Octave swarm, take3

[Ben Abbott]

On Oct 14, 2008, at 5:16 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> I fixed almost all of the attributions errors, I think. I upped the
> resolution, changed the colours and sizes of things, and I played with
> ffmpeg2theora until I decided that Theora ain't such a bad codec after
> all. I also fixed character encoding errors for the names and
> languages that I knew were missing it. Even Søren's name is spelled
> correctly. :-) All the names are very readable now, especially near
> the end whereas they weren't before. I bring you Octave Swarm, take 3:
>
>     http://platinum.linux.pl/~jordi/movies/octave-swarm-fast-take3.ogg
>
> As usual, it plays with VLC.
>
> And Octave Swarm, the director's cut:
>
>      http://inversethought.com/jordi/movies/octave-swarm-slow- 
> take3.ogg
>
> This is a slower version, about 16 minutes of video, so about one
> minute per year of Octave development. It shows more detail. Seems a
> little less dynamic, and has some more obvious periods of inactvity. I
> would like to know what happened in the middle of 2002 when for a
> couple of months development was seemingly stalled and then suddenly
> exploded again.
>
> I hope my hosts aren't brought down by a sudden surge in traffic. I
> don't know how many people follow this mailing list regularly.
> Hopefully it will all be fine.
>
> A few final remarks: I made these videos in hopes that they could be
> used to promote Octave. If anyone needs some help for creating
> different versions of the videos (change the music or whatever), let
> me know and I'll try to help. They show two things very clearly: (1)
> jwe has done, pardon the expression, a metric fuckton of work on this
> project for the last 16 years and it would be a sad loss if he were
> unable to keep contributing, although (2) the number of contributors
> to the project has been steadily rising and really exploded recently,
> so I do not fear too much for the future of Octave development. It
> seems alive and well so far. I am hoping these observations or others
> you can draw from seeing Octave's development with these videos can
> help convince people with money that it's worthwhile for them to
> contribute to Octave. :-)
>
> Cheers,
> - Jordi G. H.
>

Excellent job!