I've been hearing that word lately all over the place...
Serendipity:
1) The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2) The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3) An instance of making such a discovery.
I described to a few del.icio.us RSS feeds and it's like a little piece of serendipity in my mailbox everyday.
Anyways, through that I discovered ITConversations which is a wonderful little audio archive of conference lectures. Interesting talks by Malcolm Gladwell, Alex Steffen, and others. (I've only gotten through a few of them but I'm sure that the other clips are equally engaging. And if you register, you can use the dandy "queue" tool to keep track of what you want to hear next).
I love this queue idea. I've muddled over the idea for a while since hypertext (while a god send) is extremely disruptive to narrative. I like the "InfoCollector" found on the Ars Electronica site. And Functioning Form has suggested another way to keep track of related weblog entries. Now if it could actually transcend one url......
Maybe that's where attention.xml comes in?
Information overload, oh my...
I went to the Skyharp talk (part of the SoundPlay festival) the other day. It was okay... nothing new since the artists aren't the most hi-tech people though they are really able to bring in an organic quality to their compositions.
The odd thing was that it was sponsored by the architecture program. I continually asked myself what Skyharp (a nature-driven sound art piece) had to do with architecture (building man-made objects) but it all made sense when one of the arch professors said that he recently attended a symposium. Three topics came up over and over again:
(a) meta-data of physical spaces
(b) mapping
(c) embodiment
Hot issues, indeed. I have to wonder if it's really an emergence of a new way of thinking (more of a reaction, I suppose, towards the influences of computer technology and telecommunications) or if it's just trendy.
Oh and check out the Mutation Workspace project by cellophan.de. That poster looks eerily like my Blog City project. (Once again, a reminder that everyone's brains must be connected.) I think the image is just for illustration purposes because they instead use a matrix of numbers on the actual site. Check out the other projects too... interesting stuff.
I love to bookmark web links. In fact, due to my overwhelming need to archive everything whenever I reformat the computer (or every few years: get a new computer), I'm sure I have a folder of links from 1997 lying around here somewhere.
Anyways, more to the point, I was using this application called Pluck that stores my bookmarks online so I could access them from anywhere. However, I couldn't just publicly share them without entering in someone's email address.
So I decided to finally register on del.icio.us. It is so awesome, like you don't understand.
Try it!
Been doing insect behaviour research lately... It's been quite well known that if we want to improve our technology, we need to look towards already existing biological systems.
For example, this article is fascinating: How your everyday house fly can be analyzed to develop flying technology.
I just had one of *those* moments... where you realize that it is literally impossible to have an actual original idea.
Ego crushing, on one hand. Vastly comforting, on the other, to know that others think the same way I do.
Some of you might remember that I wrote a project proposal earlier this year. Excerpt here and full 8-page proposal here (pdf).
And so today I see Pleix's Netlag video.
Spooky!!
Oh and I'm not saying at all that someone's idea was stolen... I've never heard of Pleix before nor did I ever upload my proposal until right now in order to show you the similarities.
Actually, I quite like how their project turned out. Apparently they projected it onto a big wall when they presented it.
Remember those days of bandwidth caps from ISPs? Okay, so not like they're still not worried about mp3 leechers but now they've decided to just run with it -- and most importantly, make some money out of it.
Bell just recently announced that they're going to open a Sympatico Music Store with the Canadian puretracks.com as the backbone.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Toronto Star article.
Here are some graphical programming environments that you can use for realtime manipulation or triggering of video, audio, etc. which are dandy tools for making installations or for VJ (video jockey) visuals. (Did I explain that right? I think so.)
Max/DSP
EyesWeb
Pure Data.
I haven't been digging the past few months of CBC Radio3 but this week's issue seems especially good and/or inspiring.
I should make a top 10 list of my fave issues.....
All the talking heads in this presentation kind of scare me but it's interesting to think of how portable everything is becoming and the movement towards making the interface (technically) transparent for the user:
http://www.vodafone.com/flash/futures/
And in a strange mix of art being showcased by a corporation, vodaphone's latest issue of reciever covers wireless network art:
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/09/index.html
And one more link.... for those hardcore designer's, computer love is a global community of graphic designers who love -- what else -- their computers and design:
http://computerlove.net
Here's a project from my classmates: Open Radio
Stick it to the corporate (and not to mention crappy and unoriginal) radio broadcasters by uploading your own music and tuning in.
(Note: CKLN, CIUT, and CBC are still worth listening to... it's the rest of them that suck)
and be happy.
http://happygator.da.ru
Oh yes, and happy Chinese New Years to all. To all my monkey friends... it's our year. :)
If this guy made this while living in Regina, I *completely* understand where he got inspiration from.
Also, my MPM032 mini-site for school is now live. Dirty and ugly like a true reject site should be.
This thing is right so often, it's spooky: http://y.20q.net:8095
And this thing is definetely worth a check: http://ica.20q.net/intro2.html
The Globe and Mail has a great series on right now about "The New Canada" -- the 20-something generation of Canada. It really hits home for me and it's definetely worth the read.
Check it out it here.
You don't understand how many articles that I've read in the past week that claim one technology to be THE FUTURE OF THE WEB!! (Cap locks and exclamation points optional.)
This HDTV project I'm working on is suppose to be completely authored in open standards so the w3c and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other. I applaud the optimism of this industry but I'm getting a headache from all the acroynms...
Being that this is a video project, my crew has been looking at SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) in order to add a layer of interactivity to video. The examples in the testsuite are quite simple (and ugly) but definetely much more than I expected.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) was brought to my attention almost a year ago by an article by Colin Moock (Mr. Definitive Guide to ActionScript) himself but SVG still hasn't caught on to a wider audience. Now I've seen my fair share of ugly SVG graphics that I've scoffed at but these next two links will suprise you all:
+ a tutorial that takes an animation originally made in Flash and rewrites it in SVG, and
+ Adobe's link to some heavy duty SVG application examples.
Now there's a few things exciting about these links. Run an example and right-click. You'll get a menu that's sort of like the Flash Player but wait... View Source (!) ... Find (!) Now there's a kicker...
There's other cool stuff too like having the benefits of being part of the XML family and being able to apply CSS to a SVG file (told you the acronyms have gotten to me) so developers can rejoice but maybe that's the downfall of SVG... it's not very designer-friendly at all. Worth looking into though I don't know how they're going to replace the one-line inertia effect of ActionScript (this._x += (this.targetx - this._x)/rate).
And finally, there's MPEG-4. I'm still sort of confused with everything that it can do (because it does many many things) but here's a pdf of a magazine article that talks about it in layman's terms. It sounds spiffy though. And MPEG-21... they'll probably add 'serving coffee' to it's specifications... it's that good. Future of the web and all, ya know. :)
Nice simple and elegant 'discussion' about urban cities on CBC's web one.
Also, this snippet in the Toronto Star website was misleading (sort of): "Unlike Toronto's new official plan, Toronto's chief planner is happy to get into specifics. Speaking last week at a conference about that plan, Paul Bedford cut through hours of PowerPoint presentations to bring delegates a quick reality check. "This city is screwed," the chief planner said." Read on...
Ryan sent me this link worth checking out: Hektor - computerized graphitti.
My notes from Images and FITC 2003... I don't even need to type these up but I mostly use this weblog simply to jog my own memory when needed. :)
Images Festival (April 10-19)
Highlights from the Boxed Life screenings:
+ 8.7mb by Jeremy Bailey was great! (Click on placeholder to play. You should also check out Bye Bye Bye)
+ Chair/Screen by Takashi Ishida was so beautiful.
+ God Bless America by Tadasu Takamine was outrageous.
Highlights from the NegativLand screening/talk:
+ Don't have much time to comment on this right now so here's a link to NegativLand.
FlashintheCan (April 15-17)
I was pretty scatterbrained for most of this festival since I was stage manager for the smaller stage and, because of that, I ended up worrying constantly about what time it was and freaking out whenever the audio and internet didn't work. All the good code tidbits went in one ear and out the other. It was a good experience and I met lots of people but definetely hard work... next year, I'll just pay for a ticket!
Here's what I can put together in order of appearance:
+ Brendan Dawes' book was the first Flash book that I ever read which really put the designer/programmer ideal in focus for me so it was great to see him in person. Brendan is hella funny and pretty down to earth. Key: Put your audience first and test, test, test.
+ Andries Odendaal makes the most gorgeous interactive systems! Besides his isometric experiments, here's his walking skeleton that I saw a couple months ago. Play some Whizball. There was also this HP photo paper game with a little buggy that drove around an office desk... link anyone?
+ Kymberlee Weil gave a really good talk about getting more business in the Flash industry. One of her projects was Intro (goto mixed grill, then projects) which is somewhat similiar to my alphalpha project except with video. Key: network, network, network.
+ I missed most of Grant Skinner's talk but his gModeler application looks really useful. I still don't know exactly what it does but I was blown away by Grant's website. You should go check it out... it really articulates the relational navigation that I had wanted to make for this site.
+ Can you believe that I almost kicked Robert Penner off the stage because of mistaken identity? I'm so stupid so go buy his book. (Really, I hear good things about it.)
+ Glyn Thomas kind of came out of nowhere and showed off some amazing stuff with 3D in Flash. I didn't even think Flash could do that! And it looks relatively lightweight in delivery too. (As a side effect, it makes me want to put some effort into learning Lightwave but then I remember doing that paper tutorial and I wince.)
+ Colin Moock went through the new Unity 2 release and it definetley looks much easier to implement than Unity 1. More summer fun...
+ So that's about all I was really able to retain about the talks. I'm disappointed that the two other female speakers had to cancel though. All this hubbub about equal rights, yada yada, and I don't even get to see if they live up to expectations. (I'll save my rant about women in technology for another day...)
Not too sure when the update happened but looks like my favourite design team released a new version of hi-res.net and they also have the cover story of shift. (The shift from japan, btw... not North America.)
Okay, finally those Digifest notes!
OnTarget Digital Entrepreneur Workshop
I originally thought Digifest was worthwhile simply for the OnTarget business workshops but the first 10 minutes were putting me to sleep so I left when they started to get into some hairy statistics from Delvinia.
Dutch Media Practice and Resistance: Electronic Interventions
This panel talk was really interesting in that these new media practitioners really moved away from screen-based restrictions. Their work realizes how important 'real life' interventions should be to 'cyber' interactions. So in no particular order:
+ Eric Kluitenberg - Constructing the Digital Commons
By far my favourite speaker at Digifest! Eric organizes these 'technology jams' in various cities where there's an actual physical location and people just drop in on a weekly basis for some tutorials or to just shoot the breeze with others who share an interest in technology. Whoa, a good old analog network!
I believe the events are called an*at*tom*ik and I would refer to you a URL but (here's a shocker...) there is none! Eric hasn't gotten around to making one yet but he actually says that this doesn't impact attendance at all since it forces people to come by to see what's happening.
It's amazing how body language makes the hugest impact on how we communicate and that's sort of getting lost today. And you can really see how effective face-to-face speaking is when Eric immediately built a relaxed rapport with the audience by simply detaching himself from the speakers podium... plus, he had the cutest little accent.
Eric is somehow related to Next 5 Minutes 4.
+ Nat Muller - User Research in Responsive Environments
Nat founded foAM which does a lot projects with everyday people to see how they react and interact with environments hooked up with sensors. From the documentation she showed us it was hard to figure out what the actual interations where (besides people swinging around in a circus arena, serious) but she does a lot of direct interviewing with the participants after they leave the environment in order to gather information. A very tactile way of getting feedback for tactile environments... sounds like a good idea to me.
Some more info on foAM can be found in their Librynth.
+ Guy van Belle - Old School Tactics vs. New School Abstractions
An urban update to that Russian guy who makes those political Zenith projections onto buildings. (Sorry, can't even fathom how to spell his name at this time.) Guy was trying to make these culture jamming statements but this I didn't really get though... how does projecting typography and Flash animations onto buildings (when it doesn't seem like anyone is around) change the world?
He did however offer this piece of advice: To get freedom of speech on the internet, you need to fight for freedom of speech in the real world too... they aren't completely separate entities.
Here are some resources for digital copyright info: info-commons.org and creativecommons.org.
+ Floor van Spaendonck - Tools for Social Change
Seniors should be allowed to use computers too right? Technology is making the generation gap even bigger so the Waag Society for Old and New Media would bring different types of technology to seniors homes to allow them to record their stories in non-intimidating ways.
Free as in Speech: Open Systems for Creative Expression
I was starving so I missed the first 3 speakers but made it back for James Fung who is one of Steve Mann's graduate students. They hooked up the big screen to James' eyetap glasses so it was very weird to see him navigate through a Linux OS and a hacked internet browser in order to present to us.
It was also surprising to see how normal the cyborg James is in comparison to Steve Mann who seems quite nervous and introverted when he speaks. (I suppose I assumed incorrectly that only those who seem like they want to leave society would want to become a cyborg.) Though, I'm still not entirely sold on the idea that the eyetap's ability to block out ads is unobtrusive.
Also to note: this group was hardcore into the open source movement. To keep up to date, they recommended checking out freshmeat.org. When I finally hook myself up with a laptop, I think that I'm going to hunt up an open source GUI OS... Lindows makes me laugh though.
Okay, enough typing from me. I'll finish off by saying that Amon Tobin was great and I'll add some of the hints that gmunk dropped tomorrow or later on.
I wish I would have thought of this idea first! An open source flash magazine - great photos and flash widgets.
It's a finalist in the FlashintheCan people's choice awards under experimental so go vote!
Because everyone loves links (yes, I'm being partially sarcastic here since most of us recieve floods of information en masse on a daily basis), here's a compilation of URLs that have been passing through my mailbox the past couple of weeks. Content varies though I guarentee that they are interesting in one way or another.
+ Toronto's Images Festival new media component - 'Source'
+ Stelarc's website (he's one of those cyborg guys)
+ Lisa Klapstock's 'Threshold' photography
+ Promise (artsy warehouse party this Friday in Toronto)
+ Fluxen.com has a new series finished!!
+ Short promo show for Pixel Gallery in Toronto
+ Art Directors Anonymous (Canadian designer collective of sorts)
+ 4 days left to win Digifest tickets!
+ Mr.Wong's apartments (I know you'll click on this simply because of the name)
+ Semantic room building (crazy!)
+ Yahoo directory of web work
And it ain't a cool link list without... Stinkoman and Teen Girl Squad 2!
Yes! A new (full) launch from the fine folks at hi-res: massive attack
Procrastination time!
While researching for my next installation, I came across an interesting article from Julie Diamond, an American process worker who deals with organizational practices.
She referenced a Kevin Kelly term called "Hive Mind" from Out of Control... I better get around to reading that book asap!!
I was looking for connections between honeycombs and electricity and definetely found a good chunk of material, including this art project related to honeycombs in model-making (amongst other things): http://home.interlog.com/~fatemaps/breath/.
I'm far from being a religious person but I believe that there's probably some sort of universal force that makes this world tick.
But unfortunately, spirituality can be pretty intangible in today's life so I find the iconoclasm of science, art, and religion pretty interesting.
Kevin Kelly is a name that seems to pop up quite often in my life. I've been meaning to read his book Out of Control for a while now (the online version can be found on at kk.org).
But in the meantime, some interesting articles about technology and religion:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/145/31.0.html
Tuned into CBC radio today to hear the end of a broadcast expose called "Head Games" dealing with computer game addiction and it's affect on families.
One mom talked about how her son pretty much stays up all night playing games then sleeps well into the day, missing weeks or months of school.
She comments that since he paid for the computer with his own money then there's not much that she feels like she can do. But she does seem to think that it's better knowing that her kid is in front of a computer rather than skateboarding late at night.
Hmm... is it really all that better?
I tried looking for a transcript of this broadcast and came across this previous article. Apparently, some guy shot himself with a rifle because of EverQuest last year.
Sony, of course, is making billions of dollars from EverQuest so a life lost here and a family ruined there doesn't seem to be of their concern.
Another person in today's broadcast talked about how he's made $50, 000 in the past two years from competing in online gaming tournaments and wants to go pro. (paraphrased: "I don't need no college education.") His dad use to frown upon his gaming addiction but now that the money is coming in, the dad is proud.
So what happens when the money stops?
This scenario reminds me a lot of professional sports. And look at that industry now... They use to be on top of the world but now they're restructuring their marketing in order to bring in more youth to make up for the aging sports fan population.
I'm all about the multi-user internet experience but this... I don't know... There's something seriously gone wrong with society.
More and more people seem to be getting these 'non-browser related pop-up messenger boxes of advertisement crap' lately so I thought I should re-post how to get rid of them here.
Contrary to the misinformation that's been passed around, this is not a spyware issue that can be cleared up using AdAware (though I recommend scanning your computer with AdAware every week anyways to get rid of all the other ad crap that's lurking around on your harddrive).
Netsends are actually coming from your internet provider network. Or more specifically, people who take advantage of open ports that are suppose to be used by your internet provider.
So if you're running w2k or XP, suggestion is to:
1. go to your control panel > administrative tools/services, search for messenger, go to it's properties, press stop, and then select disable from the drop down choices. (that should be enough to stop those messages.)
2. scan for and close off any open ports. (Google "portscanner" or choose the "Probe my ports!" option* from ShieldsUP!.)
3. you'll more than likely find that your Port 139 is open so go to control panel > network connections. Pick whatever you use to connect to your internet provider > choose properties > select Internet Protocol(TCP/IP) and look at it's advanced properties. Under the WINS tab choose Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP.
* I've already pointed out the wording for this portscanner elsewhere but seriously... first it was Metroid erotica (re: my Oct 26th entry about Art System) and now there's port probing going on... there's some serious sexual repression going on with some geeks, I tell you.
http://www.hometransfer.org/
- technology and it's use in the home
http://www.limiteazero.com/
- rhizome approved... check out the carnivore project/Quicktime video
http://www.limiteazero.com/wana/index.html
- uses MU NowServer (http://www.nowcentral.com/)
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashcom/
- site for Macromedia's Flash Comm server
http://moock.org
- Unity MU server... also check out showcase links
http://electrotank.com
- another MU flash xml server
http://www.sulake.com/
http://habbohotel.com
- MU servers from Fortress and FuseLight using Director/Lingo. (Check out the free light version.)
http://www.hi-res.net/sites/jump-tomorrow/
- MU Avatar navigation/exploration by the folks at http://www.hi-res.net
*MU = Multi-user, EC = Electronic Cities
Very amusing to read this forum war on CBC....
Canada vs. USA
The creator of Strong Bad is soooo in tune with the web design world. (And I don't mean that sarcastically at all... For those that know, I wonder if he's been visiting the forums of FITO? hehe.)
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html
This thing is too much fun... beautiful too.
http://www.modifyme.com/
(disregard if it makes no sense to you)
MT Plug-ins site
home
EntryLocation (by Yuri T.)
plug-in page
download & info
Location (by RC)
plug-in page
download & info
MapLocations (by Peter T)
plugin page
download & info
Geo::Sketch (by Peter T)
plugin page
download & info
VisitorLoaction via IP (by Gavin E)
plugin page
download & info
CrossBlog (by EJS)
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/crossblog.php
http://ericjamesstone.com/script_archive/mt_crossblog.htm
Related:
GeoURL
The World as a Blog
http://www.mcwetboy.net/maproom/
http://xplane.com/xblog/mapping/
http://www.bryanboyer.com/indyjunior/
MTCodeBeautifier
CPAN
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/entrylist.php
http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000312.html
http://www.pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/archives/process_designing/2003/000348.html