samizdat drafting co.

PlotDevice/python-powered 2d graphics

websiteplotdevice.io
docsuser manual
codegithub
years2014–2022

PlotDevice is a Macintosh application used for computational graphic design. It provides an interactive Python environment where you can create two-dimensional graphics and output them in a variety of vector, bitmap, and animation formats. It is meant both as a sketch environment for exploring generative design and as a general purpose graphics library for use in external Python programs. PlotDevice scripts can create images from simple geometric primitives, text, and external vector or bitmap images. Drawing commands provide a thin abstraction over Mac OS X’s Quartz graphics engine, providing high-quality 2D rendering and powerful compositing operations.

In PlotDevice, a little code can go a long way. Using simple commands you can set the colors and line-style numerically, then programmatically draw using coordinates drawn from a hat. Each time the script runs, a newly chosen set of random circles will be drawn to the canvas.

In addition to static images and PDFs, your scripts can also generate movies. Here is an animated hypercube rotating in four dimensions. Animations can be saved to MPEGs, animated GIFs, and multi-page PDF flipbooks.

PlotDevice can be used from the command line or launched as a full-featured mac application with a friendly GUI for exporting images and a powerful Ace-based text editing environment.

Skia Canvas/a cross-platform, gpu-accelerated graphics engine for node.js

packagenpm
codegithub
years2020–2022

Skia Canvas is a JavaScript library for Node.js that enables the creation of bitmap and vector files outside of the browser. It provides a drawing model identical to the html <canvas> element via an emulation I wrote in Rust for speed and memory-safety.

It is based on Google’s Skia graphics engine and, accordingly, produces very similar results to Chrome’s <canvas> element. The library is well suited for use on desktop machines where you can render hardware-accelerated graphics to a window and on the server where it can output a variety of image formats.

The renderer makes use of the system’s GPU both for generating image files and for displaying directly to the screen in one or more windows.

In addition to being a browser-compatible canvas API, skia-canvas has a wealth of extensions allowing for sophisticated bézier manipulations, perspective transforms, advanced typography, and more

Xyzzy/Interpretive fiction

websitexyzzy.io
year2014

Xyzzy is a JavaScript-based virtual machine that emulates the Z-Machine created in the late 70s by the M.I.T. nerds who went on to found Infocom and create masterpieces of Interactive Fiction that endure to this day. It is able to run classic IF stories from that era in the browser or in a terminal (using Node.js) and provides tools for inspecting the ‘state’ of the program as it runs.

The website includes a searchable catalog of interactive fictions stories hosted by the IF Archive.

The interpreter is highly customizable

If you ever begin to regret your choices, you always have the option of rewinding to the moment of your fatal error (though be sure to pack your peril-sensitive sunglasses anyway)

Arbor/Tools for the likeminded

websitearborjs.org
codegithub
year2011

In a number of projects I’ve made use of force-directed layout algorithms when dealing with tree-like structures. It’s an elegant approach to positioning that uses a physics simulation to find the most ‘relaxed’ configuration of nodes and edges based on their connectivity. After reinventing the wheel in Java, Python, and Actionscript I decided to build a more general framework for this kind of visualization that would run in modern browsers. The result is arbor.js, an ’HTML5’-friendly open source graph-rendering library.

A demonstration app displaying the birdsong data from the Echolalia project.

Atlas plots states as nodes and connects them based on shared borders. The resulting shapes are familiar yet surprising.

For years GraphViz was one of the first things I would reach for when I needed to view hierarchical data. Part of its appeal was the simplicity of the .dot language. Halfviz is a worse-is-better recreation of the tiny subset of GraphViz most relevant to me.

Corduroy/Early asynchrony

websitesamizdat.co/corduroy
codegithub
year2012

Corduroy provides a python-friendly wrapper around CouchDB’s HTTP-based API. Behind the scenes it hooks into the asynchronous i/o routines from your choice of Tornado or the Requests & Gevent modules.

Using corduroy you can query the database without blocking your server’s event loop, making it ideal for CouchApp micro-middleware or scripted batch operations.

Written years before async and await became standard language features, this library experimented with Python’s existing syntax and generator-based co-routines in order to allow for cooperative multi-tasking without descending into the ‘callback hell’ that characterized asynchronous programming at the time.

The extensive documentation provides a friendly introduction to not just the library, but CouchDB and its ‘NoSQL’ approach to data modelling as well.