The Coding Blog

Sorting the “United States of Europe” Flag

Based on a post on the r/eyehurtingflags subreddit wherein someone wanted to see a sorting animation of the hideous “United States of Europe” flag. Being a lover of sorting videos myself (example, seizure warning), I decided to try it out.

A couple things to note:

It turns out that sorting colors is notoriously difficult so I chose to sort by HSV (hue, saturation, value) because I thought it looked the best.

I used QuickSort because I wanted to learn about it, but I found out too late that QuickSort is not terribly efficient when it comes to datasets with a lot of duplicate values, so not all parts of the sort are that interesting

I realize now that my method of rendering the “animation” in a loop is pretty convoluted and that I probably could’ve done it a lot simpler but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it was a learning experience. 

(and screaming into the void)

I haven’t updated this dusty ol’ blog in a while but it feels like I should document my progress. Unfortunately, I haven’t really made much headway any any projects save for Cobber-9000 (more on that later). Nearly a year into my job, I’m still adjusting to my dramatically reduced free time; finding the energy and time to sit down and focus has been a challenge. Still, I’m learning a LOT about development at my job and it’s been great to apply this newfound knowledge to the personal projects that got me there in the first place.

So, yeah, I haven’t gotten much done, but I have been working somewhat consistently on my pride and joy, Cobber-9000. With the liveblog scene going strong, I’ve had a lot of inspiration to keep chipping away at this bot. And now, nearly two years from its humble(er) beginnings as ModBot, Cobber is finally starting to take shape. There’s still so, so much to do, but I’m starting to get really excited about where this project might be in a few months.

I’ve always really loved the work in /r/glitch_art and have been trying to think of a program that could be used to make glitched art of my own. One idea that just struck me was a Sound Corrupter, a program that would use audio files to glitch images.

The first thing I would likely attempt is a simple program that somehow uses the audio input to apply a distortion to each horizontal line of pixels in an image. This first iteration would likely be a command line program that takes an image as input and present the glitched output at completion. I’m not completely sure how I would use audio files to affect this, but TarsosDSP seems like a good start.

Beyond that, I would like to create an interface that allows the user to see the actual process of distortion. While the audio and image processing may not be able to work in realtime, it would be cool to process the whole image and then have a playback functionality that syncs the music to the glitching process. Development past that would probably just involve adding options that distort the image in different ways.

Yet another Discord bot, this one built to handle trivia games on a Discord server. This project is designed to help me learn both JavaFX/FXML as well as various Java discord libraries, though I will likely switch to a client/server setup that will use MongoDB and Node on the server side and Java on the client side.

This is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I just got excited about it again.

If I ever really get off the ground with anatomy cutaway projects like this one, I'd love to have a simple site that allows me to layer different pictures over each other and control how much of each is showing. Ideally, it would function very similarly to those before/after sliders but it would also allow the user to adjust the angle of the image.

Desired Features:

Custom Sliders: This is the most basic element, and probably the easiest to code. Having a slider that goes left and right is very simple and there are plenty of free versions that I can use as a starting point. Having multiple sliders may be more challenging, and sliders at angles might require something entirely different.

Uploading Images: User should be able to easily browse for images and assign them to a layer. This should also be relatively simple to implement.

Loading and Saving Layered Art: It would be nice to have a custom format that would allow users to load and save their layered art. Whether this would involve saving the entire images to a single file remains to be seen. I know PureRef does something like this, but their code is not publicly available.

Sharing Layered Art: Slightly different from the above, this feature would allow users to share their creations via custom URLs, similar to any hosting site or something like Vocaroo. This may be the trickiest simply because it requires some sort of storage, and I do not have to funds to reliably host any data.

Here are some projects that are currently in the works:

ModBot: A discord bot for liveblogging servers. The github site can be found here. This is my largest and most active project at the moment.

Figure Timer: This one is on a bit of a hiatus, but it's a program that would allow people to upload pictures for gesture drawing practice, complete with customizable timers that allow the user to adjust how many pictures are shown and for how long they will be on screen.

List Sorter: A simple Java program that allows users to manually sort lists with a simple button interface. Nothing particularaly complicated, mostly used for UI practice

I’ve decided to finally make a blog to collect all of my code ramblings in one place and, should anyone happen to stumble upon this blog, to get help and ideas from others.