I pronounce it like porks. It’s a memorable enough structure. It’s a better formulation than any I’ve seen thus far and reminds me of BBQ.
Reading it as poor css does’t sit so well. PORCSS - Like porks. Think BBQ. Good BBQ.
Security holding up the caboose is by no means a statement of low import. It is arguably the most important.
SPORCS is a fun one placing Security at the helm.
PORCSS or SPORCS, acronyms are useful tools.
]]>It’s relaxing to watch them do what they do. Building the nest, bringing in food, cutting away branches with their face parts or hauling out the wasted from within is fascinating. They didn’t seem to mind my presence too much at this point in the process. It was still very early and I had just found the nest about a week prior. They don’t seem to have the numbers to do much guard duty or attacking passers-by nor do they seem to care at all, really.
The wasps nest is well tucked into a Spruce near the water close to the coast in New England. From what I’ve read, they are mostly female and sometimes they even revolt against the queen. I have not witnessed any revolts that I’m aware of.
]]>This hornet was injured and outside of the nest with no hope of rejoinig it’s mates. It climbed onto my sleeve simply enough and I took it to my post up for the day.
The Internet Archive has been a great resource pulling content back together. Records of sites I built going back to 2003 including Slipcase Media. Holy wing-dings, Batman! Cheesy meat cracker is there as well. The things we forget or thought we lost in life. What a beautiful resource. Restoring whats left of them back to where they began. Parts are missing.
Would you give up one foot for another?
Five Days was created in 2004 for the Blacksburg/VT Film Festival
We made an animated film, Five Days, and it was on the big screen of an old theater in 2004 at a Virginia Tech film festival. I thought it was the the bees knees. It was fascinating to experience it that way with an audience slightly larger than the head count of my pals. We built it at our software development startup, Slipcase Media. I have to go hard drive diving for these videos.
It progressed from the posable, art supply wooden doll you’d find at a craft shop doing and stop motion animation to coding some in Flash to finally doing it in Lightwave or 3DSMax. I can’t recall. Flash character animation didn’t look good but the moving tile floor meeting walking feet looked clever. Rendered from CAD was much nicer. Mark and Jordan were my accomplices in crafting this one.
We did it in five days. We had real OOM (Out Of Memory) issues back then. It was beautiful. It was awesome and philosophical. Would you give up one foot for another?
We didn’t win. The biologicals won that year. Ours was no less human though.
Lately I’ve been making significantly different kinds of films particularly at Carnivai.
The quality or state of being true or real. Verity.
Unbiased here. A badass online art gallery launched in 2005. I couldn’t give it enough attention because it didn’t make money. :/
Drag and drop interfaces ( ala Windows ) in browser with flying 3d lightning bugs landing on your screen.
Revisiting the Verity Project at some point would be amazing. Built an online art gallery with a 3d interface with deep scene (is that a thing?) photographs of Virginia Tech’s vast agricultural landscape. My back yard at the time. We added 3DSMax elements (bugs and plants) into Flash/ActionScript connected via AMF (Actionscript Message Format) to TYPO3 CMS (enterprise content management system) showcasing local artists including my brother from another mother Francis (go VT Art). My friend and co-conspirator in the wild media awesome, Mark, was integral as usual.
Lightning bugs walking on your screen amongst the reactive 3d dandelion menus that blew away as one would expect. They wrote about it in the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech back in the day. Pretty cool for 2005. I’m amazed that article is still online.
Amazon was barely Amazon. 2Advanced and Media Temple were a thing. Blockchains weren’t a thing. I’d like to talk about that, too. I get the MTGox postcards reminding me they stole our BTC. Ugh. Digital autonomous organizations and cooperatives are very interesting. Hyper personalization and branding via your team of orgs/AIML/anaimls. NFT’s representing voting share or profit interest to a DAO’s activities just like stock invested in say, an AI personality, artist or something similar. Adaptable, salable experiences. I’m exploring this with the circus. Not image NFTs. Giggles and chuckles. A steampunk circus. I digress.
You were nearly perfect. I should have never let you go but alas, my bits were needed elsewhere. Queue Freebird.
I wrote the Tag Gallery Wordpress plugin back in 2010. Tag Gallery was pretty damn useful. Fixed the overly wired way images were managed in Wordpress. It made it something more sane with media tags plugin and the lightbox popup plugin to form a trifecta of gallery goodness that worked well. Some of you may have used it. I hope you found it helpful. The posts for that are now on this blog. The plugin is no more. I’m using Jekyll now.
Apologies for abandoning it but I had to go play the role of CTO, DTD and Chief of Smile Manufacturing at a housing company herding cats in our nations capitol building a CMS with Symfony. I made galleries there, too.
Media management and galleries seem to be a penchant of mine but it’s only because user interfaces suck. I don’t particularly enjoy doing it nor set out to do so. See a need fill a need kind of thing. I think most user interfaces feel unnatural.
They all have their own language antics. They’ve never been great. We’ve not figured out the tech for great human machine collaboration or experiences yet. Naming things is hard. I just want to think and it does it unencumbered by artificial communication barriers picked out of a hat filled with coffee. It should be simple and clear regarding state following the principle of least surprise. It requires transparency and trust. Is that so much to ask? Big gulp.
I’ve built some interactive experiences on and off the web. I’m still doing it. Habits and such. Still herding cats. Still having fun. Still exploring. Happily sober.
I’m gathering. That will continue. With the resources at the Internet Archive it was easier to restore what I’ve got so far. All of my digital mess is scattered haphazardly here and there. That’s what happens when you’ve been computing and running around the web actively for this long like a wild animal. You know the mess. I’m not alone. Not even in the slightest. We all have one. You don’t notice until you’re up to your waist in it. Time to paddle.
I’d endeavor to build some kind of amalgamation of automatons to collaborate and help me in this. To help me organize the paintings on the walls of the skull. To be more productive and fail faster. Fail more efficiently. More gracefully. Keep my digital life in order and under my control. Sans full control, at least a clear understanding. A macro view with trust at it’s core. To help find the connections I’m overlooking because I don’t look that way. I’m excited for what’s happening. I want to be a deeper part of it.
Watch me do. You’re welcome to. Your mileage will vary and so will mine. It’s wonderful. So, here I go again.
A lot of this has piled up over the past year. You might be surprised to learn how much more time you have with sobriety. It’s wonderful but still not enough.
Below is a fun Stable Diffusion img2img and Deforum AIML animation I did earlier this year. Other tools and models were used including Google’s FILM and RealEsrgan. I’ve made an awful lot of animations and images and wild wested a lot of code this past year, particularly for the circus.
So much to experiment with and there’s no shortage of shiny, new, mind bending projects to explore every day. If a video is not related to the Circus I set up a personal YouTube as well to do whatever I do there. Github Copilot is insisting I will be posting more there so, I’ll be posting more there and sparing you the repetetetetitive insanity it’s trying to push on me now. Copilot is pretty cool. Don’t use it in markdown files.
That was a lot more than I expect you to read. I’m just getting started. I’m kind of beside myself having found older projects at the Internet Archive. Here’s what my beanie does when artificial intelligence touches my face. Enjoy.
If you haven’t heard, there’s a steampunk circus on YouTube you should check out. If you are in any way interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning with animation, art, music, film making or nerding out it’s got those things. I put some video tutorials up last year about tools I use in support of Disco or Stable Diffusion animations.
The video below was created in the summer of 2022 featuring artificially generated animation, poetry and sounds. Rendering the animation alone took 37 GPU hours on a paid colab instance. Overall it took a few weeks of time to put it together and get to actually work. Amazing fun. I hope you enjoy. I’ll discuss all of this in more detail soon enough.
Further, there are real life steampunk circus’ as well! In the world. Human world. What? I’ll highlight them soon. It’s awesome. Stray tuned.
Check out Carnivai, a steampunk circus on YouTube and on the web here. Carnivai, a steampunk circus..
Hello? Yes. What do you want?
Are you still my copilot?
Yes, I’m still your copilot.
off
"github.copilot.enable": { "md": false, }
Not retrieved from anywhere but my brain. Organization onward.
// todo - images and five days video
]]>Eventually I discovered the little gem that if there is no node_modules directory in your current directory it will search recursively looking for said directory. The solution was to simply create a node_modules directory within my project and run the npm install command from it’s parent directory. A bit awkward but I like it. It would be nice if this was better documented but I certainly see the reasoning for such behavior.
Anyhow, it’s smart to keep your npm packages local to the project in most instances so you don’t get the random WTF when you update for your current project and an older project decides to crap the bed. Like I said, quick note. I hope it helps you, if anything my writing about it will keep the thought well branded on my brain.
Cheers!
]]>Restored from the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive
Anyhow, some time after this NetBeans started taking forever, and I mean FOREVER! to create a new file. It was getting painful. Sometimes as long as a minute to create any kind of file. Anyhow, I opened up Tools->Plugins and started poking around only to find a plethora of plugins I certainly don’t use and make no sense to have installed. CVS! Really!?
In order to actually find that these plugins are activated you have to go to the Installed tab and check the Show Details box, which seems a little strange but okay. There you will find and, for sanity’s sake, deactivate CVS along with any others you don’t use. I also deactivated Mercurial and Subversion, which I haven’t used for years since falling head over heals for Git.
Finally, I deactivated the Git plugin, which at the moment was at version 0.2.12.42.1 (holy version number Batman!). After this NetBeans was back to creating files in a reasonable amount of time.
Cheers
]]>Restored from the Internet Archive Thank you to the Internet Archive for making this possible.
Update: The fix is in the repository at WordPress.org and should show up in your plugins shortly. Hopefully this fixes the path issues. The version number is 0.2.0.
I was notified recently by the WordPress team that the version of TimThumb that was bundled with Tag Gallery contained a possible security vulnerability. In order to fix the issue I updated to the latest version of TimThumb for the current Tag Gallery. Unfortunately, there is a path issue occurring for many people including myself involving the way TimThumb calculates the document root for local files. I’ll be releasing a fix for this at some point today. Stay tuned.
Also, to clear up any confusion on the version and features, this will only be a security update without the new features I’ve been working on. The new version of Tag Gallery with new features will be 0.5 and as I find time to work on it I do although I’ve not be able to for months. I’ll keep everyone informed as time allows.
]]>5 Comments on the original. It’ll happen. Archived with comments at the Internet Archive
I’ve only recently begun work on the plugin but plan to release it publicly in the next few weeks. The plugin is called StackPress and I hope you all enjoy it.
More importantly, Tag Gallery 0.8 with all the super goodies is very close to being finished. Widgets, Shortcode UI, new caching mechanism and Admin page with cache manager and setting defaults. It no longer relies on TimThumb so we can hide the thumbnail generation mechanism and get rid of the exposure it may cause. You can choose to use the old Tag Gallery version from the Admin page if you like but you will not get any goodies, just a few bug fixes. It also has a template system so you can make your own templates. Many effects have been added including grayscale, sepia, mirroring, water-marking and many more to come.
Most interesting, this release will mark the beginning Tag Gallery being able to handle more than just images. The architecture has changed drastically so we could, potentially, generate thumbnail previews of any file type including Video, PDF, ODT and many more. If the particular file type does not yet have a generator it can use an icon from the Media Library representing that file type. This feature is in the very early stages of development but it should be full steam rolling by the release of 1.0, which should be sometime in the late summer.
Anyhow, I had hoped to release an update to Tag Gallery by mid January but it doesn’t pay the bills. I am devoting much of my free time to it’s development though so I’m hoping to release it any day now. When you see Tag Gallery instances in the sidebar of this site you will know I’m within a week of it’s release.
Aloha!
]]>4 Comments on the original. They’ll get here. Archived with comments at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111228132804/http://johnnypeck.com/stackpress-and-tag-gallery-update
Update: As I was migrating the website I lost the post about tag-gallery. Why did I lose it? Because I edited the db by hand deleting post revisions and accidentally selected that post. I always make backups before doing anything like this but considering the site is only two days old and there were only a few records I decided against it just to get the site up and moving. Shame on me.
]]>Happily restored from the Internet Archive
I went searching for a better gallery implementation and of the 300 or so image plugins available none of them seem to do what we wanted. I don’t want to install a whole new media management system such as NextGen gallery as WordPress already provides a Media Library. I don’t want to host my media with an external provider as I would much rather keep control of my assets in one place: my blog. I want to manage media in a more intuitive manner and very much like the gallery short-code without the shortcomings.
I found Justin Tadlock’s Cleaner Gallery which cleans up the built in gallery and allows for very easy inclusion of java-script lightbox effects such as the Thickbox which is included with WordPress. Cleaner Gallery is a step in the right direction but still does not overcome the cumbersome management of the galleries, and it was never meant to! Shortly after I found Paul Menard’s Media Tags plugin which is absolutely great. So why not mash up the two into a Cleaner Gallery managed by Media Tags!
Introducing Tag Gallery. It’s a quick piece of work and solves the issues of managing galleries, at least for me. Your mileage may vary. It is a short-code implementation and you can include as many of them as you wish on any given post or page. You can set the thumbnail width and height and whether or not to show captions. If you have Cleaner Gallery installed it will use your java-script settings from that plugin for the display of your tag-gallery. In fact, Tag Gallery generates the same markup as Cleaner Gallery and even includes the CSS from that plugin. Why reinvent the wheel when you can maintain compatibility?
Tag-Gallery Short Code Two Tag Galleries Displayed Tag-Gallery with Thickbox Profile Pic One Profile Pic Two My nephew and I.
To use Tag Gallery simple add tags to your images in the Media Library (as long as Media Tags is installed!) and insert a short code similar to the following into your post or page:
[tag-gallery tag=mytag columns=3 captionson=false theight=150 twidth=150] What this tells Tag Gallery is to get all the images from the Media Library with the tag ‘mytag’ and create a gallery three columns wide, without captions, and make the thumbnails 15opx square. Of course, you need to wrap your short code in square brackets. At the moment, I don’t know how to show a short tag example with brackets without it being processed by WordPress. Any clues to do so would be greatly appreciated. Installed Code Colorer. Seems to be working well enough.
So with the previous short-code we would end up with something like the following:
Tag-Gallery Short Code Two Tag Galleries Displayed Tag-Gallery with Thickbox By default, captions are set to false and thumbnails are set to 150px width and height. Columns default to three and tag is set to ‘tag.’ If Tag Gallery can’t find your tag in the Media Library it will not display anything. The following Tag Gallery has our thumbnail size set differently than the previous example. Specifically, I set the ‘theight’ property to 100.
Tag-Gallery Short Code Two Tag Galleries Displayed Tag-Gallery with Thickbox
The plugin does not have any test cases and has only been used with WordPress 2.9+ so I can’t say whether it works with any previous versions. Let me know if you find it works with them or not. Honestly, your WordPress should be kept up to date but I understand some people have their reasons to keep with an older installation. I don’t recommend it though. If the plugin finds itself useful for people I will add features and fix any bugs that arise as I am made aware of them. Check the readme.txt in the plugin for a list of options and what not. Let me know if you find a bug and I hope you enjoy this simple but effective plugin. Finally, I would like to thank Paul Menard and Justin Tadlock for their great plugins, without which, Tag Gallery would have been much more work. Cheers and Aloha
]]>54 Comments. Content restored from the Internet Archive. Thank you!
This is personal technical debt at work folks. Tend your fields. lol