Interesting projects, or not. The projects described here range from one night ideas turned into code to life-long endeavours. Click on one of the
projects to view the details. Most of them contain something downloadable that lets you play around with it.
Note that most projects are not open source. I supply the source, grant you the right to play around with the
source, but I keep all rights, until somebody comes up with an improvement. If I receive the improvement, I'll release
the source code.
Physical distances are not the same as psychological distances. Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances? The Mapped Web does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.
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Google News Map shows a map of the World with on top of it projected the latest headlines according to Google News, pointing with their upper left corner to the country where it refers to.
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One of my better alife programs. Cambrium shows creatures crawling around the screen in search for food. The creatures are controled by a neural network and assembled out of parts.
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Land Geist is a combination of Googles Zeit Geist, Google Mind Share and Visited Countries. For keywords like 'war', 'poverty', 'party', this project shows which country (names) have the highest relative scores (google shares). I.e. 35% of all pages with the word Iraq on them, also contain the word War, making Iraq leader for war, just after Afghanistan and North-Korea. The axis of evil appear therefore in red.
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Visited Countries is a small project demonstrating the power of manipulating the palette of a gif image on the fly. Here we start with a map of the world with each country in a different color. The script asks which country you have been to and sets the colors of those countries to red, the rest to green.
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Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color.
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The Archean project explores self organization by multiplying the six dimensional strings in a matrix world with a transformation matrix, a little like Conway's game of life, but then in full color. From a random pattern something more ordered emerges. Different every time!
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Amazing movies taken using a digital camera that was taken up into the air with a couple helium balloons. The movies show the vondelpark and the rijksmuseum from 50 meter or so.
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A little program that allows you to see what would happen to the coastline of europe with the sea at a certain level.
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| Chinese Radicals | Learning Chinese is hard, they say, but it is made easy with the Douwe Osinga's learn to read Chinese method, to be downloaded for free from here. Chinese Radicals is a simple program that teaches the user in an interactive way the 215 radicals used in Simplified Chinese. |
| Google Random Image | Google Random Image is a little javascript code that scans the html of the page it is on and uses that to find a matching image on Google Image Search, which is then displayed. This way you can always have a fresh image on your site/blog. |
| Google Top 1000 | Google Top 1000 is a list of website who have the number one position at google when you search for the corresponding number. If, for example, you search for the number 42, the number one position is a site on Deep Thought (why not the HHGttG?), so this site would apear in slot 42 of my Google list. I wrote a script to do this, which you can download, but it is very easy to do by hand of course. |
| Google Date | Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows three results. Since Google isn't very good at sorting documents for relevance when it comes to dates, it usually doesn't give you a list of big events, but of the things happening in the lives of random people. |
| Collective Proza | You know this game where everybody gets to add one sentence to a story? Well, here's the online version. In order to make it a little bit more interesting and protect the concept a bit from abuse, each visitor can contribute one candidate sentence. When there are four options, a vote starts and the first one with two more votes than the others gets added. Repeat. |
| Collective Poetry | Everybody knows those magnetic poetry kits that let you form poems with magnetic words on your refrigerator. This projects lets you do the same thing on the web. That has been done before, but here the thing is real time (you see what others are doing) and persistent (if you restart, you'll see the same config). |
| Poetry in Translation | Poetry in Translation uses Googles Automatic Translation service to translate sentences from English to German, then to French and then back to German again with sometimes funny results. |
| 20 Words | simple project that allows you to check the languages you speak and get a list of coverage |
| Speakamylanguage | simple project that allows you to check the languages you speak and get a list of coverage |
| Google Talk | Ever wondered what Google would say if it could talk? Wonder no more. Enter three or four words and Google will finish your thoughts by searching for what comes next after these words. |
| The Next President | The Next President is a simple web application where you guess for each state which candidate is going to win and the program plots a map showing the results and adds up the totals of the Electoral College, in short calculating your prediction. |
| Visual Poetry | Poetry is supposed to project images in your mind. VisualPoetry translates any text into a series of images by looking up the words on Google image search and projecting the most relevant results as a slide show. |
| Visited States | Visited States is a copy of Visited Countries, but here you select the states of the US instead of the countries of the world and it draws a map where you've been and where not. Also nice as a general mapping tool if you need a graph wich state will vote democrat or something |
| Worldsizer | Worldsizer shows the major parts of the world on a map sized according to their GDP, Population, Military spending etc. |
| Google Battle | Use Google to determine which of two terms is more popular on the Internet. Who is the more popular painter, Van Gogh or Rembrandt? The Beatles or the Stones? |
| PyTivo | PyTivo is a small python script that listens to rss streams containing bittorrent references. If they match your keywords, it downloads the torrent and launches it in a program of your choice. |
| Caerfai Chemical Simulation | Caerfai is a first attempt at simulating chemical reactions. The model is much too simple to be useful, but it gives some nice images and animations. Source is included and offers a nice starting point for similar endevours. |
| Movie Rater | One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how many bad movies are made. Well, being made is one thing, but they are also put in theaters and being promoted heavily. I think it is odd because in most cases you can tell pretty easily whether something is a winner or a complete dud. |
| Google Protocol | Google Protocol is a little app that when installed, registers two extra protocols similar to the http: and the ftp: protocols under windows, namely google: and lucky:. Urls starting with the first refer to the corresponding google search. Urls starting with the second refer to the top Google result. |
| CIA Factbook Grep in Python | This project is just a quick python script that parses the CIA world factbook, searches for a specific property, like population, and prints this property for all countries in the database. |
| Google Elections | Google Elections tries to prove that the number of hits on Google doesn't mean that much by using the results of Google searches as an indication for the next presidential elections. According to Google, it will be a close race with the republicans winning. |
| Abracadabra | A long time ago a good friend of mine told me this puzzle. Let’s say there is a monkey hitting a typewriter at random. And let’s assume he is only hitting letters and that the chance for each letter to get hit is equal. Do you have to wait on average longer, the same or shorter before the monkey will have typed ‘abracadabra’ or ‘abcdefghijk’ (i.e. a string with an equal amount of characters)? Don’t start reading the next paragraph if you want to solve the puzzle, since I am going to give away the answer. |
| Eddie the DJ | Eddie lets you manage your music on your computer by voice commands. Source in Delphi and Python included. |
| Language Evolution | Very unfinished. A shot at an evolution program to calculate the distance between languages. |
| Conway's life for p800 | Life 800 is a life implementation for the p800 smart phone by Sony Ericsson. Source code is included and a short getting started programming for the p800 in java. |
| Google History | Artificial Intelligence with a little help from our friend google. Use Google to find out in what year something happened. Workds for events between 1800 and now. |
| Automatic Color Scheme | The colors used in this website are automatically generated, based on how long visitors stays. All visitors get a variant of current scheme. The more pages they view, the more the current scheme becomes like theirs. This way the sites colors will always follow public opinion. |
| ZGoogle 1.1 | ZGoogle makes it possible to do google searches from within Zope, the webserver environment that runs this website. |
| The canned laughter box | Canned laughter box is a small executable consisting of one button that when clicks, plays a laughter sound. The idea is that you can install this program and anytime somebody tells a joke, press the button. In comedies they use canned laughter to make jokes seem funnier. Why not in real life. |
| dot IANAL | dot IANAL is an open petition to collect supporters for a lawyer free toplevel domain. By entering the domain you declare never to sue anybody based on the information you'll find there. |
| OberStat | OberStat is a webstatistics component voor Zope. Based on FSCounter, it adds some eye candy and does redirects. |
| Google Best Time to Visit | Google Best Time to Visit is a simple application of using Google search results to extract knowledge. Here the question is, what is the best time to visit a place. This way you can learn when to plan your next holliday. |
| Ant Arena | Ant Arena is a simulation of multiple ant colonies. Each colony is controlled by a script written in one of the Windows Scripting Host languages, such as VBScript, JScript or PythonScript. The most efficient script wins. |
| Six Movies of Separation | Six Movies of Separation is a game where the player has to build the shortest path between two movies. The user starts with one movie and chooses an actor from this movie, then chooses a movie with this actor and then an actor etc. |
| ZAmazon | ZAmazon is a zope component that allows zope developers to directly access the Amazon database of books and other stuff. |
| Bush's Friends | Globally speaking, Bush is not one of the more popular presidents of the US ever, to put it lightly. I'm no fan either, but I think that people tend to react either way. This project is a little satire concentrating on Bushs biggest failure: his tendency to make foreigners dislike him.
Try this by going to Google, type in "bush's foreign friends" (mind the double quotes) and press I feel lucky. |
| Random Baby Name | Small project to generate random, Italian, baby names |
| Google Pos | GooglePos is a small python script that uses the google api to find out what position your website has for a certain keyword (or set of). How do I score for Google Hacks? |
| Google Share | Implementation of Google Share, as come up with by Steven Berlin Johnson. Type a domain (ie. Beatles), and some Items (John, Paul, Ringo, George) and you get a list of their relative popularity within that domain. |
| Vendian | Vendian is an a-life simulation. Every creature runs a BASIC-like program and the program evolves. The best program wins. You can write your own programs or see evolution work. |
