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Sunday, March 30, 2014

Thoughts on Agent Themed Instanssi 2014

To continue the tradition I participated in this year's Instanssi. It is a local demoscene event held at Jyväskylä. It lasts for three days and packs plenty of action. This year it was agent themed.

You can check out some of the results. Not all is suitable for work unless you like strange stares so take care.

Personally I participated in a little agent themed competition where you were supposed to crack series of codes. I even wrote a tiny decoder to avoid using clunky, paper based one. Overall it was a nice challenge and I would not mind taking part again. I also learned to pick simple locks at a workshop. Maybe that skill comes in handy some day.

effectserver-client - Controlling Lights Using Node.js

As Instanssi provides programmable lighting through a simple UDP interface I decided to play around with them a little. As a result of my experiments I ended up releasing a small Node based library. effectserver-client abstracts UDP and provides simple means to animate the lights. The library comes with a couple of sample effects.

Of course it's an useless library unless there is suitable hardware around. It would be a good exercise to write an UDP server that works with the client and then provide a visualization for that. Perhaps that is something I will do next year. Or sooner even if there's sufficient motivation and reason to do that.

Conclusion

I hope we see Instanssi again next year. It's not a very big event but that in part makes the atmosphere nice and cozy. This is one of those things I value in Finland very much. It is excellent to have a local community that keeps these kind of events alive. You don't have that everywhere.

EDIT: Photos of the event by Rakeinen.