(ITP 4-in-4 day 4+1, or how i learned to stop worrying and love blowing deadlines)

to complete the signal to noise meter previously posted i wrote up an apple script which calculates a ratio of messages in my mail inbox to the junk messages which have been caught. the apple script then sends that ratio via serial to the signal to noise meter. i’ve set up a rule in mail.app to trigger the script every time a message comes in. the serial output (ascii only, it seems) is thanks to SerialPort X.

it’s certainly not perfect…having a lot of read messages stagnating in the inbox brings the ratio down…but i’m posting the code below so maybe someone can figure a better way.

also, the script wasn’t triggering when called directly from mail’s rules…my workaround was to have a launcher script run ‘do shell script “osascript ” signalToNoise.scpt’. for some reason this worked when the launcher script was triggered by mail – YMMV.

oh! it just when off as i was writing this entry…the light came on, and the needle swung high….i need to clean out the junk mail!

code after the break (i always wanted to write “after the break”)

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For today’s project I wanted to do something with the analog decibel meter that Tymm gave me on day one. My idea is to calculate some kind of signal to noise ratio in my email inbox and to display the value on this physical meter. Since I already get a lot of noise in there, maybe the value won’t change very dynamically, but be a steady din. Perhaps I could tie into the junk mail filter to show just how much work it’s doing, like a tachometer. Who am I kidding, really, I’m likely going to jump into what all the cool kids are doing and just come up with some type of Twitter visualization… (more…)

…look at my pinwheel and see what i’ve found.

here’s the promised update to the earlier pinwheel post with a video of it in action. this is just a demo of the animation, i’d like to work more on the compositing and to add some user interaction. i’d like to perhaps have a user blow on the phone and cause the wheel to spin more quickly. for now, this is what i’ve got.

the iphone is missing one of my most beloved relics of os x…the pinwheel, aka beachball of doom/death. i wanted to experiment with using the core graphics framework to draw to the screen and create animation and this was an interesting experience.

the animation is too slow currently…i feel that i’m doing things in a really inefficient way at the moment. i had also tried using UIImageViews and animating them, but i couldn’t figure out a way to get the spinning layer to composite using the overlay blend mode…which you can easily do with core graphics contexts.

i’ll try again later, but i really need to get away from the computer and onto my bike to train (which is a matter of about five feet now that it’s dark and icy out). i’ll post a video if i can get the animation on the phone to happen more quickly.

Spent most of the day at Tymm’s house, pretending to participate in 4-in-4, but mostly drinking coffee and watching videos. I did eventually get around to tinkering with my new Meggy Jr RGB from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. The Meggy is a pixel game platform built around a vivid 8×8 LED matrix running an Arduino compatible ATMega168. EMSL has also released a simple to use library for managing the display, buttons and speaker. It’s really a great kit.

I decided to ignore all the nice easy stuff (more…)