unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2010-09-04 at 08:25 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Hey, that's very cool.

It's a cool idea and it got a good response from the crowd.

> Something I wanted us to try was the idea of "convergence days", where
> we'd publish a data file quietly which would say "on such and such a
> date, try to be as close to this as possible", specifying the position
> and parameters of the various effects / lights / features. That way,
> we'd have weeks of divergence, then a "rush to convergence" over say 5
> days, so on a particular day everyone's desktop looks the same again.

Well you know how gullible I am for making things for free ;-), here you
go your feature request has been granted:

http://doctormo.org/2010/09/04/whoa-wheres-it-going/

> I thought of using constellations (playing again with "light") as
> inspiration, so you could have a "convergence day" like this: 

The generate-plot.py script takes an svg input, so you dig out the svg
file and open in inkscape, enter the gen group (important!) and move
around each of the elements, rotate, skew your heart out until you have
your pattern. Save and then run through the plot generator and direct
output to plot.txt or some such.

$ generate-plot.py my-awesome-convergence.svg 2010-09-10 5 > plot.txt

That's from the 10th September converge for 5 days. It's progressive
convergence maths means if you execute it only on the last day it'll
move 100% of the way.

If this was packaged it'd go into a standard dir in usr share and be
updated by an updated package.

$ nudge-wallpaper.py wallpaper.svg plot.txt

Also code is published at
lp:~doctormo/doctormo-random/genetic-wallpapers and patches are welcome.

Best Regards, Martin Owens