Building and City Transformations

An amazing view of relationships between shapes, buildings, design ideas and their transformations.


Pascal Mueller, along with collaboratoters Peter Wonka, Simon Haegler, Andreas Ulmer and Luc Van Gool, is responsible.

Checkout their Procedural Pompeii Reconstruction

Current TV :: Viewer Created Content

Current TV's web site has a section on producer training. Cool.

• Production Tips
• Storytelling :: help from Ira Glass, Xeni Jardin, Sarah Vowell, Orville Schell, Robert Redford and more
• Journalism :: help from Sean Penn
• Broadband
• Gear Selection
• Shooting
• Editing

Its not enough to have an interesting life.
You have to have interesting things to say.
--Sarah Vowell

My advice? Start with Sean Penn. Its Penn's focus is more on people who want to break a story on pesticides in Mexico than people who want to produce next generation kayaking videos, but he captures the zeitgeist. I stumbled into this after seeing the Ira Glass's presentation on story telling. Anyone who needs to communicate can benefit from this material on storytelling. Don't miss Sarah Vowell (see above) who nails the importance of editing, not the technique, but the value, the need for obsession.

Dive Deeper
Links are provided to a number of resources I did not even know I was looking for.

Directions for the net :: first pass -- end user experience

In the rush of new tools, services, etc. for building and distributing content on the net (cellular, wifi, Internet, etc), its easy to miss some broad trends.
The end user is not an end user -- computing and communications resources get embedded everywhere. Ubiquitous computing. Concrete walls get smart.
A web page is not a web page -- browsers become tools for distributing loosely coupled apps which play the role of minimalist operating systems as well as providing end user functionality.
A computer is not a computer -- the computer really is the network.
The network is not a network -- it may be better to forget all about computers/networks and think about human communication. The net becomes a way to augment human communication and perseption. Its easy to see how it is augmenting vision, hearing, and speech, but surface computing is moving in a tactile direction (think iPhone) and body language is even finding enhancement (think Wii). Some are experimenting with olfactory communication as well.

Outsourcing Collaborative Tools

A group at UC Berkeley is working to align campus wide approaches to technical infrastructure to support education and research. They have published a report summarizing their findings in the "...areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally." They focused on offerings from Google and Microsoft, but mention other companies.

They did not investigate a variety of other collaborative tools, but mentioned them. (See below). This is slightly surprising, since wikis, for example have been in use in many universities for around 10 years and are undoubtedly used by the majority of under-graduates.

• Collaborative Authoring (e.g., Google Docs, 37signals Writeboard)
• Discussion forums
• Instant messaging
• Knowledge bases
• "Live" collaboration tools (e.g., electronic whiteboards, screen sharing tools such as
• TeamSpot)
• News Aggregators/Feed Readers
• Personal Portals (e.g., UPortal/NetVibes)
• Photo Sharing (e.g., Flickr)
• Podcasting (e.g., iTunesU)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us)
• Social Networking (e.g., FaceBook, MySpace)
• Surveys/Quizzes/Polls (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang)
• Video Sharing (e.g., YouTube)
• Web/video conferencing (e.g., WebEx)
• Weblogging ("blogging") tools
• Wikis

the media reloaded

If:book has interesting coveerage of changes in the nature of 'the media' as all kinds of new players begin directing traffic, filtering, etc.

Qemu, VMware, & Emulation

Doug Schaefer at QNX has an interesting post on Qemu
"... an open source processor emulator that can emulate a number of different processors and peripheral devices, to run a Debian Linux ARM installation."

Qemu can sometimes run faster than the ARM it is emulating! Not magic at all when you think about it a bit, but cool for sure.

More typically my goals are the opposite: I like VMwar's ability to run a configured os + software unchanged. Slow is just fine. Even if scaling after development making development smooth and hiccup free is wonderful. Really it is a requirement. Coding by convention (ala Ruby on Rails (RoR)) solves many problems. But its not appropriate for all contexts and when it is not, VMware is one approach that may help.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)

Got it!

If you are not familiar with the offering, check this out.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Who needs it?

Lets say you are developing a custom content management system for a photo editor. Raw images from today's cameras run about 5 - 15 megs. Lets plan ahead and assume 25 megs so we get an even 40 per gig. It would be easy to shoot 400 gigs of photos in a year or two & the required disk drive would cost $250 & then you would need reduncancy and backup & all of a sudden $1,000 in fixed costs plus co-hosting fee. It adds up. Finally you could be sure that your bargan basement ISP would not be able to restore your backups when you really needed them any way.

Enter the cloud

400 gigs of storage will cost $40 per month.
Working with 10 images per hour, 10 hours a day would require about 2.5 gigs of traffic at $ .20 each. Fifty cents. $15/month.

Plus: No IT department

USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions

USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions: "The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved it's true: The brain's wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making.

A brain-imaging study reported in the current Science examines 'framing,' a hot topic among psychologists, economists and political hucksters.

Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London."

...
The brain images revealed the amygdala, a neural region that processes strong negative emotions such as fear, fired up vigorously in response to each two-second (on average) gambling decision. Where people resisted the framing effect, a brain region connected to positive emotions such as empathy, and another that activates whenever people face choices, lit up as well, seeming to duke it out over the decision.

Dance Machine

The dude with the pink shirt reminds me I need some new shoes.

How I Became a Basketball Fan

Northwest Florida Daily News: NBA star Yao Ming swears off shark's fin soup in wildlife protection campaign: "BEIJING (AP) - NBA star Yao Ming pledged Wednesday to give up eating shark's fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, as he joined a campaign to promote wildlife protection.

'Endangered species are our friends,' Yao said at a news conference organized by the London-based conservation group WildAid.

The group said China is the world's biggest importer of shark's fins, which conservationists say are cut from sharks that are thrown back into the ocean to die.

'As the human population increases, many wildlife species are decreasing, and the primary reason is that humans fail to treat animals as friends,' said Yao, who played for the Shanghai Sharks basketball team before moving to the Houston Rockets."

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact: "So far, we've been able to harvest only a tiny fraction of geothermal energy resources, taking advantage of places where local geology brings hot water and steam near the surface, such as in Iceland or California, where such phenomena have long been used to produce electricity. But new oil-field stimulation technology, developed for extracting oil from sources such as shale, makes it possible to harvest much more of this energy by allowing engineers to create artificial geothermal reservoirs many kilometers underground."

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box: "Continuous Integration, Source Control, a Wiki and a Bug-Tracker are all cornerstones of a functioning Agile development project. But if you've not configured them all before, it can be a bit tricky - and you might miss some of the tight integration that makes them really useful."

Another example that thought works.

Writely

I tried this 10 months ago & did not find it useful, but it was promsing.
Looks pretty cool now.

paul graham railsconf 2006

the power of the marginal
california has an advantage with its climate because there is more marginal space
the only business woz and jobs had was building blue boxes --- a business with the rare characteristics of being both illegal and unprofitable
evaluating a field :: what are its tests like? how hard are they to hack?
look for overlap between leaders and practitioners
how much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders
where the insiders are corrupt, don't worry
if it is corrupt enough, the test is an anti-test

"even a dumb man is considered wise if he remains silent" old testament
may have worked for bronze age goat herders in palestine

if you want to score big, focus on the margin of the margin

Martin Fowler at RailsConf 2006

opinionated :: focus on limited problem space

drive toward simplicity :: facilitated by focus

conversational approach :: move developers from closet to customer

• often focus can be accelerated by shooting, then aiming. show the customer something -- is this what you want?
• observational approach to requirements -- see what the customer actually does
  

ruby :: not the same level of uniformity as lisp and smalltalk, but provides a better foundation for dealing with computing resources as they lay

post modern computing :: just as buildings composed of modules don't live, software built from a uniform paradigm don't live

• ruby says: dive in a deal with the mess in the world -- be the glue
• ron jefferies pointed out that becasuse it deals with more messy realities of the real world, a payrole system is more complex than an operating system
  

Instrument Apps and Servers

Andrew Wilcox published an interesting article on DeveloperWorks which details the use of the Java 5.0 agent interface combined with aspects to produce an interactive, pure java, profiling tool. The article introduces asm, an interesting byte code manipulation framework, and an eclipse plug-in supporting asm.
Implicitly the article exposes some aspects of the term 'open':

• Wilcox presents code anyone can use
• Asm is open source
• While we can complain that Java is not truly 'open', it is open enough that bytecodes can be manipulated in truly useful ways by independent developers.
• Eclipse is 'open' not just in the sense its source code is open, but in the sense the resulting ecosystem is open to all manor of contributions

Profiling presents a developer's perspective of instrumentation. Runtime monitoring is another. The approach Wilcox outlines suggests an useful path for making applications (clients and servers) somewhat aware of their footprint.

Eclipse :: Suitable for Server-side Development?

For many Java developers, Eclipse is an IDE. Since Eclipse RCP became popular with the release of Eclipse 3.1 last June, many see it as an IDE for RCP.
But the real strengths of Eclipse stem from its design as a tool integration platform. This has both technical and business implications. Consider the Eclipse Apogée project.

• The project's technical architecture requires complex integration of many different technologies. Because Eclipse tooling allows rapid development of tools which can work well together because of the eclipse plug-in architecture, it is possible for the project architects to leverage an amazing range of technology. Check out the project proposal.
  
• The flexible open source license used by Eclipse also allows a wide range of proprietary and open source projects/organizations to plug into the effort. The most recent example is the decision of db40 to join the project to help with persistence.

On a more modest level, products like myeclipseide and Eclipse projects like WTP illustrate use of Eclipse as a server-side tool box. One can simply spend 15 minutes browsing the rich variety of Eclipse projects to see many more examples of the technical and business ecosystem that is emerging.

An examination of the technical archiecture of Apogée is worth while. Products like db40 and Mylar are far beyond the experience or knowledge of most good developers. They provide knowledgeable developers much a much deeper toolset than most opensource projects utilize. For simple projects this can be overkill, but it makes it possible to address a wider range of problems.

Yahoo! :: UI Library

Often linked to their new Design Patterns Library, Yahoo! Released a UI library under bsd licensing today. How does it compare to Prototype?

The Prototype examples win hands down and Rico is over the top. Thanks Sabre!

[Normally I'd post this type of stuff and my earlier post on the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library to Haystack, but I'm trying to illustrate something here: Sabre and Yahoo both think it is a good idea to give this stuff away. And this stuff is core Ajax functionality. Focus.

Design Patters :: Yahoo! 'Patterns'

Yahoo! delivered an a Design Pattern Library under a creative commons license. I have only inspected one 'pattern' so far, but it looks like a good start. Unfortunately, their notion of 'pattern' is shallow, there is no mention of pattern language (although that is sort of what they are providing), so the effect is at least as much a description of modules or components as patterns. This effect is accentuated by their simultaneous release of a code library under a bsd license. Still, overall, the effect will be positive for developers with short term objectives.

SiteMesh :: decorators and composites for site integration

Integration of pages from multiple sites is neither easy nor pretty. As the SiteMesh docs explain:

There are many web application platforms that are in common use, and even more frameworks. Typically, a web-application is built for a specific framework on a specific platform (e.g. using custom JSP tag-libraries on the J2EE platform, a custom Perl collaboration API using CGI, or a pre-written application using PHP). A web-site may usually consist of many web- applications built with a variety of technologies.

The SiteMesh Overview provides a clear visual example of their approach and solution.

Sounds great, looks like I might want to use it, but what are the Ajax issues?

I ran into SiteMesh because of its use on the Grails project, which is a Rails-inspired framework for Java/Groovy.