GuruBlog

I wrote anoter 5 pages of my processing book, and as the praglife blog tells us i haven't tried to correct anything besides syntax-errors in my docbook files yet.

The pragmatic programmers have started the Pragmatic Programmers Writing Month and post tips in their pragmatic live blog. The goal is to write 80 pages or more during november.

I have started a book on processing today and managed to write my first 6 pages. i will post my progress on this blog and tag the articles with pragprowrimo

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I made another useless but fun to watch processing sketch

click here to get mesmerized :-)

I have been in denmark last week and they have their monsters too. some even took over the electric system

and the problem there is so severe that even McDonalds has started to make ads specially for monsters

I always considered barcode scanners as a pice of rocketscience that mere mortals like me aren't able to build. But this weekend megalomania hit me and i wrote one in processing. I didn't use any libraries beside GSVideo (on my linux box) or processing.video (wherever quicktime is available)

My barcodescanner is able to decode a subset of the code128 barcode. it shows all printable characters and it supports all three charsets, but i didn't include all those Bell, Stx, Enq, .. character. feel free to add support for them if you need it :-)

The program assumes that the barcode is placed in the middle of the camera image. It takes the middle row of pixels and converts it to black and white. then it calculates the width of the black and white bars and searches for a barcode startsequence. if it finds one it tries to match the next six bars with the code128 patterns and adds the value of the character that has the highest match to a stringbuffer.

when a stop character is found it calculates the checksum and if that matches it returns the found string (minus the checksum char).

sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. the hardest part was turning the row of pixels into an array of black and white values.

The code is not really beautifull and it is a bit long because of the big char tables.

click here to download the code.

I just wrote a little arkanoid clone in processing in less than an hour.

click here to give it a try

i have used processing to access map materials from geoserver. but i have noticed that the earth is not flat and that processing is making 3d animations really easy :-)

so i have coded a rotating sphere and project the GIS data from geoserver on the surface

flat map from my last sketch

spherical map from the new sketch

I have written a processing sketch that shows how to use the buzzer for the ps2. the sketch uses the proCONTROLL library and draws a rectangle for every button on the buzzer.

i just added 8 new pencil drawings to my drawings gallery