Contents tagged with geeky

  • Lots of little Facebooks

    The web is a world of unlimited choice and unlimited possibilities. So why does everyone choose to use Facebook? Why is the web dominated by a few big companies? I watched the first part of the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution yesterday on iPlayer. They made the point that: When there are no rules, there is nothing to stop those with huge resources dominating everyone else. Google is obviously the biggest at this point in time, but Facebook is also massive. I don’t really mind Google. They’re big because they’re good and more importantly if I want to use another … more

  • Using ImageMagick to make a composition of square thumbnails

    This isn't a very exciting post, but it took me ages to figure it out, so I wanted to write it down somewhere. I wanted to use a one line ImageMagick command to: Take four pictures Resize, centre and crop them to be square thumbnails Arrange them in a 2 by 2 grid Here is the command for ImageMagick on Windows: convert -size 300x300 xc:transparent -page 150x150 ( "image1.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ -extent 150x150 ) -page 150x150 ( "image2.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ -extent 150x150 -repage +0+150 ) -page 150x150 ( "image3.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ -extent … more

  • Developing for the iPhone - what you need to know

    They say the future is mobile. (Ed. Two years on since originally writing this post, it almost seems like the future is here. We might have all missed the App Store gold rush, but app development for mobile is still exciting and now there's Android, Windows Phone 7 and iPads to think about.)

    So, I'm quite excited to learn about developing for this new platform and see what I can create. Will I be able to use my existing web development and programming skills, or will I need to learn a new set of skills. This is what I've learnt so far about what I'll need to know.

    There are two options … more

  • University final year project: Evolving Pursuit and Evasion Strategies in Realistic Worlds

    It's six years since I did my university final year project, but I'm still quite proud of it. I've meant to get around to publishing it online for a while. There is a copy in Leeds University Library, but I thought this would improve my readership. I might put up my source files at some point, but for now I'm just including the report. I developed a genetic computer algorithm that mimicked evolution to evolve small virtual robots that chased each other. Summary This report details the methods and results of a set of experiments into evolving virtually intelligent agents capable of displaying … more