Program or Be Programmed

Via OnlineCollege.org

Sparkfun parts in Fritzing

The Fritzing software now contains parts from Sparkfun. Sweet!

Paintings as pie charts

Paintings as pie charts.

Ira Greenburg at FSU Digitech

Ira Greenberg, Director of the Center of Creative Computation and Associate Professor at SMU, an active developer of the Processing software, and the author of Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art, will be speaking at FSU Digitech, Friday March 30 at 12:30.

Ira’s Blog: http://iragreenberg.net
Ira’s Work: http://www.iragreenberg.com

With an eclectic background combining elements of painting and programming, Ira Greenberg has been a painter, 2D and 3D animator, print designer, web and interactive designer/developer, programmer, art director, creative director, managing director, art professor, and author. He wrote the first major language reference on the Processing language, Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art, friends of ED, 2007. Ira holds a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ira has steadily exhibited his work, consulted within industry, and lectured widely throughout his career. He was affiliated with the Flywheel Gallery in Piermont, New York, and the Bowery Gallery in New York City. He was a managing director and creative director for H2O Associates in New York’s Silicon Alley, where he helped build a new media division during the golden days of the dot-com boom and then bust—barely parachuting back to safety in the ivory tower. Since then, he has been inciting students to create inspirational new media art; lecturing; and holding residencies at numerous institutions, including Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, Seton Hall University; Monmouth University; University of California, Santa Barbara; Kutztown University; Moravian College; Northampton Community College’s Digital Art Institute; Lafayette College; Lehigh University; the Art Institute of Seattle; Studio Art Centers International (in Florence, Italy); and the City and Guilds of London Art School (UK).

Currently, Ira is Director of the Center of Creative Computation and Associate Professor at SMU, with a joint approintment in the Meadows School of the Arts and the Lyle School of Engineering. Previously, he was Associate Professor at Miami University (Ohio), where he held a joint appointment within the School of Fine Arts and Interactive Media Studies program and an affiliate member of the Department of Computer Science and Systems Analysis.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle

Bio: Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

For more Bret, see worrydream.com

Student work: Images generated with Processing

Samples from the first week of Processing…

Walters

 
Alvarado

   
Loreti

Kraft

Rousseau

Jordan

Morgan

Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance

“Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software,”

…

“Facebook does massive surveillance. If there is a ‘like’ button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user. So you visit several pages that have ‘like’ button and Facebook knows that you visited all of those, even if it doesn’t really know who you are.”

—Richard Stallman

Watch video

Censor the internet (bookmarklet)

With all the jabber and laws trying to control what people see on the web it’s a good time to point out this script by Greg Leuch and fffff.at Now you too can censor the internet with the Ctl+F’d Bookmarklet.

Simple jQuery and Javascript examples

Here are some jQuery examples to start thinking about the final project. Feel free to post other examples, especially ones that push the use of technology like the jQuery Robot v.01 by Anthony Calzadilla (above) or the HTML5 Beat Sequencer by Jesse Jackson.

Tutorials

W3Schools jQuery Examples
jQuery.com Live Examples of jQuery

Specific functions

jQuery Easing Plugin
Farbtastic: jQuery color picker plug-in
highlightFade
Suckerfish Menus

Data/infovis

jQuery Visualize
HeatColor jQuery plugin
jQuery Air

Galleries

Lightbox2
jQuery Cycle Plugin
FancyBox
Scrollable
jqZoom

Web apps for learning code online

Here are some web-based interactive code environments for learning markup or programming via tutorials or just practicing or showing examples.

I’ve know about W3Schools’ Tryit Editor ever since I first learned Javascript on their site. Edit code on the left and click to try it on the right.

CssDesk allows you to create, test, and share HTML/CSS markup within an online editor. Good for quick demos.

Codecademy is a full-on interactive “shell” and step-by-step tutorial for learning Javascript. The UI returns results and shows errors, and users can earn badges and points as they move through the tutorials.

The ProcessingJS website offers an IDE for writing and running Processing code within the browser. Great for workshops where installing software is not an option.

While not really focused on teaching, ScraperWiki’s PHP scraper creation environment actually let’s you run server-side code. It even let me run this statement which I thought was rather impressive.

$str = file_get_contents('http://owenmundy.com','');
$arr = explode("\n",$str);
print $arr[100];

ScraperWiki also offers a Ruby and Python tool too. Very cool.