Beyond Tellerand – Play!

I just got back last night from Beyond Tellerand – Play! This is a conference put on by my good friend Marc Thiele. Formerly known as FFK, it’s a conference that I’ve wanted to go to for a while, and which Marc and I have talked about for several years. We finally got it together this year and I made it out. The conference is held in Cologne (or Köln), Germany. There are two days of sessions in two tracks, plus a day of workshops before and another afterwards.

I flew out Monday night, getting into Cologne Tuesday morning. Despite the jet lag and red eye flight, I immediately went for a 10K run on the Rhine River, then back to the hotel room to catch a short nap before heading out to dinner with the other event speakers.

Wednesday, the conference proper began. I saw the keynote and hit up sessions in almost every track. I skipped the pre-lunch track so I could eat early and use the lunch break to ensure my computer could properly project on the screen. The last time I spoke with this machine, I had some problems, not realizing I had the wrong Linux video drivers. But all went well this time and I was the first speaker after lunch.

My presentation was a newly revised version of the Playing with Chaos talk I’d done a few years ago. I cover fractals, strange attractors, a bit of chaos theory, etc. All the examples this time are done in HTML5/JavaScript with canvas. Actually, this version was a bit cut down as I only had 45 minutes to talk, instead of the usual hour or so. The talk went very well. I decided to redo this particular talk because it did seem like one of my most popular talks, and I guess that was a good choice. I do believe I got some of the best feedback for any talk I’ve ever done this time. I am not scheduled for any other talks this year, but I would like to do this one again with a bit more time to cover things. The presentation slides and all the examples are on line at http://www.bit-101.com/chaos.

Wednesday night was the conference party. It was at a small club with Andre Michelle DJing. It got a bit loud and warm inside, so about half the crowd was gathered out front. I found it a bit chilly outside, so I spent the evening cycling between the two locations. Also gave me a chance to mingle with plenty of people.

Thursday, many of the morning sessions were in German, so I slept in a little bit, went for another run, and got over to the venue in time to see Tom Beddard, aka subblue, do his talk about fractals. Two fractal talks in one conference? Does it get any better??? 🙂 This was an absolutely mind blowing presentation. He skimmed through some of the same basic material I’d covered in my talk and then dived in to a bunch of demos from his Fractal Lab program. Hoping to be able to play with this one myself.

Finally, the conference ended. Another nice meal with friends and then back to the hotel to try to get a good night sleep before my morning flight. Unfortunately, that last cappuccino seemed to have hit me hard and after sleeping for about an hour I was wide awake most of the rest of the night. But somehow managed to get up and out to the airport, where I hopped on over to Amsterdam for a 3 hour layover. Finally got on that flight and taxied out to the runway. Engines revved up and we started barreling down the strip, gaining speed. And then seconds before we would have been airborne, the engines cut out. We slowed to a stop and pulled off the runway. Apparently some indicator light had come on just before we were about to leave the ground and whatever it indicated, it was important enough to make them abort takeoff at the very last second. Taxied back to the gate, got someone to fix whatever it was and then we had to wait one hour to “let the brakes cool down”. Bizarre. So, three hours late, I was on my way to Boston. Pain in the butt, but I respect the fact that they made that choice. Better to have people read what happened on my blog than an investigator dig it out of a black box.

A note on the code in the above linked examples: although I haven’t posted the source directly, it’s all HTML and JavaScript, so you won’t have a very hard time digging it up. The examples make use of a personal graphics library I’ve been creating called “bitlib”. You are free to use this library if you find it useful, but understand that I have not released it as an official library, and may or may not in the future. So don’t complain if it doesn’t work, you don’t understand it, or it’s missing some feature you need. 🙂

As for the examples themselves, a lot of the code was thrown together at the last moment with lots of experimentation and just stopping when something looked presentation worthy. So I can’t guarantee how well written or understandable it all is. Needs a lot of clean up. However, I will soon have an announcement on a related subject that some people will find very exciting. Stay tuned!