Contents
This is the personal website of Eric O'Dell. About half of the stuff here is of general interest, and the other half probably only interests friends and family.
Technē
Articles
- Pseudo-Analog Palettes - A possible solution for the sometimes excessive regularity of digital painting, complete with some tools you can use yourself.
- Random Access Stable PRNGs - How to associate a stable random value with every point in a space of arbitrary dimensionality.
- The Apple II Palette - If you're old and nostalgic or young and into retrocomputing, the low- and high-resolution palettes of the Apple II are presented here as RGB triplets, ready to use for syntax highlighting or in CSS stylesheets.
Guides
- Internet Zero - A guide to running a telnet BBS in DOSBox.
- Troff and Unix Text Processing - A powerful typesetting language more than fifty years old, reconsidered.
Toys
- Diagrammata - Diagrammata assembles
complex structures from simple rectilinear or hexagonal tiles by a random
process. Tiles are defined by their connectors on each side. The end result
of each run can be suprisingly complicated compared to the simplicity of the
tiles, and the same tileset can produce two or more radically different
patterns, analogous to crystal allotropes. More than 200 presets are
included if you just want to explore without getting into the process of
designing your own tiles. It is based on Paul Harrison's original Ghost Diagrams and
licensed under the GPL. - Martin Attractor Fractal - The
Martin Attractor is an orbit fractal that was first discovered by Barry
Martin at Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and later popularized under the
name Hopalong by A.K. Dewdney in the pages of Scientific American in 1986.
(Dewdney chose the name because of the somewhat quirky order in which the
points are plotted, i.e., they "hop along" elliptical paths from the
center.) Martin preferred the name "Martin Attractor" for them, but the
Hopalong name stuck. - Ulam Spiral Explorer - The Ulam Spiral was
discovered by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1963 while idly doodling
during a what he described as a boring presentation. It consists of a
rectilinear spiral of integers with the prime numbers marked by dots. To
Ulam's surprise, this revealed unexpected structures in the supposedly
random appearance of prime numbers on the integer number line. This tool
lets you explore variations on the Ulam Spiral, including some silly
features for transforming the spiral into abstract art at least as good as
what you'll see in your doctor's waiting room. You can read more about it here or jump straight to the toy here. - Minimal Oracle - This started as a Perl script (and snark) when I was working for a company that did online Tarot readings. It consists of several oracles of varying degrees of seriousness, from the obligatory coin flip and Magic 8-Ball, to Art Wells' lyrical I-Ching adaptation, Newwings, (and a couple of Tarot-like remixes of it), four variations on Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck, and the Viking Runes. It's a pretty straight port of the original commandline Perl program and it shows.
- Miscellaneous Toys - This is a collection of minor experiments that are currently (and perhaps permanently) too small to warrant their own pages. Right now, it contains a harmonic progression calculator and an algorithmic art generator.