Blackkettle

Wow.

Now I just need to generate some spare time to think through what’s possible with all this.

Also, intriguingly, the Ordnance Survey has released an API that mitigates my old post somewhat.

Listening To Reason: First Impressions of L#

This looks really fun. One of the main issues I’ve had with Lisp in the past is that the libraries seem to be completely foreign. With a well-known and understandable library behind it, L# could well be the answer to that. Shame it doesn’t compile, though…

Alex Young’s homepage

Ok, this is just frightening. For starters, to clear up any confusion, it’s not my site. Other than that, the similarities between me and this guy are astonishing. We both live in London. We both do web dev work. We’re both into Ruby and/on Rails, and dig the whole community-centric Web 2.0 push. We have similar tastes in music, and this page is probably more info than I would possibly have taken away from a conference I really wanted to go to, but couldn’t.

That is all somehow overshadowed by the fact that he’s got the same damn name as me. We should meet up, so that the universe can implode, or something.

Just a quick pointer to some useful code I found myself needing:

A Porter stemmer in Ruby.

Carrot Clustering Engine

This is really cool. It also seems to be inhumanly fast. It’s a pretty blatant advert for a commercial clustering and knowledge extraction engine, but it’s still really neat.

There’s a great essay up here. Should be required reading.

This is indescribably cool. At least, I think so. I’ve been out of the image processing loop for a couple of years now, but the sort of thing SIFT makes possible are just mind-boggling. Photosynth is just the beginning. Shame about the licencing, though…

For those of you who haven’t been following along, here’s a brief state-of-play update. I’m working on Shaxam.com, which span out of Turning The Pages, and has had me learning lots about LightWave’s SDK and file formats and the 3D parts of XAML, and is the most fun and interesting work I’ve been involved with in years. I’ll be posting here info about what I’ve learnt, a few questions for those involved, and progress updates as and when necessary.

The main output so far has been a simple plugin to convert static LightWave objects to XAML meshes, with as much detail intact as possible. Head over to shaxam.com if that interests you. On sale RealSoonNow(tm) will be a plugin to handle animation data. We’re about 95% there functionality-wise, and it’s looking better all the time.

I’m working on all this with Mark, who is fiendishly good with LightWave, and keeps pushing my code further than I was expecting, which is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for now. More updates as and when, you know the drill.