labe.me

A beautifull little project, released the 11th of december 2011 at 09:34 AM :)

This one was the most difficult. The result is full of errors but since the end of the world is imminent… let’s draw to survive!

An illustration for a game I am currently working on. I will certainly have to clean it up a little before usage. It’s my first new indie illustration, champagne!

There’s something special with Processing and I love testing things with it. But I am not a great fan of Java.

I decided to have some fun and experiment with Scala, Eclipse and the processing libraries. It worked.

But, then I was hit by a question: assuming I create something funny with all this wonderful stuff, how do I ship it to people?

After some really convoluted attempts I found an ugly and half baked solution which still involved hard work for each and every new sketch.

A little bit disapointed, I opened Processing to see how easy it was to ship a sketch as a native application.

Here’s a screenshot of the export panel.

Now, there’s definitely something important to learn from this panel.

I think that Processing works, is minimalist and focuses on helping its user experiment and ship.

Every word is important in the last sentence:

• works
• minimalist
• focus
• helpful
• user
• experiment
• ship

That’s a great lesson a lot of people should follow.

Thank you Processing :)

I am an org-mode user. I write things and I organize most of my life using org-mode. It made me code with emacs after many years of vim -yes, I know, coder’s stuff is often boring-.

Since this blog was created I made a promise to manage it through emacs using org files. If possible without changing of blogging platform: Tumblr.

I used a few tools and coded some converters and I now have the following structure on my computer:

blog-fr.org     # the French blog content
blog-en.org     # the English blog content
picasa/         # images used by posts
labe.me/        # the static entrance http://labe.me

Plus some files which help diffuse, deploy and synchronize all this stuff, among which a good old Makefile to make things as automatic as possible.

Here are the main tools used by the system:

• tumblr-rb: a ruby implementation of the tumblr API with a useful command line interface
• googlecl: a command line client to manipulate google services’ data
• Markdown.hx: a buggy Markdown to HTML converter written in haxe. After some hacks and filters it helped me convert org content into custom HTML
• elbow grease to create the haxe org file parser and the glue code (boooooring)
• even more elbow grease to test and debug the whole thing (even mooore booooooooring)

Finally:

• everything is published and synchronized from the same local repository
• using a simple keystroke in emacs or command line in the terminal
• the directory is versionned (git)
• I can prepare my posts without an Internet connection and I won’t have to copy/paste the result in some HTML textarea
• TODO means draft and is synchronized to Tumblr draft for preview when required
• I publish simply by toggling TODO to DONE
• I can modify what I draft or publish, no need to connect to the Tumblr dashboard to correct a typo
• images are synchronized with picasa transparently and their URL is replaced inside the posts, using another hosting system would be really easy
• I can change my blog hosting system pretty easily since everything is on my machine
• the system can be improved with more elbow grease -add a local HTML preview, a better integration with Twitter/Google+/Facebook, better typography, automatic replace, two way sync, etc.-
• org-mode :)

If some org-mode user is interested I will gladly share the code -which is simple-. My emacs lisp fu is not good enough to code this in lisp without losing a lot of time but some emacs guru might be interested by the idea and give it a try.

In the meantime, I am pretty impressed with the result and the open possibilities!

It’s less ugly but I still have a lot to do before the initial release.

Here comes the great-colors-which-make-your-display-work-for-a-change little update.

Um yeah ok, it is really ugly at the moment :)

[Updated experiment available here]

After 8 years within my former company July and August feel like a decompression chamber.

I travel here and there and my beach sessions are only separated by gargantuan meals with friends and family.

Fortunately train, mild evenings and rainy days give me some opportunities to have fun with my computer and to experiment things.

I found this experiment hypnotic enough to deserve a little place in the Internet.

clic to start

I made it with Processing. You might need to install the java plugin to make it work.

The effect inspires me some game ideas but I first have to finish my “secret” project…