ITP BlogBlender

I met Chika,my ITP colleague, yesterday at a izakaya restaurant in Tokyo. Cho- natsukashi!

A musical collaboration with Joey G. More coming soon.

Click on the image to play in a new window.

Last summer I worked in Tokyo at a division of TBS, where I was asked to develop a prototype for an English listening comprehension game for Japanese kids. I spent a month conceiving the game, laying it out, developing the code, and art directing the incomparable Nina Widartawan-Spenceley, who created the characters and animated the grotesque death sequences.

Once again, Flash Player in Firefox is a bit screwy. Mozilla, what’s going on?

The rain is one of my favorite things, especially in the summer when we need to be quenched. Its been so hot lately, you can’t but help think about water all the time. I can’t imagine how plants feel after weeks with no rain—they can’t just go to Duane Reade and get a bottle of water, now can they?

Inbetween doing laundry this evening, I decided to take some photos in the garden of the leaves and flowers just after a light shower that we had this afternoon. I hadn’t realized just how much more green and happy everything looked before.

Maybe the garden was more parched than I thought? There’s no telling when the next rainstorm is coming, so I think that all the plants soaked up their fill in a hurry, because the sun has been relentless lately.

I think people, like plants, need to be watered every now and then. The rain makes them slow down a bit and think a little slower and with more care. Umbrellas, though useful, prevent our spirits from being replenished by the strange joy that comes from a summer rain shower to and from our daily business. Everyone loves to laugh after being soaked a little bit.

Click to view slideshow.

Maddy, Elizabeth, Emeri, and I met up this afternoon to beat the heat. Luckily Brian’s place was well air conditioned, so we had another wine/cheese party.

Before I got there, I ran around Union Square for a while looking at the farmer’s market. I bought a chocolate chip cookie and a molasses cookie from a mom and pop and stuffed them in my face in short order. It was SO hot so I stopped and got some iced tea to cool off. Ahhhhh!

At our little party, we posed on the balcony because it was too hot to go on the roof like the other night. We took photos in short bursts in between drinks and cheeses.

I think we are off to see Inception soon. I hear that movie is either really good or really bad.

What do you think?

Click to view slideshow.

Madeline, Elizabeth, Chris, and I had reason to celebrate on Thursday. First, Madeline got a sweet job at Scripps—the company that owns Travel Channel, Food Network, and HGTV, among others. Second, she found a great apartment with plenty of space for her to tinker and play around. Elizabeth also closed in on a new apartment of her own, and Chris had just flown back from New Orleans. I didn’t have anything particularly festive on my end to report, but I was more than happy to partake in the rooftop revelry at Brian’s place on 23rd and Lexington with my friends.

The view from Brian’s place, as you have seen before during the daytime, is sublime. However, the night sky from the 28th floor makes for a stunning place to chill out.

This made for our third crazy rooftop party this month! I think we are on to something. Our little party was full of crackers, cheeses, and wines. Yes, plurals.

Being able to see everything that is New York in all directions is a special treat for the eyes. You get to appreciate the wondrous architecture and landmarks, and see the differences in neighborhoods from up above. Watching the traffic flow and halt on the streets is a pulsating show of lights at nighttime. The soft breeze cools you down in the summer night.

This is New York.

Click to view slideshow.

You need Flash Player 10 to run this bad boy because I’m using its sound generating capabilities. Oh, and if you don’t have a webcam and a mic, you’re out of luck, sorry. Also, for some reason this isn’t working with the latest version of Firefox.

I finally ported the Sensorship sketch I wrote in Processing to Flash so that you too can enjoy the marvels of real-time censorship. It’s not quite as slick as its Processing predecessor, but it works on the web, and there’s no arguing with that.

There are a number of ports of OpenCV to ActionScript based on Ohtsuka Masakazu’s original port (“Marilena“) and also a native library called Deface. I ended up using one of the former, Mario Klingemann’s slightly modded Marilena, not because I have a particular preference but because I’m lazy and he very generously included an example that used the webcam.

After making the necessary adjustments to the face detecting code to draw the black bar and flip it and the image to make them mirror reflections (it always weirds me out to wave with my left hand only to see myself waving back with my right), I used the new SampleDataEvent that Adobe has helpfully documented along with insights gleaned from Jeff Swartz’s helpful tutorial on generating sounds dynamically to generate what can only be described as a horrifically annoying beep any time the microphone’s input passes a certain threshold.

Just finished presenting the ZigBee Internet Gateway at Sketching in Hardware 2010, held at the Encounter dome at LAX airport. My presentation covered the basics of (essentially) bringing web services to the Arduino via a ConnectPort and XBee radios from Digi International. The Gateway is intended for use in schools, design firms, hacker spaces or art venues. Some engineers from Sparkfun wanted to know if this was something I’m selling. Nope, it’s all going to be free.

A very succinct and convincing way to quickly show people how your app works and what makes it so appealing (aside from the interesting UI/UX) to get them on board. I don’t have an iPad but gosh darnit, this isn’t helping me in the “gimme gimme” department of my brain.

Maurice is always up to something cool, and is always in the know. He has been working for the Bagir Group for a while now. Bagir specializes in finely tailored clothes for both men and women, and their innovative use of high tech fabrics makes for some great styles. They even make machine washable suits! Awesome!

To show how awesome they were, Bagir threw a party atop Atelier on 42nd and 11th ave at the Sky Lounge. I had partied there for New Years and had a great time, so I was excited to hear that the party was there. I knew the location alone would make for great photos.

There was quite the crowd, and they were ever so fashionable. There were models all over the place for everyone to gawk at and flirt with.

I met some of the most interesting people there at the party, and made a couple new friends along the way.

I was so glad that Elizabeth came as my plus one because I would have felt out of place without her fabulousness not there with me. Naturally, she struck a pose in front of the symbol of New York, the Empire State Building. Score! It was awesome to be on top of the world and watch lighting strike all around us as the night went on. Not a drop of rain on our party though!

Some people there had crazy wild styles, and I couldn’t get enough of the snacks they had floating around on trays. They had cupcakes, chicken, and bacon wrapped shrimp that would make a kosher meal shrivel up and die. YUM!

They had a red carpet set up, so I couldn’t help but get in some more target practice and take photos for Bagir, seeing as I was honored just to be invited to this party in the sky. I look forward to seeing more styles from this company.

Party well done.

Click to view slideshow.

Elizabeth and I were invited to a rooftop party tonight by Maurice. It was at the Sky Lounge at Atelier on 42nd, where I had spent New Year’s. Being there sober and single was a completely different experience, since the view from there is astounding in all directions. But that is beside the point, and many photos will come from that party tomorrow when I finish going through them.

Upon getting home at a ripe hour, I realized I was hungry. I also realized I was too lazy to go out and forage for food. The solution was to cook. And cook I did!

I had bought some chicken yesterday from the Amish Market on 9th avenue and dreamed up a fabulous recipe centered around French tarragon. Why French tarragon you ask? Well, for one, it has a pungent aroma and flavor and is complemented well by garlic and chives. Also, its one of the four fines herbes in French cuisine, so you can’t go wrong—ask Julia Child. I had intended to bake the chicken, but I came to the sad conclusion that I had ruined all my baking pans making plastic and molds throughout the school year. The obvious solution was to fry the chicken!

Now I know what you’re thinking. Yes, frying generally is as unhealthy as it is tasty, but tonight I just had to try this idea that I had thought of while shopping yesterday—and I was starved (after snacking on party food).

At any rate, get INTO this recipe I created:

*Get you a pound or two of chicken tenders, breasts, wings, or whatever you like

*Combine 2 tablespoons of dried or fresh French tarragon with 2 tablespoons of chives and minced garlic in a bowl with about a 1/2 cup of olive oil. Toss in a smidgen of salt to taste.

*Marinate your chicken in the above ingedrients for about 20-30 minutes

*Fry the chicken in grandma’s old cast iron pan, flipping the meat once its nice and golden brown

*Serve with or over wild rice

*Nomnomnomnom!

(Sorry for the lo-fi food porn, but I took the photo in a rush with my iPhone because I wanted to EAT!)

We needed some new music up in here. Marina and the Diamonds are great, but the ongoing adventure into good, happy music continues. I found this new track with Usher and Pitbull on the Carter Cartel, as with most of my music. Not only is the song now featured in the fabled showertime playlist, it has made its way into the workout mix. Ohhhhhyeah!

Usher can make great hits on his own, as referenced by pretty much his entire musical career. Pitbull can pretty much make anyone get up and shake their ass, so the combination of them is s sure hit. It will definitely be rising up the charts soon. Something about Usher singing and Pitbull speaking Spanish makes for a good dance song, so enjoy the music!

Christopher was in town last weekend for his 27th birthday, so Chris and I made sure to festivate and entertentiate with him all weekend long (yes, those are new words I made). I got him some cool plants for his new apartment, and we took him out to a great Spanish spot in HK for dinner and drinks.

I saw this debonaire man on our way to getting cake for Chris. I imagined bubbles coming out of his pipe. He posed ever so crisply for the camera. How very sartorial.

We got cake from Juniors (!) and ate it like fatties and went for more drinks later with Maurice at Blockheads. While there, we met Christopher and Steffi, whom we shared drinks and laughs with. Yay!

After that, I guess Spain won the World Cup or something, because the crowd of people outside the bar next to our favorite Thai place the next day were going crazy. Yikes!

The following day, I shot a short demo reel for a neighbor of mine at the top of the Paramount building in Times Square. The view from the office we were in was awesome to say the least, since it was right next to the famous ball that drops.

Since then, I’ve joined the gym, and taken some more photos of the beautiful greenery by my place. Ohyeah, the happiest news since FOREVER is that Maddy is now officially professionally awesome and will be moving to Chelsea soon! Yay!

Click to view slideshow.

My former ITP classmate Dimitris Makris has a way with words. He weaves them together into rich tapestries of thought before tugging at a single idea and unraveling them into a meta-mountain of meaning qua meaning—you get the idea. To commemorate our graduation from ITP, I had a way with his words too. It goes a little like this:

X marks your spot

I found myself in a bit of sticky situation a couple of days ago. I wanted to map site visitors’ approximate location using Maxmind’s amazing free IP address geolocation database. I used the same database for one of my paywalls so I thought it would be a fifteen-minute kind of affair: getting site visitors’ IP address using and looking it up in the Geolitecity database, then encoding the results into a Google Maps url that would display the map on the site.

As often happens with fifteen-minute affairs, this took most of the day, first because the WordPress install I was posting on wouldn’t allow PHP (reasonable) or Javascript (really?) in the post body. Ok, no problem, so I do everything remotely and create a page which I then embed in an iframe. Nope. Turns out the only thing I’m allowed to include in a page are images. At this point, I probably should have contacted the site’s admin and asked for added permissions, but I decided to figure it out.

As anyone who’s worked with static Google Maps knows, you pass in a bunch of parameters (latitude, longitude, size, markers) on a url string and Google returns a map. The problem for me was that even if I managed to pass the requisite latitude and longitude coordinates to the page, the link itself would not end with .png, .gif, or .jpg, which meant that WordPress would not display it as an image.

I will spare you the cursing and hair pulling that ensued and instead delight you with the multi-part solution. I wrote a PHP script that takes a visitor’s IP address and looks up its latitude and longitude in the Maxmind database, formulates a syntactically correct Google Maps url request, and uses a header to redirect the browser there. In order to convince WordPress that I was adding an image, I used mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file to redirect requests for “here.jpg” to my PHP script, and voila! Success!

“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.”
– Bob Moawad

via every.jelly.bean

• SVN: Subclipse
• Minimize the package explorer and outline and use two panes for source files (see image)
• Generate ASDoc HTML using External Tool
• Use “Set as Default Application” on main source file so that you can use the run keyboard shortcut while focused on any file.
• Use the Flash Debug Player to get traces in Flash Builder
• I’m still searching for the best way to launch your swf in the Flash Debug Player instead of the browser.
• Enjoy!

GPX export seems to be working, and imports fine into Google Earth. This is just a basic implementation of the essentials for a route; I’d really like to include other recorded sensors somehow into the track – maybe it could be a layer in Google Earth?

Looking at the ride data here reveals just how bad raw GPS data can be between tall buildings in NYC. Several data points often share the same GPS location. It seems that moving quickly with a clear path to the sky gives the best performance.

The app also quit midway though the ride – I have to look into that.

GPX export is available in the github repository.

Basic GPX export has been added to the github repo. That is all.

http://github.com/rcarlsen/Mobile-Logger/commit/9e1dc73304de562c30e64fa9a9b61840e69963c3

Eliza sits at her desk in her office. She completes ordinary office tasks—she checks her email, she drinks her coffee, she gets up to go photocopy something or talk to a colleague, and once in a while she checks out the New York Times. Little does she know, she’s being livestreamed to the whole world over the web. If someone calls, she picks up. Sometimes she recognizes the caller, sometimes she does not, and sometimes the connection is so bad that she hangs up and calls back.

Eliza lives on a screen in an eddy of a high-trafficked area, say an out-of-the-way elevator lobby in a busy building. A user sees her and after a couple of minutes, his curiosity gets the best of him and he succumbs to the flashing invitation and calls. To his surprise, after a couple of rings Eliza picks up. Phone conversations are ritualized in the first place and the added awkwardness of voyeurism and conversing with a stranger create the ideal situation for Eliza’s black-belt phone jujitsu which with minimal effort wrests control of the conversation from her interlocutor. It’s a bit like a good dancer foxtrotting and waltzing an overwhelmed novice around the floor.

The prototype is rough, but it works, though because of Flash’s arcane and draconian cross-domain security measures, I can only run it locally through the Flash IDE or stream from my machine using a personal broadcasting service like ustream or livestream (in order for it to work properly on the web, I’d have to host all the components I enumerate below on a single box, something I have neither the hardware nor the inclination to do). The main problem is that I’m making XML socket connections from Flash; if I used a PHP intermediary, I could probably get it working, but again, the whole inclination thing is missing and the thing is already mindbogglingly complicated. Maybe at some point in the future. The following video demonstration will have to do in the meantime.

SO HOW DOES IT WORK?

Warning: this is not for the faint of heart.

Eliza has a ton of moving parts:

1. The Asterisk script: A simple program that answers phone calls and hands them to a PHP script, which connects via socket to the main SWF.
2. Various PHP scripts: One to handle connections from Asterisk, one to reset connections from Asterisk after a call ends, and one to initiate callbacks when required.
3. A simple Java socket server: Adapted from Dan Shiffman’s example, this program runs in the background on the Asterisk server, waiting for connections (phone calls). When a call comes in, it connects it and broadcasts call events (new call, hangup, button press, etc) to the PHP scripts and the main SWF and allows them to talk to each other.
4. The main SWF: This is the brains of the operation. It loads the movies of Eliza and controls the logic of their looping as well as the logic of the audio (via socket connection back to PHP and then to Asterisk via AGI).
5. The looping movie files (not completely smooth in this prototype, notice the moving phone and the changing light conditions!): These live in the same directory as the main SWF, which streams them as needed (for a web deployment, they’d probably have to be pre-loaded and played back).
6. The sound files: These live on the Asterisk box (completely separate from the movies) and are played back over the phone, not the web.

NEXT STEPS
There are several things I’d really like to do. First, I’d like to actually get this working somewhere where I could observe people interacting with Eliza. I never really got to see someone who didn’t know the backstory calling in, partly because I was exhausted from thesis when I had the chance to show it and partly because there are bugs I have not yet located that occasionally cause the whole thing to stop working—there are so many things on so many separate machines that can go wrong, I pretty much need to be standing next to it to troubleshoot. Seeing people’s reactions would allow me to rework the conversations so that they’re more disorientingly convincing—better pause timing, more realistically intoned, and taking into account repeat callers’ stratagem’s to see if Eliza is real. I could then reshoot the video so it is completely seamless. That would require monitors, good lighting, laser levels, an OCD continuity editor, and several days of shooting.

If you know of an easy way to overcome the cross-domain headaches, leave me a comment! If you want to fund such an undertaking, please do get in touch! Otherwise, enjoy the video above.

Building out a Flash interface from a PSD can be a time consuming process, so to make things most efficient, here are some handy guidelines for preparing Photoshop files.  Designers may want to duplicate their PSD and save it as a new file specifically for Flash import if they want to keep extra hidden layers, etc..

• Turn off or delete all unused or irrelevant layers.
• Merge all adjustment layers or masks into regular layers.  Masked layers or groups cannot be used!
• Layer effects are OK!
• Vector graphics are always preferred!  If you are using Illustrator to design any assets, please provide the Illustrator file too, as Flash cannot import Smart Vector Objects.
• Vector graphics are especially preferred for layers intended to be animated.  Imported bitmaps will often look shoddy and low-resolution when moving around and rotating.
• If an Illustrator file can’t be provided, rasterize any Smart Vector Objects or other non-standard layers.
• Keep groups and layers orderly and named accurately whenever possible

People love to play games. They’re fun, of course, but they also teach us valuable real-world skills. Chess teaches pattern-matching and strategy, Dungeons & Dragons teaches exploration and collaboration, Olympic sports teach physical coordination, and others such as soccer and Halo teach many types of skills simultaneously. In all cases, games provide safe environments for learning as well as clear criteria for success. It’s better to learn to run fast when you’re on a field because you want to win a game, and not when you’re running from a sabre-toothed tiger because you don’t want to get eaten. Games create artificial environments and structure incentives in ways that make us better equipped to prosper in reality.

As technology allows us to measure things that were previously unknowable, we will design new games that improve our ability to live in this increasingly complex world.

Jesse Schell gave an excellent talk at the 2010 DICE Summit:
(I’ll quote/paraphrase the applicable parts of both talks, so feel free to keep reading and watch them later.)

Schell observes that many of the unexpectedly wildly popular games from the past couple of years (such as Farmville and Guitar Hero) “are all busting through to reality.” He predicts that increasingly inexpensive data sensors will become ubiquitous, and will record where we go as well as the things we buy, read, eat, drink and talk about. This data will enable corporations and governments to reward our behaviors with game-like ‘points’, when really those points are just a way to trick us into paying more attention to advertisements, and we will consent to this because we will be able to redeem those points for discounts and tax incentives. Schell concludes:

The sensors that we’re going to have on us and all around us and everywhere are going to be tracking and watching what we’re doing forever, [...] and you get to thinking about how, wow, is it possible maybe that, since all this stuff is being watched and measured and judged, that maybe, I should change my behavior a little bit and be a little better than I would have been? And so it could be that these systems are just all crass commercialization and it’s terrible, but it’s possible that they’ll inspire us to be better people if the game systems are designed right.

Jane McGonigal recently gave a compelling talk at TED that approaches similar ideas about how gaming can save the world:

McGonigal observes that games, and especially immersive massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, always offer quests that are perfectly tailored so as to be both challenging and possible. She offers four useful descriptive terms for these activities:

1. urgent optimism – gamers tackle obstacles without hesitation, and they expect to succeed
2. social fabric – games require trust and collaboration, and as a result the players develop strong relationships
3. blissful productivity – gamers work hard when playing because they enjoy it
4. epic meaning – game narratives make it easy for the players to see the big picture

These are part of a larger argument that gamers can save the world if they play games that are designed to have positive effects outside of the magic circles of the games. McGonigal cites an example from Herodotus in which the ancient Lydians survived a famine by distracting themselves from hunger with dice games, and she makes an argument that we can similarly use contemporary games to solve contemporary problems. That example breaks down, however, because we don’t need games that distract us from our problems like the Lydians did – we need games that enable/encourage us to face our problems and overcome them.

She goes on to describe an example of a game she worked on at the Institute For The Future called World Without Oil, which was “an online game in which you tried to survive an oil shortage.” The game provides online content to the players that presents a fictional oil crisis as real, and the game is intended to get people thinking about that problem and how they might solve it. But just as the first example is missing the direct applicability of the game to the real world, this one is missing the application of the data from the real world to the game, and both directions of influence are important.

When the ubiquitous sensors described by Schell are combined with McGonigal’s vision of games designed explicitly to save the world, the content surrounding the games (that presents real-world crises as ‘quests’) will no longer be fictional, and can instead be based on real-world data. The games will provide frameworks for understanding and leveraging all of this new data about the world. They will motivate us to act for the greater good through both monetary rewards such as tax incentives and social rewards that play to our instinctive desire for the esteem of our peers. Some games might make the model of the real world immersive, so that we as players can ignore distractions and concentrate; others might be similar to the digital tree that grows inside the dashboard of the Ford Fusion Hybrid, and will provide subtle yet constant feedback for our behavior.

We live in a world in which ‘all models are wrong but some models are useful,’ and as that world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, the games will provide us with the data collection tools and data processing shortcuts that enable us to act intelligently. In this future we will design game-like incentives that teach and encourage us to make wise long-term decisions, so that we can outrun that tiger and save this planet. Which is important, because we only get one shot at each.

—

Note: the remainder of this post contains spoilers of the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

—

In the book, Card’s characters play war games that they do not know are actually quite real. The protagonist Ender, who is just a child, excels at the games because he thinks they are games. He uses ruthless tactics to win, unaware that he is actually committing those atrocities in the real world. Ender, unburdened by the extreme pressure resulting from real-world consequences, believes that he is merely playing a game and is thus able to save humanity from an alien threat.

Of course the games of our future need not be so ethically questionable, but the point – that games can simplify the world to enhance our focus and remove our hesitation if we are less sure that they are actually real – is still important.

—

Sup dawg, we heard you like games, so we wrapped a game around your game so you can save the world while you save the world.

 

 

My living, breathing online portfolio was in a bit of a funk until today. It felt rather stuffy in comparison to the generally happy tone of this blog, and so I spent a day and some change redesigning my site, geminijono.com, to clean, happy standards.

I’ve added a lot of new material, and broken it up into manageable chunks. I have more to parse through, and some little changes to make here and there, but overall I am very happy with the new tone and look of the site. Tell me what you think, and if there’s anything that should change.

Similar changes and layout will be coming to this blog shortly, so stay tuned!

… when I can take the resume tab off my website.

America got one glorious year younger yesterday. She has grown into quite the lovely lady.

The fourth of July has always been one of my favorite holidays. At home in Washington, my family would either be at the beach, or camping to celebrate, and it was always fun times. I don’t really care for lighting fireworks myself, since I’m deathly afraid I’ll burn or blind myself. However, those little poop looking snake things are entertaining. Oh yeah, sparklers too.

New York just HAS to do it BIG though. Bigger than most. Just as with last year, New York put on a show to be reckoned with on the Hudson. Not quite sure what was going on with its usual East River spot, but hey, I’ve got a million dollar view on my roof so I can’t complain.

My friends and I had sweet tea that I made, pork buns that Elizabeth brought from Chinatown, and though I actually had more groceries than normal (ever) we didn’t eat much. Skinny bitches win.

When we got on the roof, there were a lot of my neighbors already positioned for optimal viewing. I snagged a sweet spot and stuck my tripod in place and got to shooting. The show was spectacular. New York knows how to throw a party, so America was pleased.

BTW, the Chrises and I went to Village Underground for the first time in FOREVER, and I cranked my ISOs to ungodly levels to bring you some action minus rude flashes. Thanks Cartier-Bresson. The live music was a dream, and I wished I could have stayed, but alas, I had to get some sleep, like I need to be doing now.

Click to view slideshow.

As part of Japan’s efforts to grapple with its massive public debt, the JET (Japan Exchange & Teaching) Program may be cut. Soon after coming into power, the new  government launched a high profile effort to expose and cut wasteful spending. In May 2010, the JET Program and CLAIR came up for review, and during the course of an hourlong hearing, the 11-member panel criticized the JET scheme, ruling unanimously that a comprehensive examination should be undertaken to see if it should be pared back or eliminated altogether.  The number of JET participants has already been cut back by almost 30 percent from the peak in 2002, but this is the most direct threat that the program has faced in its 23-year history.

We are asking JET Program participants past and present, as well as other friends of the program to speak out and petition the Japanese government to reconsider the cuts.  Please sign this petition in support of the grassroots cultural exchange the JET Program has fostered and write directly to the Japanese government explaining the positive impact the Program has made in your life and that of your adopted Japanese community.

For more background on this issue, please refer to “JET Program on the Chopping Block” by Jim Gannon on jetwit.com.

Paul Adams, a member of the user experience team at Google and the user research lead for social, recently gave the below presentation at the Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference:

It’s worth reading through the entire thing, but there were a few groups of slides I found particularly clear/insightful/interesting (you can jump to a particular slide from the bottom toolbar) –

• social contexts: 15, 58, 71, 83, 181, 212
• evolution of the web: 19
• status updates: 145, 179
• memory and information: 150, 152
• influence: 158, 159, 171, 172
• privacy: 193, 198, 199, 204

There are lots of other useful ideas in there, but there’s one in particular on which I want to expand. Adams discusses the categorization of our relationships into strong ties and weak ties, saying that, “Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.’ [...] Weak ties are people you know, but don’t care much about. Your friends’ friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties infrequently.” Adams then goes on to define a new type of relationship online, the temporary tie, for “people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with,” such as strangers in public online social spaces.

He also discusses the cognitive limitations of the human brain that make us unable to stay up-to-date with more than 150 weak ties at a time (see Dunbar’s number). Given that we now have social tools for keeping track of many more people than that – Facebook ‘friendship’ seems to be for “everyone I know and don’t actively dislike”* – I wanted one additional term to help me think about the portion of my 859 Facebook friends with whom I wasn’t keeping up at all and had some sort of tie that was weaker than a weak tie.

Latent ties seems to work nicely here, for those people with whom I’m not at all in touch but also have not forgotten, and who could potentially become a bigger part of my life and replace one of my weak ties. This is a new type of tie – it used to be possible to have no way to contact someone I once knew but hadn’t heard from in years, and these new tools will prevent this from ever again being the case. I think it’s especially important to design for these latent relationships on Facebook/other websites where there are social stigmas around friending and unfriending that make it difficult for the user to keep her ‘friends list’ as an accurate representation of only her current strong and/or weak ties.

* Who was it that first said this? Please let me know if you have a source for that quote.

Say you want to copy all the properties of an object to another object, but you can’t just assign it because they’re different types:

var requestVars:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
var myObject:Object = {prop1:"someValue"};
requestVars = myObject; // Throws type mismatch error

So you need to iterate through the properties of the source object and assign them to the target. You can do this with AS3′s array-like property access syntax:

for (var prop in myObject) requestVars[prop] = myObject[prop];
trace(requestVars.prop1); // prints "someValue"

Easy! Now sometimes you might need to do something similar with an XML file, say, a configuration file with a bunch of properties that you want to automatically assign to a local object:

var configXML:XML =
<configXML>
  <paths>
    <host>www.something.com/</host>
    <list>list</list>
    <recent>recent/</recent>
    <liked>liked/</liked>
  </paths>
</configXML>;

var paths:Object = new Object();

for each (var val in configXML.paths.*) paths[val.name()] = val;

trace(paths.host); // prints "www.something.com/"

You now have a plain Object instance with all the properties of the XML tree. Bing!

Several weeks ago I presented my project Where Do You Go at the NY Quantified Self Meetup Group‘s seventh Show & Tell at ITP. Evan Creem recorded and edited together videos of the presentations, and mine is below:

If you’re interested in self-quantification in general, The NYT Magazine recently ran a good article titled The Data-Driven Life. About a month ago I received my Fitbit, one of the devices mentioned in the article, and you can see the public data I have collected so far here. I’ve been using it primarily to get a sense of how much I actually walk and how little I actually sleep – two things about which it’s slightly too tedious to make daily notes but which still might be interesting to examine in the aggregate.

Today I caught the train to West 4th, and walked to Washington Square Park. Just cause. Well, not really….I had some time to kill before my barbershop appointment.

There were some pretty flowers there, but the construction in the surrounding area was taking away from the ambiance, so I walked up to 14th street and soaked in the sights of Union Square for a while. These yellow flowers ARE sunshine itself.

Union Square had some silent protest going on, that wasn’t quite so happy. Something about Guantanamo that I wasn’t in the mood for. Black hoods on people don’t make for a pleasant experience, in or out of prison. However, there were some more flowers there to see, like the clover looking flower above.

There was a really odd set of sculptures in the northern half of the park though.

When I soaked in as much sun as I could there, I continued on my way to Madison Square Park, and photographed even more flowers. They had dahlias that were to die for, and their hydrangeas were in full effect. There wasn’t really any cool fashion going on with anyone out today which was a bummer.

Except for this cool old lady who deftly juggled her belongings into order.

Despite the heat, I braved Broadway some more and continued on up to Herald Square. It was just a bit jam packed for my taste, but they had planters full of hibiscus that caught my attention. Their delicate peach color was really amazing, considering the norm is red.

I topped off the walk with a couple photos of my favorite ziggurat, and headed to finally get my hair cut. BTW, it looks awesome, in case you were wondering. I’m sure I’ll be vain enough to post a photo of my fresh cut soon. This walk was great because I covered almost all major squares and parks that I love in New York in one long stroll. Success!

Click to view slideshow.

I haven’t put up any music on here in a while, mainly because I go through music like boxes of Captain Crunch, but also because really good, happy music is very hard to come by. Yesterday though, I discovered a fantastic video of an even more fantastic happy song.

Enter Marina and the Diamonds. Marina is Welsh (as is about 1/8th of me) and she makes genuinely good music. It is witty, self-aware, and in many cases saccharine. You may not know this about me, but all happy music goes directly on my famous SHOWER PLAYLIST. Yes, it is a playlist specifically for singing and dancing along in the shower. Yes it is awesome.

Back to Oh No! though. I was drawn in to this song within the first 5 seconds of watching the video on a blog last night. The visuals were something of an Roy Lichtenstein/Gwen Stefani/PCP-color laden mashup and my friend Chris and I started jumping around because we loved the song so much instantly. Overkill, yes. Unmerited, no. At any rate, get into this girl and her music pronto, because I see her giving La Roux, Kate Nash, and Katy Perry a run for their money.

As part of Team FarmBridge, I’m handling the web development and design as we gear up for the Microsoft Design Expo this mid-July in Redmond, Wa. Here’s a snapshot of FarmBridge.org. I’d like to give a shout-out to CSSEdit and Niall Doherty’s Coda Slider for being awesome. It’s the first time, I’ve really hand-coded a web design as thoroughly as I have (now I’ve done SocialDrinkster, StreetSnaps, etc but this was on a different level) on a front-end level.

The written content will be updated as we draw closer to showtime but if anyone’s curious to poke around, feel free. Just realize it’s under construction, sssssh.  Also, as a social media ninja, I’ve started up FarmBridge on Twitter and it now has its own Facebook Fan Page. Join us there too!

Hi Everyone,

In order to consolidate and streamline my online presence, I have moved my ITP work (including everything here)to my new site: http://aaronuhrmacher.com

Please redirect yourself there!

kthnxbye.

As has been observed many times in the years since its debut, ActionScript 3.0 has no “onMouseUpOutside” event, meaning that if you press the mouse button down while over an object, move the mouse, then release the mouse button, that button will not generate a MOUSE_UP event.

This problem is not too hard to solve for a single object, in which case you can hard-code any callbacks you might need.  The problem becomes really complicated if you need to pass in arguments to the event handler, i.e. if you’re writing a function that automatically initializes an arbitrary object.

The solution to this is not elegant, not simple, and I’m not convinced it’s 100% perfect, but in practice so far it seems to work pretty well. This example initializes a display object that has a drop shadow and animates the mouse down state and calls a callback on release.

import flash.utils.Dictionary;

var _lastButton;
var _callbackDict = new Dictionary();

function initShadowButton(which:Object, callback){
	which.buttonMode = true;
	which.useHandCursor = true;

	which.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, function(e:MouseEvent){
		_buttonShadow = e.currentTarget.filters;
		_buttonShadowDistance = _buttonShadow[0].distance;
		e.currentTarget.filters = [];
		e.currentTarget.x += _buttonShadowDistance;
		e.currentTarget.y += _buttonShadowDistance;
		_lastButton = e.currentTarget;
		_callbackDict[_lastButton] = callback;

		stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMouseUpOutside);
	});
}

function onMouseUpOutside(e:MouseEvent){
	_lastButton.filters = _buttonShadow;
	_lastButton.x -= _buttonShadowDistance;
	_lastButton.y -= _buttonShadowDistance;
	stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMouseUpOutside);
	_callbackDict[_lastButton](e);
}

Yesterday was Gay Pride here in New York, and all over much of the US. What is special about Pride in New York, is that here is where it all started. The Stonewall Riots marked a turning point in gay culture here in America, and every year since then, there has been a parade to celebrate pride in one of the most influential, innovative cultures on the planet.

I had gone to the parade last year with Sylvia and Scott and had a blast, so when my other mother, Sabrina, came to town, I made sure to tell her and her friends to check out the parade while she was here for her birthday celebration.

The streets of The Village were lined with people in their most outlandish outfits with the craziest hats and hair you could imagine. It is a show of people who want to be seen, heard, and understood. Though it was balls hot outside (no pun intended) the crowd seemed much more energetic than at the Puerto Rican parade. Chris and I were dying of thirst, so we exited fairly quickly and walked back home.

We saw this girl with her puppies and just HAD to take their picture. Look at the little ones!

Click to view slideshow.

It’s been a few weeks since I showed you what was growing in my garden.

As you can tell, it is abuzz with life and energy.

The colors of nature alone are enough to make you happy about the day.

The shapes of nature inspire us with their organic geometry.

Click to view slideshow.

Last Wednesday, the 23rd, I shot photos for a nonprofit called The Energy Project. They specialize in maximizing personal energy to improve the quality of the workforce, in and out of the office. . The Energy Project’s leader, Tony Schwartz, is a charismatic man (that I swear has a voice that sounds like barack Obama) and his mission is to spread the word about how inefficient many of us live and work, and what can be done to remedy the situation.

Ramona Pringle, my fellow ITP alum, set me up with the event, and while she covered video, I captured stills. This was clearly a Canon-centric affair, because she used the formidable 7D (W00t!).

In Tony’s new book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, he describes that one of the main sources of inefficiency at work is lunch, or rather a lack thereof. You know what I’m talking about here. You’ve gone to work, waited HOURS for lunch, then got your food, and went back to your desk, and finished eating in 15 minutes. LAME.

Tony says that if people took their full hour long lunch break, and got out of the workspace for the entire time, people would be able to work at 100% of their potential for the 8 hours or so they are at work, instead of starting at 100% and decreasing to about 40% by the end of the day.

So, in an effort to get New Yorkers and everyone else out there to take their full lunch break and get outside, Tony and his team got together with the Hired Guns and put together a huge event in Madison Square Park to encourage people to get out and stay out for lunch.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather that day, as it was hot and sunny—-and thanks to the trees in the park, we had plenty of shade. I arrived at about 7am to take shots of the promotional hours before everyone jammed to work at 9am, and the event started at noon.

It was a huge success, and the event was on the cover of the AM Weekly, and news crews from all over came to talk to Tony and spread the word. The event in Madison Square park will continue all summer long, so make sure to take back your lunch, and if you are in the area, come have a bite at Madison Square park.

P.S. Madeline face came! Success!

Click to view slideshow.

The Many Days of Jonokah have come and gone already, and though these photos are late, they are fantastic. Jonokah, my birthday/holiday season, begins 7 days before my birthday on June 13th, and extends 7 days past my birthday. It is pretty much the most magical time of the year, and there is at least one minor miracle per day, and one major miracle that occurs during the holiday(s).

The past few years, I have been celebrating the Many Days of Jonokah in conjunction with Chrissmass, the birthday of my friend, Chris Paul. Chrissmass is celebrated on June 15th, and culminates in a cake with enough candles for our combined ages. This year, we collectively turned 48, and so I had that written on our cake in red frosting.

Lucian, Chris, and I had a great time stuffing our faces with cake during Chrissmass, and we had a FABULOUS time at the Bourbon Street Pub on 46th and 9th for my birthday brunch with all the gang. LS, Catherine, Fabulizabeth, Maddy, and many new friends of mine came out and we had a festive feast. Maddy wrote me the best card ever, and gave me the best gifts.

Prior to birthday brunch, Chris Hickson and I had a romp though the Puerto Rican Day parade, which just happened to be a miracle of Jonokah. In case you hadn’t realized, both the parade and my birthday coincided this year, so I had to partake in the festivities. The energy and pride there is surreal.

On Chrissmass Day, we attempted to do all things Drake. Seeing as his album dropped on the 15th, and was the manifestation of another Jonokah miracle, we went to his album signing at the 24 hour Best Buy at Union Square. That turned out to be a fail, because the line was beyond long. You know us geminis wait for nothing.

We then wandered to the South Street Seaport to see Drake perform and get our Paper Magazine VIP passes. To our chagrin, everyone in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx got the memo, and showed up too. The crowd quickly swelled from a few thousand, to over 25,000, but by that time, we had given up seeing Drake and went home. The miracle of that day was that we made it out BEFORE the riots started, seeing as Drake never made it onstage to perform, because of security reasons. Smooth move, Paper Mag, smooth.

All in all, it was the merriest Many Days of Jonokah yet!

Click to view slideshow.

Nippon Club
June 26, 2010

Keynote speech by playwright and JET alum Randall David Cook

Loving the new Purpose office, where Chinatown meets Little Italy (Ni hao you doin’?).   Our building was formerly known as Odd Fellows Hall.  A fitting name indeed. 

More about Odd Fellows Hall.

Odd Fellows Hall by epicharmus, on Flickr

I was getting this error:

Error #2078: The name property of a Timeline-placed object cannot be modified.

…even though I had no code addressing any Timeline-placed objects. What gived? I was trying to give an instance name of “name” to the object. Change it and you’re good. Word to the wise!

After I did my additional research, I brainstormed some drawings again and finally had an idea. I decided to make a model of a hare that fit over a large flat-screen plasma television/monitor, in which several pieces of the hare had been removed through which you would watch small videos related to hare mythology and [...]

OpenCV Face Detection: Visualized from Adam Harvey on Vimeo.

This video visualizes the detection process of OpenCV’s face detector. The algorithm utilizes the Viola Jones method of calculating the integral image and then performing some calculations on all the areas defined by the black and white rectangles. The sub-window (in red) is scanned across the image at various scales to detect if there is a potential face. In the post-processing stage all the potential faces are checked for overlaps. Typically, 2 or 3 overlapping rectangles are required to confirm a face. Loner rectangles are rejected as false-positives.
This visualization was done as part of the documentation for CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection. For more information, visit http://cvdazzle.com

we’ve got the storyline all plotted out now

The mobile logger server seems to be having some trouble at the moment. I’m investigating the issue and will update this space when there’s news.

In the meantime, I’d advice anyone having trouble logging to disable the Upload feature in the settings.

Thanks for patience!

UPDATE: It looks like the server is back online. 12:09 6/22/2010

UPDATE #2: Err, I may have jumped the gun with that good news. Going to sleep on it.

UPDATE #3: everything seems to be working again. 8:00 6/22/2010

Arturo invited a bunch of folks from ITP up to his place in the country over the weekend. We had a splendid time camping, swimming, and communing with nature and each other. Here are some of my favorite photos; the full set on Flickr.

If you’re like me, you occasionally get emailed PDFs that need to be signed (with a written signature, not a fancy-schmancy digital certificate). It would be ridiculous to print it out, sign it, and scan it, so luckily there are more logical (and environmentally friendly!) alternatives.

First you’ll want to scan in your signature and make the background transparent in Photoshop or equivalent, and save it as a transparent GIF (I also save it as a transparent PNG). Keep in mind that, security wise, it is not a Good Idea to have your signature sitting around on your computer unless it’s encrypted. I still have to find a good solution for that.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Professional, select Tools > Advanced Editing > TouchUp Object Tool, then right click on your document and choose your GIF in the picker (for some reason Acrobat didn’t recognize my PNG), then resize it and place it! Easy!

On a Saturday morning in May, with the help of friends, I conducted the first field test of 7 Transitions: a location aware, public sound installation for train cars on the 7 line through Queens.

The project incorporates a GPS module, the coordinates of which are passed through an Arduino microcontroller into Pure Data on my laptop. The Pd program is written to trigger sound according to what neighborhood the train is passing through—a sonic demarcation of civic boundaries that seeks not so much to represent the diverse neighborhoods of Queens as to highlight the transitions between them. For this iteration, I’ve employed a USB speaker to project chords of pure tones into the public space of a train car.

To invite passengers into the experience, we also distributed flyers with a brief statement in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. This helped to provide a context for the work and allay concerns about the nature of our activity. (Cooperation with the MTA will likely be necessary for a larger scale installation.) It’s my hope that the transformation taking place on the train would also reconfigure the relationship between strangers who simultaneously occupy that space, in inverse proportion to the way a train delay does, for example.

7 Transitions reflects on the dynamics of nomadism, the character of urban neighborhoods, and the influence of proximity on one’s identity. A manifestation of research begun in the fall and developed over the spring semester, it was critically insightful to realize the project in public. For future development, there are at least two aspects to improve upon. First, I’d like for the sound to include input from the immediate environment, processed and output as part or in place of the prepared sound. At present it’s somewhat programmatic. I also need to find a more substantial method of deploying mobile audio as the speaker didn’t have quite the range I was hoping for.

Here is a video of the transition from Woodside to Sunnyside. Additionally, a video of me explaining the project to visitors at ITP’s end-of-semester show can be viewed here.