Blog

HostingRails and Capistrano Permissions Mismatch • April 9, 2010

I stumbled across a problem, and then a solution, today, when deploying a Rails application to HostingRails. After I deployed, I started getting Application (500) Errors on all of my pages.

After talking with support, I found out that is was because the group write permission was being turned on on my dispatch.fcgi file. Looking further though, I realized that all of my deployed files had group write turned on! So, the question was, why?

Some searching led me to this post on the HostingRails forum, which essentially says that starting with version 1.4, Capistrano turns on group write for all your files by default. Lovely.

One commenter posed this solution (which I slightly modified), which worked for me:

In deploy.rb, add the following code:

desc "Set permissions to 755, so HostingRails does not complain"
task :hostingrails_fix do
  run "chmod 755 #{deploy_to}/current/public"
  run "chmod 755 #{deploy_to}/current/public/dispatch.*"
end

after "deploy:symlink", :hostingrails_fix

Glory Math 2 Icon Work • April 5, 2010

I've made a lot of progress on Glory Math 2... it's starting to make some beautiful music! In case you missed it, I posted a video of the work in progress last week (although it's already come a long way since then).

But aside from working on the app itself, there are always the accompanying materials to be made, such as the icons (big and small) for the iPhone, and the App Store itself. Today I thought I'd share with you what I have for that so far:

Glory Math 2 App Store Icon (in progress)

The colors are from a screenshot of the app, and the keys are from my roommate's Wurlitzer EP276, which sits in our living room.

And, if you haven't got your copy of Glory Math 1 yet, you should do that now.

Glory Math 2 is Coming Along • April 1, 2010

Here's footage of Glory Math 2 in development. The audio you hear is coming from the iPhone in the video. Glory Math 2 builds off of the cellular automaton in Glory Math 1 and adds generative music to it. I plan on going a lot further with what's going on with the audio, but even so far I think it's pretty interesting.

A Simpler Magnifying Glass (Loupe) View for the iPhone • March 25, 2010

magnifier_screen.jpg

I recently needed to create one of those magnifying glasses in an iPhone app that shows you a close-up view of where you're touching. Searching around led me to this article by Sean Christmann, which was really helpful in showing me how to create what I was looking for (Thanks Sean!).

However, once I got familiar with his approach, it seemed like there had to be a simpler and possibly more efficent way to get the same thing. He generates a cached image to get the effect, which takes up some memory, but more importantly, it also prevents the magnifying glass from having live updates (which I needed). In other words, once the magnifier is there, any activity going on beneath it won't be properly shown.

So, I wrote my own. read more »

FJenie Resurrected • March 24, 2010

Just a quick note to say I've created a page on this site now for FJenie, a Java-based Csound utility that I wrote back in college. There used to be a page for it at sphericle.com, and during all my domain shuffling, I neglected to keep FJenie available online. So, it's back!

Experimenting with NetLogo • March 23, 2010

netlogo_exp1.jpg

My friend Matthew has repeatedly told me that I should try out NetLogo to aid me in my experiments with cellular automata (such as Glory Math), and a couple of days ago, I finally took his advice. Man, he was right.

I think I downloaded it somewhere around 4pm. I stopped using it and went to bed around 2am. The following is part of what I have to show for it. I started with the Vants model (one of the many models that comes with NetLogo), and experimented from there, both with the behavior of the agents, and the color mapping, until I got something that I found visually interesting.

Basically, this model makes a bunch of little guys that run around in circles. Most of the time they like to stick to the same general area, but occasionally they get inspired and bolt off to new territory. Along the way, they leave trails that light up the more they are traversed.

Here's the NetLogo source file so that you can poke around yourself. read more »

The Math Behind Glory Math 1 • March 20, 2010

Glory Math 1, all stretched out

Glory Math 1 is an example of an asynchronous, two-dimensional cellular automaton (CA). If you poke around Wikipedia, you can find some pretty good information on what exactly that means, but in a nutshell, it's a rectangular grid of squares, each containing a number (which represents a color), and each square in the grid constantly updates itself based on a set of rules that take into account that square's neighbors (the squares around it).

The Rule

The rule dictating the behavior of the cellular automaton is really simple: each generation (step in time), each square takes on the value of the average of its 4 neighbors' values (in the cardinal directions, not the diagonals). That's it.

But, It's Asynchronous

A synchronous CA computes each cell in a generation simultaneously, meaning that only the cells from a previous generation are taken into account when calculating the next generation. read more »

Glory Math, the Wallpaper • March 5, 2010

Recently I experimented with taking successive screenshots from Glory Math 1 and laying them out next to each other. I wanted to share with you the results of the experiment. It makes a neat desktop wallpaper.

Glory Math, the wallpaper.
Click for a larger version

It might be cool to add the ability to create these directly into the app itself, yeah?

Building a Community: Coffeeshopped Support • March 3, 2010

Mt. Bonnell Sunset

Today I added some support forums to the Coffeeshopped website. So, now there's a central place to get help, give feedback, and discuss Sphericle, HourPatch, and Glory Math.

Sign up and let's get the conversation going!

Glory Math 1 Now Available on the App Store • March 1, 2010

It's here! Our new iPhone App "Glory Math 1" is now available on the iTunes App Store. Check out the Glory Math Home Page for more details on the app itself (including a video), or just go straight to the App Store and get your copy!

Here's another screenshot from Glory Math 1 (made this one last night):

photo.jpg

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