Something is missing

Now and Then

ActionScript was introduced with the release of Flash 4 back in 1999. In my never-ending naïveté I assumed it should be pretty mature by now. Almost a decade should be enough for that, shouldn't it? Obviously that isn't the case - otherwise there wouldn't anything to rant about. ;)

I started with ActionScript3 (Flash9+) a few weeks ago. It's supposed to be so much better than ActionScript2. There wasn't much of a reason to not use the latest version; given that about 90% of the users use the latest version of Flash. The remaining 10% quickly fade away if you consider things like the lifespan of small web games (a couple of years easily) and the time it takes to get things rolling for real. A quick look at AS2 was actually enough to discard it completely; it's ugly.

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Slashdot's Garbled Unicode

It's simple; put some special characters into the very first post and verify it. Re-check after database rollbacks. Amazingly easy, isn't it?

Despite that some websites completely fail in that area. The most popular among them is probably Slashdot. The eye-catcher on the right shows the text as entered in the text area and how garbled it's spit out at the end. It doesn't have to be this way.

We aren't living in the 90ies anymore. This isn't a cutting the edge issue. It really isn't.

Recently I've hit upon how to express something that I've learned and worked with over many years: standardization is a bad goal. I know that standardization is something that management, both in software development and out, loves to focus on and push. However, I've often seen it cause more harm than good. There is a much better way to phrase the goal, with "standardization" taking it's proper, subservient role.

The key here is the one word - "goal". Standards themselves are not inherently negative. It is when perspective is lost and they become the goal itself instead of simply a means to a goal that the damage is done. A perfect example of this is military underwear.

For example, in the Eighties, the US Army had come to a realization that much of its purchasing standardization had come to be getting in the way of achieving the mission, and made efforts to reform it. Standard issue underwear were just one example. In order to try to gain consistent quality, specifications for requirements of underwear had been made. Pages upon pages of military specs covered them (tens or hundreds of pages, or perhaps more). However instead of the desired effect of quality and efficiency, over the years these military underwear specs had ended up locking things in to the state of the art from decades long past, pushing up prices and limiting supply. The process was redone with a simple focus on the actual goals and not only did the quality of the 'equipment' supplied to the troops go up, but the price came down.

When it comes to software development, most often there is an unstated goal hiding behind the calls for standardization. The true goal is not really standardization at all, but instead I believe it is most often interoperability. When a piece of software has a "standard" interface to meet (e.g. RFC 821) the goal is that different pieces of software running on different types of computers altogether can talk to each other, aka "interoperate".

Another reason to standardize things in software development is to allow for people new to a project or team to get up to speed quicker and be able to contribute sooner. I would argue that this, too, falls under the more general goal of achieving interoperability, but on a personnel level.

Of course one of the more recognized problems "standardizing" things causes is in limiting the effectiveness of developers. But there is another often overlooked issue: monoculture (and specifically software monoculture). If all developers are on a single version of a single operating system, then chances of code problems going undetected increases. Even moving to a new version of the same operating system can expose latent bugs. Time and again I've seen the quality of a project go up with an increase in variety of developer platforms and tools employed.

Monoculture often infects software development in the name of standardization. When a build system needs to pull code from several sub-projects and put them together, all of the sub-projects need to be able to play nice with the build system. Often management might try to guarantee this by declaring a requirement that all developers "standardize" on a single programming language and a single IDE tool on a single OS platform. Yes, this will reduce problems with setting up the builds, but at what cost? This approach can definitely be called the tail wagging the dog.

The focus needs to shift off of standardization and move to interoperability instead. One should leave the choice of language up to what is most appropriate for the project, based on common factors including target platform, delivery, maintenance, etc. The tool should be left to what allows individual developers to be most productive on whichever projects they get assigned to and may be different from developer to developer (and of course may change even during the course of a single project). Finally, a build system should be chosen to get projects built and delivered as needed. In all of this the requirement for interoperability needs to be explicitly stated and stressed.

A good example is with Java development. There are several choices used for development tools, with IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Emacs and NetBeans among the more common. There are also many OS's that are used as developer platforms, with Linux, Windows and OS X among the more common of these. Despite being very different tools, all of these allow a developer to program in Java. Also most support the common build systems of Ant and of GNU Make in addition to their proprietary project format (and where the tools don't, Ant or Make can be made to support them).

So instead of battling over the various trade-offs of *.ipr files versus .project files, the "build people" and the "engineering people" of a group can standardize on either GNU Make or Ant. Then the requirement for developers would merely be that their workflow was compatible with the project build system and leave the choice of specific tool and/or tools up to the needs of individual developers. Even source control can be mix-n-match. Inkscape's official source repository uses Subversion, but some developers use other interoperable (there's that word again) tools such as SVK, git and others.

Similar comparisons can be made for C and C++, and with Inkscape we see quite a bit of it. Emacs, vi, VisualStudio, Anjuta, Eclipse, Kdevelop, vim, gvim and more have all been seen in use by different contributors. Developers don't don't have to use a standard IDE, but they do use interoperable IDEs and workflows.

To sum up, don't be foolish; clarify your actual goals. As Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

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Thanks giving trip- visiting Gwen and Pat 3, originally uploaded by deerfang.

This is Gwen Widmer, Patrick Clancy, me, and . I studies with Pat at Kansas City Art Institute for undergrad and worked with Pat and Gwen on some early startups. You guys already know the connection with Lu.

I should write a book about all the great people I have considered mentors (and friends) in the past. I think post iSummit, I will take a few days off to plan out the next 10 years or so

How timely stories found on the mental_floss blog can be! It was only a week ago that I wrote about some of the exciting applications the concept of evolution can have in computing. Around the same time, I found a story about a TED Talk called Simulating Humans.

If you didn't see the movie on that page yet, take a few minutes to watch it in its entirety. It's both amazing and amusing to see how researchers have used evolution to teach a stick man how to react to various stimulus (such as being pushed over).

The first results show the stick man learning to walk, and the first attempts are just plain hilarious. Many face plants ensue. But after several generations, things start to improve, and finally the stick man can walk in a straight line, more or less like you and I.

Next, the stick man was shown to wobble and brace himself for a hard landing after being pushed from the side. It was amazing how natural it looked. I don't think it would be possible to spend enough time animating this behaviour by hand and have it look as real, though perhaps a pricey motion capture system could do the trick.

Finally, on a whim, they decided to see how well their technology would work for a famous stunt that has James Bond jump off a dam and get caught by a bungee on the way down. The animated version performed very well! This means that dangerous and expensive stunts may be replaced by animations that look just as natural.

This kind of technology could be applied to everything from big film productions to video games to medical simulation. That last one piqued my interest. Apparently one of the upcoming projects was to give software to surgeons who could then using the walking stick man to predict the outcome of surgery performed on, say, children with cerebral palsy.

If there was ever a doubt that computer science and engineering are exciting career choices, let the recently released hit animated picture Wall-E change your mind. What most people see when they watch this movie is a touching love story from an unexpected source. Sure, I saw this too, but I also saw some of the many reasons it would be really cool to work in the computer animation industry!

Read the rest of this story at the Nerd Girls blog!

Do you think that brains are beautiful? Geek is chic? Smart is sexy? Then run, don't walk, over to the Nerd Girls website now! With these beliefs in mind, the Nerd Girls mission is to "encourage other girls to change their world through Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, while embracing their feminine power." Now you can join the movement, too!

The Nerd Girls website just launched today, and there was supposed to be a segment about it on the Today Show (I'll hopefully find it online later, since I don't have cable). If you look around, you might find something interesting on the blog section of the site.

Did you see it?

Yup, one of the bloggers is yours truly! I'll be posting one or two stories like those you find here every week. I'll also point you to those stories from this blog so you'll always know when they show up.

While you're there, you may as well also sign up for the forums, where you'll undoubtedly be able to connect with other awesome girls from around the world.

Over at Fabricatorz we launched the Cantocore.com website and are continuing to push on raising funds to fund selected artists projects. If you are in SF, we invite you to come to the Home Concert Preview next WED from 7-9. Tickets to the event are $50 and may be purchased at the door, or preferably, through paypal or contact jhoover.charles@gmail.com to process payment.

NOTE: If there is some other contribution to Cantocore by writing about the shows, contributing to the blog, helping record the event, please contact me to discuss bypassing ticket price.

Good friend Christopher Willits will be performing along with Chinese musician Ma Jie“>Ma Jie. Wine and snacks will be served as well! From the RSVP list it will be a great mix of interesting folks from the area. We have a cap of 70 people, so please do RSVP today. More about the launch, project, and Cantocore.com Home Concert Preview:

Hi all, welcome to a new project which is a collaboration between Fabricatorz and Garage Biennale. Here are two levels of scale about the project:

“Art show in Guangzhou, China in September 2008 and then in San Francisco November 2008.”

And, a few more sentences…

“Garage Biennale and the Fabricatorz are bringing you Cantocore, a research project investigating contemporary art and culture between Canton (Guangdong) and cities around the world. The initial focus is a contemporary art exhibition with two versions of the same show in San Francisco and Guangzhou, China.”

There is a solid line-up of artists working on projects at present for both shows with the main concept being the ideas of import and export where projects in both locations are the same, but different versions.

Lu re-blogged the Cantocore Home Concert Preview we are doing next WED in SF, and so, I’m pushing out this post about the Cantocore project which is a contemporary art show that Lu, myself and Justin Hoover are pushing out this early September and November. The first instance of Cantocore is to generate some funds to help in production of the artwork. No one is getting paid from the raising of monies to support art production, so we are putting on a concert to preview the artwork for the show.

Lu wrote about here:

What it will take to make an art show. You will need three things: Artists, Space and Money! Sometimes these three things don’t come so easy, don’t they?

These are the things we are pushing right now for Cantocore exhibition, a show in both Guangzhou China and San Francisco this fall. There is a home concert preview party coming Wednesday 7/23 to fund the production of the shows. I am not a very good sales woman, but really want to make this one works!

Visit Cantocore site for information about the show, artists, and detail about the preview concert. Performing musicians for the the preview concert are Ma Jie and Christopher Willits.

And then there is a follow-up post on the Cantocore website:

Cantocore Home Concert Preview is coming up next Wednesday July 23rd, 7-9 PM in San Francisco. Right now our RSVP deadline for this event is extended to Monday, July 21st. And tickets are on sale right now for $50 USD! All money goes to the production of the Cantocore exhibition in Guangzhou and San Francisco. And, all contributions will be rewarded with praise, promotion in printed materials and on this website.

This event is a preview of the coming exhibitions, and also a home concert featuring Chinese traditional instrument musician Ma Jie and electronic musician Christopher Willits.

To reserve your tickets please do one of the following:

Call Justin at 415-425-1647
Email: jhoover.charles@gmail.com
Or use Paypal option

We are eager to raise some funds from those interested in the ideas which will gain both a plug on the http://cantocore.com website and then in our printed material. Feel free to ask questions here on this blog post publicly, or send us email about this.

Please participate in this project and if in SF, RSVP by next MONDAY, July 21 to come to the Cantocore Home Concert Preview.

Loic Lemur came over to CC yesterday and we shot fun video about Seesmic adding CC licensing. Loic sat on Joi’s fixie from Mission Bicycle and I sat on my wife’s cruiser for this one:

The interface looks super-awesome. Great jobs guys and thanks for supporting the commons!

Loic and I at CC

From Joi’s site…I need to get one of those Yukata’s to wear around the house. I have some awesome shoes that Lu’s mom got me from Beijing (they look like stereotypical kung-fu shoe no joke):

News of Seesmic + CC startles me at 5AM

just a quick note. my mate mdious now has a blog!!!

http://mdious.wordpress.com/

that is all.

I have cool wife! Check out this documentation of her project on display now at McBean Gallery at SFAI in recently sunny San Francisco. The show is totally free and interesting.

Adam has helped me document the installation in the Walter & McBean Galleries. This is part of the exhibition “We Remember the Sun”, on view from now till Sept 19th. Documentation video-taped by Adam Barczak.

This documentation footage is quite great and feels like some type of 3d model rendering or something. Speaking of which my cousin, Brad Phillips, is here this week working on pulling together his resume, doing some 3d modeling of upcoming projects, and generally hanging out. Great to have him here!

All About Eve on IMDb

Synopsis: Anne Baxter looks up to Bette Davis just oh so much!

Pros: The opening monologue was a hoot, and boy, were the ladies catty and the men cunning.

Cons: I had to watch it in two parts since the month of July has been so ridiculously busy.

Verdict: Not bad.  Not bad at all.

for this tutorial you need a recent build of inkscape
here is the final svg file : http://pastebin.com/f1ff1cae6

open up inkscape and click on the pencil or pen tools. Select the new spiro mode

notice the shape setting? this applies a pattern along path to match a brush like effect rather than just a solid width path.

have a scribble with the rough shape you want to accomplish

let go and checkout your awesomely smooth shape .. its probably not exactly what you want yet.. but we’ll fix that later.

to see what inkscape has done for you, checkout the path effects dialog fond in the path > path effects menu.

if you have your path selected with the node tool, you can edit your pattern along path on-canvas. just click the show “next path effect parameter for editing” (we should rename that button). Anyway, have a play with the default.

If you want to try a brush like effect, just create a star with the star tool, convert to shape (ctrl+shift+c) and delete a few middle nodes (ctrl+delete) to get a similar shape to what you see here.

All done!
now you can fill and stoke your new path effect like it was a normal shape. have fun!

someday .. i dont know when. 2geom will probably support spiro splines. and someday (hopefully soon) this means native spiro drawing with a spiro tool rather than this path effect hack we’ve got going (notice the red original path ?) eww .

While I perused some of the many stories and emails I have saved for writing about later, I noticed a theme popping up in a good number of them. It seems that educators are taking advantage of the hold video games have on young people these days by pulling some pretty impressive head fakes with them. Let's see what kids (and adults) are learning while playing.

I came across a list of 25 educational simulators and games on a distance learning website. It reminded me, first and foremost, of some of the classics I used to play as a kid. Take, for instance, Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I used to play the originals for hours on end (and with only the most basic of graphics and controls, too!). The same list goes on to suggest that Age of Empires will help you learn history, for example, and Railroad Tycoon will teach business skills. I was a bit sceptical about these choices at first, but after thinking about it, I guess I can see where they're coming from. Through the simulations involved, you would get a bit of a sense in how people used to live or what works in the business world, even if the actual details aren't entirely accurate.

My next example takes us away from traditional games to those you might call "edutainment".
[Immune Attack is] an educational video game that introduces basic concepts of human immunology to high school and entry-level college students. Designed as a supplemental learning tool, Immune Attack aims to excite students about the subject, while also illuminating general principles and detailed concepts of immunology.The educational nature of this game is much less subtle than it is with games like Age of Empires. To master the game, students must learn about how the immune system works, plain and simple. It's also free, which is a whole lot cheaper than setting up complex labs to learn similar concepts (and it also means you can download it and try it for yourself!). It seems to be a successful concept; one commenter mused that "I wish we had had games like this when I was flunking advanced biology in 1969!"

In a news article about how technology is reshaping the face of classrooms in the States, 11-year-old Jemella Chambers talks about her experience with math software that has students compete against each other for the highest score by solving the most math equations. She's quoted as saying "This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game." The software is called FASTT Math and claims to "automatically differentiates instruction based on each student’s individual fluency levels in customized,10-minute daily sessions." Reminds me of the Train Your Brain activity that gets you to fill in the sign for a simple equation as fast as you can. Fun because you want to beat your previous time, and educational because you get really good at fast mental math.

As an added bonus, games seem to help bring out creativity in some students, according to a study described in this article. To quote, "in real-life terms, the study appears to indicate that after playing the game, happy or sad people are most creative, while angry or relaxed people are not." Perhaps there is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone here.

While relying on video games (or even computers in general) to replace all traditional forms of education doesn't sound like a very good idea, the power to engage students' interest cannot be ignored. Educational games can serve a very beneficial supplementary role in the classroom, and their design could be an interesting research topic for the computer scientist interested in software engineering or human computer interaction.

I use Xine to watch DVDs. In the past I’ve encountered “full screen” (4:3) DVDs that carried a wide-screen (16:9) image. This means there were black bars on the top and bottom of the video frame. When watching this sort of video on a 16:9 monitor, you end up with a full border of black surrounding the image. I have encountered this much more frequently when recording standard definition TV that contains wide-screen video. For example, many music videos on MTV have a wide aspect, but are displayed with top/bottom bars in the 4:3 standard definition frame:

Displayed on a 16:9 monitor, in Xine:

In MythTV, there is a “zoom” function that zooms the video, matching the width of the frame to the width of the display. This ends up cropping the top and bottom black bars, allowing the zoom to fit to the width of the frame:

I have been unable to find such a feature in either Xine or MPlayer. A weekend ago I ran into another DVD doing the wide-screen-in-4:3 trick, and wrote a patch to Xine to create a zoom post-processing filter. Now I can start Xine like this:

xine --disable-post --post zoom path/to/video

And Ctrl-Alt-Shift-P will let me enable-disable post processing. In my case, I’ll be mapping the VPProcessEnable to the same lirc button I use for zooming in MythTV.

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Was behind google streetview prius today…, originally uploaded by rejon.

Ok, only drove behind it for like 2 minutes, but I got a shot from my phone!

I suppose you've all heard about Spore by now. Many of you have probably already tried out the Creature Creator, too, since the full game isn't available yet. I haven't download it yet, and will probably just wait until I can get the full deal. There are also many other related projects to play with while we wait.

And if you don't know what's Spore's all about yet, the important piece of info is this: with Spore, you can "EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization."

Sounds pretty cool. But while Will Wright had the insight and ability to turn evolution into a compelling video game, there are many more applications of the concept. Check out this article written by a friend and fellow Carleton U alumni, Elan Dubfrofsky. It's called The Ultimate Problemsolver: Computer + Evolution = Genius, and includes all kinds of interesting uses of evolution.

Take, for instance, the travelling salesman problem. It turns out it's not so easy to automatically figure out how to travel to an arbitrary number of cities, only once each except for a return home, in the shortest possible way. In fact, this problem is classified as NP-hard, and if the number of cities is large enough, only approximate solutions can be computed in any reasonable amount of time. But not to worry - by starting with some random solutions, mutating and recombining them, and finally filtering out the best solutions so far, we can eventually come up with a pretty darned good approximation of the best answer. We just need to give this process enough time. Ah, the beauty of evolution!

Another example that Elan points out is the design of an antenna for NASA, developed in 2006. Many very strange looking devices were suggested through this process of evolution, but once it was all said and done, the winning design really was the most fit for the job, consuming only a small amount of power and being easy to produce.

I've even talked about evolutionary techniques earlier in this post. After reading Elan's article, you might enjoy the discussion about the state of artificial intelligence and the evolution of a virtual checkers player. Be sure to read through the comments as well!

So the next time you are working on an optimization problem, ask yourself if you might be able to evolve a good solution rather than trial-and-error your own. Or just wait for Spore and watch evolution in action while creating some silly looking creatures on the side.

I’m stoked about the latest OpenMoko release and looking forward to getting my hands on the latest freerunner released last week. Over on the CC blog, Tim “thwang-roflcon” Hwang, blogged about the effects of releasing the OpenMoko case plans under CC BY-SA license. Enjoy!

Great news coming out recently that our good friends over at the awesome open source mobile phone project OpenMoko have been seeing rapid success with releasing their CAD design files for the FreeRunner phone under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Their open design approach has spurred adoption, becoming the basis for the Dash Express car navigation device, and a popular platform for other projects such as the Debian-based WEphone. It’s gaining a lot of traction, and it looks like we’ll be able to look forward to even more successes on the open design front in the near future. Might have to pick one up for myself…

This follows in the line of similar recent adoption successes seen by other businesses taking the strategy of making their CAD files open to the public like the award-winning OpenBook project that makes designs for their laptop available for anyone to use. We’re hoping that these examples set the stage for companies to take up the business opportunities available in CCing their product schematics.

Geez, how did I not blog this yet! We released the CC Metrics Project this week to open up the data so that anyone can help figure out how many CC licensed pieces of media are out in the world. CC has put a new number at 130 million, but I personally, as in a personal capacity, think this number is very very low! If Flickr has 70 Million CC licensed photos, then combine the rest of the cc licensed objects in the web, is the lower bound really only 130 million items?

Please help CC figure out a more accurate number please! There are tools, scrubbed apache logs, and more to help sort things out. If you don’t have time to help with this project, then please write a story about this project, shoot me an email for an interview, or help by blogging more about this project.

CC BizDev Intern Tim “thwang” Hwang, Mr FabBitches himself, aka Lucas Barton (The Power Glove, its so badddd), wrote on the CC blog about this:

Tim Hwang, Business Development Intern here. Along with Jon Phillips and many others, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and excited to announce today that we’ve officially launched the Creative Commons Metrics Project!

Recently, there’s been a growing academic interest in understanding how CC adoption is changing the creative landscape worldwide. Metrics is a wiki-project designed to bring together existing efforts and encourage collaboration on this emerging field of research.

You can read more details about the project on our Press Releases page, and can visit the project directly to browse what we’ve gathered so far (and contribute!).

(image: Giorgos Cheliotis’ chart of global CC adoption and permissiveness — learn more about his amazing work at the Participatory Media Lab)

Here is the blog post draft I never released from the CC blog since I went on vacation to Yosemite with my parents on a fake vacation last 6 days:

We are on a roll with releases! Last week we successfully launched the Case Studies project which “explores and adds noteworthy global Creative Commons stories” (translation: an open wiki-based way for anyone to add and edit case studies about Creative Commons integration). This week, we are releasing the Metrics project.

Often, businesses, press, and people ask us CC folk, “How many CC licensed objects are there out there there?” Our response in the past varied in some accounts and then the solution struck us: release privacy scrubbed apache logs free of copyright, any tools we have used to scrape the web or find linkbacks from Google and Yahoo, and encourage people who are smarter than us (researchers and scholars around the world), to do research on this data to help everyone accurately understand how Creative Commons licensing is spreading globally.

Work on this project has been inspired by the great work by Giorgos Cheliotos and the Participatory Media Lab in Singapore.

A chart showing latest CC license usage we can stand by comfortably

So, if you look at the project website, you see information useful for getting, processing and visualizing CC license usage globally.

Ok, so I trailed off on finishing that post. If this interests you please do join CC communication channels and help CC make better estimates and research about usage that will help all.

QR code for this URL

Just a few hours ago Google announced the latest feature of their chart API: QR Codes. I always thought that it might be cool to have some QR image of the current URL on my website. So, if someone happens to read one of my articles over at some internet café or at a friend's machine, a QR code might be handy for "bookmarking".

Writing a QR encoder with PHP didn't look like much fun though. And then there is the processing overhead, which can be addressed with caching, but that only means more work. There is also that random string DoS attack vector. Far too much hassle, really. But if Google takes care of all that, it's a piece of cake.

That's why I wrote a little test module for Drupal. It lacks width/height options, but apart from that it's fully functional (as far as I can tell).

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