• [ timebeat ]
  An interesting meditation on time. Very pretty.
  (tags: design cool inspiration)

The INTERACTIVE SHADE project was started with three objectives in mind for the public square space. The first was to enable citizens to use the space more intimately(when sunny and rainnyday). The second was enabling the space to hold hundreds of different programs efficiently and flexibly. And the last was to reduce the loss of time and finances that occur whenever event programs switch.
I suggested the utilization of intelligent fabric structures, as in combining the preexisting Tent structure with the interactive mechanisms such as the Auto-Folded umbrella structure, the Interactive Pole and the Panel-Link system. This sustainable shelter structure would exceed the limit of simple mechanism from the old tent structure, which is not changeable or flexible. Also, it can make the composition of the plaza space more functional and dynamic.

Designed by Minsoo Lee / 2008.AUG

Hey, remember when I used to blog about what I was doing? Man, that was a fun time.

A lot has happened since Stern, including finishing my thesis, graduating, and turning Socialbomb into a real company. I’ll be writing about all that relatively soon, so expect updates (finally).

Meantime, I should mention that Socialbomb now has offices on 23rd St. in NYC (overlooking the Shake Shack line!), which makes us like 57% more believable as a company.

Also, I’m super-stoked to say I’ll be coming back to ITP as a Resident Researcher this year. I’m planning on working on a pile of urban-, music- and sustainability-focused projects, so hopefully I’ll have lots more to say in a bit.

So, many good things in the works, very little time to talk about it, and more entries coming soon.

Just a quick note to let you know that my book, Learning Processing, is now available for purchase. If you are local to NYC, you can buy the book at the NYU bookstore.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Processing-Beginners-Programming-Interaction/dp/0123736021/
">Amazon says “out of stock”, but I’m told by the publisher that this is an error and they do, in fact, have copies. Also, at $37.00, this seems to be the cheapest option online that I can find.

All the example code will be available live online at learningprocessing.com by early next week. Feel free to contact me with comments, questions, feedback!

Who is this book for? Check out my earlier post.

sonus_sketches

Vivien Muller came up with a tree design to harvest the sun just like my tree concept, Helios: The Power tree.

PhotonSynthese is a small little tree that can charge your gadgets just like the Helios. But thats about all it does. It is built of 52 mini PV solar cells, so it should get around a quarter of a watt of electricity.

This is a good wake up call to put the Helios production on high gear!
Here is the article that Mike Rosenthal sent me about the tree: Photosynthesis Solar Tree Concept Is the World’s Best Looking Solar Gadget Charger

Cuba to put anti-Castro punk rocker Gorki Aguila on trial

Miami Herald, August 27, 2008 

By Frances Robles

Cuba to put anti-Castro punk rocker Gorki Aguila on trial

Miami Herald, August 27, 2008 

By Frances Robles

So I heard from Simplify Media, and their response was informative:

A port scan is a ping from a specific location to a range of ports probing for an opening.  The logs you posted actually show the opposite.  These are pings from to range of ports to one specific port:

Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62838
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62839
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62840
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62841

Note that the connection attempts are all to 127.0.0.1:59008 (in your case), and, as you mention, these are on the loopback interface and have no impact on security.

What you observed is standard behavior on startup.  Our UI launches, and for the first 15 or 30 seconds while everything is coming up, it tries to communicate with our networking stack.  Retry attempts are not from 0 to 65535 but rather from the “upper range of ephemeral ports” that are dynamically allocated to client TCP/IP socket connections (49152 through 65535).  Once the application is started, internal communication should be flowing over the designated port and no more retry attempts are necessary, unless the peer process terminates for some reason.

Simplify Media, the iTunes library sharing application, has been flooding the loopback ethernet interface and scanning all 65,535 ports of my machine.

My Macbook Pro’s networking has been a bit sluggish lately, so I looked in the system.log and found thousands of entries like this:

Aug 22 00:07:37 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 261 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:39 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 252 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:47: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Aug 22 00:07:47 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 255 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:49 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 252 to 250 packets per second

I did some research and found this type of log entry to be indicative of a DDoS attack, or at least a port scan.  So, in Terminal I changed the sysctl param to display failed network attempts (“sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.log_in_vain=1”) and started logging these types of entries:

Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62838
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62839
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62840
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62841
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62842
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62843
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62844
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62845


The “Blue Dog” Democrats were thrown a lavish party on AT&T’s dime at the DNC:

Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party’s purpose was, why they were attending, etc. One attendee said he was with an “energy company,” and the other confessed she was affiliated with a “trade association,” but that was the full extent of their willingness to describe themselves or this event. It was as though they knew they’re part of a filthy and deeply corrupt process and were ashamed of — or at least eager to conceal — their involvement in it.

Yay democrazy. *sigh*

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/25/blue_dogs/

I was hanging out in D.U.M.B.O. Brooklyn yesterday. While looking around for a place to seat in the grass, I found a four leaf clover. Now It is believed that this is good luck in many culture, which is fine. But what about a five leaf clover? what is that? I say that is a sign of bad environment; acid rain and pollution that is mutating the clovers. Below you will see a fine version of such a clover which I found at The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. The scary thing is that i keep finding four and five leaf clovers by chance.

On a positive note, on my way back home. I had a plastic bottle left over from my vitamin water. I was thinking to my self, would it not be nice to have public recycling cans on every corner of the street to help people recycle? As I was pondering on the effect of this I turned the corner of the street and guess what. My wish came true.

Now I wish all the earths problems would be solved with wishful thinking…

oh well.

I bought two bike locks a couple of months back to protect my bike from evil thieves. One was a Kryptonite bike lock and the other was a no name lock. A week ago I tried opening the lock with the key and it would not open. After a few days of trying and trying, I gave up and decided to find a way to cut the cable; which I thought would be a hard task. I borrowed some bolt cutters from school in hopes it would do the trick. To my surprise, cutting the cable was like biting through a twizzler. And from that moment on I trusted cable chains no more.

“The non-Kryptonite locks cracked in seconds, but all methods failed on the New York Lock, even the monstrous bolt cutter, which ended up useless with large dents in its jaws.”
-kryptonite web site

I got a second cable for my bike but this time with out a lock since I use the Kryptonite lock with the cable as well as the Kryptonite chain. The cable I know is useless against thieves who really want to cut it. that’s why I only use the cable to secure my helmet and bike seat. Two things a bike thieve may not be worth the trouble of taking out his bolt cutters. But who knows, maybe my next post will be of my missing bike seat and helmet.

Logged into facebook and saw a really bad condom ad. This instantly triggered a memory to really cool TV ads I saw a few years back. Now that we have youtube, we can look back into the past. Why cartoons? because we are all children trapped in grown up bodies.

Girl Looking for love:

Boy looking for Love:

Gay Boy looking for love:

David Byrne has designed some funky bike racks for NYC.  Before learning it was designed by Byrne, I saw the high heeled shoe one in front of Bergdorf’s on Fifth Avenue and it made me smile.  Nice work.

I flew in to OKC yesterday afternoon from San Diego, and not only did I receive a jump in temperature (74-94) there’s also a train that has caught fire near where my parents live. It’s on the northeast side of the city and we’re on the northwest, so there shouldn’t be any chance of it spreading here, but it’s a doozie.

Also, when I got off the plane yesterday and stepped in to the walkway, I was immediately struck with a smell of cow manure. No shit (pun intended).

Welcome back to OK, David.

(click to enlarge)

I generated the above image by running the script for The Big Lebowski through the awesome Wordle service.  Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.)  I think I may have to make a t-shirt.

As I’ve just passed my 33d birthday and have been thinking a lot about getting older and social networks, I started to wonder - what is Facebook going to look like in 5 years?

Let’s assume, arguendo, that they win the social networking war. Or, for ease of mind, let’s just call whatever winning social media strategy is out there Facebook.

The interesting bit of the graphing for me comes not in Facebook itself, I could care less about the company.

It’s about the friend list.

It’s about what our friend lists will look like in 5 years.

Right now my list comprises friends from kindergarten, elementary school, middle/high school, college, law school, my masters program, my summer camp, friends I’ve met over the years, exgirlfriends, friends from various jobs, and more.

The links don’t degrade over time, as Clay once pointed out in class. What does this mean? My friend Aaron, whom I haven’t seen since I was five, is now linked to me. Five years from now, what will be revealed? New friends who link to old friends, and an entire social fabric. Facebook tried to model how we all know each other but that feature has been deprecated.

Of course, some of my friends, like Ethan, are refuseniks who won’t join. I can’t say I blame them, particularly after seeing Rambam’s talk at The Last HOPE.

I’ve got more thoughts on this issue, but we are the first generation that’s really able to actively map our social structure. What happens when our kids start getting old enough to join up? To make linkages of their own?

• Cinderella, Snow White and Mickey Mouse arrested as police clash with staff at Disneyland

Ok, so maybe its because I made the illustrations for the album cover, but I totally dig the music. Maybe its the fact that I digged the music that I made the album art? Who knows the bottom line is that its a good album.

Beau Black released his new album “Meant to be” and it rocks!
I love song number 5, “You Can’t Say Goodbye” from the album. There is something about the spacey sounds it has that I enjoy. Below you can see a rough video of Beau performing the song:

and you too can own the album from iTunes by clicking on the link above.

David Griffin is the photo director at National Geographic.

• My Top 10 Source Code Search Engines at cavdar.net
  (tags: webdev tools todo programming cheatsheet)