December 31, 2003

Nerd savvy meets Martha Stewart

Posted by Scott at 09:39 AM

Computer enhanced cross stitch - What do you get when you take a computer nerd with a bit too much time on his hands and turn him towards cross stitching? You get this. Go on! Click it! It's impressive! My good friend, Russell, who's working part time at ARC as a contractor, was inspired by how icons are made for Windows programs. You have a limited palette of colors you can work with, not unlike web browsing was about 10 years ago... When he looked at the zoomed version of the icon it reminded him of a cross stitch. A light bulb went off. He bought hundreds of colors of threads from our local A.C. Moore craft store. He wrote a small program that worked with his scanner to analyze the red, green, blue intensities of those threads. This helped him build a database of thread color names and their actual color values. He wrote a separate program that takes an image and tiles it into squares with the nearest thread that matches that small region/pixel. For a given thread color the program will tell him all the squares he should fill in with that color. Over the course of December he built a cross stitch of his goddaughter, Jennifer. As much as I respect those who wrote a 50,000 word novel in November, I'd have to say this effort trumps that. That Russell, he's one crafty fellow!

Comments

Whoa, dude. That program just blew my mind.

Posted by: Suzy at December 31, 2003 12:35 PM

Oh and I have been reading the novel website you linked to and I don't get it.

Posted by: Suzy at December 31, 2003 12:47 PM

The website was for NaNoWriMo. In November lots of hobbiests with an interest in creative writing voluntarily commit to writing a 50,000 word novel by the end of November. My friend, Will, participated in it this past month. The website is an online community/forum for those who participate in the event.

While I may write a decent amount at this website, I certainly don't approach that volume of writing. It comes to about 1600 words per day! On my most long winded, "what is he blathering about today" web posts I usually top out at 1200 words. But writing 1600 words or more every day and churning out a consistent storyline is something completely different. I just write about what I know and it jumps all over the spectrum. Heck! I'm sure my Master's thesis was no where near that long!

So do you have AOL Instant Messenger where you are now? If you have AIM setup for your account on your machine, then when you're surfing bilikfamily.com, just look at my status in the lower right hand corner of the front page. If it says I'm online, just click the "online" button and it will open AIM on your machine with a channel and message pointing at me.

Posted by: Scott at December 31, 2003 01:23 PM