wonderwhy-er blog

So, three days ago I got an invite to Google+

I already heard about its roll out before, and actually was anticipating when deciding where to upload photos for public sharing (taken by my new Android Phone which is a separate story). Facebook is not public enough, I want to leave my DeviantArt account for Flash stuff mostly etc etc. So I went for Google Picasa app to organize my photos and upload some to Picasa Web Albums. Little bit more about it later.

What Google+ is

In short I would say that Google+ is holy union of  Twitter+Blog+Facebook. Why? There is written much about various feature of Google+ on the wen but I will stop at those who appeal to me:

• Privacy and visibility. Google+ has a built in people grouping called Circles which servers two purposes. Filtering network content by Circles. And filtering visibility of content you publish by Circles who will see this content. Second purpose allows you to both leave personal messages, share things with family, or share with anybody. In this sense it is more or less similar to Facebook. But Google+ has a broader visibility called “Public” which is accessible to whole Internet. And it is a Twitter/Blog like improvement over a Facebook that I always lacked. In these sense while Facebook is walled off and feeds on the web Google+ allows to give back to the web. It is a very significant and key feature to me.
•   Asynchronous relationships. While Facebook allows only friends status, Circles are asynchronous. Someone can add you to their Circle, but you may not add him. What it means? He will “follow” your public posts but will not see posts you made for your circles. So it allows broadcasting relationship. Facebook allows this trough Pages though.
• +1 a Facebook “like” competitor Google rolled out earlier. Now it gains a lot more sense for users to use as it is a fast small sharing of what you liked. So now users have reasons to do it. Now I do, while before I was not doing it.
• Authorship. Google raised a playing field around content author marking. Now recognized authors behind content are shown in Google search results. I think it can have a pretty big consequences for accountability of content. Now you can go and see contents author public account on Google+, potentially see his interests, employers, bias
• HangOut – a much mentioned feature based on a google video plugin. Managed to get a taste of it only yesterday. Some may call it a SkyPe killer but I don’t. It is an up to 10 people video chat app in a browser. My experience with it I could be put in short like “SkyPe made fun”. After it SkyPe feels like a strict, uptight business meeting application. I don’t know what Google did on usability(and I will need to investigate it later) but HangOut feels light, fast, and… fun… It feels like a party at friends place, you just jump in, start discussing, sharing, watching synchronized(rewinding and video itself) youtube video, jump out. Then jump in again. So, HangOut is not a SkyPe killer. They are different. You can’t use HangOut for some things you use SkyPe for and reverse is also true.
• Gorgeous public photo galleries. I did mention it above. Here are some photos taken by my SGS2 android phone. Not big implications with this feature, just best looking galleries I seen so far in social networks. Have a suspicion that it is Microsoft inspired as looks similar to Windows Phone 7 interface. But I guess Microsoft was inspired by some sites too.

I think those are first things that come to mind after using Google+ for few days. I guess you can already see how with “public for web” posts it serves as twitter and blog, while with privacy and Circles it serves as a Facebook.

What Google+ can become

I talked about things on the surface. But some linger in the future or under the surface. It seems to me that with this move Google has chances of making internet truly social in a way Facebook never could  because of its more closed nature. Google+ gives back to the web. Also Google now can use +1 and authorship to effect search results and rankings. Which can solve some of Google search quality problems. I do hope though that they will allow turning +1 effect on and off to get “unbiased” results.

Also trough same +1 Google gets their hands on one of most crucial things for recommendations. Lists of things people like. Now Google can start providing similarity browsing and recommendations on all fronts. I do think that +1 in such context is the most important feature for Google, and us. Its a feedback we are giving to the Google so that it can improve its offering to us.

Problems

Nothing is perfect so here we go:

• Its little bit confusing. Already seen people who are very computer savvy misunderstanding how asynchronous part of Circles work. What will your granny understand then?
• Privacy control is not fine grained enough. Like two examples from my experience. I post a public photo for web to see, and friend or even girlfriend posts a personal joke for example. Now whole world sees it. Why? Because comments inherit privacy status from parent post. So you are ending up with a choice of “too public” and “too censored” sometimes. Another example are people in your circles. You can choose what circles are shown(all or say celebrities you follow) and how public it is(only your family or whole world?). But you can’t make it so that whole world sees people you follow while your family sees all. And there are many other such small but very significant privacy control issues. Hope they will fix them. I sure am sending them feedback on all occasions BTW their feed back is awesome, never seen anything like this.
• There is also one two sided problem, dependency or coupling. One of biggest advantages over other firms Google always had is that its a multiheaded hydra. All projects drift independently not hurting and rarely improving each other. Well it started to change a little before but now it clearly comes to an end as Google+ seems to be posed to bring it all together. And some of us know how well it works for Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. They ruin separate projects and user experience to tie  down their offering together, locking they users to use them together. I really hope it is not a fate that awaits Google and all its users. Though I already heard of bad consequences of this for some people. Mostly on a side of Google merging all kind of accounts across all its products in to one account.

There is more of course, but service is only rolling out and I hope they are working on a clock of addressing it as I think Google+ has a big big potential. So far my feelings are similar to Google Wave roll out. I am very excited and pumped up as I never really liked Facebook, and do like Google+ a lot. But there is a crucial difference with Wave and Google+ for me. Wave was all cool and hypish as is Google+, but with Wave I entered few times, played with it and rarely returned since. Google+? I am using it each day now, publishing photos, cross posting from Facebook, started using +1, and am working on adding some of Google+ related feature to my blog and page. So, my use of it differs a lot, hope Google+ future will differ a lot too. So far there are claims that they already reaching 20 millions.

Over last months of 2010 I was coming to realization that I want to be able not only to make multimedia Flash apps in web but also build HTML pages and services around them. So decided to start slowly learning some. Also with HTML5 making core web stack more and more potent it would make me more prepared for challenges where HTML5 will be a better choice then Flash for rich internet applications.

Not that I don’t know or did not know some. I have basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL. Kind of standard stack used today for various cases. But here my knowledge is gather from various small cases and web examples. Probably only part of it where I did get some formal education is relational data bases. What I wanted was to broaden my knowledge in all this.

Asking friends for ideas about good books to start from I was often asked “why books?”. Today you can learn anything from the web, thousands of examples, tutorials and documentation sites and active developer communities allow anyone to learn to program anything.

Thing is that I find it to be a bad way to start. Tutorials and examples often concentrate on solving something specific, are not always made with big picture in mind or sometimes even made badly and teach you bad things. I prefer to start from some book that give a broad and not deep view, showing how it is meant to be done without going too deep in to the details(details I will dig out later if I will need). I need this to get some ground under my feet from where I can start. And then explore the web myself knowing for what to look, what’s good and what’s not so good etc etc.

For starters I picked a little bit unusual direction As I mentioned I more or less know PHP and I wanted to try something new. Also for some time I was curious about Google App Engine. Pocking around GAE I found that probably best languages for that platform right now are Python and Java. Well I knew Java years back and don’t want to return. So I went in direction of Python.

In last December I was ordering some books from Amazon and ended up ordering 3 books on web technologies.

Google App Engine

First book from those I started to read was specifically about Google App Engine. This book covers whole GAE platform as far as I can tell. On programming part it includes both Python and Java specifics, classes and code examples. It helps you trough your first Google App Engine application. Big part of it is Data Store. Then it comes trough various other features of GAE like memory cache, google account integration apis, various other built in apis.

For me most interesting part was Data Store. I am pretty familiar with relational databases and ideas behind them and was always curious what Data Store is, how it works, where better to use it and this books gives pretty good overview on that side. Actually something like 1/3 of this book is about Data Store related stuff.

Some interesting things about App Engine. It was designed with “return answer as fast as possible”  ideology for rich web apps. One related to that interesting feature is that app can return result first and then start working on updating data, indexes etc. I guess that possible to do with any stack but I never looked on it from that optimization point.

As far as Data Store goes it reminds me of simple Object Orientated Database. It basically stores entities by unique keys that may have properties and something like classes forced by code. Also Data Store allows building indexes to run queries on some of the property types. As far as I can say there are 3 significant differences from SQL database:

• Query language is simple, does not allow joins and some types of queries that need calculations
• You can retrieve entities not trough queries but directly if you know their unique keys, it is lot faster then trough query
• It is possible to store an array as entity property, it also allows running queries that target content of arrays so you can get entities who have some kind of values in their array typed property, you can store keys in such array making kind of Object Orientated version of one to many relationship between entities

Another thing is that keys are constructed in a way where first part of key is application ID, and you don’t even see it, which means that each app can only get access  to entities it has created. Can’t access other apps data directly. Also there are limitations on how many entities you can access at once which along with other GQL limitations makes GAE a bad platform for solutions that for example need t work with large amount of data providing statistical info on it.

I guess that would be it on that book. Overall it gives good overview for GAE providing a good start point if you want to know what GAE can and can not do.

CSS Mastery

Another topic I was curious about but never was really getting to know it better was CSS.

Basically its something I knew what it was for but did not knew general ideas behind it and how it is really meant to be used. This book claims to be a book for those who have been using CSS for some time but don’t feel they are experts yet. Or people with basic knowledge of CSS. After reading this book I must say that its rather a book for starters. It rather teaches clean and simple CSS/HTML showing where common pitfalls are and all.

This books covers essential parts of CSS, selectors, techniques of layout, advanced CSS3 features and how to do something like that in CSS2.1 using old methods and tricks.

I think best part of this books is that it teaches how it should be done and why. Why HTML part of pages should be designed as meaning and structure while all styling should go in to CSS. Author adds small examples from his experience which make it pretty clear why it should be like that.  Or another thing is how using hacking to fix problems is a bad idea as problems are fixed as browsers are updated. So your hacky fix now becomes a bug.

Some 7 years ago coming from Java/C/Pascal background I started to dig in to HTML/CSS/JS and Flash. Flash slowly win me over. It was a way to develop Apps while HTML seemed like way to developer styled text pages along with a bonus of serious cross browser inconsistencies/bugs and limitations. Over these 7 years things seemed to improve especially on JS/CSS front.

Sadly coming from Flash I still find that even CSS3 is insufficient to style things cleanly. Firstly today style is not only about static visuals. Its about animations, reaction to user actions, its about visual behavior of interfaces. Now CSS3 includes animations but that’s not enough. I think big problem is  that you can’t reference values in CSS. For example one of examples in the book shows how to make 3 text columns to be of one dynamic height. Thing is that you can have them aether of static height or they all will scale according to size of text inside them. As you can’t reference values in CSS what author proposes is to make all columns of large height, then use container of those columns in “hakcy” way which resizes according its content actual size. Now container is of size of highest column. And now use overflow property to cut out unnecessary height of columns. Of course such trick is possible only with simple column style. Now then all I wanted is to make 3 columns to share same dynamic size. And I end up with doing lot of trickery to get a limited solution. This kind of lets me down…

Another example is vertical content centering on page. Solution looks pretty clear but is limited too. Just make your content top padding 50% which will move its top side to center of page. And then, with different technique, move content up by half of its height. Yay it is centered. Sounds even intuitive and logical in idea. But you can’t target values in CSS. So you can’t target its own height in position style. So you can’t center object vertically if it has dynamic size in HTML/CSS… Or at least it seems so.

Well anyways this all is CSS problems. This books does good work communicating good and correct way of dividing content and style of your HTML/CSS pages. I guess many HTML/CSS problems can be solved with JSS/jQuery filling in position of visual and other behavior for HTML/JS/CSS at least for now.

Python Web Development with Django

Another book I only just started to read is this one. I thought that it is a good idea to learn not PHP/Python language directly for web development(as that I can do myself). What I wanted to learn is how to develop good web solutions too. How to architect your engine, authentication, user content, HTML output components etc. I wanted to know best practices in how to develop your engine/framework for web site building. And what’s a better way then learning some framework and seeing how they done things there.

Another thing with Python books is that Python is a language used for broad number of things. While PHP is mostly used for web development Python started elsewhere as general purpose language like C. As a result majority of books don’t cover Python use as web development language almost at all. And thus majority of those books are of no interest for me in current situation. For that reason picking Python based web development framework book seemed like a good idea too.

Now first chapters of this book gives incremental introduction to Python first which is perfect I knew for a while that Python used spaces and new lines as part of its syntax instead of various braces. I always was finding that it is both good and bad. Good that everyone writes in same style as it is enforced trough syntax, also makes language less bloated with special symbols and more readable. Sadly in some cases it also makes language less readable as you can’t arbitrary style some part of code for better readability.

I just only started this book but so far I must say I really like some features of Python. They make language a lot smaller when performing task with array for example. Here are few interesting examples:

• string[1] – like in any other language it returns strings second character
• string[-1] – here good things start, it returns strings last character, so if index in [] is less then 0 array length is added
• string[:1] – now what? Turns out that Python extended this operator to allow ranges. In this case it will return first two characters of this string.
• string[1:3] – now this is full syntax returning second, third and fourth symbols in the string.
• string[1:] – and this will return whole string without first character

Anyways I have still much to read from this one so no more comments on it so far.

Other books and some practice

Basically this is it from this book order but there are two more I would like to buy. One on JavaScript/jQuery and one on some PHP framework to improve my knowledge in those directions. Also I have few test projects planed to try and use these technologies. After reading book on CSS I already updated homepage a little(here how it looked before), planing to do more work later on it. Also planing to try and do two projects for practice on GAE later.

Just bought one Humble Indie Bundle 2 for my self. And two as gifts for later. I already have Cortext Command but I always wanted to buy/play Osmos and Braid but never was getting my self to but them. Thus Humble Indie Bundle was a hard offer to resist Revenge of the Titans seems good addition too

Open game development

Things that Wolfire do interest me a lot. I was thinking for a while(few years) about how AAA games industry and often indies prefer to stay at a distance from their clients. For AAA industry it often feels as if you are facing a faceless giant that does not see, care or bother with you. For that reason I slowly start to pay them with same disrespect. They may make good games but it feels like some large soulless machine spiting out stuff for consumption… Something that makes me feel bad about the purchase.

For few years I was thinking about various ways and business models that would make game development closer to the people where customers know what’s behind the scene, can influence, interact and engage with development and developers while supporting them in various ways be it testing, ideas sharing and crowd funding.

And Wolfire with their Overgrowth are trying to do just that. Good to see such developments. Humble indie bundle initiatives Wolfire made are interesting in same sense though probably not exactly what I want. But still good.

Interesting features of HIB

Here are things I find to be brilliant about Humble indie bundle:

• Allowing people to choose their own price is a jewel here but it is hard to foresee all the cases where developers loose or earn money with such an offer, but it definitely is a buzz generating part of this
• EFF and Child’s play charity are part of this, but even more important that project allows users to choose what proportions of payment go to what. This I think brings more meaning in to the purchase by making users to make a choice. Now it is not meter of pure consumption. As with amount of price here user makes a choice about who he is and what he wants in various dimensions. I think it engages user more with action of purchase making him more aware of what goes where.
• Stats of average price given by OS platform. It is interesting in many ways. For example you can see that Linux users pay twice as much then Windows users and Max is in a middle. And you can see proportion of platforms. That actually shows that Windows market is bigger in numbers but almost equal in money to Linux here Interesting observation considering AAA companies prefer to say “There is no money to be had on Linux market”, yeah right… If you do not try then yeah there is not money to be had. Another interesting thing about this is that it provides a base point and forces user to answer a question of who he is. Are you cheap? Are you generous? Are you average and just like majority of people?
• Then there is top 10 contributors top. This one partially works like a previous adding moral and competitive motivation for users to pay more but this time I see what I hoped to see with first HIB. Advertisers. At the moment 3 out of 10 top payers are advertising something paying the project together something like 2k$. Not not that much I guess but I think there is promise in that idea.
• Also majority of games are selling for a while. Hype already ended for them. As I mentioned I was thinking but not bringing myself to buy some of those and basically my money was money they would not get otherwise.
• They picked a right time to do this in combo with gift option. As I mentioned I bought few copies as gifts as well.
• There is number of less significant things, no DRM, probably a world wide release, digital download being available for a while etc

There are of course some things that bother me a little:

• Bundle version bothers me a little, last time I had 50%+ of games, that was alienating me to not participate or motivate to lower a price as I payed one already for some of them. And low price because of that may lower average price stats and in this way influence others choice as well. I guess you could tackle this with trying to sell new games like that or adding ability to say which games you want and which you do not even though you still get all of them.
• This offer is 7 days long… This bothers me because as usual with such stuff people would manipulate it. Buy like 100 and resell later for bigger price when it will not be sold anymore. Of course such exploit is little bit effected by “pay what you want” and “no DRM” parts of this but still it holds.

Conclusion

HIB and Wolfire explore things that I am very interested in and my respect to them for this. All that is very interesting on many levels and could be a start of many interesting game development business models I wish will succeed. Bringing all models together is what is right and what HIB tries to do may be not in very refined way so far. Motivation, morals, engagement of buyer. Social media. Charity. Advertisement place for big contributors/sponsors. All it together in as easy to buy form as possible. Right way to go don’t you think?

Just a small sharing of fun thing. Click the image to follow to the site.

Interesting HTML page. Kind of animated advertisement where animation position is attached to page scroll bar. Reminda me of this funny breakanoid built on HTML elements where HTML buttons were used as blocks, radio button as ball and scroll bar as player controled pad. Sadly I forgot a link…

I wrote before that I find some of the aims behind copyrights noble but that I just don’t see their today state noble and bringing more harm then good.

Well during last weeks many things have happened on internet vs copyrights front.

Recent developments

Pirate bay appeal in court

Messy and questionable case… Unproven revenues and expanses of site, unclear involvement of defendants, questionable and arguable intent to infringe copyrights. And yet jail and fines measured in millions of dollars. That’s how it looks to me, confusing and not solid…Is this a precedent and example of how justice in court should be? It looks to me more like rushed and lobbied decisions even if it is not.

COICA act and domain name seizure

EFF wrote about this act and its implications, its a latest idea of media industry. They do not want to go after all of the pirates as it makes big fraction of their clients too and criminalizing such large amount of people is pointless, so instead they look for easy, cheap and effective technical solutions to make digital sharing go away. So they try to sue site owners that are not directly responsible like blogs that link to tricky stuff or platforms like Digg where users create and link to content. They pressure open platforms like Youtube forcing them to police their own users spending their own resources and in addition paying the industry… They try to force ISPs to police their own users. And now when all of it fails to bring internet on its knees they try a new thing. To push laws that would allow without court to seizure domain names of sites that may not even be in USA jurisdiction.  This has far going consequences in technical level. As with any other attempt of censorship on internet new technologies or alternatives will spawn. There are already many talks about alternatives to DNS like unified root project , its one thing when they close servers, sue technology creators and so on but now they attack one of the core elements of the internet… It surely will make internet a lot less reliable and could even motivate countries to do their own DNS systems so that we will have internet with borders… Horrible possibility.

All in all they attack internet core now which has large implication for freedom of speech, innovation and unified world. You can read in more details in this post for example or follow EFF posts like this one. This is a really really horrible development.

And now just the other day I learned that USA already is seizing domain names of torrent indexers and other sites media industry sees as “infringing”. Without court order, without notice, without famous digital millennium copyright act notices… Or so it seems at the moment.

ACTA accepted by EU

This week I learned that controversial ACTA developed in secrecy from public was accepted by EU, luckily not as mandatory things that does not force EU countries to adopt “thee strikes” regimes or similar things. So it is hard to understand what implications ACTA will have for EU with such foggy stance. I guess it is a lot better then it could have been.

Screenwriter against 20th century Fox

And most outrageous of last days news that shocked me and forced to write this post and add new category to my blog. A screenwriter from USA that was collecting on one site scripts from various films to share with other screenwriters to read, learn and use as cultural base for their work is sued by 20th century Fox for 15 million in damages?!?!? One of those “scare the crap out of everyone for using internet” type of cases again… She did not even leaked, made or stole those scripts, just collected them and is sued for 15 millions… In what kind of world are we living in now…

It seriously looks like some fear inducing tactics and racket by media companies against internet these days…

Thoughts that such news provoke in me

Honestly I have no idea what media industries are thinking doing all that. I know that by their definitions we all are pirates these days and what they show us? That we all are potential targets for prison sentences and fines with ridiculous amount of zeros in them… So we all are criminals now? We all should be living like criminals waiting to defend in court, run, bankrupt or fight for your freedom? Rampant piracy is here for 10 years or so. As a master of computer sciences I do not see technical resolution to it, or in other words means to enforce copyrights in digital age without sacrificing freedoms and/or internet.

I especially am sad and sometimes even angry on copyrights collateral damage on innovation. As I wrote in my older post media industry right now tries to force others to shoulder copyright protection. It attack service providers like youtube forcing them to make expansive copyright work detection systems and attacks ISPs to police their own users and also attacks governments lobbying for disastrous laws…

Want one more example of how it damages innovation? There is art site I participate in and love called DeviantArt. They have fractal, photography digital and traditional art, games and animations and movies sections. What they do not have is music section. Actually people manage to upload music in to various sections like Flash apps/games/animations or in to video section but it is prohibited and someteimes when administration feels like it they purge those without checking. Why? You can find short answer here “Will deviantART ever allow uploading of music files? Not at this time as there is a wealth of legal and structural issues to consider”. So yeah. Internet sites, start ups and others should provide frameworks to police copyright content if they want to make a content related service. And it is especially worse for video and audio content. That’s the price we are paying sadly

This all starts to remind me of alcohol prohibition laws and we know how they ended up. Prohibiting something many want and anyone can do in his basement out of cheap widely available elements is just pointless and is a welcome for corruption and underground movements. They do not remove the problem, they force it underground… And that’s what will happen if they will be approaching it from laws and enforcement side only.

Well I always was a more or less silent or more correctly passive supporter of Creative Commons and pirate parties ideals and aims. But with cases like that of a screenwriter or other cases mostly in USA with outrageous sums of money and other ridiculous penalties on a selective basis where hundreds of thousands if not millions of people do the same and one of them is sued like that… Such cases stop to remind me of alcohol prohibition story from our history. They start to remind me of various fear and oppression stories from out history. And they all end bad for oppressors be it rebellions in Rome, American Civil War or French Revolution. Probably it is far reaching comparison but media industries are becoming oppressive, pushy, racketing and making many if not enemies then at least no sympathizers be it Google, ISPs and new generations of netizens. And we can see first glimpses of growing movement against that oppressions and attacks on internet that started from pirate parties years back. But those parties are small and with narrow aims that appeal probably only to younger generation and thus do not have enough voice to change things and protect internet for now. Which leaves masses unsatisfied and willing to do something, to help, to participate, to make your voice heard. In recent months this took on a new form. A civil disobedience in digital age.

Anonymous and Operation Payback

You can read about it here and here and here is their page. In short it started in September 2010 as reaction and counterattack against DDOS attacks on torrent sites. Since then they were attacking various anti-piracy related sites almost constantly. After appeal verdict on Pirate Bay case they attacked IFPI and it was down for 27 hours. Now they attack Warner Bros, MGM, Universal, and Sony as ones behind IFPI. There are no words on screenwriter case yet but I guess 20th century fox should get ready for being DDOSed by people they oppress.

My view on Operation Payback is constantly changing. For few first time it seemed like ordinary civil discordance aimed to voice and show that people do not agree… Just in new and kind of interesting for me way.  It looked like fighting fire with fire and as disorganized little man was coming together to show corporations that they do not agree. But it goes on since September. Too long I was thinking. They were even attacking some targets I was not finding to be good targets. It was starting to seem more like vandalism then civil disobedience and they were asked by pirate parties to stop. There were rumors that Anonymous agreed. But after all those recent events we see that they aether did not agree or changed their mind. And I changed mine too today, I again agree with what they are doing. I even feel slight motivation to join in… Is this what copyright industries want? Rebellion? I would have liked to go the pirate parties way but it is long, pirate parties seem weak and battles over those issues are lost in courts and law making… It just does not seem to work so what are we left with then just trying to show with civil disobedience that we do not agree and that we are willing to fight in a way netizens ought to fight.

Today saw this talk at TED.com , it is called “Why work does not happen at work”

Hierarchy as solution to organizational problems

Basically it is critics on old and modern way of organization. Thing is that when someone works alone or in group from 2 to 5 they can manage to organize themselves more or less. But as number of people working in collaboration raises costs of managing collaboration raise too. I guess all of us know how it works… We need to start to manage our work, break it to smaller peaces, assign those puzzle parts to different workers, someone then should work bringing parts together and checking everything etc etc.

And we know how for last century various organization coped with it. Though basic ideas probably go far back be it Rome legions or other large collaborations. We humans start to make a hierarchy of management. Like there is Cesar who has legats, who have tribunes prefects etc etc. So we have small group that has manager, then there is manager higher that manages lower level managers etc etc. This kind of hierarchy allows to minimize organizational costs and inefficiencies, but not to remove them completely, and even add new organizational costs and inefficiencies like bureaucracy. continue reading…

Just a small sharing. Stumbled on one more site about HTML5 and Canvas tag featuring number of examples. It is called Pocket Full of Canvas.

There is one thing that bothers me though. Those demos even though they are simple in no way fast… Depending on browser and demo the eat some 20-50% of CPU for me… I wonder if they do something wrong or is such inconsistent slowness here and there what HTML5 has to offer? Hope not.

Generative times

You know why I love times we live in? Well its because thanks to generative web and generative PCs that squeezed a whole world information to a small scree before us and gave everyone of power to use and manipulate that world. But even more it gave us power to collaborate with efficiency never seen before and lowering barriers to entry and prices to some things almost to 0.

There are various examples be it Wikipedia a collaboratively made encyclopedia that allows efficiently aggregate our small efforts in to a result that is greater them sum of its parts. Sites like Wonderfl or Aviary that allow collaboratively and iteratively produce, share creative works and then build new ones upon them making cycles and networks of work evolution.

Open Kinect

Kinect, a new input device for XBox from Microsoft that sees in 3D and is relatively cheap and powerful to various alternatives. First devices of that kind that can bring Minority Report like user interface to mainstream and homes.

Well over couple of last days I noticed that people from various interactive and computer art spheres started to get their hands on Kinect and started trying what you can do with it. By that time I was not sure what they were doing. My guess was using Microsoft SDKs with XBox but I was wrong. Today I read here first, then followed to that page and then read article here at EFF blog. It turns out that Kinect signal was decided independently in first hours  after release around the world, a contest for first open source driver with small fund was organized in in coming days first Linux driver was out. And then Windows and Mac version followed. Next? Contests of frameworks and tools around Kinect and of best apps, demonstrations and uses of Kinect. And all that outside of Microsoft XBox platform.

Damn I love these times and how organizing and aggregating humanities lust for exploration and creativity becomes so easy, cheap and empowering

Initially I chose WordPress as a bloging platform as I found it to be a lot more polished for numerous purposes and allowed a precise fine tuning with various free plugins and themes. Perfect thing for a “for fun blogging“.

So for a while I wanted to share what kind of stuff I use and for what purposes. I listed them in chronological order as I was installing them. continue reading…

Just a little fun thing I wanted to share here

Something fun I stumbled on this week. Great idea

On a side note it is interesting that Flash works worse here the HTML for some reason. You can notice that ball to the right kind of fails to redraw properly. I guess that because of wmode=transparent set for Flash which means that it is drawn inside HTML hierarchy by browser which probably in combination with something in page causes problems. This mode works pretty bad in FF overall. Though almost the same happens in Chrome. I wonder if creatore made something wrong.

Well no meter this is a fun experiment