I stumbled upon this neat way to view Flickr photos, called Flickriver. Basically, you search for a topic (like orangutans) or a member’s photostream and it displays the photos as one continuous ‘river’ down the page. But the nice thing is it only loads them dynamically in small batches, so you only use extra bandwidth if you scroll the page.

I’m guessing it’s based on this jQuery plugin Lazy Load which is basically the opposite of pre-fetching. Might be worth incorporating into a project. Hmm…

Check it out and be sure to also have a look at stuck in customs photos. He does some absolutely stunning HDR images. Highly recommended.

My running theme lately seems to be brevity but I think that’s good thing. It’s always so easy to make something complex, messy and convoluted (laws, government reports, relationships), but the real skill is in distilling and simplifying it down to it’s essential elements while still being palatable. That’s beauty.

Anyway, I came across this really nice summary of the big events from the beginning of the Universe to the present day and it was too good not to share (a little US-centric towards the end though). Much respect to the author. Have a read:

“ Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation?

Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation.

Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization!

Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization.

Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?”

- © 1997 by Eric Schulman

Less than 100kB you say? Not possible right? Check out kkrieger.

I’ve been really interested in the demoscene lately and came across this cool creation. It’s not so much the quality of the gameplay or anything, but the way they’ve managed to cram a fully rendered, interactive 3D environment into the size of a word document file.

The demoscene has been around for years as a programming sub-culture that make audio-visual demonstrations that often push the boundries of computing. Since the creators know waaaay too much assembly code, are fueled by copious amounts of caffine and aren’t constrained by anything more than imagination, they make some incredible (usually non-interactive) procedurally-generated content.

As a step up though, these guys from The Produkkt designed a fully 3D first-person shooter (FPS) game kkrieger, with the entire thing fitting into 96 kilobytes of data.

It’s like the old 20 clowns in a Mini trick - 96kB is less than the size it takes to store an ingame screenshot! Pretty amazing. And the graphics use all of the advanced rendering techniques (normal mapping, spectral lighting etc.) found in games like Doom 3 that usually take up a couple of gigs in uncompressed textures and sound (admittedly they take advantage of directX libraries too).

Here’s a screenshot:

Note: you probably need a decent graphics card and processor to run the demo (it crashed on my laptop).

I’m pretty sure Spore uses some of the procedurally-generated ideas that the demoscene guys pioneered. Apparently most of Spore’s music is procedurally-generated too. Sounds interesting.

Anyone else found any cool interactive demoscene creations?