Mixed Day

5th May, 2007

Ok, so its my brother’s 18th birthday which means that instead of revising for the AI exam I have plenty of distractions.

Some good news in the form of our idat205 Eden Game has been uploaded to the Eden Project’s website, and has been featured in a BBC news press release!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/6629765.stm

New Website Design in production

Meanwhile I am working to produce a new website design, which I am happy fulfils every intricate criteria I am striving for, and replace the current site which was a result of mashed together previous attempts with the aim of trying to keep everything active. So essentially EVERYTHING needs to be replaced and unified. This is of course while I am heating up the search for a placement.

Other Stuff

Seems relevant to the impacts of digital media as studied in idat203 –
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6627135.stm

An Update

27th April, 2007

Having worked right up to the deadline on the final courseworks for idat203 and 205 I’m pretty glad thats all over. And some good feedback from the few results I’ve had back.

AI Coursework

Exercise 4 – Tic Tac Toe AI – Play this simple noughts and crosses game against either an intelligent computer player, or one who choses moves at random.

Exercise 2/3 – A-Life and Genetic Algorithms – Demonstrates the evolution of insect-like organisms through the process of selection and mutation. Start by clicking ‘Initialise’ and then trying to catch 4 parent organisms before clicking ‘Replicate’ and watching the outcome of your selection.

Exercise 1 – Flash Arrays for Vectors and Matrices – A demonstration of the use of vectors and matrices, an important component of AI.

Eden Game Project Thoughts

6th February, 2007

Some Ideas for Game Formats

The games produced by Eyemaze are visually intriguing logic puzzles and I can see how such a mini-narrative puzzle might be applied to a crops and global warming story.

In particular, take a look at growcube,http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/index.html

Because we needed to know for research, and it was damn difficult to find when I searched, the correct order for growcube is: guy, water, plants, pot, tube, fire, bowl, bone, ball and spring.

eCo

22nd January, 2007

eCo

Is the name for our environmentally aware software and web design company, the task for which is to design an online interactive game for Eden Project. Nice and round shape to it I think (the word and capitalisation of the ‘C’), lending itself to a nice glassy spherical icon logo.

soft221

Handed soft221 coursework in at last, and now onto the final essay. It makes one wish http://dack.com/web/bullshit.html was a bit more comprehensive… Soft 221 work can be seen here, but try using firefox or IE6 for this rather than IE7, unless of course you have specifically re-allowed java applets to be run.

The Creative Garden

25th November, 2006

This weekend I will spend pulling The Creative Garden website into presentable shape and form, while writing the basic textual content.

The Creative Garden Company

Lots of work… all at once!

25th October, 2006

Not a great amount of time has been available for blogging so here is an update:

soft221

In addition to the current projects with rapidly approaching deadlines we have been introduced to a small mid-term exam from soft221. Marvellous stuff.

HCI

HCI (Human Computer Interaction or isad223) will be wanting coursework done by the end of this term, involving the creation of an interface based on the design techniques learnt here. That would be a four thousand word essay comprising 100% of the overall mark for this module.

Simulacrum 3D Video

Simulacrum (trans-spacial design) admittedly has been in the pipeline for a while but at least there are a number of thoughts as to an idea (I like this project as its the first that asks for a reasonable amount of creativity from my part – yes thats not f*ing actionscripting aka java) if not much to show for it yet. I have effectively what I want to create planned out already, but more of that to be revealed soon…

Critical Contexts

Idat203 – Critical Contexts, what else can be said? The ‘other’ four thousand word essay comes to mind.

Organism Project

Orrrrganism project proceeds and has a week-before-deadline deadline tomorrow, hence this is my current activity. The flowers grow, the bees move. The flowers currently undertake a form of assexual reproduction though, and literally create a clone seed of themselves which is planted and grows and seeds etc.

Creative Garden

For the Creative Garden company, our chosen niche of professional school and college websites seems very fruitful.

Oh yes and finally, I still want to create a working new design for my own website!

Creative Garden and Generative Art

12th October, 2006

Creative Garden Update

Each of our roles have been decided for The Creative Garden team, and work gets underway to creating our company persona, website and example products. It has been decided for now that I should produce the main HTML portfolio website while Tom and Lloyd handle the visuals and portfolio pieces.

idat 203

I have now considered examining the Generative Webpaintings by Stanza as a basis for my work in idat203. It has also been suggested to me that I should look into the photographer and artist Paul Smith (http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/)

Other Stuff

Catalina Estrada – Artist from the Computer Arts magazine also featuring an ex-MLA (media lab arts was the course I signed up for but it changed to i-dat on our first year), Pete Harrison.

Back to replicating bees; having placed traces on every value surrounding the creation and death I have discovered the problem was far more elusive than I thought originally. Every-so-often a bee would die twice, or even three times, causing the total count to go down more than it should for a single death. The effect of this can be seen here, but be warned, running this for a while means a lot of extra bees and serious CPU stress. ALSO, it quite often needs to be left a while before things start to happen.

UPDATE: An even better code bug, just wait for the second generation plants to reproduce…

The Creative Garden

3rd October, 2006

We begin the plans for our brand new imitation company, The Creative Garden, an internet-based web design company that creates websites specifically for schools. I will be working alongside my compatriates Tom Stembridge and Lloyd Randall for this group based project.

Promotional Website Specifics

We have chosen the idea of a garden to promote both growth and and a fertile environment as well as healthy, natural and fresh web design. In turn, the look of our site and products should feature aspects along this theme. The main site is being developed at http://www.cgarden.srjm.co.uk/.

Having checked for any domains for the words ‘Creative Garden’ we’ve found that it is quite popular so securing a real domain would be very difficult.