lab 89 - electroquongton

By

NAME

lab 89 - electroquongton

NOTES

The code for this lab was something I was playing with to display on a Nintendo DS. It uses the mux window manager and the prefab module builtin. Because of the dependency on the builtin, which isn't usually part of the inferno-os standard emu build, I've included a muxemu.exe for Windows in this labs code. To launch the code run the following, 

% muxemu -r . -g256x384 /dis/mux/mux.dis

and on the screen you should see this,

10872522390-Inferno

Move up and down using keys 'i' and 'm'. Enter a selection using the 'Enter' key and return to the main menu by pressing the spacebar.

I'm not experienced with the draw(2) API so I started with screens for board games.

10861214276-Inferno

I was experimenting using transparency effects. The look I was going for was Electroplankton for Nintendo DS.

I tried to get shapes with edges that blended out into a graded background and some simple animations of shapes pulsing.

108725231623-Inferno

The one serious application I was trying to write was a QUONG keyboard for convenient touch input.

10872420332-Inferno

This application responds to the mouse to enter letters. The top half of the windows is an implementation of Plan 9's libframe. It was part of Inferno's acme implementation and I extracted it from acme's dependencies. If you take anything away from this lab it would probably be this one library, maybe to build an inferno based 9term.

A big disappointment is that these didn't actually work on the inferno-ds due to what I guess is a bug in the handling of graphics with masks. They did seem to work on the DS emulators, but slowly. Another difficulty is writing them so that they fit in the DS memory, the techniques of which I'm completely ignorant because I'm used to the great spaciousness of modern desktops.

FILES

inferno-lab/89

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lab 110 - inferno archive edition

By
I've been occupied recently with archiving my digital media. I've been copying home videos on DV tapes to hard-disk, ripping audio CD's to WAV files, gathering photo collections, and trying to copy documents from Iomega disks, floppies, and my dusty old Acorn RiscPC. The plan is to have a copy of this data to give to each of my children. My Dad recently scanned and sent me all his photographs of me and my siblings growing up; he also included pictures of himself and my Mother when they met in Africa. With technology today each generation can build a digital library of family history to hand on to the next generation. In the past a family album may have been passed on to only one person. The accumulation of digital data still presents problems. It requires discipline to store files that are open and not locked into devices or proprietary formats. With digital preservation in mind I've tried to use file formats recommended for long term archiving. WAV files for audio, D
Read more

lab 107 - midiplay

By
NAME lab 107 - midiplay NOTES Midiplay plays back MIDI files. It uses the synthesizer I described in lab 62 and the MIDI module from lab 73. The command takes only one argument, the path to the midi file. I've included one in the lab to demonstrate. Bind the audio device before using it. % bind -a '#A' /dev % midiplay invent15.mid The synthesizer has 16 note polyphony. It uses three oscillators, one at the pitch, one at half pitch, one at double pitch. There is also a filter, two delays and a vibrato. The sample rate is 8000hz and there is one mono channel (MIDI channel events are ignored). It performs well enough to work on my laptop without JIT turned on. All the synthesizer parameters can only be tweaked from inside the code at the moment. FILES lab - 107
Read more

The Cartesian Theater of AI

By
Image
The Cartesian Theater was an intuition pump proposed by philosopher Daniel Dennett to describe a false theory of consciousness. Inside the mind is a stage watched by a humunculus that observes what passes on the stage, hears the sounds, and controls the rest of the mind by responding to the action of what the smaller version of the self sees. Of course, what makes the smaller self conscious? It is an infinite regression. Our understanding of mind is that there is no such theater. There is no one place in the mind that is the locality of consciousness. I want to offer another thought experiment based on the concept of a Cartesian Theater. Imagine a theater containing a screen with a camera pointing at it, and a speaker with a microphone directed toward the speaker. The camera is pointing at the screen. The mic is pointing at the speaker. However, instead of there being an infinite loop due to a direct connection between the camera and screen, insert an AI in the loop. The imag
Read more