ITP AlumniBlender

Calling custom fields in custom widget / wordpress

Inhye Lee — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:53:20 +0000

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/324306

Saved my day :D~

My Asterisk Links - passing variables

Steve Bull — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:05:32 +0000

asterisk-gateway-interface-scripting-with-php
Asterisk+AGI+php
Asterisk+Detailed+Variable+List
Asterisk+variables
asterisk-channel-variables-and-the-asteriskagi-perl-module/
What is AGI?

I was able to pass variable from .php to dialplan, that is the number that SalesPitch.mobi needs to make the follow-up call, let's review the hard code:
/* as saved within the passvariables.php script itself */
//- essential parts of /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/passvariables.php
// lines 51 to 64
// create .PHP variable with a hard code phone number
$CLIENTNUMBER = '8005551212';
$SOMETEXT = '\"some text for swift to speak is thus\"'; // *
// speak a script identifying that we are in this file
write ("EXEC Swift \"pass variables dot p h p\"");
// speak the variable to be sure it works
write ("EXEC Swift \"$CLIENTNUMBER\""); // spoken as a billion number
write ("EXEC Swift \"$SOMETEXT\""); // spoken as complete string
// create DIALPLAN variable equal to .PHP variable
// this DIALPLAN variable is a Channel variable
write ("EXEC Set CLIENTNUMBER=$CLIENTNUMBER");
// * NB: ONLY THE FIRST WORD IN THE PHP VARIABLE IS GETTING PASSED * * *
write ("EXEC Set SOMETEXT=$SOMETEXT"); // *
// go to dialplan with DIALPLAN variables in tow
write ("EXEC Goto scene6|s|1");
// - essential parts of /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf [scene6|s|1]
/*
[scene6]
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
; identify this dialplan context
exten => s,2,SayDigits(66)
; go to this new context with "Channel" DIALPLAN variable in tow
exten => s,3,Goto(sceneTest,s,1)
; hangup if above not available
exten => s,n,Hangup()

[sceneTest]
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
; identify this dialplan context
exten => s,2,Swift(scene test)
; speak digits of DIALPLAN variable
; from passvariables.php
exten => s,3,SayDigits(${CLIENTNUMBER}) ; spoke in single digits
; * NB: Swift ONLY speaks first word of this DIALPLAN variable
; to be determined later how to pass a .PHP string as a variable
exten => s,4,Swift("${SOMETEXT}")
exten => s,n,Hangup()
exten => i,1,Playback(pbx-invalid)
exten => i,2,Goto(salespitch,s,1)
exten => t,1,Playback(vm-goodbye)
exten => t,2,Hangup()
*/

Big City - Celebrating Surprising Donations at the Secret Society of Creative Philanthropy - NYTimes.com

Carlyn Maw — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:31:09 +0000

Big City

Seeing How Far $100 Can Go

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: February 8, 2010

Andrew Marantz paid strangers to walk through Bryant Park holding hands and sharing secrets. Joshua Krafchin walked up and down a B train begging people -- to take his money.

Enlarge This Image

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Amy Coenen placed 20 $5 bills, each inscribed with quotations on the theme of giving, in places around the city — the straw container at a Starbucks, the floor of an apartment building lobby — where they might be found and inspire generosity.
And Helen Coster slipped the whole $100 into a thank-you card and asked a friend to hand it to the clerk at Duane Reade who regularly cheers her up.
As acts of philanthropy go, none of the above would rate particularly high on any measure of effectiveness. They do get points for creativity, however, which, to Courtney Martin, the 30-year-old minor-league benefactor who spawned them, is an undervalued aspect of charitable giving. “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted,” she likes to say, quoting a fellow maladjust, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
via nytimes.com

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"Fist Fight", Crisis of Conformity

Dennis Crowley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:25:41 +0000

When Ronald Reagan comes around
He brings the fascists to your town
You think it’s cool to be a jock
But we all get beat up by cops

It’s a
Fist fight fist fight
Fist fight in the parking lot
Fist fight fist fight
Fist fight in the parking lot

(Spoken, Fred)
I guess my mind’s all messed up
But isn’t that a result of going to your schools being a part of your system following your orders

(Ashton)
I guess you want me to put on a suit and tie and eat my happy meal

(Dave)
I guess you want me to have 2.5 children and a white picket fence I have a better idea. Why don’t I kick in your windows with my boots

(Fred)
You hear that Alexander Haig? You getting all that Ed Meese?

It’s time for a
Fist fight fist fight
Fist fight in the parking lot
Fist fight fist fight
Fist fight in the parking lot

Inspirational. feltron: The making of The Year in Numbers

Dennis Crowley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:20:55 +0000

Inspirational.

feltron:

The making of The Year in Numbers

Superbowl 2010 Menu

Dennis Crowley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:15:00 +0000

@sarahmcsimmons blew us away with this… easily best Superbowl spread ever.

msg:

Here is what homecooksuperstar served. Stay tuned for recipes…

Sriracha Chicken Wings with Blue Cheese Yogurt Dip

Sloppy Joes

Mac and Cheese cups

Pumpkin Pizza with fresh ricotta and pancetta

Fried Bocconcini with Spicy Tomato Chutney

Mini Cheese Toasts

Junk Food Cookies

===

I just went into a food coma again just by reblogging this

OceanScope - underconstruction_process

Minsoo Lee — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:16:47 +0000

concrete base and container window cutting.
container architecture - OceanScope

OceanScope - Sunset

Minsoo Lee — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:57:45 +0000

송도 인천대교 전망대 - Container architecture project
Un-used container recycling.

Box2D and Processing

Daniel Shiffman — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:03:00 +0000

I’m pleased to announce I’ve published a first draft of a tutorial about using Box2D in Processing.

Tutorial: http://www.shiffman.net/teaching/nature/box2d-processing/
Google code repository: http://code.google.com/p/pbox2d/

I’m struggling here to figure out whether I’m (a) creating a Processing Box2D library or (b) simply creating a tutorial and set of examples piggybacking off of JBox2D. For now, I’m doing a little bit of both. The library is just a few helper functions, but the examples require you to dig into actual Box2D code. These examples aren’t nearly as comprehensive as what you’ll find in the JBox2D demos. It’s my goal, however, to make the material accessible and easy to use. Hopefully, with some feedback and more time, I’ll be able to publish a more sophisticated library and thorough suite of example. Who knows, maybe no one will ever need any of my previous Nature of Code tutorials any more!

Next up, I’m planning on creating a few simple examples that use the fantastic and awe-inspiring toxiclibs.

송도 인천대교 전망대 "OceanScope" - Completed

Minsoo Lee — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:26:36 +0000

Container Scope from Minsoo Lee on Vimeo.

송도 인천대교 전망대 "Oceanscope" is completed and open published finally
Press - SBS NEWS Broadcasting (Korea)

Postcards for Hasbeen “Post-Mark” Show

Anh Nguyen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:21:24 +0000

The Hasbeen Design “Post-Mark” art show opens Friday, February 12th. I submitted two postcards to the show:

“Hand” the ubiquitous computer icon. - Keep an eye out for Hand stickers in your ‘hood, I’ll be posting them up right quick.
“White geometric abstraction #1″. I’m really intrigued by the form, texture, light and overall aesthetic of this piece and will make more iterations.

Next Exhibit › Arrested Time: Nathaniel Stern with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

Greylock Arts — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:35:36 +0000

An exhibition of works combining contemporary technologies with traditional drawing and printmaking methods.

Nathaniel Stern is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, networked art and multimedia physical theater performances, to digital printing and collage, stone lithography and slam poetry.

Opening Reception:
Friday February 26th 2010, 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday February 27th 2010, 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. in case of heavy snow or freezing rain.

Exhibit Dates & Times:
Admission is free and open to the public.
Saturdays, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Otherwise by appointment.

Contact:
info@greylockarts.net
413-241-8692

Location:
93 Summer Street, Adams, MA 01220

I’m going solo. I want you to meet Tinker. Let’s work together…

Alex Rainert — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:05:01 +0000

Today I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for years. I’m starting my own studio and I’m calling it Tinker.

As those who know me might expect, Tinker is going to focus on strategy, experience design and product development in the mobile, social and emerging tech space. If my initial projects are any indication, I’ll be working with startups, agencies and individuals—a mix that’s very appealing to me. Of course, there are few personal and collaborative projects that have languished in a Moleskin for some time that I plan on squeezing in as time permits.

Tinker will start as a studio of one but I expect it to grow and change organically over time. As someone who’s spent the past 12 years in New York City working with startups and agencies, I’ve never witnessed a time where the creative tech community was more inspiring, collaborative, dynamic and capable. Just as every industry is being redefined before our eyes, I expect the concept of what it means to be a creative/consulting/product/service/etc. company to also evolve and there’s no group of people I look forward to working with and learning from as we help define it than the army of creative folks right here in NY. No less exciting is that I’ll also finally get to fulfill my dream of working in Brooklyn. (ps: I’ll see you in DUMBO this Friday, Schnitzel Truck!)

So what am I going to work on? I’ve spent the past few months working with the amazing team of people at kgbweb on getting our product to a private beta launch. We successfully hit that milestone last week and I will continue to do work with the team in a part time creative advisory role as the product continues to evolve. Additionally, this week I’ll be kicking off an Android project with some old friends I’d worked with in the past – a great combination of research and design. I also plan to build more writing into my daily schedule so stay tuned for a more more lively everydayUX as well as some new ideas I’ve had for features that I haven’t had the time to explore over the past two years.

Not enough projects? The most exciting one of all is currently set for early March—my wife Karen and I are expecting our first child. Not only will I be happy and proud to be building my own business from scratch, but it will also allow me more flexibility to spend more time with the family during these first few months.

Now that I’m on the brink of embarking on this very different chapter in my life, I’m giddy with excitement. While this is something I’ve always wanted to do, I wouldn’t have been able to make the last, crucial, leap without the people around me who helped me either with advice, inspiration, encouragement or in most cases, all three: my wife, Karen; my mother, Vicky; Dennis Crowley, Buster Benson, Dan Parham, Chris Reardon, Sundance DiGiovanni, Nick Bilton, Kip Voytek, Toby Joe Boudreaux, Naveen Selvadurai, Champ Bennett, Michael Lewis, Sandy Fershee, Judd Frankel, Silvia Fernandez, Jeff Bonna, Lian Chang, Gabe Berezin, Tom Kletecka, Ian Cunningham, Kevin Cancienne, Chad Pugh, Mike O’Dea, Omar Elsayed, Danny Newman, Michael Surtees, Paul Dix, Stephen Baker, Mike Brady, Kevin Kearney, Matt Galligan, Phoebe Espiritu, Oliver Turner, Jeff Dachis, Hyo Yeon, Brian Murphy, and many more that I’m sure I’m forgetting and already feel awful about! Tinker Studio is live thanks to you all.

Whether it’s this week, next month or next year, if there’s something you’d like to work on together, shoot me an email at alex@tinkerstudio.com or come check out the site and we can take it from there.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

- alex

Dual screen setup @ my SuperBowl party: one for game, one for...

Dennis Crowley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:07:18 +0000

Dual screen setup @ my SuperBowl party: one for game, one for tweets. Great backchannel for ads. This is the future.

Partly inspired what Twitter did w/ the debates in summer 08 (dual screen, tweets vs. TV) I rigged up something similar for SuperBowl 2010.

My LCD on the left was hooked up to my MacBook and with TwitterFall was streaming tweets from the people I’m following (of which 97% where about the SuperBowl and from friends-of-everyone-in-the-room). [see pic]

The dual screen gave us a running commentary of what our friends where saying about both the game and the ads. And just as you’d multitask between different IM windows at work, we’d shift glances from Twitter to Superbowl whenever there was downtime on either screen.

Like Twitter itself, it’s hard to explain how interesting this was unless you were actually a part of it, but the combination of seeing our friends tweets and our own running commentary (from the folks on the couch) — AND it then spawning conversation around the coffee table — was kind of fascinating. About 1/2 way thru the game we got used to the setup (read: “less distracted by”) and we were pointing to the tweets (“pay attention”) in the same way we’d point to instant replay.

Matt Laher said something along the lines of “The dual screen made the party uncrowded but huge.” MSG and I were thinking this will be the last time we’ll (er, all of us) will watch the SuperBowl + Twitter on two separate screens. Everyone will do this next year.

Someone’s gotta hack this up for the masses ASAP. I know Samsung / Boxee are trying it, but not like this. It’s not about showing hashtags from everyone - hashtags are still for nerds (and plus you can’t filter hashtags by “from friends only” - watching a global Twitter search on “superbowl” feels spammy and irrelevant). And it’s not just about tweets from friends — I mean, the only reason this even worked was because 97% of the people I were following were tweeting about the SuperBowl.

Instead there needs to be some smart way of knowing that a tweet is tied to a channel/show (meta data dance party!). Think of how Twitter is geotagging tweets and then imagine if you could swap out “40.72, -73.98” for “Superbowl”, “Oscars”, “True Blood s3e10”. You’d need a twitter client that was smart enough to know what you were watching (hello HotPotato!) and an on-screen layer that was smart enough to tell the Twitter API what you’re watching (again, “Superbowl”, “Oscars”, “True Blood s3e10”… maybe do this via some audio recognition, a la Shazam?) ps: Dear Twitter, please add a “only show results from my followers” to Twitter Search soonish. It would enable the rest of us to build the fun stuff.

Anyway, this is a fun problem to solve. If I wasn’t working on foursquare, I think this would be my thing.

(looking forward to trying again - Oscar Party anyone?)

—

[add comments here]

Book Excerpt: A Peace Corps For Developers

Matthew Burton — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:42:06 +0000

In the coming weeks, O’Reilly Media will publish Open Government, a collection of new essays on how technology can make DC more transparent and efficient. Today, O’Reilly released a preview (PDF) of the book that features the first eight chapters. My chapter is included; its entire text is below.

—–

The federal government should fire me. Like the thousands of other contractors who develop software for government agencies, I am slow, overpaid, and out of touch with the needs of my customers. And I’m keeping the government from innovating.

In recent years, the government has become almost completely dependent upon contractors for information technology (IT). So deep is this dependency that the government has found itself in a position that may shock those in the tech industry: it has no programmers of its own; code is almost entirely outsourced. Government leaders clearly consider IT an ancillary function that can be offloaded for someone else to worry about.

But they should worry. Because while they were pushing the responsibility for IT into the margins, the role of IT became increasingly central to every agency’s business. Computing might have been ancillary 20 years ago, when the only computers were the mainframes in the basement. Average employees never had to worry about them. But today, a computer is on the desk of every civil servant. Those servants rely on their computers to do their jobs effectively. Every day, they encounter new problems that could be quickly solved with a bit of web savvy, were there only a programmer there to help.

And they desperately do need help. Imagine not having Google to quickly find information; no Facebook or LinkedIn to find new colleagues; no instant messaging to communicate with those colleagues once you found them. Imagine having to ask for permission every time you wanted to publish content online, instead of being able to do it quickly and easily with a wiki or weblog. This is the state of computing in the federal government.

SIDEBAR

On top of keeping the government from innovating, the dependence on contractors hurts the country in much more tangible ways. In February 2003, a few weeks into my job as an intelligence analyst with the Department of Defense (DoD), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia officially changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro. My job was to maintain an enormous database of facilities in Eastern Europe, including labeling each one with a country name. But the tool we used didn’t have an option for “Serbia and Montenegro,” so on the day of the name change, I emailed the contract officer in charge of the database with a simple request: “This country changed its name. Could you please update the tool to reflect this?”

Doing so would have taken a computer programmer less than five minutes. But instead, he used that time to respond to my email:

“We’ll consider it for the next version.”

In other words, his current contract—written months prior—didn’t account for changes in the geopolitical landscape, so there was no paperwork explicitly authorizing him to make this change. To do it, he would have to wait until the contract was renewed (months or years from now) and the government allotted funds for this five-minute job. It wasn’t his fault; he was no doubt aware of how easy it was to make this change. But doing it without permission from either his boss or the government would spell trouble. Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore. Except inside our office, where we had to wait for a contract to make it so.

The government can no longer afford to outsource IT. It is core to the government’s business. If the government intends to do IT right, it should wean itself from outsiders like me and start doing the job itself.

What’s so wrong with contractors? Nothing, really; the problem is the processes they have given rise to. The pervading philosophy is that government is slow, inefficient, and incapable of quickly adapting to change, while private companies do things better, faster, and cheaper. In many cases, this is true; the government is by no means a well-oiled machine. But software is one thing that contracts do not speed up. Software developed under contract is much slower and much more expensive than any other form of software development still in practice. Here is how the typical IT contract evolves:

1. A low-level government employee complains to her boss about a problem. This could be anything from a bug in an existing piece of software to a gaping hole in her agency’s IT security. The boss has no programmers on hand to solve the problem, so he dismisses it.

2. More and more people complain about the problem until it gets attention from higher levels. But even thinking about a solution is expensive—months of paperwork must come before a contract is awarded and someone finally starts writing code—so the problem remains unsolved.

3. The problem leads to a calamity—a website is hacked, classified information is stolen, or electronic voting booths break down on Election Day—and leaders are finally motivated to solve the problem.

4. Procurement officers write a list of requirements for the ideal solution. Because they have little direct experience with the problem, they survey the workforce to get a sense of what’s needed.

5. The workforce’s version of the problem is condensed into a document called a Request for Proposals, or RFP. The RFP is then distributed to potential bidders, who will respond with a proposed solution and a bid based entirely on the contents of the RFP. Contractors cannot go directly to the users, the people who know the problem best. The RFP is therefore an indirect, highly edited communiqué from the user to the contractor, a substitute for the invaluable direct interaction between user and coder that guides any successful software product. But it’s too late: contractors are from here on out trying to solve what they believe the problem to be, not the problem that really is.

6. The contract is awarded. Months or years after the problem was first noticed, the first line of code is written. Over the coming months, the winning bidder will develop the solution off-site, hidden from the eventual users who could be providing valuable feedback.

7. The solution is delivered. Because the target users had such a small part in the development process, the solution falls short. It is hard to use and comes with an 80-page manual.

It should now be clear why the government is so far behind the times: it isn’t allowed to solve its own problems, relying instead on people who do not understand them. Two glaring faults doom the contracting process to failure. First, the development process is vastly different from that of today’s most popular software. Modern web applications are persistently watching their users and adjusting their code to make it faster and more user-friendly. Adventurous users can begin using these applications before they’re even finished, giving the developers invaluable insight into their users’ preferences. Without this constant feedback, the developers risk spending years on a product in private, only to reveal it to the public and find that nobody wants to use it. Such products are so common in government that they have earned their own moniker, named for their eternal home: shelfware.

Second, the paperwork required to simply start coding takes time and money. So, to even consider solutions, the problem has to be severe enough to justify months of bureaucracy. Why go through all that trouble just for a problem that would take a week to solve? The logic makes the taxpayer ill: the bureaucracy actually wants high price tags. The result is an organization full of easy problems that get no attention until they are big, expensive, and ready to boil over.

Tipping Point: The Extinction of Pencils

One such problem that may soon boil over is the terrorist watch list. For years, the list—created to monitor suspected terrorists and keep them from flying on commercial airliners—had inconvenienced innocent travelers. The problems were evident, but they weren’t bad enough to justify asking for help.

Then a toddler was kept from boarding a flight. Then a senator. At some point, this problem crossed the threshold, and the government issued an RFP for an improved database to manage the list. The $500 million contract was awarded to Boeing and a smaller company. After months of development, a congressional investigation discovered that the soon-to-be-deployed database could not perform basic searches for names, and was missing huge stores of valuable data. The National Counterterrorism Center had spent half a billion dollars on a tool that, while certainly complex, could not do things that you and I do every day from our home computers.

Why so much money for something that seems so simple? This frame of mind—that technology projects should be big, expensive, and time-consuming—has honest beginnings. Twenty years ago, computing was a niche. The government used computers to encrypt the president’s phone calls, simulate nuclear blasts, and predict the weather. The government paid private companies lots of money to build very complex systems. That’s OK, because tasks such as these required lots of computing power, so the biggest, baddest, most expensive system was usually the best. It didn’t matter that these systems were hard to use, because the only people using them were computer scientists. The builder of the system understood the user—the builder and user may have even worked side by side—and if the user ever needed the system to do something it couldn’t, that user probably had the skills to tweak the system. Computers were left to the computer people. Everyone else still used pencils.

But computing is now everywhere. Computers long ago fit on our desktops. Now they fit in our palms. But the government still acts like computers fill basements, and if you could sit down at a government desktop, this outdated mindset would be immediately apparent: on the screen would be websites reminiscent of the mid-1990s, without any of the web-based productivity and collaboration tools that define today’s Web. Expensive supercomputers still matter. But so do cheap, light web applications. Small, unassuming tools can change the way an organization does business. Such tools are commonplace online, but they do not get a second look from a government that expects and needs its technology to be expensive. Meanwhile, independent developers are at their keyboards, proving themselves willing to help a government that, as we’ll see, is slowly opening its arms to them.

Competition Is Critical to Any Ecosystem

One of the reasons the Web has better tools than the government is competition.

Take airfare as an example. There are countless websites that help you buy plane tickets, each of them constantly improving their tools and layouts to make you happier. And if you aren’t happy with those sites, you’re free to start your own business and compete with them. But when the government contracts new software, it gets only one product out of it. Instead of many choices, users have only two: use this tool, or use nothing.

Web developers know that the first attempt at an innovation almost never works, and that it takes many attempts before someone gets it right. For every Facebook, there are countless Friendsters. Given one chance, you’ll likely end up with one of the latter. If the government wants better software, it has to start creating and acquiring more software.

In the past year, two promising government projects have chipped away at this problem. Washington, D.C.’s Apps for Democracy competition let independent developers build web applications for a shot at prize money. The D.C. government’s $50,000 investment bought it 40 tools in 30 days. The District got to keep every contribution but only paid for the really good ones.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Intelligence Community is becoming an unexpected leader in engaging everyday developers. To provide more analytic tools to their workforce, they have released BRIDGE, an open development platform akin to Facebook’s: now, any software developer can build a tool and provide it to intelligence analysts. If the analysts like it, the government buys it. If it’s junk, your tax dollars are saved.

This approach worked for Facebook: it gained 30,000 new tools in two years, and got other people to do all the work. Most of these new tools fall into the junk category, but many others are invaluable. The community finds the good ones and makes them more visible. It is the same principle that governs our economy: we buy the dish soap that works, and the bad ones go away. We should expect the same practice from our government, whose very job is the promotion of market economies and democracy. Apps for Democracy and BRIDGE are a welcome departure from contract-based software.

But while these projects are giving government employees more options, they haven’t filled in all the gaps. Who will maintain software that was built not by a global firm, but by an independent developer who is juggling multiple projects?

And what about user feedback? Neither of these projects addresses the fact that government software is built by people unfamiliar with government users. Apps for Democracy produced useful tools for D.C. residents, but little for D.C. employees. And applications on the Intelligence Community platform are hobbled by the world’s biggest firewall: intelligence analysts use these tools on a top-secret network that doesn’t allow them to communicate with the outside world. As long as the government keeps developers outside its walls, those developers have no hope of solving the government’s technology problems. The civil service needs an infusion of technical talent. The civil service needs intel techs.

Creating a Developer Corps

Decades ago, the intel tech (also known as “mission support” at some agencies) was a specialist in the Intelligence Community who helped analysts with now-defunct technologies: setting up the light table to look at satellite imagery, making mimeographs, and so on. Unlike today’s tech support staff who sit in the basement or in Bombay, these experts sat among the analysts and were solely dedicated to the analysts’ mission. And because they were government employees, they were at the analysts’ disposal whenever help was needed.

But then personal computers arrived. Software made the intel techs’ tools obsolete. The light tables vanished. The intel techs soon followed. It is the opposite of what should have happened: IT’s role in intelligence analysis—and every other government function—has grown tremendously, while the government’s in-house technical talent has dwindled. Government employees’ need for technical help has never been greater, but there is nobody there to help them.

If they still existed, today’s intel techs would be developers. They would be deploying web applications for new needs the moment they arose. They would mash up data and make it easier for both civil servants and private citizens to consume. They would do the things that contractors do today, only immediately—no paperwork necessary—and with users at their side. The intel tech must be resurrected for the Internet age. The government must hire web developers and embed them in the federal bureaucracy.

The government needs to hire the people who have been fueling the web application boom for the past 10 years. They are young programmers who created revolutionary tools from their dorm rooms, and they are small firms with virtual offices who stumbled upon a new way of doing business. The trouble is, most of these people are not compatible with government culture. They like working from p.m. to a.m. They don’t like ties. They seek venture capital, not pay grade bumps. Are they supposed to move from one coast to another and indefinitely trade in their lifestyles for something completely different, not knowing when they would return to their old lives? That is asking too much.

But what if these in-house developers weren’t standard government hires on entry-level salaries? What if their time in the government wasn’t a career, but a mission akin to a term in the Peace Corps or Teach For America? A program marketed and structured as a temporary “time abroad” would let developers help their country without giving up their careers and identities.

Now is the perfect time for such a program. Silicon Valley’s interest in D.C. has never been as great as it is now. Technology icons are encouraging developers to quit creating banal tools and instead put their energy into things that matter. And it’s working: several prominent Internet entrepreneurs have become full-time civil servants. Many more have contributed software tools to programs such as Apps for Democracy and BRIDGE. Apps for America‡—a federal take on Apps for Democracy sponsored by the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation— received 34 submissions during its first iteration, and 46 more on the second. Geeks want to help government. The government just has to give them the right invitation.

Like the Peace Corps and Teach For America, terms in the Developer Corps would have a time limit. Whether this limit is six months or six years, I do not know. But a limit of some kind is important. First, it will be easier for developers to make the leap if they know they will eventually return to their current careers.

Second, being detached from an agency’s pay scale and career plan will give the participants the freedom to experiment and—more importantly—to fail. Failure is a key part of innovation. Technology firms know this, and their employees are used to working in atmospheres that encourage failure. If they don’t try new things, they’ll be killed by their competition.

Not so in government. Unlike private companies, a government—at least ours—is relatively safe from competition, and thus doesn’t feel the need to be constantly reinventing itself. Things are fine how they are. The populace views failed government projects as little more than a waste of taxpayer dollars. No career-conscious government employee wants to take on such a risk. So, to succeed, the Developer Corps’ participants must have the same freedom to fail that they did in their former jobs. The knowledge that their terms will end on a set date will quell the fear of failure that plagues the average government employee.

The greatest threat to this program is lack of permission. If red tape keeps developers from being productive, they will end up wasting their time fixing printer jams instead of writing code.

Developers work quickly. They can implement ideas within hours of conceiving them, continuously deploying, checking, modifying, and redeploying their code dozens, hundreds, thousands of times along the way. Doing this never requires anyone’s approval. But within each government agency are multiple offices that must vet code before it is deployed: system administrators, information security officers, lawyers, and so forth.

Developers will never get anything done with such thick bureaucratic walls between them and their work. Wasting their talent is the fastest way to destroy the corp’s reputation. They must be given authority to code what they please. Not all agencies will grant this authority. Such agencies must not be allowed to participate in the Developer Corps. (Participants in restrictive environments would never get anything done anyway, so there is no harm in barring uncooperative agencies.)

Finally, this program should take a page from a new organization called Code for America (http://codeforamerica.org). CFA recruits coders to work with government offices for set terms, but at the municipal level instead of federal. About to enter its inaugural iteration, CFA’s participants will work with their respective governments remotely from a shared space in California. This communal coding environment will let participants enjoy networking events, guest speakers, and the creative energy generated by each other’s ideas.

The federal program I’ve proposed in this chapter should incorporate a similar communal environment. While coders will spend their days at their respective government agencies, group housing will let them discuss their work over dinner and drinks, allowing the creative process to continue after hours. And select days could be dedicated to meetings with government leaders and tech luminaries, visits to other agencies, and networking. Such events will help ensure a D.C. term is a boost to a coder’s career instead of diversion from it.

Conclusion

Our government agencies need the ability to develop their own software. Keeping them from doing so prevents them from providing vital services that we all pay for. No story makes the case for this capability better than that of Jim Gray.

Gray was a technology pioneer who, during a sailing trip in early 2007, disappeared off the coast of San Francisco. The Coast Guard searched for him for three days and could not find him. They called off their search.

But a group of determined people kept looking. They had imagery satellites take fresh pictures of a swatch of sea outside the San Francisco Bay. If Gray was out there, he and his boat were now on film. But they were left with hundreds of photos, each big enough to cover a wall. A handful of people could never review the images in time to save Gray. So, a team of software developers converted those large photos into lots of smaller ones, which were then posted to a website where the public could review them. Clicking on a possible sighting sent a report to a flight crew, which then searched the area in question. Noticing that the images were blurry, another team of programmers contributed code that automatically sharpened the images. The entire system was created from scratch in just a few days. And it was done without any help from the government.

This effort was coordinated entirely by private citizens with the help of publicly available technology. Though he was never found, Gray inspired the largest collaborative search party in history. Twelve thousand private citizens reviewed more than half a million images. It is an amazing story of teamwork and ingenuity. Inspiring. Soul-stirring.

But also frustrating: why didn’t our government do this the moment Gray was reported missing?

It is tempting to use this story as a case for more self-governance: if the public can do it and the government can’t, why not go with it? Instead of equipping the government to do what private citizens already can, let’s just do their jobs for them from our home computers.

The Web has made it simple to form ad hoc groups and coordinate their actions, and we will continue to see cases where such groups fill the government’s shoes. But such cases will not be the norm. Our populace cannot govern itself just yet. There are too many critical functions that we cannot yet take over. We do not have battleships. We cannot run elections. Some private citizens guard our borders, but that doesn’t mean they should.

We will need a formal government for the foreseeable future. Our government should be at least as capable as a quickly organized group of virtual volunteers. It will certainly have the budget for it.

City Centered: Request for Proposals

Elizabeth Goodman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:08:22 +0000

I'm helping organize City-Centered, a show of site-specific locative media projects in San Francisco. The deadline for proposals is March 1 -- please let me know if you have any questions!

Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.
From within San Francisco's Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers --people, places, and devices -- will meet for four days of street-side celebration, public exhibitions, a symposium, and workshops. The festival seeks new work aligned with the themes of creative mapping, urban storytelling, sentient space, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming.

City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community
June 11- 13 & 19, 2010
Sponsored by the Center for Locative Media, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, KQED, Conceptual Information Arts/Art Dept/San Francisco State University, the City of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Center for New Media
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010

jendunlap: samreich: Noah was just in a Superbowl...

Dennis Crowley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:28:00 +0000

jendunlap:

samreich:

Noah was just in a Superbowl commercial!

Zach gave us a heads up a few commercial breaks early. Awesome.

In case you didn’t know, Noah is the guy who took a photo of himself everyday for 6 years, made a video of it, and got parodied by the Simpsons. He’s also a superstar photographer.

ps: bonus = I thought this was one of the better commercials of the night (Google ad was my fav)

inothernews: Heard ‘round the world. Amazing photo, er, screen...

Dennis Crowley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:21:14 +0000

inothernews:

Heard ‘round the world.

Amazing photo, er, screen capture.

marsbot: The Prom King (a badge I made for the prom) Me and...

Dennis Crowley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:18:50 +0000

marsbot:

The Prom King (a badge I made for the prom)

Me and Mars and HarryH were very close to making the Naveen Birthday Badge unlockable for the party… buuuutttt last minute bug about an hour before we left threw a monkeywrench into our masterplan.

(interesting sidenote on foursquare - as of about two weeks ago, we can’t just take the site down whenever we want, we can’t just update things as we see… we’ve got so much traffic from all over the world, that finding windows to do things so that the smallest number of people possible are affected is becoming challenging)

The very last sketch on last night’s SNL. Awesome.

Dennis Crowley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:40:00 +0000

The very last sketch on last night’s SNL. Awesome.

Profundity and plasticity for the greedy

Nathaniel Stern — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:12:10 +0000

Profundity and plasticity for the greedy
This article by Chris Roper appeared in both the online and print editions of the Mail & Guardian. Also see their online video feature.

“… The work is funny, pretty and accessible, but it’s also complicated, surprising, exceedingly well crafted and rewards a long-term relationship. That’s your cue to rush out and buy a piece, take it home and plug it in.”

“I’d better take a stab at describing the pieces in the gallery, although it would be easier all round if you checked out the video of the work on www.mg.co.za/stern. Basically, it’s a new-media mash-up. Paraphrasing the artists’ own description: they mount translucent prints and drawings on top of video screens, creating moving pictures on paper.”

“That doesn’t do justice to, for example, the mesmerising, joyful experience of watching insubstantial sharks endlessly circling The Gallerist. He’s depicted kneeling on some driftwood in the middle of the ocean while sketchy vultures hover ominously. And there’s a perfect beauty to The Great Oak, the central image of which is a drawing of a sturdy tree, already complicated by the digital echo of itself, counterpointed by ghostly figures leaping at its base.”

…

“So when you wander around the show at the misnamed Art on Paper, or if you’re lucky enough to have one of these works on your wall, you can choose. Do you just want to enjoy the playful nature of a piece such as Twin City — whoah! Here comes the flying cow again! — or do you want to meditate on the nature of the loop, which ‘without origin or telos … interweaves the work’s time with the spectator’s as rhythm rather than succession’?”

“I know, you’re a 21st-century art lover, so you want it all — profundity and plasticity, facile conversation piece and deep worth. Greedy. But with this work, you can have it all and, in true hypertextual style, leap from moment to moment, constantly recreating desire and satisfaction, in much the same way as the looped video constantly re-enacts the pleasure of watching.”

Read the entire article.

Tags: art, art and tech, exhibition, me, milwaukee art, printmaking, re-blog tidbits, south african art

Take Apart Tuesday No. 5

Carlyn Maw — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:28:41 +0000

http://blog.crashspace.org/2010/02/take-apart-tuesday-no-5-electric-toothbrushes/

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Field trip to APEX electronics

Carlyn Maw — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:27:15 +0000

http://blog.crashspace.org/2010/02/hacker-supplies-field-trip/

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Since Thanksgiving I’ve had this awful white burn stain on...

Dennis Crowley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:29:07 +0000

Since Thanksgiving I’ve had this awful white burn stain on my kitchen table… and then today, I went on the internet, Googled my woes aannnnnndddd :

Basically you just iron the stain out by steaming some moisture back in! (that is picture perfect infomercial copy btw!)

tipnut.com/diy-how-to-remove-white-heat-stains-on-wood-ta…

Internet FTW!

Since Thanksgiving I’ve had this awful white burn stain on...

Dennis Crowley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:29:07 +0000

Since Thanksgiving I’ve had this awful white burn stain on my kitchen table… and then today, I went on the internet, Googled my woes aannnnnndddd…. FIXED!:

Basically you just iron the stain out by steaming some moisture back in! (that is picture perfect infomercial copy btw!)

tipnut.com/diy-how-to-remove-white-heat-stains-on-wood-ta…

Internet FTW!

A puppy sent me a txt message!! (via MariSheibley)

Dennis Crowley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:16:02 +0000

A puppy sent me a txt message!! (via MariSheibley)

via jonathan crowley: » Facebook Ad: Who googled You?...

Dennis Crowley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:16:00 +0000

via jonathan crowley:

» Facebook Ad: Who googled You? I’m guessing not this little minx :(

Plants Are People Too

Leo Klein — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:23:50 +0000

So we got this enormous plant for the reference desk which looks like it came from the "Little Shop of Horror". It's looking at me all the time and I know it's probably eaten a student or two when my back was turned. So naturally I'm taking a poll among my colleagues to see what we should call it: "Harvey or Irene?"

At this point it's a tie.

Transfer resistor = Transistor

Steve Bull — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:03:42 +0000

My son Frank sent me a link to HOW DO THEY REALLY WORK? by William Beaty, BSEE 1995 and I am pleased to report that this is the best explanation I have ever read on transistor basic principles. For years and years I was baffled by all previous explanations and this article told me why. There are useful links at the end for more visualizations plus a nifty article on Iron Pyrites Negative Resistance Oscillator with a DIY cat whisker radio.

Big Screens 2009 Show Video

Daniel Shiffman — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:05:23 +0000

For anyone who missed it, here’s a video of the 2009 Big Screens show at IAC. Thanks to Lina Giraldo for editing it together, and a great group of student volunteers who did the shooting.

Tennis & Diving Season Begins Anew

Amos — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:56:20 +0000

It’s tennis & diving season again. Diving class consists of 4 young skinny asian girls, a tall latin american boy, me, and Yasuo, the prestigious fine art framer. Yasuo doesn’t commune with the beginners, preferring to do his own thing on another board. I bide my time waiting patiently for my turn amongst the newbies. Our instructor, C, is good with details. He was impressed with my retention of diving prowess. Besides Yasuo, who is a great diver, I am the only one who can perform a dive. But C gives plenty of constructive criticism, often mimicking the ridiculous gesticulations of the divers with good humor.

Tennis is a different story. A, the buxom young instructor, doesn’t mess around. The 7 women and I run drills, returning balls, rallying with each other, and practicing volleys. The two oldest women – a fiery 60-somethinger and a middle aged latina – joked about having to compete for me as a hitting partner. An oversized and middle-aged administrator at the university stated matter-of-factly that I would hit with her since the two best hitters had already had me. Later, the administrator questioned the integrity of my racquet, based on the sound made when hitting. Towards the end, we practiced serves, with little guidance.

Gone

Vaibhav Bhawsa — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:47:31 +0000

RIP Marianne Armacher. Just learnt that you are gone. I wish I could have seen you play.

EverydayUX morsels (January 31st – February 5th)

Alex Rainert — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:00:07 +0000

Apple, Major League Baseball Team Up on iPad App | Latest Apple News Blog | Apple SKY
MLB at Bat on the iPad may just be enough to seal the deal for me. Wow. Absolutely love what MLB.com's been doing.
The iPad UI Dissected In Photos
Nice little resource to get a sense of all the different UI elements coming in the iPad.
LukeW | iPad Apps: Physicality and Heightened Realism
Welcome to Hokeytown.
LOS LOGOS :: Typography Served
Nice case study on the approach to an identity design.
LukeW | iPad User Experience Guidelines
Nice high level summary of the iPad specific guidelines.
What the iPad Means for the Future of Computing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
It makes me so happy to see sites designed for mobile use be better experiences than their web counterparts.
Unleashing the Power of Website Analytics
Nice high level primer on how to make sense of analytics data and roll that info back into your design process.
Big Spaceship | Think Blog – Getting Past Viral
One of the best pieces I've read addressing agencies' and brands' misguided belief that media can be engineered to be viral. A must read.

Paper FaceBook

Jonah Brucker-Cohen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:37:16 +0000

Students in the class I teach, “New Media Research Studio” at New York University’s Steinhardt’s Department of Media, Culture, & Communication had the class build a paper version of FaceBook as an assigned in-class activity. The results were pretty chaotic as they would be in normal real life circumstances, but the output was a really nice reminder of how important social networking has become in the last 5 years. Above is a picture of what the class came up with!

GroundedPower on Fox Boston

Rob Faludi — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:12:40 +0000

Fox Boston ran an in-depth report on the initial results of the Cape Light Compact pilot that our GroundedPower project installed in 100 homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. We’re now taking this to at least six more municipal utilities, tripling the size of the pilot program. GroundedPower focuses on customer engagement—employing technology as a means to creating a desirable behavioral outcomes, in this case supporting energy efficiency in homes and businesses.

Who pays for art

Anne Poochareon — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:51:55 +0000

I’ve been to several artist talks here in Toronto, and one of the questions from the audience that almost never failed to get asked is how the artist funds their work.

Which, I find, is a rather personal question to ask after you’ve just listened to the artist talked passionately about his/her work for an hour (or so). Sure, I can understand the curiosity and everyone in the room who’s listening might be wondering the same, but it takes a certain type to actually word it out. Imagine your friend taking you to a house party in a really fancy place owned by someone you don’t know and you show up uninvited then asking out loud how much they pay for rent. *awkward*

Tonight, after Golan Levin presented his body of work, in what was quite an excellent talk, at the OCAD auditorium, some questions were asked and answered and then there was:

“So, who pays for all the fun and why?”

Golan chuckled a bit, he took it in stride though and said that he often wonders the same. To be fair, the prelude to the question was probably the fact that he started his presentation with a little diagram showing how his work doesn’t fall into the ‘useful’ category because people tend to make money there, thus revealing that he doesn’t really make money doing all this stuff. He answered the question by saying that he doesn’t do the ‘fun stuff’ all the time. “I do other stuff too, I just don’t show you any of that here.”

(photo by @katehartman)

And the thing is, at most of the artist talks, this is usually the answer. They will do whatever they have to do in order to do the art. Exceptional cases are when the artist has a collector / rep gallery or is funded to do specific work by certain institutions. But even in those cases, before they can get that kind of funding, everyone will have done something to make money and they’ll never show as part of their art work. Because it doesn’t matter. Because the work has to come out so you just do whatever it is you need to do to make it happen. Most people understand this, and it’s why we don’t ask.

Perhaps the question about who pays for the art isn’t really about the money or the artist at all. Maybe it’s a way of wondering how it is that the artist gets to do these cool things but I don’t. Just like walking into a party in a fancy apartment and wondering how it is that people get to live like this but I don’t.

I think I’m due for a Chelsea trip this weekend. Also...

Dennis Crowley — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:14:00 +0000

I think I’m due for a Chelsea trip this weekend. Also recommended by Noah.

BTW, Danny = same artist who made the Wooden Mirror that you’ve all prob seen at NYU / ITP.

noahkalina:

Daniel Rozen at bitforms is recommended.

Didn’t realize this was the first of 1000000...

Dennis Crowley — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:08:00 +0000

Didn’t realize this was the first of 1000000 “Where’s Snooki” things when I posted it last night. BTW, JJ and Shoops used to love love love love love these.

inothernews:

notthatkindagay:

Where’s Snooki?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

New Processing Books

Daniel Shiffman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:28:36 +0000

It seems like every day I hear about another Processing book being published (or soon to be published). Joshua Noble’s recent book includes Processing along with openFrameworks and Arduino: Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and Openframeworks. Processing for Visual Artists is another new book I know little about, but am excited to check out. And I’m particularly thrilled for the upcoming Getting Started with Processing. An inexpensive, short beginner’s guide is a big gaping hole in the landscape of Processing books and this book should fill it nicely. It’s really what I imagined Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to be, but the book ballooned a bit into a more comprehensive beginner textbook. Hopefully Casey and Ben’s new book can introduce a lot of new people to Processing.

Finally, Ira Greenberg’s new book The Essential Guide to Processing for Flash Developers recently came out. And if you didn’t notice, I wrote the forward! Which, strangely enough, means that my name is somehow on the cover along with Ira’s. Which is pretty crazy considering that I only wrote a few short paragraphs.

Oh and I still am working on a The Nature of Code book, with more PDF chapters to be available soon!

Academic Admissions Requirements (Leo Klein U.)

Leo Klein — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:38:17 +0000

You don't get in -- no way, no how -- unless you own a flash drive (and know how to use it).

-- That way, if you're in a lab and the computer goes bonkers, you won't lose the paper you've been working on all day because you didn't save it.

aZza + RaaWee

Steve Bull — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:21:28 +0000

Early shout outs to Saleem Qazi and his crew at RaaWee for the Android programing they are providing to my art application aZza. I look forward to the finished code, publishing and selling this application out of Orange, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Android & Sony-Ericsson shops.

Design in the Wild: Cultured Code’s Roadmap Transparency

Alex Rainert — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:24:46 +0000

This is one of the best examples of a company publicly showcasing their product roadmap. My other favorite is Dropbox’s Votebox section (login required) – bonus points for letting their users vote on what they want to see and have the amount of votes they have reflect their engagement with the service.

Both of these reflect a really excellent trend in transparency (and user involvement) that I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more of.

Super Weapon is Beautiful and Deadly

Jason Krugman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:42:03 +0000

Could be an Onion Headline. Its like its so ironic that its stupid to say. Helllooooo Dr. Strangelove. Here’s the photo. Its from a MIRV, this crazy nuclear missile that gets launches from submarines, or land, or ships, or pretty much wherever. Once it gets up to space, its pretty much impossible to shoot down. The warhead detaches, arms, and then it deploys, like 8 or 10 nuclear weapons, that re-enter the atmosphere and explode in this crazy matrix that destroys a whole lot of stuff. The problem with nuclear weapons, is that when they blow up, they really destroy one area good, but their destructive force decreased by a power of 3 as distance increases. The MIRV solves that “problem”, by creating a grid of exploding enormous bombs that can kill way more people and poison a much larger portion of the world. Oh, by the way, of course its called the “Peacekeeper” ***[pause for applause]**** Thank you.

A link to the Wikipedia entry on MIRVs

Some other photos I found. Typical internet stuff

“Yes” vs “No” says Brain Scan

Jason Krugman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:02:51 +0000

A recent article from the New York Times tells of a recent study in which patients previously thought to be vegetative, were actually aware… able to hear and to think, but not respond with physical gestures. We are now able to read thoughts, albeit with a low resolution. Linked here

inothernews: zachlinder: This is awesome. [via mopostal] It...

Dennis Crowley — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:55:15 +0000

inothernews:

zachlinder:

This is awesome.

[via mopostal]

It is. It is awesome.

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Dennis Crowley — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:27:23 +0000

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy:

inothernews:

mattlehrer:

Since energy and mass can be converted back and forth (E=MC2), it’s only a matter of time before teleportation is real. 2010!

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

Star Trek predicted the future. Star Wars gave us Jar-Jar Binks.

Dinner for one

Anne Poochareon — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:27:37 +0000

It’s funny how nothing tastes that good when you’re eating by yourself, even if it’s the exact same thing you’d make if there was just another person around.

Let experience, not technology, drive your products

Alex Rainert — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:38:37 +0000

Bob Pittman understood what Google does not: When it comes to consumer products, it’s not about “technology.” It’s about consumer behavior and brands. Consumers don’t like to customize. They don’t like to be forced to learn new ways of doing things. They actually don’t like “technology”–at least not for technology’s sake. Consumers like to keep things simple and easy.

via businessinsider.com

This Blodget piece from Silicon Alley Insider couldn’t be more spot on about what Google struggles mightily with. Yes, people love Gmail because it’s very good at some things. Does that mean Google should turn it into some sort of communications Frankenstein? Absolutely not.

Also, let’s take a moment to analyze this wildly awesome sentiment that is so difficult to grasp for so many companies:

When it comes to consumer products, it’s not about ‘technology.’ It’s about consumer behavior and brands.

Nobody cares how many giga-whatevers your product has if it doesn’t seamlessly fit into the lives they lead. This is exactly what Apple is getting right with their approach to the iPad and what many other companies that are driven by engineering rather than experience are getting so wrong.

iPhone Controllable Touchscreen Display

Uncommon Projects — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:41:46 +0000

360 Car Demo

If you’re new to upLog, it’s an occasional blog post and email update from the workbench of Uncommon Projects in which we share development ideas from recent projects. In this post we’ll show a proof-of-concept we’ve been developing with our friends at Hush Studios. The goal was to create a working prototype to explore touchscreen and iPhone control of 3D rendered HD content.

Having developed interactive kiosks in the past, we’ve also grown interested in creating an extendable platform for quicker and cheaper development of common kiosk tasks. Currently a demo, we imagine a more fleshed out version of this platform working for Exhibitions, Museums, Retail and Architectural experiences.

360 Car Demo from uncommon projects on Vimeo.

A Little Biz

This past year, Uncommon Projects, was accepted into the Accelerator Entrepreneurship program. The mixture of classes and mentorship from successful entrepreneurs really got us thinking about our business model. We’re increasingly interested in augmenting the straight R&D work-for-hire we do with some products that we develop in-house. Until recently, most of our work has been one-off projects. But with work like Bikenik and work on products like gDitty and miShare we’re gaining more experience in the marketplace. This is both a natural progression and an exciting new field for us to explore. From a business perspective, the 360 Car Demo is a step closer to our goal of creating an affordable turnkey system that exhibition designers can skin and modify to suit their projects.

Touchscreens

We’ve created interactive touchscreens for the Entrepreneurs Kiosks at The Museum of American Finance, the HD Video Kiosks for Panasonic’s Trick Nav and we built a multitouch surface for Brickhouse, which sadly never got used (welcome to R&D, ladies and gents). Our goal with the 360 Car Demo was to try to take some of this experience, modularize it into a software framework and update it with the latest developments from the tech front. Multitouch surfaces are now purchasable off-the-shelf, and screen technology continues to get bigger and cheaper. Four years ago, the code we wrote for Trick Nav needed a quadcore tower and high-end video card–it now runs on a Mac Mini. So the idea was to start sketching out an extendable platform with some custom software modules to address specific needs that clients have asked for–menuing systems, touch control, HD video playback, etc. Finally, we wanted to see what it felt like to use a device many of us now carry in our pockets (the iPhone) to interact with the beautiful high def content Hush was imagining.

iPhone and Cocoa

While the demo allows for both physical touch and iPhone interactivity, we were especially keen to test out the iPhone as a platform for screen-based interactivity. You know what? It turns out to be really fun to use your iPhone to spin a big, shiny car around. Users can manipulate car rotation, color, transparency, lighting and velocity, as well as selecting hot spots within the media for more information. Currently, the demo uses the iPhone for one way communication between user and content. Down the road, we imagine the device as a two way communication platform, with relevant content being sent or saved back to the user’s device. As I write here, we’ve been developing using XCode/Cocoa for a few years now and it’s a great development environment. It’s stable, fast and has low level access to multimedia control. It’s also turned out to be a lucky investment on our part as Apple continues to expand its marketshare and create whole new markets. XCode/Cocoa are the only real development option when creating software for OS X, the iPhone and recently announced iPad.

Platform

The 360 Car Demo is made up of the following elements

Samsung 52″ LCD Display
PQ Labs Multitouch Overlay
Mac Mini with custom code
iPhone with custom code

Inspiration

Collaborating with a team as talented as Hush was great. Not only are they a killer 3D and motion graphics house, but they have experience working in exhibition and retail design and “get” interactive deeply. Over the course of developing the demo, Hush and Uncommon came across some exiting new developments in this space. Here’s some links we used as inspiration and talking points.

Apple Hyperwall

Weather Channel gives QR codes a bit of a coming out party

Alex Rainert — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:34:06 +0000

via engadget.com

There are a couple great things about this video:

The Weather Channel is bringing QR codes to a mass audience in a way that’s easy to understand.

They’re speaking to owners of an up and coming platform instead of just focusing on the low hanging fruit.

The little timer they use prior to displaying the code shows a nice understanding of the technology and the way their users will interact with it.

All in all, good stuff.