Code With Jim

This is my first little program created using BeetleBlock. https://github.com/ericrosenbaum/BeetleBlocks I really like this program because similar to Scratch programming, it uses bunch of building blocks and it is interactive inside 3D environment. Still in beta version, but I would like to see how this can be used to learn and teach programming.

Only the other day, I started to look at Processing again. And I just realized it has Python mode! MOMENT OF REALIZATION I really SHOULD have taken Processing thing more seriously years ago. I practice and study Processing ON and OFF, depending on interest. Processing was particularly very popular around 2010. Still not dying today, not sure whether people are still using it or not. Lots of good books were written back then. As Visual Artist, my attempt to start getting serious with programming started when I was looking at works from John Maeda. I have one of his digital art book, still inspiring and brilliant. I think his book and tool titled Design By Number (DBN) is one of books that encourage myself to try on programming. DBN is simple and interesting and the book is worth looking before one jumps into Processing. There is also another book about "Basics Programming" with lots of cartoon drawing of dragons, etc. It helps me to say to myself: "Ok, I should learn

I installed the iOS 10 Beta on my iPad today and just like mentioned at WWDC 2016, with iOS 10 we now have a NEW app called "Swift Playground" that allows users to start digging into programming in Apple Swift language. When I first saw the presentation about "Swift Playground app for iOS 10", I was totally mind blown. That is exactly what I have been asking for many years. A good coding app on iPad. Well, actually we are already able to do some coding on iPad and iPhone using 3rd party apps like Pythonista and Procoding (Processing, Python, etc). But now, we finally got the Apple official coding app built in for iPad. The app is using Swift iOS programming language, and Swift is a kind of nice blend of Python, Lua, and few other high level programming languages. Heard that many programmers are liking Swift, which is a good sign! FIRST TEST SWIFT PLAYGROUND Swift Playground app comes with some tutorials and I guess anyone will definitely start from here.

Not sure where to start writing this topic, but it has been in my head for a while. I will jump around, but all will be related to animated GIF. But basically when it comes to dealing with GIF (animated) using code or programmably, there seems to be no easy way. For example, there is no Python module that deals with Animated GIF elegantly.  I found it really strange. In my previous experience as graphic designer, I have used Photoshop to edit and create animated GIF. Editing GIF is simple enough in Photoshop via the interface and menu. As many years pass by, I tried to challenge myself to try not to rely too much on Photoshop. The truth is I want to be very flexible with my computing habits these days (it needs to be portable) and also I am becoming a little bit more comfortable in programming. So, with open source languages like Python, Processing, or Wolfram Cloud, I supposed I should be able to produce animated GIF quite easily right? Well, not that simple apparently.

Continuing with my Wolfram Mathematica Trial Experience... I watched and went through some more Mathematica introduction videos, read lots of Mathematica documentation and also going through the Wolfram Lab Online again a few times. There are some major learning curves and Mathematica is a lot different from normal programming language. Sometimes there is a lot of interesting "shortcuts", say like: FindFaces[] , WordCloud[] . Sometimes I got a little confused on how one can do iterations. Normally FOR LOOP concept is introduced early, but in Wolfram, because everything is EXPRESSIONS and ENTITY (like OBJECTS), sometimes it gets quite quirky. Mind you I am still in the first impression and having to look at many tutorials. Lots of NEAT EXAMPLES from documentation, but sometimes I got lost. I found Wolfram to be really awesome with LIST and generating list. It's almost too easy when it works visually. I cannot explain them with my own words yet, but there are

Now how did we end up here? Wolfram Mathematica Installation I installed Mathematica on both on Mac and PC, it was a pretty heavy 2.5 GB download and when installation completed, one will end up with 7-8 GB of hard disk space occupied. I installed Mathematica on both on Mac and PC, it was a pretty heavy 2.5 GB download and when installation completed, one will end up with 7-8 GB of hard disk space occupied. And THEN, there is this annoyance where the license can only be activated on 1 machine. Switching from my Windows desktop environment to my MacBookPro, and I got this popup requesting System Transfer for the license. This is a typical commercial app :( Wolfram do feels like a Adobe Photoshop or Autodesk software (Maya, 3dsmax) or big bundled tools packaged. I still have to remind myself all the time that “Wolfram is a paid commercial app” . It brings back my nightmares a bit of having to deal with commercial apps. No matter what, Python and Jupyter migh

Can you tell what it is? Computer Vision. Yesterday, I spend almost whole day exploring this opencv module using Python. What I discovered was revealing. Even at the very basic level, I could produce some interesting Image and Video manipulation using all the code collected from documentation and many, many blog tutorials. If you are a total noob like me, I am still getting used to knowing that the CV in OpenCV means Computer Vision! Actuallly, I recalled that I did try to get into OpenCV few years back ago, when I knew no Python and when Python opencv module was probably still early. It was all C++ code and it was a little bit too hard for me. I read a couple of books about opencv at the library, I did not understand a single thing. That was back then. Today, for strange reason, with a bit of knowledge of Python, I can go a little further. EDGE DETECT IN OPENCV Me holding you know what. What leads me this far is my curiosity on how we can replicate Wolfram Langu

This is going to be a really quick blog post. Fine Tuned "Ada" Edge Detect result. IMAGE & WOLFRAM ALPHA APP Last night, I was again exploring this Wolfram Alpha app on the iPhone, which I paid for extra few dollars to get "Image" upload feature. I am curious about this kind of thing, so I feed in a photo I took the other day of this very vivid photos of rainbow wings on the street: I give extra input "Edge Detect" and naturally Wolfram Alpha app can do the Edge Detect thing. And I also tried "Posterize" filtering. That is pretty impressive because of these things: It supposed to detect the image and predict what the image is, rarely, but sometimes it can give you the right guess. It gives some Mathematical analytic, sometimes it gives back location of the image  It gives you some options of what "filter" you can apply to the image It gives user a very easy way to process INPUT and OUTPUT. Pretty fa