Martin Vilcans (Librador)

Arduino + motor + solenoid + piezo = music

2013-04-07T17:00:00Z

My first experiment with an Arduino, made at the Instrumenthack day at Plan 8 in Stockholm. The Arduino controls a motor, a solenoid and a piezo to create percussion and a melody.

Arduino + motor + solenoid + piezo = music from Martin Vilcans on Vimeo.

Not one of those posts

2012-12-12T22:55:00Z

You know when you visit a web site, and on the front page the latest news item goes something like, “I’m sorry there have been no updates here lately. I have been busy with real life, but I promise I’ll post more frequently in the future.” Posted in 2009.

This is not one of those posts.

But it’s been a while.

I have been busy. Here’s a summary of the updates:

I started my own business as a freelance programmer (or consultant/contractor but that doesn’t sound as creative).
I got an assignment at Goo Technologies.
I got stuck at Goo because it’s a great company and now I work there as the Head of Development.
I participated in Ludum Dare 24 and failed.
I took a course in Artificial Intelligence at edX. I really recommend that course. This form of distance learning works very well.
I changed the engine behind this blog from Jekyll to nanoc. It’s still a statically generated site, but nanoc is faster and more flexible. This may mean that the site’s feed will have gotten what looks like lots of unread articles.

And if you see this post at the top of the front page some time in 2015, you’re allowed to punch me. Just not that hard. And not in the face.

Initializr cleanup

2012-08-15T22:00:00Z

If you have used the code from Initializr, you may have noticed that some of the files have DOS-style line endings (CR+LF) instead of Unix-style line endings (LF). See the Initializr bug report All output files should have Unix-style line-endings.

This is annoying to no end because once you notice it, you may already have committed and made changes to the code. Changing the code then may cause conflicts in your version control.

Another issue is that Initializr’s code mixes tabs and spaces, and some files have lines ending with spaces.

This little script i wrote fixes these problems. Just download it, cd to the directory where you extracted the zip file from Initializr and run it.

The script requires the commands dos2unix, sed and expand. I have only tested it on Linux, so please let me know if it works or not on Macs.

Creating an interactive CV

2012-07-30T22:00:00Z

After having worked with software and web development for a number of years, it becomes difficult to write a good CV if you have worked on several projects, at several companies and with several technologies.

As a CV shouldn’t be longer than a couple of pages, you have to cut down on the information. In my traditional (PDF CV), I chose to keep most of the projects I’ve worked on, but I didn’t keep the information about the technologies I worked on for each of them.

But I work with computers. I should be able to create an interactive CV that contains all the information about projects, organizations and technologies and the relationship between them.

This lends itself naturally to visualization as a graph, I thought.

So I created the interactive CV where each project, organization and technology is a node in a graph. Click on a node to focus on it and see what it is related to. (Note: Clicking doesn’t work on iOS and Android; you have to drag a node to select it. And it’s untested on IE.)

I’m not sure the experiment was succesful. Even though I only added data for the projects from my last three employments, the graph got pretty tangled, but as the developer I’m not the right person to do a usability test. Let me know what you think!

Prioritizing Screenplain features

2012-07-21T22:00:00Z

I got an email with the question when I’m going to implement the following features in Screenplain. (Screenplain is a utility I made for converting a movie screenplay from a simple text file to a good looking format.)

Output as text and PDF
Title page output
Notes

My current plans are as follows:

Notes will be the first one I’ll implement, as that is required to support Fountain completely. It’s a pretty simple fix, so there are no excuses.

Title page output shouldn’t be too much work to implement. I’m not 100% sure how it should look, so it will require some research.

Output as text and PDF is more complicated, especially PDF, as the logic for where the page breaks should appear can be pretty complex.

I’m working on Screenplain in my spare time while I’m starting my own business as a contractor, so it’s difficult to say how much time I’ll have for working on it. If you have suggestions for what I should focus on, please let me know as I prioritize the work based on the input I get. That’s why I made FDX output higher priority than PDF in the first place!