Unfocused Brain

Like I said in my last post I have been working on some tools for writer brainstorming. The first one was the “article title writer” at TheWritersSecret.com. Next is a one for brainstorming movie titles. I call it “Movie Brain”.

The tech behind it:

It is written in JavaScript. That way the work of sorting through the data is done by the client machine instead of the server. JavaScript also has some pretty decent string handling abilities.

I collected over 11,000 titles from the WikiPedia list of movies. These are stored by category and are processed into usable data using a combination of awk, grep, and php scripting. For example:

cat horror_words.txt | awk '1==1 {printf("\"%s\",\n",tolower($2));}' | sort | uniq >movies_all.js


The engine uses a very simple template technique. Examples:
“() meets (2).” The parenthesis would be replaced by two different random words. “Boy meets Bacon.”
“The {} and the ()” The brackets would be replaced by a random amount of random words and the parenthesis would be replaced by a single word. “The egg substitute and the curmudgeon.”
“[]: {}” Here the [] means a year. “2012: Pirates Invade”

The last piece of tech was a fun part. When you generate the random list of movies you can see what they would look like with your standard coming soon movie title over a black screen. Just click on one and see what I mean. It uses JavaScript and CSS to generate and animated the title. For a time I had added zooming in on the title but I didn’t like how much processor it hogged.

I also used a technique for the coming soon generator, to keep it all client side, that I had never used before. A couple days ago a friend asked if it were possible to do forms without a server. Apparently it is possible if you are using method GET. You can just have JavaScript parse the URL to read the data.

While writing the JavaScript I found a wonderful resource JavaScript equivalents for PHP functions.

Tonight I am working on a brainstorming tool which needs lists of movie titles.

The tool will eventually be able to generate movie titles based on which genre you are interested in. I made one of these back in the ‘day’ when I was wanting to make a horror movie. The title I came up with then from the brainstorm software was ‘Reanimation Vermin’. Which was a story about a mad man who identified with squirrels.

The tool I am making today will cover more genres and I will add the ability for you to give it a title and it will use Bayseian classifiers to say which genre your movie title would most likely belong to.

The most important thing I’ve learned today is which genres are most popular based on the wikipedia lists of movies entries. (Example: War Films)

11085 total
1960 horror.txt
1731 comedy.txt
1242 western.txt
1095 drama.txt
1011 noir.txt
921 sci-fi.txt
760 war.txt
523 action.txt
499 fantasy.txt
488 sports.txt
452 adventure.txt
303 disaster.txt
100 comedy_scifi.txt
I imagined horror would be #1. I was surprised that western was greater than drama.

Last night I demoed the “Trampoline Sensor MK II” (patent pending) at the EFF Plutopia event @ SXSW.

If you were at the event and have any questions please leave feedback here.

Video by Vern Graner of the Sensor in action at a The Robot Group meeting.

The trampoline sensor was awarded an Editor’s Choice Ribbon at Maker Faire Austin. Local news Video of the Trampoline Sensor MK II @ Maker Faire. (About 1/2 way into the clip.)

Some tonemap and hdr images I did from Friday night’s DorkBot event.


<?
$URLTOSENDTO="http://www.unfocusedbrain.com/site/";
header("Expires: Wed, 15 Aug 1984 20:30:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT"); // always modified
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header(”Location: $URLTOSENDTO”);
?>
<a href=”site/”>Enter Here</a>


I am a huge fan of TiddlyWiki and use it all the time. This morning I wrote a quick utility in JavaScript to convert CSV to TiddlyWiki Table format.

I am releasing this code into the public domain. The main reason I am doing this is because I had problems finding a JavaScript CSV interpreter that was already public domain. Mine is quick easy and kinda bug free. //smile

Sure there are over 6 million places on the internet to check your IP Address. I’m sure I’ve written this app at least 7-8 times.

But this one is different. No mission creep. Just a plain minimalist way to find out: What is My IP Address?

Some interesting things have happened Since May of last year when I wrote the “Color Match” article.

• If you do a google search right now for “Classical Art” the article comes up as the 7th natural link.
• According to my logs over 400,000 people have seen the article.
• People have posted blog articles about it at least 6 different languages.
• The content of the article is now being heisted and put on “Scraper Sites” using tons of my bandwidth by hot-linking the photos.
• I get great feedback from people using the technique.
• I think the coolest thing about it is: Sometimes when I meet someone for the first time; they have already read my article.

These are some of the first photos I have ever released under Creative Commons Licenses

Some time ago I went on a glue buying freak-out. I needed glue for a particular project and realized that we were really understocked in general. So I went over to the office supply store and bought about 4 different kinds. They all have their uses but the one I keep finding new uses for is the “ELMER’S® Glue-All™” pens.

They seem to just contain the normal white glue but the real advantage of these things is the applicator tip. Just squeeze and out comes a drop of glue. I sometimes use the tip to help spread the glue around. I don’t have a caliper small enough to measure the inner diameter of the tip but it is about 1.5mm diameter.

Another thing that has impressed me about these pens is that I have had one ‘active’ for at least 3 months and it hasn’t dried out or clogged yet. The cap seems to make a really snug connection.

I haven’t tried it yet but the applicator tip unscrews from the pen part, so theoretically these things could be re-filled.

A pack of 4 cost me less than $1.50 and each pen holds 10.5mL of glue.