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Notes
Throughout our tour, Stephanie and I have been capturing some of our sights through photography that can be processed into three-dimensional panorama scenes. The following are some of our favorites:
Nordkennemerland dunes near Den Helder, Holland. Alexanderplatz and the Hauptbahnhof (central train station) in Berlin, Germany. Dresden cityscape from the Augustusbruecke over the Elbe River. City wall around Luxembourg. Monk statue outside a village along the Alsatian Wine Route. Ruins of Castle Ortenbourg. Vineyard on the Schlossberg in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
Youth hostel at Schlossli Altenburg in Brugg, Switzerland. Sunset along the Swiss National Cycling Route #8 in Heimberg, Switzerland. Alpine perspective outside of the town of Stechelberg at the end of the Lauterbrunnen Valley. From the panorama path on Schynige Platte near Interlaken, Switzerland. Near Oberberghorn along Schynige Platte.A few months back, I started learning to program with Flash. I was excited about the work and directions of my friend and associate Tom Saunders, and I wanted to engage with some of the questions of user interface design and data representation that had long inspired me. The core language of Flash -- ActionScript -- has a common lineage with JavaScript, a language I learned to love in 2006. One of my first Flash programs was a hacked-together proof-of-concept for accessing Drupal services through Flash remoting/AMFPHP. That was November 2007. Four months yielded a great deal of productivity for the Drupal/Flash project: internal, the introductory talk at Drupal Day, Andrew Haeg, soon a new site for The Hobo Nephews of Uncle Frank band, as well as some very interesting r&d from Modern Carpentry. Today I am very pleased to post the first of a new set of iterations for arithmetric.
Google adds street-view of Minneapolis and several other cities; evidence it's from before August 2007.
simcity source code is open source and named metropolis (read). discussion from don hopkins, the developer of the unix and OLPC ports. download the source here.
origins of idioteque: radiohead samples from 'mild und leise' (listen), the first work of computer-generated music pioneer paul lansky.
dryad: stanford project for creating better 3d models of trees.
drupal day: learn how to build a website for your organization, and network with others in the twin cities technology community. hosted by twin cities open circuit.
videotrace: prototype software for creating 3d models from videos
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all work on this site by joe turgeon is licensed under a creative commons attribution license.
camping in the Netherlands
For the past month, Stephanie and I have been travelling by bicycle through the Netherlands. Our journey began in Amsterdam. We rode west to the coast and followed it north through the dunes, stopped in Alkmaar, and continued north to Den Helder and Texel island.
using flash with drupal
welcome to a new arithmetric.
if you have adobe flash player installed, you should be reading this post in a flash-based interface. some directions for use: the green boxes on the left side represent my images, the red boxes at the bottom are my articles, and the blue boxes on the right side are notes. if you'd prefer the html version of the site, please navigate here.
this is the result of some recent work with drupal services, a module that provides remote access to the drupal subsystem, and with amfphp, an open-source php-based implementation of adobe's action message format. amf is the native communication protocol of adobe flash, flex, and air. its specification was opened recently by adobe.
3dhistogram.com
thirdavedesign's 3d histogram project is released.
3dhistogram.com is an open-source web application for producing and modeling a three-dimensional color histogram from a supplied image. this tool was developed to help people visualize, understand, and make better use of color in their endeavors whatever they might be.
experiments with color visualization
for a long time the world looked as it looked. if you saw a green leaf turned yellow, you might wonder how it happened. you might look at a lake, see it blinding and jagged against the afternoon sun and wind, see it mellow and transparent in the evening, and then nearly invisible between shimmers of moon light. and you might think about reflection and refraction, light and color, photosensitivity and the eye's rods and cones.
then came technologies to record and represent the world as we see it. the photograph shows a scene that happened, that expired a frame of film with a half second of light, that is printed anew with another flare of light. television and the video tape sequence multiple images from various perspectives, but they also mark the beginning of turning the scene into data, sampled, and translated for radio, magnetic, or optical media.
the digital advance carries this further by providing a universally transferable medium for recording, sharing, and representing the recorded world. this form of data also proves to be a malleable medium, and opens new ground for the deconstruction, resampling, and reuse of creative material.
with tom saunders, i am experimenting with the analysis and visualization of colors from an image. some samples are above. we expect to release our project soon.
what you can do with a meraki
meraki is building wireless networking hardware that aims 'to bring internet access to the next billion people.' their products (including the meraki mini for $49, pictured) are wireless router/repeaters with applicious design. a meraki can be used to create a public or private wireless access point from an ethernet connection (from a cable/dsl modem) or from another wireless network. merakis are designed to create mesh networks, meaning that meraki devices can look for routes to the internet through other merakis in wireless range, rather than each requiring its own direct connection to the internet.
preparing video for the web
embedding video on the web can be a tricky endeavor. ultimately its success depends on the accessibility of the video to most users. in part this depends on circumstances beyond the control of the web designer, such as the kind of software or connection the site's users will have. however, web designers can anticipate these factors and prepare video that works for the most prevalent configurations.
