resonata for Mobiles' link and play around.

I'll clearly have to add lots of different fun stuff to it later, but I thought this was quite a nice start. Gives you a good feeling for what's actually going on, which tends to be a bit obscured by all the bells and whistles in the web version.

Incidentally, does anyone have a clue why every single community related to Java on mobiles is overwhelmingly Russian? I'm sure there must be a reason, but it's got me baffled.

Wooh, thanks to andrewducker pointing out a wonderful thing called 'Not Long' you no longer have to type http://www.mimeomai.f2s.com/applet/rosalymob/ into your phone to see the mobile version of Rosaly. If you want to see pretty swirly patterns, just point your phone at oolong.notlong.com and select the top link. It's only 8k big so it should really only take a few seconds to get. I still haven't actually seen this thing on a phone yet, but I hear good things. It makes me want to get a phone.

I've also added more controls, as detailed on that page (switch between full-colour, pastels and white! Any other requests?) and a link to the simulated-phone version.

Years and years ago now, I made a whole lot of animations using a little-known programming language called Poco. Built into Autodesk Animator Pro, it was a simplified dialect of C giving direct control over most of the things the animation package could do - which was a lot of things, this being one of the premier animation packages of the day (mid-90s-ish). It was also designed to be easy to pick up, a bit like BASIC (in which I also did some graphics programming, as a kid), to make it usable with the minimum of fuss by animators and artists who might like to just dip their feet into programming.

Unfortunately, with the arrival of Windows, a DOS-based package like Ani Pro rather quickly looked terribly out-of-date, and when Autodesk finally caught up with the times and released a half-decent 2D animation package for Windows, it came without my pet programming language. With BASIC having been abandoned by almost everyone long ago and Java not trying very had to fill the hole, the world was - as far as I've been able to tell - left without an easy-to-pick up, visually-focused programming language which artists, animators and children could play about with to see what happens. Flash ActionScript may have filled this gap, but it's certainly not as easy as it might be, and of course Flash costs hundreds of pounds.

Enter Processing:

"an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain."

I first happened across it a while ago, but fool that I am I didn't investigate it properly until about a week ago. I think I love it. Simple, beautiful, powerful. It compiles Java applets, but I'm not going to hold that against it. Let's go.

I've just made my first Processing 'sketch', a straight-down-the-line adaptation of one of those animations I made all those years ago, which Java per se just didn't provide me with any straightforward way to do. It took me maybe 15 minutes to adapt. It's not optimised, it runs a little slowly, and it's a bit dark, but it works, and I think it's fairly beautiful. Go see!

I am happy, and excited.

The only trouble is, I really don't have the time right now to do anything much else with this.

EDIT: Uh, okay, I had a few minutes while diotina's fish heated up, so I made a faster, simpler, lighter version. Looky!

EDIT2: So kick me, I couldn't help myself - here's another one. This one's interactive - click and drag in the square to change the frequency (x-axis) and amplitude (y-axis) of two interacting spirals (left mouse button and y mouse button).

EDIT3: ...and here's the second one optimised, and here it is bigger.