TheSpicyChicken » Development

Custom iTerm Color Themes

Spicy — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:09:56 +0000

I just found this blog post on kpumuk.info here (http://kpumuk.info/mac-os-x/customizing-iterm-creating-a-display-profile-with-pastel-colors/) and it has changed my iTerm life. I used to be a Terminal.app fanboy but between TextMate’s iTerm integration and this color theme, I am a fully iTerm man now. Because this has changed my life so much, I’m going to repost the script that sets the default iTerm color scheme to this beautiful pastel on dark style.

I’m only posting this for prosterity sake, you should really go to the original blog post (link above) for more detailed information.

Close down iTerm and run this bash script from Terminal. Open up iTerm and you’ll see the changes.

#!/bin/bash

PASTEL=’”Pastel” = {
“Ansi 0 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.3097887;
“Green Component” = 0.3097887;
“Red Component” = 0.3097887;
};
“Ansi 1 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.3764706;
“Green Component” = 0.4235294;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 10 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.6727703;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 0.8094148;
};
“Ansi 11 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.7996491;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 12 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9982605;
“Green Component” = 0.8627756;
“Red Component” = 0.7116503;
};
“Ansi 13 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9965209;
“Green Component” = 0.6133059;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 14 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9970397;
“Green Component” = 0.8763103;
“Red Component” = 0.8759136;
};
“Ansi 15 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 1;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 2 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.3764706;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 0.6588235;
};
“Ansi 3 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.7137255;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 4 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9960784;
“Green Component” = 0.7960784;
“Red Component” = 0.5882353;
};
“Ansi 5 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9921569;
“Green Component” = 0.4509804;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Ansi 6 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9960784;
“Green Component” = 0.772549;
“Red Component” = 0.7764706;
};
“Ansi 7 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9335317;
“Green Component” = 0.9335317;
“Red Component” = 0.9335317;
};
“Ansi 8 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.4862745;
“Green Component” = 0.4862745;
“Red Component” = 0.4862745;
};
“Ansi 9 Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.6901961;
“Green Component” = 0.7137255;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Anti Alias” = 1;
“Background Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0;
“Green Component” = 0;
“Red Component” = 0;
};
Blur = 1;
“Bold Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.5067359;
“Green Component” = 0.5067359;
“Red Component” = 0.9909502;
};
Columns = 120;
“Cursor Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.3764706;
“Green Component” = 0.6470588;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Cursor Text Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 1;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Disable Bold” = 0;
Font = “Monaco 14″;
“Foreground Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 1;
“Green Component” = 1;
“Red Component” = 1;
};
“Horizontal Character Spacing” = 1;
NAFont = “Monaco 14″;
Rows = 24;
“Selected Text Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.9476005;
“Green Component” = 0.9476005;
“Red Component” = 0.9476005;
};
“Selection Color” = {
“Blue Component” = 0.5153061;
“Green Component” = 0.2224857;
“Red Component” = 0.2099074;
};
Transparency = 0.1;
“Vertical Character Spacing” = 1;
};’

DISPLAYS=`defaults read net.sourceforge.iTerm Displays | sed “s/}$//”`
DISPLAYS+=$PASTEL
DISPLAYS+=”}”
defaults write net.sourceforge.iTerm Displays “$DISPLAYS”
echo “Pastel display profile added”

BOOKMARKS=`defaults read net.sourceforge.iTerm Bookmarks | sed ’s/”Display Profile” = “[^"]*”;/”Display Profile” = “Pastel”;/’`
defaults write net.sourceforge.iTerm Bookmarks “$BOOKMARKS”
echo “Pastel display profile installed as default”

R Tip: Fitting Sigmoidal Data

Spicy — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:12:54 +0000

Sigmoid functions are our friends and sometimes you have data which you would like to fit with a sigmoid function. We can use R to find such a fit. First let us look at a sigmoid function.

y = 1 / (1 + exp( -a*x + b) )

Now let’s say you are given a vector x and y, say:

x = c(0.00,0.02,0.04,0.06,0.08,0.10,0.12,0.14,0.16,0.18,0.20,0.24,0.26,

0.28,0.30,0.34,0.40,0.42,0.48,0.54,0.56,0.64,1.00)

y = c(0.409742,0.319277,0.530120,0.377778,0.357143,0.608696,0.315789,

0.692308,0.642857,0.636364,0.750000,0.000000,0.833333,1.000000,

0.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,

1.000000,1.000000)

In this case the y values here represent probabilities and one thing you’ll notice is that we have probs of 1 and 0. Both of which are bad. So we apply a little “laplace smoothing” to them:

y[y==0] = 0.001

y[y==1] = 0.999

Now let’s look at what the data looks like.

plot(x, y)

Well, it may be sigmoidal, maybe not. For now let’s assume we think it is. Which we do for the most part.

Okay, now let’s solve for a line in our sigmoid function:

y = 1 / (1 + exp( a*x + b) )

1 + exp( a*x + b) = 1/ y

a*x + b = log ( (1/ y) – 1 )

Now the left hand side of the equation is a line and the right hand side is some logarithm of the y data. We can plot x versus this right hand side:

new_y = log( 1 / y – 1 )

plot(x, new_y)

Looks pretty interesting and hopefully at this point it also looks kinda linear, which it kinda does.

Now let’s fit it with a line:

lm.res <- lm( new_y ~ x )

lm.res

Which produces this output:

Coefficients:

(Intercept) x

1.122 -11.647

We can also test the significance of the fit with an ANOVA.

anova(lm.res)

Which produces this output:

Analysis of Variance Table

Response: new_y

Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)

x 1 172.80 172.802 14.641 0.0009834 ***

And we can plot the resulting fit in linear space:

Now let’s see how our fit looks back in normal space using our formula with our derived a and b values.

a = -11.647

b = 1.122

plot(x, y)

sim_x = (1:101-1)/100

points(sim_x, 1/(1+exp(a*sim_x+b)), type=”l”)

Voila! We have fit a sigmoid function to our data.

Snow Leopard Super FAIL

Spicy — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:52:55 +0000

Just got snow leopard in the mail and was so excited to install. Then got on Twitter to see what my friends were up to:

http://twitter.com/caddymob

I think I’m waiting now.

UPDATE:
Jason posted details describing his troubles and how he worked around it here:
http://corneveaux.com/blog/installing-snow-leopard-a-big-fail-and-a-work-around

Trick your friends…

Spicy — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:52:58 +0000

Are your friends Gullible? Trick them with Guppy a free iPhone app.

I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s loads of fun and it’s free. Download it now and have some fun with your friends!

Free Download here.

-Spicy

PopBalloons and making Demonstration Videos

Spicy — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:13:48 +0000

Background

While learning how to use the microphone on the iPhone to record I thought a quick and fun iPhone Game which leverages the microphone on the phone.

There’s lots of apps out there that take advantage of the accelerometers, but not too many that use the microphone as a control device. In PopBalloons you control a laser that floats around the screen (using the accelerometers, of course , but to fire the laser you need to make a sound. A snap, a click, sing a song, whatever. The intensity of the laser is directly proportional to the intensity of the sound that the iPhone hears. You can even slightly tap the microphone with your finger, if you really need to be quiet.

As an added bonus, I cartooned up some LOL cats, and instead of popping balloons with your sound-laser, you can pop LOL-CATS! I know, it’s brilliant. More information on PopBalloons, and all of my future mobile phone apps can be found at the website of my new company, Mophilia, Inc.

Demonstration Videos

The real point to this post is to demonstrate how to make a crude demonstration video of a live-action game. My first thought was to take screenshots using the screen shot function and then string them into a video.

CGImageRef screen = UIGetScreenImage();
UIImage *viewImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:screen];
CGImageRelease(screen);

However, the process of getting the screen shot and saving it takes way to long and eats up too much memory to be run at full speed. So it occurred to me, that since the game is being triggered by timers which are on the order of 30fps then I could slow the game down and take screenshots between the frames. For example, if I slowed the entire gameplay down to 10fps then I could take screenshots at that rate and not run into memory issues. So in my PopBalloons_Prefix.pch file I have this:

// This is the master Timer update frequency. Normal speed is 30.
#define PopBalloonsMasterFrequency 10

All of the rest of the frequencies are based on this one. So if I have a timer that normally runs at 20fps I would simply redefine the frequency like this:

// Nomal update frequency is 20 Hz
#define kUpdateFrequency ((2./3.)*PopBalloonsMasterFrequency)

Now I can arbitrarily slow down my entire game so that I can do CPU and memory taxing procedures. In case you are interested I save the images to file using:

NSData *imgData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(viewImage);
if (![imgData writeToFile:filePath atomically:NO]) {
NSLog(@”Failed to write the image data to file.”);
}

Where filePath is an NSString object that contains the full path to the destination file and viewImage is a UIImage object from the code above.

Encoding the PNG files into a Video

Now that I have a whole bunch of images I need to encode them into a movie. I use mencoder to do this. Mencoder comes with MPlayer which can be installed using Darwin Ports.

#port install MPlayer

Note you need to have /opt/local/bin set in your PATH file.

I wanted the video to include an image of the phone, so it the game looks like it is being played. To do so I just used Grab to take a screenshot of the simulator and saved that file as PhoneImage.png in the same directory as my screenshot files. Now I can use some a handy python script to combine the images and generate what will be the frame for my video.

import os
from PIL import Image

phone_image_name = ‘PhoneImage.png’
file_names = [f for f in os.listdir('.') if not os.isdir(f) and not f.split('_')[-1] == ‘done.png’ and not f.split(‘.’)[-1] == ‘py’ and not f in [phone_image_name] and not f[0] == ‘.’]

for file_name in file_names:
phone_image = Image.open(phone_image_name)
im = Image.open(file_name)
phone_image.paste(im, (63,160))
phone_image.save(file_name.split(‘.’)[0] + ‘_done.png’)

After the images are converted I just delete all the old files and then string them together to make a video using mencoder:

mencoder “mf://*.png” -mf type=png:w=320:h=480:fps=28 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac copy -o foo.avi

The product of this is the following video:

As you can see it’s far from perfect. It’s a little shaky and you can see the flicker of the text prompt in the Text Field, but as a first pass it will do.

-Spicy

In the works.

Spicy — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:14:43 +0000

The reason I haven’t posted in a while is that there are BIG things in the pipeline, that I am dying to tell you about…just not yet.

Stay tuned!

The Pulse v1.1 Released

Spicy — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:40:19 +0000

I have received some really good feedback about my first ‘official’ iphone application, The Pulse. Users have really liked the app, but it seem to lack some basic features. In version 1.1 the ability to pause the onslaught of incoming news articles as well as in-app web viewing has been added.

Most importantly, here are some screenshots:

You can download the app from:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=301786228&mt=8

First “official” iPhone App

Spicy — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:39:31 +0000

Hi all,

As I mentioned earlier, my first official iPhone application has come out. It’s called The Pulse and is great for killing some extra time. Keep an eye on the latest from your favorite news sites. You can download it for free here:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=301786228&mt=8

If you like it and would like to see more features shoot me an email. If there is interest I’ll expand on the app.

Best,
Spicy

Happy New Year

Spicy — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:32:43 +0000

With the new year and some much need down time to work on some side projects, I have some fun news.

First, I am close to releasing an Alpha version of my newest iPhone application. The details about the app are very hush hush, but it’s really cool and should be lots of fun to use. I do need some Alpha Testers, however, and if you have an iPhone and a desire to test barely funtioning-cutting edge software, please email me at thespicychicken@gmail.com.

Seconds, I wanted to let all of you know that work on Customize will continue. I have found some much needed time to get the website server back up and running as well as fixing the app for 2.2. Stay tuned for more news on that.

Happy new year! -Spicy

fwitter… a facebook app for your tweets

Spicy — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:27:03 +0000

Yesterday I wanted to have my latest tweet be set as my Facebook status message. It seems to me that this is very useful. However, the app that does this isn’t working. So I wrote my own.

If you want to use it, sign up for it here:

http://apps.facebook.com/fwitter/

-Spicy