Last Updates and again a new Domain

Hi there
internet is really amazing, with several clicks we have now our own web site - FMcrawler
We have a forum and links for the last,fm program.
Maybe it is high time to reveal the project on the last.fm forums and to gather user feedback.

By the way, I hope that if I write my name Nikolay Jetchev here, google will finally notice and index this blog with my name.
And in order not to leave this post too dry, one more picture :-)

Art goes on and New Domain

Finally I have a domain for the last.fm application, so I can handle the potentially enormous traffic :-)
This is the address

And I have included the voronoi design there, here is a screenshot from the latest version.
Probably I should also write a table with intructions as well.

I have also experimented with Voronoi diagrams with nonliears generators, the results can be quite beautiful.
The "nonlinear algorithmic geometry " lecture I may do this semester will be dealing also with Voronoi diagrams, so it was quite a pleasant surprize that my personal interest meet my academic ones.

Computer Art

Ah, art is fun. The last week I have spent probably more time playing with java and photoshop(all the images in this blog are created by me) and looking at optical illusion books and pictures, than doing my job at Fraunhofer. I will describe some of the stuff I did. These are just first steps in a vast new domain, but already there is some eyecandy :-)







First, I looked at some interesting web sites about fractals. It manages to explain them quite nicely using complex math. In a few hours i wrote my own java code to do this. (there are programs like ultrafractal, but it was not intuitive enough for me). I am facinated by the concept of the fractals: infinite copies of the self twisting and fillling the universe. If I study more carefully the theory i may even find other interesting fractals, this is a very rich domain for mathematicians, and a nice stimulus to get into complex math.

I also learned about voronoi diagrams.
They are easy, yet have interesting properties if one goes deeper (geometry and diskrete math needed here for amazing results). It passes perfectly for my last.fm visualization, as can be seen from the screenshot. I have written the voronoi engine in java, now remains just to experiment with different point generators.






I also played some more with the polygons from last week. I did the poster for Elena'S birthday. I think it was a quite nice present, the picture here is 4x4 smaller copy of it, printed on A2 quality photopaper. I also experimented with impossible figures, like this classical triangle with unending edge. The good old Escher was againg quite inspiring for me, his tiles are perfect filling of any polygons.






So much art for now, i will try visiting tomorrow some weird lecture "nonlinear algorithmic geometry to see if also brings me some new ideas.

Op Art

I was this friday on this exhibition in frankfurt. Op art means optical art , or art meant to confuse the senses. There were some really good installations with mirrors, for example a room with glass floor and ceiling which gives illusion that there are multiple floors with people beneath it.

I got really excited by some posters giving an illuion of warping space. It remings me a bit of the works of Escher, the favorite artist of most mathematicians :-) Now I am trying to do something like this myself. Here are my first tries, i will post more later.

Last FM visualization

Check out what I have done in my free time the last several weeks.
Last.fm is a cool web 2.0 site with amazing amount of information. I have written an applet that browses visually the database in the form of a graph.

I am working now with Andie, a friend of mine and young artist from FH, on a way to make cool posters from the information extracted from there. What I find cool about this is that the image content is customized to the indivisual user: if you are a hip hop fen you will see your favorite afroamerican artists, if you are into electrnic you will see the weird art of electrnic arists, etc. You may either start from your profile, if you have one, like me, or from any artist you like, and then go on exploring.

If you have any suggestions write them down, I guess I will be updating this pretty often. Andie and I are full of ideas, like making the graph an online radio, connecting to other social networks, etc.

I also need a better server, so I can disclose the project on the last.fm forums and handle the thousands (hopefully :-) ) of enthusiastic fans flocking to my site.

Ich Liebe Berlin

Last weekend I went to Berlin. The plan was somehow hastily conceived, and until Thursday night i was not even sure that we are going. But than we made up our plan and as usual, drank until early morning to celebrate eveb before the journey.

We started our trip with Bojana on Friday 3 pm. We went to Berlin for 25 euro with a car we found from Mitfahrtzentrale. This is a rather cool concept, both economically and ecologocally: drivers who would otherwise travel alone offer places in their cars for money online, driving like this is quite popular in germany. There is even a bulgarian site for this, but it has not too many offers right now.

We arrived in Berlin around 10 pm. Bojana found a relative of her aunt who lives in Berlin - Köpenick, Liljana Schmidt, and she was nice to allow us to stay at her place for several days. She was a really nice old lady, probably because she has worked in a University and enjoys young people. Her apartment block is a bit similar to those in Mladost or Ljulin when it was first built in East Germany, but it was amazingly well repaired, painted and maintained. It shows that even "panelki" can be a nice place to live, if one puts some effort.

After this we went to a Frank Brettschneider minimal party in the centre of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, which was quite cool and full of people from all over the world. We stayed until 4 am and then took the 1 hour trip back home. Berlin is quite large and spread out city, but the transport grid is amazingly effective 24 hours !

The next day we slept until 12 am, had a nice breakfast with Liljana Schmidt. Then we visited a nice Dali exhibition, which managed to surprize me quite good with many things i have not seen before from Dali, and i have seen quite a lot from him. Afterwards we met on Unter den Linden with Jana, Gopeto, who had taken another car form Darmstadt, and Tihomir, who like a real hippy hitch hiked to BErlin. We drank some beers and then found a nice drum and bass party for the night. We thought we knew the address, but felt a bit lost, until a nice man took us in his car and drove us to the party to save us the time. The party was good, full untill 6 am, and much cheaper than back home in darmstadt. We went home at about 6 am, Bojana, Tihomir and me. On the way we met Beni and Tittilein, or whatever, some nice quite drunk local people from Fridrichshein. We chatted with them and they invited us for a bottle of wine at 7am in their homes, quite nice. We went home finally at 9 am, but we still did not sleep, but had a nice big breakfast with Liljana.

Finally we slept until 3 pm or so, and than went to the Bode Museum, which had a nice medieval/byzantine collection. We met some other bulgarian guys there, Stojan and Miro, some friends of Zlatka, and had some beers with them. Afterwards we found several cool party offers even for Sunday night, but we were too tired, and just strolled around Potsdamer Platz and the Sony center, the flashy part of WEst berlin made of steel and glass

And on Monday we went back home, again with a mitfahrtzentrale. We had planned so much more to do, like visit the Berlinale, the TEchnical Uni Berlin, some propaganda poster exhibition, etc, but we were already like the living dead from much beer and party :-)

Monday was the Rosen Montag, a day for catholic carnevals in germany, and the last part of our trip, the train from Wiesbaden to DArmstadt was full of drunk and masked people, it was a nice end to a nice trip.

I really like Berlin, it was my 3rd time there, and each time it was non stop fun. The technical university there also has some quite nice research areas, i may try to get a PhD program there one day, and i could imagine myself living in Berlin one day. The city is quite open and multicultural, there is even a Baj Ganjo pub there :-) , and prices for rent and food are still lower than in Darmstadt.
But only time will tell when i will visit Berlin again
I have planned a trip to Munchen at the end of March, and i will see how they compare.

2 more weeks passed

Damn, blogger and mozilla just erased the post i wrote for 30 minutes. So annnoying. I guess the problem is i just don'T enjoy writing too much. My friend Pesho is a professional translator and he uses skillfully the language to express his thoughts like an artist. I guess i have gotten myself too deep in math, and i have lost a bit the language touch i had back in ACS. I make still interesting observation about life, but can't organize myself to write them down.

Yesterday was my last exam, Visual Analytics. I passed with an excellent note. We also spoke with Dr. Kohlhammer to meet again to discuss my text visualization idea. The idea on 2 words is to make a graph like visualization of a text collection. A potential scenario is a manager overwhelmed with text data, who take a brief glance at pur cool looking visualization tool and decides what to read or not. Well, let's see what happens, things might work out really well if Fraunhofer Section a3 buys into my idea.

We wanted to celebrate after my exam yesterday. So we drank a bit of beer with Bojana, Samuil and Tihomir. Than we watched The Naked Lunch . It is a weird movie based on the drug fueled lunacy life of the real beat legend writer William Burroughs. The director is Davind Cronenberg, author opf masterpieces like the Fly and VideoDrome. He manages to create a weird atmosphere, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Casablanca . Aliens with tentacles, talking anus-cockroaches and insect typewriters, blah. Still, it was a blast watching the movie with many people, we laughed so much with disbelief at what happened onscreen, the black humor and fantasy of the director Cronenberg and author William Burroughs. Boyana reads the book on which this movie is based. But i don't want to ggo again in the sick sad grotesquely funny and ironic world of Burroughs. I respect shock entertainment for its ability to make us see the world in a different way, but i don'T want to endure such shock images too often.