http://backspaces.net Applied Complexity for the Rest of Us Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:20:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well, once again, I'm changing to a new web technology: First it was just HTML .. crafted by Netscape!  Remember the great HTML editor available in the Netscape browser? Next I converted to Textpattern, a brilliant CMS/Blog engine. Finally, because the  Santa Fe Complex is using WordPress, I'm converting to using it. This is ... http://backspaces.net/46/new-website-again/ One of my favorite challenges to my friends is “Send me an equation”. It sounds like a dumb thing, but after a bit of thought, you’ll agree that Math Is A Second Class Citizen On The Web! The Math Typesetting for the Internet page has a good discussion on the issues. So ... http://backspaces.net/32/math-on-the-web/ Last article showed how we could use Processing with Eclipse and Java 1.5. Heady with success, I decided to try to convert the near-trivial RandBoxes Processing demo to Jython. Why?? Well, our group uses Blender quite a bit, and Blender uses Python as its scripting language. More generally, ... http://backspaces.net/30/processing-with-jython/ We at Redfish have been using Processing.org’s graphics system for models requiring fairly sophisticated 3D capabilities. Here’s an example prototype of the Pittsburgh PNC Baseball Stadium done with Processing. (Note: Our Redfish site has more information on the project page. Processing is more than a graphics library, it has ... http://backspaces.net/29/processing-with-eclipse/ Last year, Nick Thompson, Professor of Psychology and Ethology of Clark University, dropped by Santa Fe on Sabbatical. Nick brought with him a puzzle relating to the Prisoner's Dilemma. The core idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma is a game where two folks choose to cooperate or not (defect). The ... http://backspaces.net/28/moth-my-way-or-the-highway/ A friend of mine, Michelle Aden, recently asked me to write about some aspect of Open Source for a conference on that topic. It occurred to me that research had recently enjoyed becoming part of the Open Source community, so I looked into writing about that. Here is the resulting ... http://backspaces.net/27/open-source-research/ While updating my ancent website (started in the 1995’s .. so very html 1.0), I decided to look into the current state of the art of web publishing. Imagine my surprise when I found that the cruddy table based mess the .com sites used to achieve their unnatural, pixel perfect goals ... http://backspaces.net/26/xhtmlcss-the-quiet-web-revolution/ Recent Web Findings This is a writeup on recent findings I've made in the web & internet world as I explored it to upgrade my web site and to begin thinking about development issues we've been discussing at WedTech and other venues like Ars Publica, RedfishGroup, and other opportunities. First and foremost ... http://backspaces.net/24/recent-web-findings/ I've got an initial version of a NetLogo model with cars cruising on a map of Santa Fe, NM. This was done as a proof of concept with summer students working in the RedfishGroup. Their project included working with the Santa Fe police on understanding the dynamics of cruising ... http://backspaces.net/23/netlogo-cruising-model/ Being new to textpattern, I was delighted to see how easy it was to update from g1.19 to 1.0rc1. Deanload the bundle, unpack it, move the old .../textpattern to the side, replacing it with the deanload, and copy in my prior config.php file. That's it! I keep a ... http://backspaces.net/22/textpattern-10rc1-boy-that-was-easy/