My friend Barrett sent along a link today to an Illustrator scripting plugin called Scriptographer. I’m sort of a slouch at Illustrator, so I had him give me the quick 411 and I must say, this is pretty cool.
If you’re familiar with Javascript, Scriptographer will enable you to crank out little scripts that can generate illustrations procedurally. As an example, the bubbelbubbling script, show above, tuns your pen tool into a fountain of random bubbles that follow your drawing path. There are certain styles of artwork that could really lend themselves to a procedural drawing tool: fractals, patterns, random “particle” effects. These things would take forever to generate manually, but by defining the effect programatically, you can quickly experiment with your work in a more dynamic fashion, tweaking variables and fine-tuning your work as you go.
The project website also has a growing library of user-contributed scripts that are worth checking out. It’s a good place to start for your own creations, or you may just find exactly what you’re looking for, already crafted for you by another designer-coder.
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I’m glad to see you have discovered VMS is still alive.
http://www.openvmshobbyist.org is where you should go for all things for the VMS hobbyist.
Note there is an emulator for the alpha (CHARON-AXP) and its free to hobbyists so you can run OpenVMS Alpha. There is also the freely available AlphaServer ES40 emulator.
My first programming experience was on a VAX/VMS system in 1980. It was a summer course put on by the local college for grade school students. I was 6 at the time and it didn’t take us long to figure out how to send each other messages while the instructor was teaching. A few years later, my dad brought home from work on of the first “portable” PC’s which was an IBM PC XT (or compatible?) with 1 floppy drive, one hard drive and a CRT where the other 2 drive bay’s would have been. The keyboard attached to the front of the chassis for moving the system.
VMS has moved from VAX to Alpha, and now to Itanium. While the VAX versions ended as V7.3, it’s still fully supported by HP (who now owns VMS). VMS (the purists insist that “Open” is slient in “OpenVMS”) is now up to verison 8.3 on Alpha and Itanium, with V8.4 about to enter field test.
It’s not only hobbyists that use emulators to replace VAX systems — the CHARON-VAX product (http://www.charon-vax.com) does the job and is recognized by HP as a true replacement of a VAX, and eligible for full software support. There’s an Alpha emulator from the same people.
I’m at a customer site right now helping with their go-live on CHARON-VAX. They have 500+ users.
Check out http://www.stanq.com/charon-vax.html for my CHARON-VAX page [Shameless Plug Alert ™ I am a CHARON reseller]
Other VMS sites:
http://www.openvms.org (community site)
http://www.hp.com/go/vms (HP VMS site)
VMS, when downtime is not an option!
Oh, and DECUS became Encompass. Encompass just recently (this week) joined with the other HP user groups to form “Connect”.
Not as much fun as DECUS (no ribbons at meetings!), but there’s still an active special-interest group for VMS.
I’ve been playing with SIMH using the vax.exe created for windows. I signed-up on Encompass received my member number. It will take about a week or two for encompass or http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/licenses.php to receive the membership information.
Montgar is the provider of the vax software. Once that goes over you get the $30 cd in short order (like a week). The only thing that has been scary is when running it, my cpu goes to 100% and begins to heat up and the fan constantly runs. If anyone has knowledge about this, please let me know. I’ve been also playing with SIMH on Unbuntu or trying to. Unbuntu does not allow the root account login. everything is done with the sudo command. Still working on setting that up. Wherry.com has a Linux install but again I am translating that into the Unbuntu way.
BTW – I started on VMS in College 82′ geez – I’ve played and work on many OS’s – VMS is still the king. So simple yet so reliable and robust. I am actually heading to my first VMS boot camp this month. Is a renaissance possible for this OS? Maybe, I have a client using it, and boy is it stable. We’ll see!