Shooting the Moon

Live-blogging the shoot!

Using Processing to control the moon. The physical controls are nice, but limited in their capabilities. Very handy for Backpack Mode, so the kid can run around in the woods with the thing. But Processing allows for much more fine control, and better random number effects (and processing speed!) too.

Hiding Things in Plain Sight

Spent several hours last night searching through the Android Source Code for their method of calculating GPS distances, to use in a Processing sketch I'm working on... very frustrating. If I knew what I was doing, I might have known intuitively where to look, but searching through an entire operating system worth of code is a very imposing task for an amateur. The Android javadocs are great, but a direct link to the source code would be very helpful.

Finally I came across this seemingly obscure forum, and without further adieu, the Android Java Core source code: platform/frameworks/base.git

And for those interested in the GPS capabilities, the Location class source:

platform/frameworks/base.git/location/java/android/location

The distanceTo() and distanceBetween() functions are part of the Location.java class, and both make use of the private computeDistanceAndBearing() function, which is certainly complex enough to justify having spent so long looking for it...

Anyway, the whole purpose of this is to make pretty pictures-

This is one of the early tests, just riding my bike, using GPSLogger for Android. I love this one, and the beauty is that it's completely unintentional. I just went for a bike ride around the park and through the neighborhood, and this is what came out.

The high point on the far left is a random GPS anomaly (read: error), but it really makes the picture. I think it looks like a fairy about to whack someone on the head...