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Project #2 - Color Wars 2008

Published April 17th, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Continuing my goals for 2008, here’s my second project I’m announcing:

Color Wars 2008!

When I heard that Ze Frank had joined twitter, I just knew it would be cool.
One day, he asked for bedtime stories. Then he made mention that he’d like to find a way to show all the cool ones he was getting to everyone else. (here’s where I come in) I direct messaged Ze (he re-followed almost everyone), asking if he needed any help with the bedtime stuff.

He said sure, and the @bedtime script was born.

A few days later, he posted this tweet:

And then:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

And since I had just helped him out on the bedtime, he asked if I wanted to be part of this “thing” (whatever it was!). Of course I said no… YEA RIGHT!

Color Wars is running Rails, Wordpress and come custom git magic. One of the other awesome things about this project is who else I’ve gotten to help at various parts:

This has been a very awesome experience, I’ve learned tons, and had some really cool conversations about really strange things :)

Reblogging Anil

Published March 14th, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

Anil Dash is doing a bit of an experiment. He wanted to see if people would embed his content in their site. Not by copy & paste, but by an embed.

I think this is a really cool concept, and aligns nicely with tumblr’s tradition of re-blogging posts to add commentary and opinion. Let’s hope this takes off! Owning your own data FTW!

Learning Processing

Published February 23rd, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

Processing is a really cool language / environment for doing really cool programming projects. One of the things it does really well is graphics. I’ve been playing around with it on and off for a little while now, and here are two things I’ve managed to make.

Video Offset

Video offset in processing from kastner on Vimeo.

This was inspired by Run Lola Run on the IAC wall. Mine isn’t a million miles wide, but I really love the cool effects and patterns I get.

Here’s a link to the code for it. The hardest part was translating the video input from a one-dimensional array, to a 2d one.

Falling Balls

Balls falling in processing from kastner on Vimeo.

This was inspired by a few things - one of which was Mark Chadwick’s Graffiti Particles. Mine isn’t anywhere near his, but I think I kinda understand how he’s doing the camera (maybe?).

Here’s a link to the code for this one. The hardest part was realizing that I needed to push and pop the matrix INSIDE the loop!

I’m just getting started with processing, but looking at some of the things out there it reminds me of sitting at home watching the amazing stuff coming out of the Demoscene and feeling simultaneously inspired and crushed. This is my chance to make great computer graphics, and as long as I have time here and there to work on it, that’s just what I intend to do!

To my lovely wife…

Published February 14th, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

An update to the Image Hiding toy

Published February 4th, 2008 in General. 4 Comments

I spent a few hours yesterday cleaning up, adding features and deploying (to EC2) the Image hiding app I blogged about last time.

Here’s the new address:
Highlite

That was fast

Published February 2nd, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

It was just a few hours ago that I posted my Goals for 2008 and I’m releasing my first project of the year.

It’s nothing big, but it was a fun little distraction.

The hide-an-image-in-text-with-css3-creator-thing

If you’re one of those folks who might care about how something like this might work, here’s the source.

My goals for 2008

Published February 1st, 2008 in General. 4 Comments

It’s February 1st 2008 and this is going to serve as my list of yearly goals. I’m going to review these periodically throughout the year, and have a followup next February.

Finish this blog post
Be the best father and husband I can be
“Ship” 10 projects
- 1+ on Amazon’s cloud
- 1+ with a new-to-me language (Smalltalk, Io, Python, etc)
Drop 20lbs of fat

BravoNation bookmarklet

Published December 27th, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

Andy at waxy was kind enough to invite me to Bravo Nation — A site for web-based achievements (kinda like iminlikewithyou meets xbox). After playing with their un-finished drawing tool, I wanted a way to do more with it

Since I fancy myself a hacker, I made a bookmarklet to overlay an image and draw behind it.

I grossly underestimated this task! I won’t bore you with the details (email me if you wanna discuss it: kastner@gmail), but long story short: “It works for me!”

Here’s the bookmarklet code:
DrawOverFlash.

Here’s something I made with it:

Here’s a video of me using it (double click to lock the image):

My Bookmarklet for BravoNation from kastner on Vimeo.

Here’s an image I made on Ze Frank’s Scribbler:

The new project - befuddlr

Published November 25th, 2007 in General. 0 Comments

I almost (co)wrote a book.

Sometime last year, Amy Hoy invited me to work on a book with her - “Web Scripting Power Tools”. It was going to be an advanced guide to javascript. Some things diverted my attention and the book project went away.

Amy Hoy doesn’t hate me and today we launched a project that came out of working on the book. Befuddlr!

The code is mostly JS (moo tools), but all the pretty is due to Amy’s keen eye (and keen PS skillz).

Restoring XEN DomU’s in debian etch

Published October 23rd, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

I ran into a small problem with xendomain saving and restoring domains on shutdown. It turns out the obscure unix command
cut was to blame.

the way that /etc/init.d/xendomains reads from xm list is to use this cut command:
cut -c0-19

I got it to work by changing that to
cut -f1 -d' '
and replace the $rest with
cut -f2- -d' '

Hope this helps someone (even if it’s just me in the future!)