Evolution is a blind watchmaker

During my years at university I was fond of genetic algorithms. However, I did't find any practical applications for that sort of algorithms. Author of a video below used genetic algorithm to illustrate an evolution of watches if they were alive.

Monitoring multiple e-mail accounts

Time passes and number of my e-mail accounts is only increasing.
At the moment I check 3 mailboxes several times a day. With other 4 accounts I receive rare but important e-mails.

Fortunately, a friend of mine developed an a-mail notifier tool. I use it for a couple of months and very satisfied with it.

It is very simple by its functionality, but it does perfect what it has to do.

So, Gexonic e-mail notifier checks all of your mailboxes and informs you on new mails immediately with pop up window. It also has a system tray icon which changes when you got new mail.

One more good thing is that I can suggest new features directly to my friend. And he tries to implement some of these.

Shooting with the burdening game

I finally posted my swbg game done with processing.org.

In the game I tried to add something new to well-known boring shooting games. In most of these games you have to shoot targets with your mouse as quick as you can. And nothing else.

I added some element of thinking into stupid game. It's not so easy to shoot target since your targeting is influenced by additional mass which is attached to mouse cursor

How the game looks like:Legend
Your mouse pointer is represented by pink circle with green dot inside.
Additional mass is pink circle.
I hope you'll identify targets quickly.

Gameplay
You just shoot targets. Every 10K score new targets appears. At 25K score targets begin moving by X axis. At 50K score targets begin free movement. Targets move with random speed, but their speed is limited by your total score.

The Game
Go for it!

My wishes
I'd like to have some free hosting with scripting (RoR/php/perl) to be able to store players' high scores. So, if somebody can help me with it, let me know.

Parabola focus animation

Parabola is well-known by its property of focusing light in one point called focus.
I've just created interactive demo showing this parabola property.

Of course, I created the demo using processing.org


Demo simulates light photons physics assuming photons to be rigid particles. The particles bounce off parabola. When you move mouse, you change parabola focus.

Demo is located here.

Rolling billiard balls in a palm

I've got a strange hobby - to roll billiard balls in a palm.

Like these ones:

About 10 years ago a colleague of mine taught me how to roll 2 small metal balls in a palm. This trick interested me so I found some balls from big ball bearing and started my trainings.

Some time later I found myself not satisfied with these small metal ball. I found slightly bigger stone balls and started trainings with them.

At the moment I stuck on billiard balls. They're big enough and pretty easy to find at stores. They also much more robust than stone ones.

Since I wanted to advance in this strange hobby, I started to roll 3 balls at once. I even try to roll 4 of them.



There're some things I'm interested to know -
Where this hobby come from?
What is the history of this skill?
Does it help to my health or whatever else?

love (with processing)

I'm publishing my another experiment with processing.
I called it 'love'
The applet and source code are located here.

How t is done
I wanted my heroes in this sketch to have transparent tails. It is not a problem on solid background. To make tails transparent with bitmap background I used following technique.

1. I render my 'souls' to color layer

a 'man' soul:
a 'woman' soul:

2. I render souls as white spots to other layer. I fade that layer to black before rendering.

3. I add my second layer to the first one as alpha channel 4. I render my background which is a bitmap with some simple animation on it

5. Last step is to render image with 'souls' on top of the background. And then I render some effects 'pink hearts' near pairs which are in love.

bubble bath with processing

I played with processing last several days. It is very interesting and easy-to-use environment built on Java.
As a result, look at my first toy - bubble bath



Here is online applet with the source: My google pages