I’ve uploaded some HD videos from the Stockspace series I did a while back. You can see the whole set on my Flickr: Stockspace set. There you can also see them in proper HD resolution, which helps preserve finer details of the geometry.

These were originally created for use as TV spots for Knight Capital Group. Most of the time they get aired on financial networks very early in the morning, since traders love preparing for the opening of the market by obsessively watching news.

They were also shown on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square once, on an occasion where the Knight CEO rang the morning bell to open the NY Stock Exchange that day. As a recent immigrant to New York that certainly felt gratifying.

The L key on my laptop keyboard is missing.

I dropped something heavy on it and destroyed the key socket. Life is difficult. The lack of L seriously interrupts my flow. To survive I have written a widget that copies the character L into memory whenever I click on it (that’s why I wrote the floating window hack.) I’m coping better every day. A few days ago I would simply wiggle the little stump that’s left of the key socket in the hope of producing a single character, or keep a spare L in the search field of my browser for easy copying. Now a single click will do, followed by the mental remapping of L to Ctrl-V. There are 33 L’s in this sad little story.

PS. #1. Yes, I know I can just buy an external keyboard. In fact, I’m sure I’ll cave in given a few more days. But I resent the fact that a decent keyboard is more than $100 in Norway, and I wonder how much money I’ve spent on computer mice and keyboards over the years. I seem to recall paying a preposterous amount of money for a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard at one point. It must have been back when I was still doing consulting work. That kind of thing ruins your sense of perspective, a good consultant can always make the unreasonable seem like a good idea.

PS. #2. Thanks to CopyPasteCharacter.com for inspiring me to write my missing letter widget. Here’s a cheer for all the really difficult characters in Unicode.

Processing does not provide any direct mechanism for manipulating the look of the sketch Window, but Java natively supports tricks like turning off the window chrome, explicitly setting window position and making a window “float” over all other UI elements. All of this can be accessed via PApplet’s internal “frame” field, which holds an instance of a Frame object representing the window your sketch is running in. But even so, Java won’t let you have free reign without a little trickery.

The following hack demonstrates how to make a window that has no OS chrome, always stays on top of the UI and has an explicitly set screen position. You can even use the cursor keys to move the window around the screen.

Personally, what I like most about this hack is that it gets around Processing’s (or possibly Java’s) assumptions about a minimum window size of ~120×120. If you specify a size that’s less than 120 on one side, Processing will be pad that side with grey pixels to reach the minimum. But with this hack you can have tiny windows that you can micro-manage to your heart’s delight. I use it to make debug dispays, small control panels and other useful things.

Update: @CedricKiefer pointed out another Processing example that allows for transparent and even irregularly shaped windows. It’s Windows-only apparently, I bet this kind of thing is a major violation of Apple GUI laws anyhow.

Update 2: @ideoforms took my post literally and made a sketch with multiple bouncing windows. Nice.

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