where programming and art collide

I was looking for a higher level abstraction for image creation and finally found one worthy of note. The NodeBox Gallery shows what the toolkit is capable of and is the first accessible drawing library that allows for Tufte's Just Noticeable Differences. I'm only now beginning to explore it, and am uncertain whether it encourages working in JND or the gallery curator just has an eye for such.

In other tech news - by which I mean "news to me" - I'd long had a love affair with the elegance of the TeX typesetting system and the amount of typographical art that Knuth formalized in its page layout algorithms. To my knowledge nobody has bested its running text composition abilities (it may in fact be optimal, see below the fold). But, put simply, TeX is a pain to work with. It is a batch-oriented system dating from the time when editing ASCII markup was quick but page creation couldn't be computed in real time. I'd sort of vaguely thought that computers have become fast enough to do TeX in real-time. Well they had, I just didn't know that the people at LyX had already done it. I was creating good looking documents again within three minutes of installing LyX. I'm perhaps too happy about that.

the 22 minute web application

I've decided that since I write so much about technologies that I was going to start aggregating my non-published works here. Woe betide the gentle reader; I shall look for a way to exclude posts labeled "tech" from my main stream.

This is just a brief note of "cool things I've recently discovered" disguised as shameless self-promotion. As Blogger has done for blogging, so has Google App Engine done for developing and deploying web applications. True, it isn't quite as easy for the computer novice to create an application as it is a blog, but I can't imagine making it much easier for the developer than they have.

noisy warnings - they should know better

Somewhere in my wanderings, Google suggested that I add their own "Blog This" extension into my Chrome browser. I figured it might cause me to write more, the merit of which is admittedly debatable, and was certainly easy enough to install and un-install if I liked.

As is it's habit, Chrome properly warned me that the extension I was installing would have access to all my browser history and the pages I was viewing. In general, the warning is a good thing, however...

I create because I must...

I've had occasion to spend time with artists. I've able to do this through the conceit (or perhaps deceit) that I too was an artist. There was one plastic artist that I was speaking with while she was preparing some of her works for market; our chat took place within her tidy but overflowing studio. She said

I create because I must, if I can make some money from it, that's great.

Having heard the same sentiment stated less directly from other artists, it was at that point that I realized I was out of my league. I create because I want to and with arduous effort, I can empathize with the artist's claim as I think we all have something that we do that is as much a part of our constitution as respiration is to our bodies, but for me it is not in the plastic or performing arts. Fortunately, it doesn't stop me from trying to be an artist, but it does put me in my proper place on the scale of nature.