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"Spin, spin, spin the Wheel of Justice…"

Jan 8th, 2008
by Dave Pattern.
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Kudos if you automatically sang to yourself "…see how fast the bastard turns" ;-)

If you've no idea what I'm on about, then YouTube is your friend.

Anyway, I got to playing around with the OPAC keyword cloud data and ImageMagick and came up with this (reload that web page to get a new image)…

wheel4 wheel3 wheel5 wheel10 wheel8 wheel11 wheel13 wheel12

I was struggling to remember how to find the points on the circumference of a circle until I remembered that one of the chapters in the original ZX Spectrum manual covered the topic.

The word in the middle is chosen at random from the top 200 most popular keywords used on our OPAC and the surrounding words at those most commonly used with that word.

Posted in: Eye Candy, Huddersfield Uni, Usage Data.
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Tasty mash-up

Dec 21st, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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I must admit that when I think of a "mash-up", food rarely enters my head (even though most people in the UK associate the word "mash" with mashed potato).

Anyway, what do you get if you mash-up the following: a picture, an RSS feed, Helene Blowers, a cake?

Just in case no-one said this on the day, Helene — you look good enough to eat! ;-)

I'm kinda curious how the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence attached to the image applies to all this… The licence allows you to make derivative works (e.g. a cake) but I guess you are not allowed to sell the cake. You have to share it (yay, I like cake!) and "distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one".

So, does that mean the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has broken new ground by creating the very first Creative Commons cake?

All the very best with the new job, Helene!

Posted in: Eye Candy, Library Stuff.
Tagged: · · · ·

Move over Bernard Herrmann!

Dec 19th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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One of the sections in Brendan Dawes' book is about generating images from music.

Whilst messing about with the "North by Northwest" images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images?

Anyway, here's the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for "North by Northwest" :-)

It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the frame. That colour is then split into its red, green and blue (RGB) components, and their values are used to generate a guitar tablature file which is pumped into the MIDI::Tab Perl module. The first chunk of the tab looks like this…

    D6: --1-5---3-4-4-4-4---4-4---3-4---3-3-3-
    A3: 0---1-2-3-4-4-----4-----4-----4-----4-
    E2: 0-----0-1---1-----1-----1-----1-----1-

Going for a 3/4 timing seemed to give the most pleasing output. That seemed appropriate, as Hitchcock often used waltzes in his films :-)

I wasn't too sure just how it would sound, but it's actually not too bad!

Posted in: Alfred Hitchcock.
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"North by Northwest" squished

Dec 19th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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After reading Brendan Dawes' "Analog In, Digital Out", I've revisited the colours of "North by Northwest" (see earlier blog post).

Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the "crop duster" sequence:


( full sized version on Flickr )

Posted in: Alfred Hitchcock, Eye Candy.
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Dear Facebook, Huddersfield is not in Northern Ireland

Dec 13th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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I was really tempted to create a protest group in Facebook but, for some reason best known only to themselves, the people at Facebook are insisting that Huddersfield is really somewhere in Northern Ireland…

stupidfacebook

Even though the correct option is there ("Kirklees, United Kingdom"), it always changes it to "Huddersfield, Northern Ireland" when you click on the save button.

I wouldn't mind, but there isn't even a Huddersfield in Northern Ireland!

To get to Northern Ireland from Huddersfield, I'd have to drive for about 8 hours, catch a ferry to travel 50 miles to another country, change all my money into a different currency, and I'd have to remember to take my passport with me.

So, please Facebook — Huddersfield is in England, which isn't the same thing as Northern Ireland!!!

Posted in: Other Stuff.
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Baroque Star Wars

Dec 12th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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Just relaxing at home with a small glass of Disaronno Amaretto**, having spent a big chunk of the day down in Milton Keynes at the End of PROWE Project Dissemination Event (Facebook group). Just in case anyone is looking for them, my slides are available on slideshare…

mk_010
(more photos here)

Anyway, whilst doing a bit of random browsing, I came across the work of Swedish illustrator Mattias Adolfsson (Flickr). Anyone who can cross Star Wars with Baroque is a certified genius in my book!

** One of the reasons why I bought the bottle (apart from that fact that it's nice to drink!) is that it's specifically mentioned in one of the narrative segments of the 1989 album "When in Rome, Kill Me" by Leeds based band CuD (official site). How's that for uber obscure, eh?

Posted in: Events.
Tagged: · · · · · ·

More "In their own words"

Dec 11th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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Here's a few more…

Michael Stephens:
ms_005c

Helene Blowers:
helene

David Lee King:
davidleeking

Meredith's book:
meredith

Posted in: Eye Candy, Library Stuff.
Tagged: · ·

spam in the hot topics

Dec 11th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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Apologies for the spam words that are currently appearing in the hot topics cloud at the moment.

It looks like the BlogJunction blog has been hacked — if you view the page source for the blog, you'll find multiple hidden links to gambling sites (the links are currently being hosted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya UOC).

I've removed BlogJunction from the list of sites used for the cloud, so the spam should disappear in the next 48 hours.

Posted in: HotStuff Project.
Tagged: ·

Librarians — in their own words

Dec 10th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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I've spent the last couple of days being inspired by Brendan Dawes' book "Analog In, Digital Out", and playing around with ImageMagick and PerlMagick.

This evening, I felt like doing something for Kathryn Greenhill to commiserate with her for not winning the "Best Librarian/Library Blog" Edublog awards, so here's what you get if you take ImageMagick, 30 minutes of furious Perl coding, a little bit of random font rotation, a suitable JPEG source image, and the RSS feed from Kathryn's blog…

kg_001

I thought Jessamyn West's photo might also make for a cool textual mashup too…

jw_001

In other news, Michael Stephens has gone a little dotty…

dottymichael

Posted in: Eye Candy, Library Stuff.
Tagged: · · ·

BBC Breakfast News items about YouTube

Dec 9th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.
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I briefly mentioned this item from the BBC Breakfast News during Jane Dysart's session at Online Information 2007…

History lessons online
Three teachers are using the website YouTube to teach history. 60 films have been posted online covering topics such as D-Day, Bloody Sunday, the Slave Trade, Vietnam and Mary Queen of Scots.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/…)

The videos are available on YouTube, along with the TV interview.

Apart from the serendipity of it linking in with Jane's session, what impressed me the most was that a news programme was actually featuring a really positive story about YouTube. The majority of news items I've seen before have been generally negative, e.g.:

If your place of work has banned access to YouTube, then positive stories like schoolhistory might be a useful tool for questioning such draconian measures.

Posted in: Online 2007.
Tagged: · ·

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