Andrés at Joensuu

I’ve got myself a new toy!! And this time it does not need batteries and it was free!. It is a 20cm-tall blank smurf (o pitufo) that I plan to paint in colorss. I have found plenty of cool information on forum.kidrobot.com about materials (the not free part) and techniques for painting vynil toys, something I have toyed about before. Soon I have my customised smurf.

This cute little smurf is part of the “happy smurfday” campaign. UNICEF is celebrating the 50th anniversary of smurfs in Europe, and in Helsinki the have recently gave away thousands of smurfs for people to paint, there is even a competition, check the webpage.

My plan is to have a small mini me ( o mini-yo). I still accept suggestions, but note that I have already discarded super-smurf.

Starting a promising career my other self has become a TV actor. After some unpredicted changes in its course, fate got me a very short acting role in Finnish series. Set your recorders for autumn 2009 (no worries I will remind you later) when a great episode of Karjalan kunnailla would be aired.
(more…)

Watching the English tv show, Yes, Prime Minister, filmed in 1986, I cannot stop seeing connections with nowadays politics and world events. In the last episode I’ve seen, a British nurse was arrested in Qumran for possession of a bottle of whisky. On the very same week it was news in Spain that two Spaniards had been arrested “accused of making homosexual advances to taxi drivers“. Last time I was in Spain, we were not that stupid… Anyway, according to the Gambian president they would have got their head cut off!!! The fictional nurse would have only got imprisoned for ten years and forty lashes.

This time, Spanish ministers started diplomatic talks to get them released, and luckily they were succesful. I can just wonder what would have happen if Gambia happened to have oil to distribute as in the case of fictional country Qumran.

These thoughts and the news of Saudi crown prince visiting Spain brought me some more connections with the past. Kapuściński’s Shah of Shahs narrates the events surrounding the history of the last Shah of Iran. It tells how the rise of oil prices back then made of the Shah’s living room one important place to visit for Western governors. At that time, no one cared about the state of human rights in Iran, as long as oil was flowing in the right direction. Today … history repeats.

As mentioned in the last post, I have been trying to move experimentally Jeliot 3 source code to Launchpad. The idea is to check whether it is the right solution for new and forecoming Jeliot initiatives.

Today I have got a branch of Jeliot published in Launchpad. It is basically a mirror of the HEAD of our current CVS server.
(more…)

The tool I have been working with in the last years is having a new offspring, it seems it is the season for new-borns…

Jeliot 3 is meant to animate Java programs. Its animation and interface has gathered a number of followers during this time. In the last years people have required to change the language Jeliot understands and animates. Java is not always the preferred first language taught in schools and colleges. So people have been asking us to implement the tool to animate C, C++, python…Jeliot was designed to allow this new breed of languages, but we don’t have the resources to make it happen.

Recently, an Irish group from the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown got funding to implement a Jeliot version that animates C++, which they have named Jeliot-C. They were visiting Joensuu and met us to discuss how their development could proceed so that both of us will mutually benefit from new features implemented in Jeliot 3.
(more…)

I include here the material I presented at today’s PhD day.

• Presentation on Conflictive Animations: With a short background on what I did in Tanzania, introduction to the conflictive animations and call for help in a forthcoming animation. I can’t believe this kept us talking for one hour. Thanks everybody for your feedback and comments!
• Koli Paper on Conflictive Animations: Discussion paper presented at Koli last year, and spearhead of the ConAn concept
• The Error of Our Ways (Chapter from The End of Education, Neil Postman) Somebody smart writing about errors and human error-detectors. Insightful reading. Courtesy of Google Cache.