The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Fun With Data

I started work on a project a little while ago, and it's probably past time I started blogging it. My intention was to produce a population map of the United States, county by county -- essentially, a map of the country's other topography.

Each cylinder represents one county or equivalent (e.g. an independent city, Louisian parish, or Alaskan census area). The circular area represents the land area, the height its population density, and the volume of each cylinder its population. The cylinders are instanced Animation:Master models generated by a script.

The population and land area data come from the U.S. Census Bureau web site. Location data is approximated from Census Burea .bna outline files made available on the Princeton web site by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne of the 2004 Election "Purple Map" fame.

The first version of the script could build one state at a time. With 254 counties, the most of any state, this is Texas:

The second could produce an arbitrary number of states with random colors, but each had to be loaded by hand as soon as the script finished with the previous. This is New England, where I was born and raised:

The first version of the script that could construct the entire United States took over 14 hours to run and had several bugs, one of which limited it to 99 counties per state. This is its first output:

Right now, I have debugged the script, analyzed its output for missed counties, and am working at sanitizing the input data to avoid screwups. I hope to have a complete work in progress by the end of the weekend.

You Can Put a Pig in a Dress, Too

This weekend, as part of my ongoing project of pretending to be my age, I picked up my first decent coat in Freeport, Maine.

Now to do something about everything else. This could take a while. Maybe I'll start with the hair.

Signup for Sandy

Having little besides time at the moment, I've decided to try out a new productivity tool. IWantSandy.com is an email-based natural language calendar/to-do notification service. It's by the original creator of the Blosxom CMS that runs the Space Toast Pages.

There was no setup required beyond email, password and confirm password. Thus far, I've sent the service an email asking it to remind me to call a staffing agency that's been doing some work on my behalf at 1PM. The message was in the following form:

Remember to call Tigres Pileser at the Windy City Senate at 555-555-5555 at 1PM.

In theory, IWantSandy.com will send a reminder to my inbox at 1PM today. Supposedly, it'll also store the contact, company, number, and so forth for retrieval at a later date.

We'll see how it does.

They Tried to Destroy the Metal

It's a Record

My roommates have gone through an entire roll of toilet paper in one day. Ladies, if any of you are looking for a nice young man to settle down and, I dunno, move in with... let me know.

Things I'm Embarrassed I Sort of Enjoy

• Jenna Malone
• The Westway theme song
• ArtDungeon.net
• Confrontation
• Slice-of-life stories
• Algebra
• Nerdcore
• Making do
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

It's Time for Another Good Idea/Bad Idea...

Inkscape: Replacing Static Palettes With Dynamic Swatches

Filed as a feature request on Inkscape's Sourceforge page:

The only major problems with Inkscape's workflow have to do with fill and
stroke selection. Without an object selected, the Fill and Stroke window
is greyed out, preventing the user from selecting a style prior to working
in it. This is fairly logical from a programmatic object/attributes
standpoint, but to an artist it's very back-to-front -- we don't expect to
begin drawing with a crayon and then change it to a marker. Likewise, in
everyday drawing one tends to flip back and forth between a few
commonly-used styles, but the only way to return to a style in Inkscape is
to draw a path, select another object containing the desired style, copy,
reselect the new object, and paste the style into it.

Replacing the color swatches at the bottom of the window with dynamic
swatches made up of previously-used styles -- including fill, stroke,
opacity, blur, etc. -- could improve Inkscape's workflow a great deal. The
current swatches take up a great deal of space onscreen but only serve to
duplicate part of the Fill and Stroke window's functionality.

With dynamic swatches, making changes in the Fill and Stroke window with no
object selected would create a new swatch. Clicking on a previous swatch
would bring it back to the first position and assign its style to the next
object drawn. I've put together a mockup of what this might look like.

"Windy City" Enters Its First Screenwriting Competition

My first feature screenplay, "Windy City," has been entered into the 2007 ASA International Screenplay Competition. The quarterfinalists will be announced by February 28, 2008, with the semifinalists coming out April 30 and the final winners being announced at the awards ceremony at the end of September, 2008.

As much as I dread (and typically fail) at self-promotion, it's nice to be back on the contest scene. Æsop's Council of Mice was my last animated film to play the film festival circuit, following the relative success of my award-winning debut Marboxian. Owing mainly to financial difficulties, I wasn't able to do much with Mice, and I've had to focus on making a living since.

It's been mentioned a few times here, but maybe it's time to introduce the thing. Windy City is a classic city mouse/country mouse story written by someone who's been both. It has airships and fantastic cities, natural and manmade disasters, and a whole laundry list of other exciting things. But that's not why you'll fall in love with it. The real movie is about a boy from the valley and a senator's daughter from the city -- Dan Assurbani and Nineve Sherrib -- and how their lives meet and grow more and more complicated.

Windy City started life as a treatment six or seven years ago. At about this time last year, I dusted it off and set about cleaning it up. Somehow the treatment became a full first draft by April, and I had some friends with a bit of theatre experience over to do a cold readthrough. I sat on the lessons I learned from hearing it out loud, and the remaining issues I had with it, picked at it for the next few months as life got complicated again, and finally -- in four days at a friend's house in coastal Maine -- burned through to a second draft in late August.

It's been an interesting year. Wish Windy City luck.

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