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According to the statistics… there are apparently some people (or ‘bots’) out there consuming my site content – mainly the gallery. For example, 1797 pageviews on Wednesday, or 0.2GB of traffic, but only 8 ‘unique’ visitors. Other days range from a few to several hundred pageviews, but not over 8 unique visitors in any day.

I wonder if it is people just casually browsing – maybe even friends who just don’t mention it – or some process mass-downloading images for some other purpose.

Meanwhile, when I came to write something this evening I discovered subpixels.com was offline – it turns out the reason being that the IP address specified in the DNS was ‘incorrect’. It was working a couple of days ago… it seems that my host had changed something and neglected to tell me. It seems to be okay now, though, if a little slower than usual (at least from where I sit).

I’ve decided that I should use my graphics tablet more while I have handy access to it – so far it’s hardly ever been used. Hence the Chinese characters here… an attempt by me to copy a wall hanging that I have in my room using Inkscape. I remember I bought it at one of those joss stick and millions of buddhas places in the city, but I can’t remember what the writing is about. Properity? Health? Happiness? Hopefully someone can enlighten me. Please contact me if you can translate, even if my calligraphy is a bit… well, first-attempt! :o)

In other graphics-related news, I’ve been working on some new visuals, and have a few screenshots to share. I still haven’t got around to connecting my mini-DV camcorder to capture video yet, and still haven’t replaced my digitial ‘still’ camera so can’t take a video of the screen! On that subject, though, I read in the past couple of days that Canon are about to release a new Ixus with a 5x optical zoom. Zoom, zoom! A 10 megapixel sensor as well, which might be a bit ridiculous in a compact camera, but I’m sure I won’t be complaining about it too much if I end up purchasing one. Of course it looks like the target price for the next purchase is about to jump up a couple of hundred bucks… don’t you hate it how they get you that way?

I’ve almost finished reading The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. I think when I’m done I might go back and read Part I again, as that was the most interesting part. I should make some notes this time – I’m sure there’s inspiration for some new graphics in there! I’m also interested in finding out more about holographic film – the kind that requires a laser to ‘view’ the recorded hologram.

I received notification of a new version of MemoriesOnTv today, which serves as a reminder to get cracking on making something of the thousands of images captured while I was in Europe… too many to show to friends without some serious culling! And now I have the disc space as well… no more excuses? Hopefully a shiny new release in the near future! :o)

-G.

Posted in: Books, Graphics, Site Maintenance, Subpixel's Creations, VJ / Visuals by subpixel / Tags: calligraphy, Chinese, Inkscape, web stats

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On Valentines day last week I went to buy an alarm clock (how exciting…), and on my way towards home passed through Borders. I asked, as I have asked at numerous bookshops in the past six months or so, if they had a copy of The Holographic Universe in stock. To my surprise, the answer was ‘yes’. Two copies, in fact, “in the astronomy section.” Astronomy?.. Er, okay, sure, that makes sense.

The book had been recommended quite some time ago by a friend, to follow The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy and Way of the Peaceful Warrior – in that order. At the time I’d already read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (perhaps not so surprising as it is apparently one of the best selling books in history!) generously lent by another friend. Between then and now I read the other two books, both of which I enjoyed thoroughly. (Side note: in grabbing links for the books just now, I discovered that films were released of both The Celestine Prophecy and Way of the Peaceful Warrior in 2006! I’ll have to check these out. Something has also been brewing for The Alchemist since 2003.)

In any case, it is a fascinating book, and whilst reading it I was struck by the familiarity of the title of chapter 4: I Sing the Body Holographic.
The chord struck was with the title of an album by Icarus: I Tweet the Birdy Electric. Why does this name seem even otherwise familiar? What is it a quote from, or reference to? After a little searching I come across references to “I sing the body electric”. That’s probably it! From a poem in Leaves of Grass, first (self-)published by American poet Walt Whitman in 1855, though initially without that line, which was introduced in the second edition in the following year.

It turns out that there is a site – The Walt Whitman Archive – which makes the texts available online, so I went to check it out. The archive has not only transcriptions of the text, but photographs of actual book pages… flipping through the second edition, I arrive at the first poem, Poem of Walt Whitman, an American:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

That sounds familiar! It is certainly in keeping with some of the ideas in The Holographic Universe such as things not really being separate, so I flick back through the book and what do I find? The quote at the beginning of the chapter in Talbot’s book:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless….

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

A-ha! Perhaps not what I was looking for, but certainly that’s where the link is. Song of Myself, by the way, being the original title for Poem of Walt Whitman, an American. Mystery solved! The “every atom” quote is probably in Talbot’s book as well. Or perhaps I’ve just imagined it. :o)

Another strange coincidence, or synchronicity, here is that I Tweet the Birdy Electric was released on a label called ‘Leaf’ (Leaf/Inertia).

In all, so far The Holographic Universe, especially Part I, has been a good read. Find out some more about the idea at Crystalinks. I noted there, in the first paragraph, “Michael Talbot (1953-1992)”, and suddenly realised he probably didn’t get to see much of the reaction from his book, published 1991… sadly Michael Talbot died in 1992 from leukemia at the age of 39. Rest in millions of self-referential, universe-encompassing pieces Mr Talbot.

-G.

Posted in: Books, Physics by subpixel / Tags: poetry, synchronicity, The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy, The Holographic Universe, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

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So the other day my webserver was moved to a new cluster. Things seemed fine until I had a poke around inside the Gallery and I discovered that thousands of symbolic links to image files are now invalid!

Contacted support, but there’s nothing much they can do. I can’t see how the links are set up, but on the basis that they aren’t working… I’m supposing that they include the path from the root. Since my home directory is now different to what it was on the other cluster, the old path points some place that doesn’t exist.

The process of building the galleries took days (I’d worked on it for hours at a time at various stages while I was away), and it’s not a pleasant thoght to have to mostly start over. The images themselves do exist in my filespace,  so I’m going to ee if I can replace the (currenlty broken) links with new links or with actual files, perhaps by removing the directories containing the links and moving/renaming the directories containing the files to Gallery’s data directory. Unfortunately the directory names are not the same (due to Gallery disallowing some of the characters), so it isn’t going to be a straightforward process.

Meanwhile, I’m learning C# .Net at the moment. I think it is going to take a while.

-G.

Posted in: Books, C#, Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: .Net, Gallery, symbolic links

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