stuff by antimatter15

During the last two days I worked a bit on my cross platform, Raphael based vector graphics editor. It now supports Firefox, Opera, Chrome, probably Safari and magically, something called IE. Yes, it works on that nasty terror. Really, the project started with just the idea of being able to support IE. Sure it has a few neat features (multiple select mainly), but the fundamental idea is to support IE and to do so in a stable manner. It’s actually running quite well in IE, though only the latest version has been tested.

Among the updates is a new delete tool that is far more flexible and powerful. It is now not just a button but an entire tool. So while you can still click on it to delete your current selection, you can also use the tool to click on shapes or drag and delete whole groups (not sure what that thing is called). It even has a nice red tint to signify deleting. There is also event listening, vX support (it only uses events and position), and selecting fill, stroke, stroke opacity, fill opacity, and stroke width.

It also integrates well into the Ajax Animator in an almost drop-in replacement type. Maybe eventually something to choose between VectorEditor and Onlypaths. The really only bug features there are multiple select and drag and line editing.

Lines are now done almost perfectly. Dragging them works perfectly and it shows two little boxes on the ends that fan be dragged to edit. This vastly simplifies the old issues with lines and stick figures. Stick figures that inherently satisfy me a lot because that was the highes level of animation I ever did.

It’s probably a bad thing that the developer od an animation application never did anything more complex than stick figures, and probably makes it seem strange for me to even start it. But anyone with more knowledge of animation would not be so naiive as to attempt this.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

The idea of a Web Browser as the OS is nothing new, and most people know it. As for current things, they’re basically very restricted normal operating systems. Google wouldn’t do something like that without tons of innovation and killer features.

I’ve been watching some google techtalks in the past few days, and I think it was interesting how the one on Wuala (a distributed filesystem) was started with the google guy saying “this talk is being recorded so please refrain from mentioning any google sensitive information in your questions”. While it may be referring to the Google File System, I don’t think it’s too similar to Wuala. So I think the idea of cloud storage distributed among peers is an attractive idea since what would you actually use the hard disk which most netbooks do have, and keeping all your data locally doesn’t really contribute to the whole idea to cloud computing.

So even though the algorithms that transform the calibration box aren’t working accurately yet, TUIO support has been made, so you can use apps like TUIO Mouse to control your computer and other touch demo things.

This is the app running, notice that it’s not yet been calibrated yet.

Here is the auto-calibration process, it alternates between black and white

This is part of Auto-Calibration.

This is some stuff from the command line:

This is just hovering over the screen, notice it’s not touching, and the algorithm can distinctly recognize the lack of a touch because the reflection is seperated from the finger by a significant gap. (Compare the top red bar).

This is a actual touch, you can see that the red bar is far larger, and it’s very distinctly a touch event.

There’s a draw tool and, here is a primitive drawing of a smiley. The dots come from an issue with PIL/OpenCV or something that makes the image all chopped up and sends the point to an arbitary point on the screen.

This is the magical sensor the whole thing is powered by: An unmodified Playstation 3 Eye on a tissue box with a pink Office Depot eraser on the back (because the camera is made tilted and the script can’t handle those tilts very well)

It’s not too insanely slow either. This is 31 frames per second coming from a pure python app, all from a scripting language. It is nowhere as fast as the normal fast native apps.

Well, I wanted a demonoid account for no apparent reason. So I wanted to search for private trackers, and found this app called Tracker Checker 2 It’s great and all, but it doesn’t work well on linux. Or at least for me, I run it and it pops up a window for a few milliseconds and then closes. There’s nothing in the tray but the process looks like it’s still running. So I looked at the trackers.xml file and thought it would be easy to create another one.

So I quickly hacked together a python script that parsed the xml file and checked for trackers. For some reason, Demonoid said it was open while it was actually closed, so I made a little extension to the format.

I’m actually probably not gonna use this, but I’ve made this private tracker registration checker app in python. It uses a trackers.xml file that is compatable with the Tracker Checker 2 app. It supports a slight extension to the protocol by being able to check if a certain phrase is not in a page. It’s multithreaded and uses expat for xml parsing and urllib2 to download the pages.

I think it would be pretty cool to integrate it with XMPP and port it to Google App Engine, and send out alerts to people when trackers are open.

It has no UI, it’s just a little command line app that could be used as a cron job and integrated with XMPP.

Download here