ITP BlogBlender

Right Back At You

Adam Harvey — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:57:18 +0000

Anti-Paparazzi Clutch Bag In Action

I own a purse, but she wears it.

Following my second semester at NYU ITP, I did an interview with Conor Risch at PDN about one of the projects I’ve been working on for two semesters, theAnti-Paparazzi Clutch Bag. Within a few days after moving to LA, I sent him photos of the recent prototype in action on the streets of LA and he published the story here:
http://www.pdnonline.com
PDN Gear Guide

Model: MarilynMonrobot
Photographed in West Hollywood, CA

Stavanger Aftenblad Pluss

Che-Wei Wang — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:48:10 +0000

Norwegian newspaper, Stravanger Aftenblad (Fredag 29, Mai 2009), published an article in their Pluss insert covering Time in Six Parts. I have no idea what it says. Can someone translate? I like Filmklokken.

git outta here…

Robert Carlsen — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:13:21 +0000

I’m switching my Source Control Management software to git. Performance has been great, I’m learning to branch and merge with wild abandon and philosophically it’s right on (what with the distributed model and all).

Creating a new remote repository on my private server was *almost* too easy. The one snafu was getting sshd to include the git binary path for non-interactive login. To save me the trouble of having to look this up again later, add a .bashrc file to your user dir:

export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH

Other steps, again for reference.

Download the git installer
Create a new bare repo on the remote machine:

mkdir -p /path/to/remote/repo.git
cd /path/to/remote/repo.git
git --bare init
exit

Add the remote repository to the local machine:

git remote add origin ssh://server/path/to/remote/repo.git
git push origin master

Done!

(Unless, of course you get the following message try the .bashrc workaround above)

bash: git-receive-pack: command not found

Summer Reading/Viewing List

Lee Sean Huang — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:15:15 +0000

Here is a summer reading/viewing list of books and documentaries relating to my internship at Creative Commons and to my ongoing personal interests. It’s a self-assigned curriculum for summer self-improvement if you will. The general themes include technology, the internet, copyright, culture, creativity, and food. I haven’t actually read all the books yet, but I have seen all the movies.

At the time of writing, all of the works are available for free (legal) viewing or download online except for Food Inc., which is now in theaters around the US – and a must see for EVERY American. I know I have kind of geeky interests, and not everybody cares to read 300+ page books about copyright, but everybody eats, so go see Food Inc already!

Books

The Wealth of Networks
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Yochai Benkler

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0
Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lawrence Lessig

Remix
Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
Lawrence Lessig

The Pirates Dilemma
How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
Matt Mason

The Public Domain
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
James Boyle

Viral Spiral
How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own
David Bollier

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain

Music and It’s Reflection on Society
Catalan: La Música i el seu reflex en la societat
Spanish: La música y su reflejo en la sociedad
Edited by Indigestió
A collection of essays about the role of music in contemporary society. Only in Spanish and Catalan for now though.

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law?
“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.” -Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

Documentaries

Good Copy/Bad Copy
A Danish documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

Rip: A Remix Manifesto
A Canadian documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

The Future of Food
An in-depth look into the controversy over genetically modified foods. Watch it online at Snagfilms.

Food, Inc.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

The Legend of Leigh Bowery
The Legend of Leigh Bowery explores a life lived as if it was a performance. Leigh Bowery was a costume/clothing designer, nightclub impresario, performer, and musician whose vision influenced many of today’s most important artists. He later became known to the world at large as the muse and subject of preeminent British painter Lucian Freud.

Controlling an AR model using a mouse

Craig Kapp — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:24:13 +0000

Just a quick video that demonstrates interactivity with a 3D AR model using the mouse. Nothing fancy, just a proof of concept.

I’m getting a lot of mileage out of the frame I built for the SimSnails project

Cha-ching!

Craig Kapp — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:28:53 +0000

Wow, it seems like forever since I’ve posted a blog entry! My summer jobs + family life have really been taking up most of my time as of late, but here’s a fun random video app that I worked on this week. I’m trying to create a generic pattern recognition engine (ambitious, I know!) - here’s a proof of concept that recognizes when you hold up a dollar bill in the prescribed area.

A web cam is required for the demo. Mac folks may need to right-click on the movie and select their USB camera in order for your video feed to show up correctly.

Here’s a video for those of you without a web cam:

#*(@&$ing FTDI OSX Drivers

Timothy Twillman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:12:30 +0000

Hoping to find a solution to FTDI USB serial drivers freezing when I work on developing applications — not sure if it’s just when there’s a lot of data that’s being sent to the machine when applications aren’t reading the data fast enough or what (that seems to be the case that this happens)… but I’ve had to reboot my mac at least 6 times today and it’s getting really old.

I ran into this problem starting about 2 years ago, then stopped doing as much serial development… but now it’s back and I’m really getting annoyed.

And yes, I just verified that I’m running the newest drivers.

ccSalon San Francisco June 2009

Lee Sean Huang — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:49:57 +0000

The Creative Commons Salon San Francisco took place on June 24th at PariSoMa, “a coworking space that provides desks, wi-fi, coffee and community to independent professionals.” The theme of the salon was “[t]he digital intersection of art, history, and culture, and how CC can play a defining role in enriching all three.” Videos after the jump.

Part 1: Francesco Spagnolo

Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections at the Magnes Museum. Francesco will explore the sharing and marketing of cultural heritage through the lenses of the Magnes’ “Digital Narratives,” a project that seeks an alignment between a narrative approach to history, a collaborative practice in the interpretation of cultural history, and the uses of technology and online social media.

Part 2: David Toole

Dave Toole, CEO and Founder, Outhink Media, will present on how storytelling bridges the cultural and business arenas, outlining the challenges posed by the new social media and the crucial role played by research in information technology.

Part 3: Nancy Van House

Nancy Van House, Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information, will respond to the other presenters by reflecting on the way in which academia is looking at social media and personal/historical digital archiving, exploring the human interactions that populate the online world.

Noisy Idiots

Lee Sean Huang — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:08:00 +0000

My ITP classmate, Catherine White, has set up a community on Ning to discuss her ongoing project. In her own words:

My research is primarily focused on how we work together in groups, particularly how to make collaboration more fruitful, and efficient (and less painful – because it sometimes is). Specifically, I am looking at groups we are part of online.

My thesis project came out of a midterm paper I wrote in March for Clay Shirky’s Social Facts class. I studied a forum online and discovered that there are some people who can be pretty disruptive in groups – even though they may not be violating the rules of the group. Its these people I’m interested in studying, to see how we can structure and govern groups to make collaboration enjoyable, not painful – and to ensure that group decisions reflect the group as a whole….

One small explanation about the term ‘Noisy Idiots’ – my main aim is to find ways to include people in debate and groups. The phrase came about in a playful manner due to sheer frustration at seeing some people dominate group discussion in a disruptive way. This paper tackles tricky issues such as balancing free speech and constructive conversation, but the aim is to get us all talking and listening to each other. I also understand the very important role that minority voices play in conversation – and am in no way suggesting that we shouldn’t listen to those with a view that is different to ours.

I’d be hugely grateful to hear your thoughts – and your ideas, thank you.

Read the the draft of Catherine’s paper and join the conversation at the Noisy Idiots Ning Community.

Here are my preliminary thoughts on the topic (Cross-posted on Ning):

Maybe you should put the paper online in wiki form and see what the crowd of angry idiots do to it

I understand that the choice to use the term “noisy idiots” is meant to be eye-catching and edgy, but what exactly do you mean by “extreme” viewpoints? If the Pirate Party or right-wing groups can elect MEPs to Brussels, than it represents in a way, that their views have been institutionalized or become more “mainstream” even if they are still minority viewpoints.

I guess what I have to more clearly distinguish between noisy/idiotic views and noisy/idiotic rhetorical styles (i.e. trolling). I have some far-from-mainstream political views, but I don’t usually go around harassing strangers on the street or online about them. You make this distinction on page 8, but I guess it would have been clearer if the definitions were made sooner.

You do clearly state that the paper is not about minority viewpoints, but about bad netiquette, however, I would argue that behaving outrageously is almost an essential tool for a minority group looking to make change in the world, whether their persecution if real or simply perceived.

If you look at history, many (most?) revolutionary changes have begun with a small group of noisy idiots, who keep it up until something in the socio-political climate tilts in their favor. While compromise and meeting “in the center” are crucial to the sustainability of a democratic system, the seemingly pathological rantings of the lunatic fringe can serve as important indicators of the health of the body politic. The question then becomes, how and why would someone come to believe that all Muslims should be deported in the first place? (substitute with any other “noisy idiot” belief)

Online fora are a place to blow off steam. In the fora you describe, it is doubtful that the people involved actually know each other in real life, or their identities are safely hidden behind pseudonyms. If I’m a noisy idiot, I know deep down that my online rantings are not going change anything. I’m either preaching to the choir or annoying people who disagree with me. Bottom line, trolling online makes me FEEL GOOD without having to take any risks, unlike trying to foment direct action in the name of my idiot cause on the streets. Posting on an online forum allows me to air my opinions that I wouldn’t otherwise hear in the mainstream media or political debate.

“Is there any other way.” It seems that the established solution is to raise the walls of homophily. After all, isn’t this why people live in gated communities, as to avoid the social friction of interacting with “the other”? Snark aside, the point is that the democratic process is messy, and not always civil and polite. YouTube Taiwanese politicians fighting to get an extreme case of what I mean. The more we scale up the size of a community, the more we have to break down into smaller units or sub-groups. That is why Congress has committees and the US is divided into states. We subdivide and compartmentalize in order to specialize and to better solve problems. The upside of homophily is reduced friction and increased group productivity and efficiency. The downside is that homophilous groups may get stale and eventually run out of new ideas. We do want Noisy Idiots sometimes to stir things up and “shock” us into new ways of doing things and inspire new ways forward. Noisy Idiots sometimes, but not too much. Find the balance and you save the princess and the Nobel Prize and World Peace are yours.

Also, related to your paper, you’ve seen this article, right?
NY Times: Ideas Online, Yes, but Some Not So Presidential
When the White House asked people to post ideas on open government on a new Web site, it heard about U.F.O.’s, marijuana and the president’s birth certificate.

Live Sushi Bar

Lee Sean Huang — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:07:28 +0000

Live Sushi Bar
2001 17th St (at Kansas St in Potrero Hill)
San Francisco, CA 94103-5012
(415) 861-8610‎

On Sunday, After spending the whole day outside watching the San Francisco Pride parade and checking out the festival in front of City Hall, I went back to the tranquility of Potrero Hill and treated myself to a nice sushi dinner at Live Sushi Bar. I ordered the Live Sushi Combo – 6 pieces of nigiri, 4 pieces of sashimi and 6 pieces of spicy tuna roll for $16.95 and the sake tasting sampler ($9.50). They kind of have a weird name and a logo that looks like the Jesus fish, but they are close to my summer crash pad, so it’s become a good place for the occasional splurge. Last time I had dinner here, I had the grilled shio saba (salted mackerel) and tempura, which were decent, but nothing mind blowing. This time, my decision to actually order sushi paid off. The sushi rice was perfectly prepared and the fish tasted very fresh and clean. I’m not sure what is going on with the Pepto-Bismol-colored salad dressing, but it didn’t taste bad.

Above: Sakes in the intended sampling order from right to left (click on image to view enlarged version)

Masumi “Okuden Kantsukuri” – 真澄奥伝寒造り (Junmai – 純米)

Dewazakura “Oka” – でわざくら桜花 (Ginjo – 吟醸)

Hoyo “Kura no Hana” – 鳳陽蔵の華 (Daiginjo – 大吟醸)

The Masumi tasted like a pretty standard junmai to me, a good starter sake. The Dewazakura, with a seductive floral bouquet, was definitely my favorite. My white wine taste tends towards Rieslings and Gewurztraminers, so it’s no surprise that I like the fruity floral sake. The Hoyo had a strong star anise taste in it’s flavor profile, which I would expect from sake. It went really well with the earthy spiciness of the spicy tuna rolls, and I bet it would

One of Adam’s friends suggested that I check out another sushi place called Umi, which is also in Potrero Hill. I will definitely be there to check it out soon!

[Personal Update] Hard at work

Jason Rosado — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:35:13 +0000

For those keeping score, I am now working part time at the Bank of New York Mellon for the next 6 weeks in order to be able to focus on building givkwik and related mobile fundraising applications for the iPhone, such as for raising money for the Red Burns Scholarship Fund. I will also be taking one more course during the Summer Session at ITP: Game Design. It should prove to be a very interesting and exhausting several weeks. Wish me luck!

Pollution Galore in NYC.

Oscar Torres — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:48:51 +0000

I was riding around in my cousin’s SUV and felt guilty of doing so. Specially since I was coming from upstate NY where the air smelled fresh of trees and flowers. As soon as we crossed the Triborough Bridge bridge to enter brooklyn, the thick smog filled aroma invaded my lungs.
This is some video of what I saw:

Smog filled city and Brooklyn Bridge from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.

And some images:

And not only that there have been sightings of some weird stuff, like radio active orange clouds of unusual shape. Some call it beautiful; I think they are too, like a mushroom cloud.

I hope this new Climate bill will change our behavior when it comes to consuming and creating waste.

Because seriously, my lungs are not going to be healthy if I bike to work every day for the rest of my life as I am doing now. Lets start cleaning our act people! We need clean air.

The Stream-Packet Duality of Content

Steven Lehrburger — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:35:15 +0000

This post develops the conceptual language surrounding the product ideas in my previous post, Filtration as a Tonic for Internet Vertigo.

Towards the beginning of his aforementioned blog post, John Borthwick writes:

what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages

I think that this progression of metaphors is moving in the right direction, but it needs to be taken further. Streams consist of web content that is delivered directly to the user (to a Twitter client, to an RSS reader, etc), and this is in direct contrast to content that lives on specific pages to which a user must navigate in a web browser. Streams are dynamic, up-to-date and are delivered in (near) real time, while pages are static and not necessarily current.

Streams, however, are just collections of individual pieces of content, or packets. Tweets, status updates, blog posts, photos, mp3 files, and video clips are all discrete packets of content. These packets are the units which a user actually consumes as information, and streams are just a way to group those packets over time, usually based on on source (such as a specific blog) or topic (such as a search term on Twitter). But there are potentially more potent ways in which these packets can be organized than by their original source/topic, and this is important because these streams tend to be overwhelming in their aggregate. Borthwick continues about the future of content delivery via streams:

Overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we cant wade through all this information. This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — it’s a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we cant attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.

I suspect that there is a more optimistic solution, however, and that there are better-than-random ways to organize the flow of content from our collections of streams. There will be some packets in these streams that are more important to individual users than others, so I want services that surface the best ones and hide the others. I predict a future in which streams are cut, rearranged, reordered and remixed into a single source of content that always has that moment’s most important/relevant/enjoyable packet at the front of the queue. The future of content on the web will be based on tools that focus on perfecting the delivery of these individual packets of information to users for consumption.

I agree with Borthwick, and think that the re-conceptualization of the destination web of pages into a real time stream of pages is the next (or current?) big thing. But I think the re-conceptualization of those streams as collections of individual operable packets is the big thing after that.

VMWare Fusion Snapshots == slow system

Timothy Twillman — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:29:05 +0000

Just thought i’d put out a quick note for anyone running Fusion (and I expect other VMWare products)… If you find that over time your system has become sluggish and is really painful to work with, make sure you don’t have any machine snapshots for that VM.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising, but in my experience with a machine of which I’d made a snapshot, over a year of moderate use the machine had become incredibly sluggish; on deleting the snapshot (which took quite a while to complete) the vm is back up to being plenty fast for my needs.

Michael Jackson Fan Pride

Lee Sean Huang — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:36:16 +0000

Celebrating Michael Jackson in San Francisco:

Eye-Fi Ah Ha…

Timothy Twillman — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:44:00 +0000

I’m trying to get my documentation up a couple of notches, and in the process picked up an Eye-Fi. My plan is to keep my camera on a mount (gooseneck screwed to a board for support) on my workbench, and set it up to upload any pictures I take to an easy-to-access folder (with resized versions of the photo for different uses) for quick grabbing. This also makes it easy to keep them in backups.

I wasn’t sure whether the Eye-Fi was smart enough to save things to a different host than I’d configured it on, though comments for Jeff Tchang’s standalone server seemed to indicate a host running a server should automatically be detected…

It turns out that when the Eye-Fi starts up, it ARPs for anything in the same network (actually not sure if it uses the netmask or just hits everything else in the same /24), then tries to connect to port 59278 on anything it finds… so it actually is automatically able to find a host to upload to, it’s just um… lacking a little elegance.

Slow-Motion Videos

Elias Zananiri — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:44:38 +0000

I haven’t posted in a while, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. A lot of work (which I can’t talk about right now), and also a lot of messing around with the Casio EX-F1 slow-motion camera.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Very silly but lots of fun. We basically learned that you can shoot any mundane thing in slow-motion and it’s going to look incredible.

Picture in Schmap!! Guide

Elias Zananiri — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:32:48 +0000

I’m still not sure of how excited I should feel about this, but one of the pictures I took of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens is featured in the Schmap!! Guide to New York. See it here.

Michael Jackson RIP

Lee Sean Huang — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:46:21 +0000

Scream! I can’t believe Michael’s gone.

Despite all of the gossip and the allegations, we should have never judged you. We should have started with the Man in the Mirror. You said, “Leave Me Alone.” Your critics and detractors can just Beat It now.

It didn’t matter if you were Black or White. You could be a nerd, a jock, a hipster, or the toughest hardest thug out there, but when an MJ track came on, even the most reticent of wallflowers would get down and dance. You said Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough, and we didn’t. The scene would be Off the Wall. The aftermath was Blood on the Dance Floor.

We knew you were Dangerous and a Smooth Criminal too. And we loved you for it. We knew you were Bad. And by Bad (which was the first CD I ever owned), I mean you were awesome and utterly ruled as the King of Pop. The King is dead. Long live the King. (We loved how you got down with the other King’s daughter too.)

Even if we couldn’t Heal The World, your music formed the soundtrack to HIStory.

You were a Dancing Machine. Your life was a real Thriller. Thanks for the music and thanks for being you. You, like Ryan White, are Gone Too Soon. We’ll always Remember The Time we spent with you. You Are Not Alone now. (What ever happened to Bubbles?) You’ve left Neverland, but we know you’re moonwalking with other heroes up in heaven now.

I’m dealing with your passing by revisiting your old songs. There is that special something about them and The Way You Make Me Feel. You Rock My World. I hope to Rock With You again someday.

So let’s Burn This Disco Out.

Open Educational Resources for JET/ESL

Lee Sean Huang — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:24:09 +0000

This is an update on my internship with ccLearn, a division of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials.

We are working on a site called OpenEd, a site for the Open Education Community and are looking for input and participation from past and present JET Programme participants (I’m a JET alum and webmaster of the JET Alumni Association of NY) as well as other members of the ESL teaching community.

The JET community already has a history of sharing lesson plans and ideas. On a more global level, educators and and institutions have being contributing content (lesson plans, worksheets, multimedia, etc.) to the pool of Open Educational Resources (OER), a kind of educational commons that fosters collaboration and yields greater flexibility and creativity in education.

OER are openly licensed educational resources for teachers and students. All materials that are licensed with a Creative Commons license are OER. OER are “some rights reserved”, meaning that you are free to use a CC licensed work without asking permission as long as you adhere to the license terms. Depending on the license used, you can access, share (copy, distribute, display), adapt (perform, translate), or derive (modify, remix) OER. The openness of a resource increases with the uses allowed.

The OpenEd site is a wiki, so like Wikipedia, anybody can edit the site. We welcome members of the JET community to add to and edit the site. We would love to see more links to educational resources as well as personal stories about how you have used open educational resources.

We invite you to take a look at the JET Community page on OpenEd. You can set up an account on Open Ed and edit and add content.

Breakfast of Champions

Lee Sean Huang — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:10:07 +0000

Pickled herring, boiled potatoes and kale. Mmm.

Photos

Alex Reeder — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:10:00 +0000

After a delightful trip to Italy I'm back in NYC.

I'm working through the Italy photos now, but first here are snaps from my return home to Tokyo.

Ithai and Rebeca in Tokyo

A trip to Izu

Everyday Tokyo

-- Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:10 -0400

Site redesign comps

Patrick Grizzard — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:57:44 +0000

These are the initial comps for the redesign of this site. I may need to fine-tune some colors, but overall I’m pretty happy with the general direction. I used a 16-column layout, which seems well-suited to the content of the Project Detail page. It should adapt well to the blog layout as well, where I’ll [...]

[VFNM] Final: Shadow Dance

Jason Rosado — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:15:39 +0000

For my final project for Video for New Media, I decided to work on a dance movement project that featured Yours Truly and my girlfriend Pamela. It’s called Shadow Dance and it shows us and our shadows dancing the mambo and interacting with each other in real life and in the shadows.

Shadow Dance from Jason Rosado on Vimeo.

Iran first-hand

Ted Hayes — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:18:42 +0000

The following was posted to the Hunter and ITP lists from an Iranian alumnus (or alumna, no way of knowing which) who is there now and has very few communication options.

Dear all,

My other email is down by the gov. hence I have been able to hack into
this unsuspecting email account.

Things are turning very violent here for Iranians - last night at
least 90 were killed and many hundreds others injured (as I write this
reports are coming in that it is in fact more than 150 from yesterday
alone killed - putting in the total in at least the many hundreds over
the past nine days).  As fate would have it, Neda, aged 22, was an
employee at the travel agency who had booked our trip to Mashad for
yesterday.  We decided to forgo the trip for safety, and she was
killed by basij yesterday.  Today, without knowing it, when picking up
refund for the trip, all of the employees were dressed in black as are
many who take to the streets today to mourn her and the scores of
others killed yesterday - certainly many will be killed today as well.
There are vast first hand accounts of many of the stormtroopers et al
being from other countries outside of Iran speaking Arabic - certainly
some groups rely on the oil profits of Iranian for their own
operations and even their security is at stake in this shake-up.
There is information, misinformation, and disinformation so take what
you will, but too many first hand reports usually add up to some sort
of truth.

It is no joke that communication is down and that what goes in/out, is
being tracked.  I have been followed by secret service.  I cannot post
to blogs for fear of safety to others.  Facebook and Twitter does not
work within Iran - it has not for more than one week - all rally
communication takes place via mobile and, more importantly, face to
face.  International telephone calls do not come in; mobiles are cut
between 4-5PM each day until midnight; SMS are out; TV channels are
sent parasites so that each night searching for a different satellite
takes place to find channels (while I have written this, VOA has just
been lost; we were able to find it last night after one week).  Most
of the journalists who are reporting are not here and seem to not be
speaking to people who are experiencing these events (as I write this
the BBC correspondant has been ordered to leave the country).  The TV
"experts" on the bbc, cnn and al jazeera are for the most part,
completely out of touch, with the facts: this is way beyond ahmadi,
the supreme leader and rafsanjani.  Many of the Western press are just
as out of touch: I recommend the Guardian from the UK if you must read
something.  This is about the IR and the people at this point.

I can still go to select areas of this vast city, but go in disguise.
You may see the stormtroopers on bikes et al, but it is always the
plains clothes basij who are to be feared - they are free to shoot to
kill, free to beat to pulps with no reprisal from government.  They
are stationed on most street corners, even tens of kms away from the
main rally avenue.  This is a very serious issue and what amazes
Iranians the most is that the UN is completely silent on this issue,
with Western governments still speaking too diplomatically, although
thankfully Merkel has come out the boldest as of now.  At this point,
the people who are going out - who are children, young adults and
people in their 60s and 70s - are leaderless.  It does not matter what
Mousavi does at this point - it goes well beyond him and has since
Friday.  Although thousands and thousands went out yesterday, there is
a very high percentage that one will be killed or gravely injured, it
does not matter.  These people are willing to die for the cause.  I
have never experienced such a movement in my life, beginning well
before the election, to last week's rallies, to Friday's speech
advocating for destruction, to yesterday and today.  There simply are
too few people from my country and too few people who look like myself
for me to write more without causing potential harm, arrest and death
so with this I end this letter.  Rest assured that the rallies will
continue until the change that they demand happens.  There are too
many millions to be killed for it not to stop.

Please post to NYPL, IMA, Facebook, Grad Center, Columbia, list
serves, forward, etc. - please do not include my name until I've
returned, which should be on Saturday, unless the authorities ban air
travel, which is a strong possibility: during the prior revolution, it
was closed down for three years.  All my other contacts are in my
other email app hence this can only be sent to a select few people.

Yours,

**

From an Iranian Student

Lee Sean Huang — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:32:07 +0000

This written by an Iranian alum of an American university. He/she asked us to re-post this message.

///

Dear all,

My other email is down by the gov. hence I have been able to hack into this unsuspecting email account.

Things are turning very violent here for Iranians – last night at least 90 were killed and many hundreds others injured (as I write this reports are coming in that it is in fact more than 150 from yesterday alone killed – putting in the total in at least the many hundreds over the past nine days). As fate would have it, Neda, aged 22, was an employee at the travel agency who had booked our trip to Mashad for yesterday. We decided to forgo the trip for safety, and she was killed by basij yesterday. Today, without knowing it, when picking up refund for the trip, all of the employees were dressed in black as are many who take to the streets today to mourn her and the scores of others killed yesterday – certainly many will be killed today as well. There are vast first hand accounts of many of the stormtroopers et al being from other countries outside of Iran speaking Arabic – certainly some groups rely on the oil profits of Iranian for their own operations and even their security is at stake in this shake-up. There is information, misinformation, and disinformation so take what you will, but too many first hand reports usually add up to some sort of truth.

It is no joke that communication is down and that what goes in/out, is being tracked. I have been followed by secret service. I cannot post to blogs for fear of safety to others. Facebook and Twitter does not work within Iran – it has not for more than one week – all rally communication takes place via mobile and, more importantly, face to face. International telephone calls do not come in; mobiles are cut between 4-5PM each day until midnight; SMS are out; TV channels are sent parasites so that each night searching for a different satellite takes place to find channels (while I have written this, VOA has just been lost; we were able to find it last night after one week). Most of the journalists who are reporting are not here and seem to not be speaking to people who are experiencing these events (as I write this the BBC correspondant has been ordered to leave the country). The TV “experts” on the bbc, cnn and al jazeera are for the most part, completely out of touch, with the facts: this is way beyond ahmadi, the supreme leader and rafsanjani. Many of the Western press are just as out of touch: I recommend the Guardian from the UK if you must read something. This is about the IR and the people at this point.

I can still go to select areas of this vast city, but go in disguise. You may see the stormtroopers on bikes et al, but it is always the plains clothes basij who are to be feared – they are free to shoot to kill, free to beat to pulps with no reprisal from government. They are stationed on most street corners, even tens of kms away from the main rally avenue. This is a very serious issue and what amazes Iranians the most is that the UN is completely silent on this issue, with Western governments still speaking too diplomatically, although thankfully Merkel has come out the boldest as of now. At this point, the people who are going out – who are children, young adults and people in their 60s and 70s – are leaderless. It does not matter what Mousavi does at this point – it goes well beyond him and has since Friday. Although thousands and thousands went out yesterday, there is a very high percentage that one will be killed or gravely injured, it does not matter. These people are willing to die for the cause. I have never experienced such a movement in my life, beginning well before the election, to last week’s rallies, to Friday’s speech advocating for destruction, to yesterday and today. There simply are too few people from my country and too few people who look like myself for me to write more without causing potential harm, arrest and death so with this I end this letter. Rest assured that the rallies will continue until the change that they demand happens. There are too many millions to be killed for it not to stop.

Please post to NYPL, IMA, Facebook, listserves, forward, etc. – please do not include my name until I’ve returned, which should be on Saturday, unless the authorities ban air travel, which is a strong possibility: during the prior revolution, it was closed down for three years. All my other contacts are in my other email app hence this can only be sent to a select few people.

Yours,

***

Doing the Google

Lee Sean Huang — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:17:54 +0000

The summer interns from Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were invited to Google headquarters in Mountain View today for a brief tour of the campus and lunch at one of the company’s legendary cafeterias. Here is my photo essay of the excursion:

Creative Commons interns do the Google.

The architectural story says “suburban high-tech campus.”

The architectural story, continued.

The mythic and cryptic Google whiteboard

Lunch@Google: Sushi, curry & Chinese food in one cafeteria = my kind of celebrating diversity

Honest Tea imparts ancient wisdom of the Orient.

Google’s dirty laundry.

Filtration as a Tonic for Internet Vertigo

Steven Lehrburger — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:07:14 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while, but was finally inspired to write it by a not quite recent but still very relevant blog post by John Borthwick (of betaworks, the startup accelerator associated with bit.ly, where I’m currently interning) about real-time distribution via social networks.

Update: I’ve written more about this topic in this subsequent post.

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
- Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakian novelist (1929 – ), in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I have vertigo. My somewhat lofty goal is to read and digest all of the information that interests me, as it is created in real time, regardless of medium. My desire to fall is my desire to abandon all of my information sources, not bother keeping up with anything, and fall endlessly into ignorance. And this terrifies me; at the very least, the Internet could come equipped with better handrails.

I am interested in information from a variety of sources – blogs, people on Twitter, email lists, search terms in the NY Times, etc – and I subscribe to these things because I think they are worth reading. Although I wish I could read all of it, I know I can’t. But I want a better way to read only some of it, without having to face the infinities that I don’t have time to read, without having to make painfully arbitrary decisions about what to read and what to ignore, and thus without having the subsequent vertiginous desire to give up, declare email bankruptcy, and read none of it at all. So the question is, then, one of designing a sturdier handrail that I can grasp while observing information on the Internet as it streams by. And that handrail must be a tool for filtering content, not a source that recommends even more.

Recommendation sites/services such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon have (as far as I know) user-preference modeling algorithms to make selections of what content to show to users, based on what those users and other users with similar past preferences have liked in the past. Netflix does something similar to make movie recommendations. They’re good systems, and have some cool machine-learning stuff going on, but I find their application to be fundamentally conceptually inverted.

I want to read the blogs of danah boyd, Jan Chipchase, and John Gruber. I want to follow Alex Payne, Jorge Ortiz, and 180 odd others on Twitter. Yet it’s too much. As Clay Shirky pointed out at the Web2.0 Expo, our filters have failed, not because of ‘information overload’ of ever-increasing magnitudes, but instead because of ‘filter failure’. Content was once primarily filtered by the editors and publishers, yet those systems are crumbling and I no longer have effective filters for this smorgasbord of carefully selected and professionally prepared feeds.

And I certainly don’t need Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon to make additional recommendations. But given that I’m already not going to see all of the things I know that I care about, why can’t those same algorithms be used to filter incoming content instead? These information filtration systems would ideally have a few particular characteristics:

They would be cross-platform and encompass all sources of information, including RSS, news, Twitter, Facebook, email lists (but not email addressed specifically to you), etc.
The user could make adjustments to the aggressiveness of the filtration algorithm on a feed-by-feed basis.
Filters would operate on a per-item level – i.e. I might be shown only one photo from an album of sixty, or one tweet from a day’s worth of a dozen. The content filtered out would not be less-than-worthwhile (you might really wish you could see all of your aunt’s vacation photos), but if the user simply doesn’t have time for everything, something must give.
Users could build their preference models both passively and actively. The system would strongly take into account rating systems (number of stars, voting up/down, etc), but would also take into account how many seconds a user spent looking at a specific piece of content. Eye tracking would be preferable, but that’s tough and requires a camera at the very least. Instead, content delivery applications (such as RSS readers and mail clients) could measure how long a person spent with a piece of content open, adjust for word count and relative time for other pieces of content from that source, and assume that more time spent implies more engagement.
Preference models would be partially social, but not exclusively. If a friend of mine liked something, it would be more likely to pass my filters. In addition, if some piece of content was enjoyed by a random other person who had shown similar past preferences to myself, it would be more likely to pass my filters too.

I don’t see this problem of perceived information overload (and consequent vertigo) getting any better on it’s own. Are there other solutions I’m not seeing? Anyone looking for a new giant software project?

Blubee At Promax BDA 2009

Oscar Torres — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:46:55 +0000

Blubee Media checked out Promax DBA at the Hilton this week. The winning spot was made for Nip/Tucked which was presented by Bob Saget.

PromaxBDA 2009 from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.

Pizzeria Bianco

Lee Sean Huang — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:39:56 +0000

Pizzeria Bianco
623 E Adams St
Phoenix, AZ 85004
(602) 258-8300

Ok, this is my last restaurant review for the day. I’ve finally caught up with my backlog of blog posts.

This place hardly needs another review, but let’s just say that it is one of the first places I go for dinner whenever I am back home in Arizona.

This place is the ultimate in slow food. Every pizza is handmade by chef-owner Chris Bianco and baked in a wood-fired oven. The restaurant is in an old “historic” building (ok 1920’s counts as historic in Phoenix). But come prepared to wait. They don’t take reservations for parties of less than 6, so show up an get in line at 3 or 4 pm for opening time at 5.

Start out with the antipasto plate ($12) or a Caprese salad (above – $9 -Americanized as “handmade mozzarella, local tomato and basil with extra virgin olive oil” on the menu).

For the main event, my two favorite pizzas are the Rosa (above – $11) and the Wiseguy (below – $14). The Rosa has red onions, Parmigiano Reggiano, rosemary, and AZ pistachios, and is bursting with vegetarian umami goodness. The Wiseguy is a meat-lover’s delight with wood roasted onion, house smoked mozzarella, and plenty of fennel sausage.

Mandalay Restaurant

Lee Sean Huang — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:44:36 +0000

Photo: Buddha of the Balada

Mandalay Restaurant
4348 California St., in the Inner Richmond
San Francisco, CA 94118
415-386-3895 OR 415-386-3896

The restaurant review marathon continues (I’m catching up after a week or two of eating).

Kris and I try to get out to Mandalay in the Richmond as much as possible, despite the slightly out-of-the-way location. Burmese cuisine seems to synthesize some of the best elements of Chinese, Indian and South East Asian elements. Mandalay may not have quite the buzz of “the other Burmese place,” Burma Superstar, but it’s had a solid history and continues to do a brisk business. This is what we typically order:

Tea Leaf Salad (Lap Pat Dok)
Salad prepared with imported Burmese tea leaves, tossed with fried lentil, grounded shrimp, fried garlic, green pepper, sesame seeds, peanuts & dressing

Unlike many other places that serve tea leaf salad, Mandalay doesn’t dilute their salad with lettuce or cabbage, just tea leaves and crunchy nutty goodness.

Balada
Burmese crispy pancake with curry dipping sauce

The balada is Burma’s answer to the crisp pancake and curry combo known as “roti canai” in many other parts of SE Asia. It’s rich stuff, a bit greasy, but really good.

Mandalay Special Noodle
Burmese fat noodle with mild coconut chicken or tofu, yellow peas, lime juice, lime leaves, onion, and fried thin noodle on the top

This stuff is amazing. The curry and noodles are rich and fragrant, and the addition of lime leaves adds to the aroma. This dish is similar to the Thai noodle dish khao soi, but the curry part is more of a sauce than a soup. The menu has no indication of what it’s called in Burmese, but I haven’t found it served in any other Burmese place in the Bay Area or in New York.

For a drink pairing, I suggest the fresh young coconut juice served in a coconut. For dessert, we sometimes order the mango sticky rice, which I guess is actually Thai, not Burmese.

While Burma may have excellent food, the political and human rights situation leaves a lot to be desired, so learn more and take action here.

Mifune

Lee Sean Huang — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:36:17 +0000

Mifune Restaurant
Japan Center Kintetsu Building
1737 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94115

Kris and I went to Mifune in Japantown for lunch last Saturday for some old-school Japanese food. We had mixed tempura, fried oysters (kaki-fry), and zaru soba (cold buckwheat noodles with dipping sauce). We washed it down with some Koshihikari Echigo beer, which is made with rice, similar to other Japanese lagers; it tasted pretty similar to Sapporo. Good solid traditional Japanese food. From the photo above, it seems like the Guide Michelin agrees too.

Spices II: Szechuan Trenz

Lee Sean Huang — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:04:38 +0000

Spices II: Szechuan Trenz on Yelp
291 6th Ave
between Cornwall St & Clement St in the Inner Richmond
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 752-8885

Spices II on MenuPages

Kris and I had a late afternoon snack at Spices II Szechuan Trenz last weekend. Despite the crazy decor and over-the-top graphic design and typography, this place serves up some great Szechuan and Taiwanese food and is definitely worth the trip out to Richmond. We had a light and crisp scallion pancake ($4.25) and the Spices! Cold Noodles ($7.25), which are more room temperature than cold and come in a beautifully fragrant spicy sauce. Despite the two-star spice warning, the richness of peanut butter and sesame in the sauce balance out the spice for a complex sophisticated taste.

Dosa on Valencia

Lee Sean Huang — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:19:07 +0000

Photo from dosasf.com

Dosa
995 Valencia St
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 642-3672

Dosa on Yelp

After many aborted attempts to eat dinner at the much-hyped Dosa due to long wait times, we finally snagged a reservation last week. We ordered:

Panipuri, a kind of chaat. $8 – Mondays and weekend brunch only

According to Wikipedia:

It comprises a round, hollow “puri”, fried crisp and filled with a watery mixture of tamarind, chili, chaat masala , potato, onion and chickpeas. Its size is small enough to fit in the mouth.

This is the first time I had tried this dish, but I was looking forward to it ever since my ITP classmate Sonaar was singing the praises of panipuri at Wo Hop after the ITP Post-Show Party.

I liked how the panipuri a Dosa were fun and DIY, but I don’t understand why they couldn’t have been assembled in the kitchen. I’m sure these things only cost pennies from street vendors in India, but in a yuppie-friendly SF restaurant, they are 8 bucks an order. Reasonably tasty, but the crispy shells tasted a bit stale. Definitely like the idea though.

Habanero-Mango Masala Dosa spread with spicy Habanero chutney (watch out!) $10

The waitress warned me that this was REALLY SPICY, but I felt safe seeing that most of the diners at Dosa were non-Indian. I normally have a fairly high tolerance for spice, but this was a weapon of mass destruction. It was all heat, with none of the fruitiness of fresh habaneros and I couldn’t taste the mango at all. This dish might have been saved by the contrasting sweetness of mango, but alas, it was just overwhelmingly hot with no complexity.

Tomato & Onion Uttampam topped with onion, tomatoes and green chiles $10

This was pretty right on, similar to the uttampam I’ve had at other places. A nice contrast to the atomic heat of the habanero-mango dosa.

In conclusion, Dosa was a little underwhelming despite all the hype. The wait times are just not worth it and the food is a little pricy for this kind of Indian food. For my next South Indian food fix, I’ll probably just wait until I’m back in New York and go to one of my usual places in Curry Hill: Tiffin Wallah, Saravanaa Bhavan, or Tamil Nadu Bhavan.

Paris Hilton Diaries Soundtrack

Sara Bremen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:43:32 +0000

Click to Play

As an exercise, Dan gave us a short animation, narration and a soundtrack that was recorded for it, and a whole host of sound effects. I used Adobe Soundbooth to edit together a narration track, a music track, and a sound effects track to go with the animation and exported them all together. I also played around a little with effects in iMovie.

Loops in Ableton

Sara Bremen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:36:50 +0000

Dan provided us with samples of a flute player he had recorded. At first they reminded me of birds and so I found some samples of bird calls online. In the end, though, they didn’t sound so similar. I brought all the samples into Ableton and created loops with some effects and modulation. I played around in real-time, bringing the loops in and out. Below are two of the results.

Leuling Birds A

Leuling Birds B

Pancho Villa Taqueria

Lee Sean Huang — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:09:41 +0000

Pancho Villa Taqueria
3071 16th St
between Caledonia St & Julian Ave, in the Mission District
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 864-8840

Pancho Villa on Yelp

Kris and I went to Pancho Villa Taqueria for a late night dinner last week. I love how this place is hopping even at 11 pm on a weeknight (compared to other places in the the neighborhood), and how it attracts a motley mix of clientele – from hipsters in skinny jeans to hip-hop kids in sweat pants to businessmen in suits.

We shared an order of the garlic prawns ($9.95 – pictured above) and washed it down with a medium horchata ($1.65). The plate, which included rice, beans, avocado, fresh tortillas AND tortilla chips, was enormous and delicious. The salsa bar made things even better. A real Mission District gem.

Como dice el “Governator,” “I’ll be back.” Más Pancho Villa, por fa-please!

Design for Unicef Brief

Sandra Davila — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:24:17 +0000

In collaboration with Unicef’s Innovation Team in the course Designing for Unicef tought by Clay Shirky, we were familiarized with the structure and the goals of the organization. Furthermore, we worked on the design of social tools for the developing world. Based in presentation’s of experts on the application of technology in the field we where divided in teams with the goal to prototype projects and receive feedback. The constrains given to develop the projects were to limit technology involvement to Cellphone and/or radio, and avoid placing new technologies in the field.

I collaborated with three teams and proposed five projects. The last team had to select which we developed further.

The projects proposed where:

CallStat

Provide technical infrastructure and financial incentive to cell phone kiosk operators so that they report the types of calls being made by their clients to UNICEF for data analysis. More information…

HealthLine.

Health consultation via SMS and radio broadcast. More information…

AutoRapidSMS

Back-end infrastructure for syntax-independent database inputs via RapidSMS using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed workforce. More information…

AfricaList

Networked digital doorways providing peer-to-peer craigslist functionality, using SMS notification for updates and responses. More information…

Midwife Network

Strengthening the social connections and information flow among traditional birth attendants in Ethiopia.

We chose the Midwife Network proposal to develop further. This project is now named RegiStory. Ari Joseph, Michelle Mayer, Andrea Dulko and Jonathan Ystad conceived RegiStory.

As a group we agreed that we wanted to develop a project related to women’s reproductive health. Instead of talking about Africa in general we wanted to focus in an specific context, due to an article that caught our attention about the story of a Traditional Birth Attendant in Ethiopia we decided to do our research around Ethiopia.

Rather than starting by prototyping the project we wanted to hear from experts about working with midwives, and be able to understand TBAs as a community of practitioners. So we reach out to as many people we could. We learned that the best way to be able to get information from the field is by having references from known people, for example: Clay Shirky or Chistopher Fabien. The most important contacts we had were because they wrote in our behalf.

We met with Emmanuel d’Harcourt from the International Rescue Committee. Dr. D’harcout, senior technical advisor for child survival, has experience working with Traditional Birth Attendants in African countries such as: Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda and Southern Sudan. Dr. D’harcourt argued that working with TBA’s is not the best choice for our project. He recommended, instead, working with community workers.

The interview with Dr. Emmanuel was an important moment for our project as we realized the controversy and issues of traditional birth practices. We then decided to open our project and follow some of Dr D’harcourt’s recommendation.

The project has had important transformation as we made more research. Relevant iterations are:

Midwife Cellphone. Provide Cellphones for Traditional Midwives and create a line where they could have 24 hours support.

Audio PenPal. Focusing in creating a stronger social network between Traditional Birth Attendants the audio pen pal will be distributed as an MP3 recorder and will be used as a message and will be transported hand by hand.

Listen, Respond, Ask. The midwife listens to the previous midwifes response and question, then responds to the new question and leaves her own.

Final Project
RegiStory,
http://registory.org
Using mobile technology, Registry’s central goal is to design and develop a data collection system for birth registrations in rural and remote areas where oral tradition prevail.

RegiStory Strategic Goals:
* To cull oral stories from audio data and remove literacy and geographical barriers from community members that includes: Mothers, Health Representatives and Traditional Birth Attendants.
* Providing UNICEF access to first hand accounts from rural communities
* Facilitate through the use of cellphone technology birth data of Newborns.
* Track Reproductive Health Issues including Maternal Mortality

Embeded you can have access to our final presentation:

The Doomed Cool

Lee Sean Huang — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:29:12 +0000

Cynthia Paulson (@CynLuscious) of Women Rock Radio just played “The Doomed Cool” by Hepnova featuring Sophia Chang AKA 52 Faces. Since the song hadn’t been released yet to the public, I guess that constitutes a world premier. Thanks Cynthia for playing the song and for your kind words of praise. In case you missed it, you can listen to the archive of today’s show here.

Women Rock Radio (Live program stream)

Download “The Doomed Cool”

More HEPNOVA tunes at hepnova.com.

HEPNOVA and Sophia Chang on Women Rock Radio Tonight

Lee Sean Huang — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:06:59 +0000

UPDATE!: The Hepnova song that was played was “The Doomed Cool.”

@CynLuscious will be playing a tune by @hepnova featuring Sophia Chang tonight (19 June 2009) at 6pm pst/9pm est

Listen here at Women Rock Radio!

More HEPNOVA tunes at hepnova.com.

Photo: Sophia in Cake City

Get your own Hepnova logo T-shirt on Zazzle.

VIDEO: Let’s Grow Up!

Lee Sean Huang — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:09:55 +0000

Ignite Phoenix 4
16 June 2009 at the Tempe Center for the Arts

Let’s Grow Up! : Food Security in Urban Phoenix
Nicholas DiBiase (@hepnova on Twitter) is a producer for Hepnova.

Description: The upshot : Improve food and nutritional security for Phoenix through radically simplified urban agronomy. Let’s promote community health and self-reliance by giving folks the educational tools to escape dependence on the institution of inefficient (and often not very nutritious!) food supply chains. It’s time now to change the focus of urban food security thinking from rhetoric and politics to simple, doable, mainstream-friendly approaches that get fast results – a healthier, more independent Phoenix is a groovier more funky Phoenix!

Let’s Grow Up! on Blip.tv

(overly simplistic) saving state in oF for iPhone

Robert Carlsen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:52:37 +0000

There was a recent comment about saving / restoring application state when using openFrameworks for iPhone which got me to thinking about how to do it. Apple’s frameworks provide a fairly thorough way to save state to the disk and restore later. There seem to be three primary ways to do this: simple plist files (usually encoded in binary on the iPhone), archived data (they like to refer to this as freeze-dried object graphs) and core data.

I believe that archiving objects require methods inherited from NSObject, which we don’t have in openFrameworks’ ofSimpleApp. Core Data seems like overkill, so I looked into using plist files.

There are likely better ways to do this, but this ad-hoc solution works wonderfully for a small app I’m working on, and only requires a bit of Objective-C code that could likely be moved up into a nice wrapper class. However, since the question was asked I’d just like to get it out there before working on a more elegant approach.

The easiest way to store state is with NSUserDefaults. The following returns a pointer to the shared user defaults object then writes several values to it. Adding data to the object will get cached in memory and eventually written to disk (or upon receiving a synchronize message). The key is just a NSString, which can be arbitrarily named, but you’ll need to use identical values to retrieve the data later.

NSUserDefaults *savedData = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];

[savedData setInteger:score forKey:@"score"];
[savedData setInteger:pointsAvail forKey:@"pointsAvail"];
[savedData setInteger:timeRemaining forKey:@"time"];
[savedData synchronize];

The savedData object should be autoreleased. Plists can handle basic data types such as integer, float, bool and double. Look at the documentation for specific messages, but it’s usually like setFloat:forKey: or setBool:forKey:. It can also handle some NSObjects such as NSString, NSArray and NSDictionary. The selector for those is setObject:forKey:.

Reading back is just as simple. If a key doesn’t exist 0 is returned for a number, and nil for other strings, arrays and dictionaries. In the below example score, pointsAvail and timeRemaining are instance variables of testApp.

NSUserDefaults *savedData = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];

score = [savedData integerForKey:@"score"];
pointsAvail = [savedData integerForKey:@"pointsAvail"];
timeRemaining = [savedData integerForKey:@"time"];

To get this all working as expected, retrieve the defaults in setup(), and be sure to do some sanity checking if the values aren’t found (ie. if this is the first run of the app). Because we’re mixing Objective-C and C++ in testApp, be sure to rename main.cpp to main.mm, testApp.cpp to testApp.mm and add “#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>” to the top of testApp.mm.

A code snippet from setup():

// test for previous state
NSUserDefaults *savedData = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
int hideInstructions = [savedData integerForKey:@"hideInstructions"];

// if the key "hideInstructions" doesn't exist, then it will return 0
if(hideInstructions) {
// we've must have run at least once before and written "hideInstructions"
// restoreGame will read in the rest of the saved values:
restoreGame();
} else {
// assume first run
[savedData setInteger:1 forKey:@"hideInstructions"];
showInstructions();
}

openFrameworks supports an exit() method which gets called dutifully on the iPhone when the application will quit. This is a fine place to write out data to the userDefaults. The challenge as a programmer will be to determine the appropriate data to save and restore. In my simple game, I needed to save the game state for score and time, but also the position and basic state of the widgets on screen. With a larger game I’d look into writing methods into my objects cough up their own important data and then request it when the app is exiting. Keep in mind that there is a narrow window of time that the iPhone OS provides between receiving a signal to quit and when it will forcefully quit your app (like a few seconds) so saving data needs to happen quickly.

This method is purposefully rudimentary, but I think it works well for this particular use.

Portfolio Redesign Wireframes

Patrick Grizzard — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:49:32 +0000

I’m getting ready to start redesigning my web site, particularly with attention to the portfolio section. These are the wireframes for the landing page and the detail page. © Griz for Gneumatic, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

coda

Robert Carlsen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:28:52 +0000

i recently switched to Coda for web development. now, i don’t do much web dev any longer…mostly for myself (as evidenced my this latest overhaul of robertcarlsen.net – which amounts to theme hacking, really). i never had a problem with tabbing through several programs to get the job done, but i like Panic’s style.

the interface is clean and with keyboard shortcuts for each of the view modes. i do so wish for more info in the files panel….i’m used to comparing modification times and the sync features of full-fledged FTP clients.

anyway, it’s good software – and i’ve come to really appreciate good software lately after writing a lot of bad software myself.

Formscreen_videoclip

Minsoo Lee — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:22:55 +0000

Formscreen Installation from Minsoo Lee on Vimeo.

working with Youngsang Cho

tdat recording

Lee Sean Huang — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:21:37 +0000

Above: From the recording session of tdat by Joe Mariglio. Photo by Tedbot. BTW, that’s me in the lower-right.

The data and tension, tdat for short, is a family of vocal systems music compositions. All of them involve more than two streams of simultaneous text. They are a bit like games.

From Joe’s blog:

we recorded the evening of 25.5.09, after dinner and wine. we improvised mic stands from spring clamps and pop filters from spandex. we hung a condenser from the light fixture. it was good fun.

Listen to tdat: the recording

Hepnova’s Nicholas DiBiase @ Ignite Phoenix

Lee Sean Huang — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:01:32 +0000

Photo by Poppa-D’s Evil Alter Ego

Hepnova’s Nicholas DiBiase mentioned in the Phoenix New Times for his Ignite talk on Food Security.

Video of Nicholas’ Ignite talk coming soon! Stay tuned at the Ignite Phoenix website.

Photo by azchrislee

Nielson Says: Americans Watching More TV Than Ever; Web and Mobile Video Up too

Shawn Van Every — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:34:14 +0000

While I expect Nielson to say that, what I didn’t expect was that they would show mobile viewing on par with internet viewing. That is certainly suspect and looking a bit more closely at their charts it makes more sense.

The top chart indicates that people watch as much on their mobile phones as they do on their computers. The second chart puts this in context, the number of internet users watching video is 131,102,000 and the number watching mobile video 13,419,000, 1/10th of the number. Taken across all of those users, the average monthly video viewing time on the internet is only 3 hours while the mobile user are up to around 3 1/2 hours.

This seems pretty out of whack but then again, the top/first 10% internet viewers are probably watching 10 times that amount (I know I am with NetFlix, Hulu, BitTorrent, YouTube and the like), it seems out of whack because you are only seeing the power users on the mobile phone accessing video while you are seeing broad viewership on the internet.

Consider it this way:

Internet: 131,102,000 users x 3 hours = 393,306,000 (almost 400 million hours)
Mobile: 13,419,000 users x 3.5 hours = 46,966,500 (approximately 47 million hours)
(mobile stills seems a bit over reported but taking into account the numbers they are talking about, it seems more likely)

update and migration

Robert Carlsen — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:26:51 +0000

i’ve updated the site’s design and will be migrating it to a new server over the next couple of days. in the meantime, please forgive any oddities (but feel free to let me know about them – i’m currently dealing with the code examples formatting right now).

also, all the old permalinks are dead and i need to fix that.

Color Relationships

Patrick Grizzard — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:56:58 +0000

PANTONE 386 C recreated in RGB color mode. I think it should be slightly greener: Albers-style juxtapositions of colored squares. In this first one I varied brightness in steps of 20: Brightness varied in steps of 40: Saturation varied in steps of 20: And, finally, saturation varied in steps of 40: And, finally, here is my color palette composition. I [...]

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