Concrete Audio:

Also, a few months ago, Erkki invited some music students over to our studio. Together we performed John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine. I invite you to listen to a selection from that performance. The piece has a score based on each person’s phone number, but the performance is flexible as it is up to each performer to decide how long each tone will be and how large a drink they will take.

Drinking and Hooting Machine:

I’m starting to look for my next apartment, and I’m sick of doing the copy+paste dance to find out where craigslist postings are actually located. I wanted to be able to highlight an address on the page, hit a shortcut, and be taken to a map of that location.

After a quick google search, I couldn’t find any bookmarklets with the behavior I wanted. As a result, I took a few minute to write my own. The following is a simple bookmarklet that queries for the selected text using google maps. If nothing is highlighted, you will be prompted to enter an address.

Drag the following to your bookmarks bar: Find in maps

You can take a look at the source code for the bookmarklet on github.

Schindler House

It took about 45 minutes to bike out to the Schindler House. Along the way, I passed the Modern Institute for Plastic Surgery and Anti-Aging, where I spent a few moments getting my bearings.

Bradbury Building

I rode the bus downtown with Becky. After a quick stop in the lobby of the Bradbury Building—which was packed with people sketching—we grabbed a kimchi taco at Grand Central Market and toured some more of downtown LA’s historic architecture.

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale

Becky drove us to Glendale, which would otherwise have been incredibly difficult to reach (or get around). The entire cemetery is crossed by wide roads that directly abut the burial plots. Artwork is presented in a bizarrely theatrical fashion. The stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper stood out, with it’s literal unveiling to a booming narrator and dramatic music.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The museum is a collection of strangely presented, delightful artifacts. You should go.

I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing. It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. I’m going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasn’t writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Ruby’s syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home ‘@,’ ‘$,’ and ‘:’ prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isn’t inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. I’ll probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and that’s what is really important).

This morning, I learned that Time Spent Alone was nominated for a Webby Award. It is a collection of explorations of personal themes using, not surprisingly, the internet.

Check out the project, and consider giving it your vote for the People’s Voice Award in the NetArt category.

We at the San Francisco Barbarian Group office had an incredible holiday party on Friday. After a full afternoon of shooting assorted handguns, we reassembled at the office. A great spread of holiday snacks and beverages was laid out before us, ready to help us recover our strength spent on the range.

For the party at the office, I had set up a photobooth of sorts. Motion in front of the camera caused it to begin capturing frames which were then turned into animated gifs. You really should check out the photos from the party.

Bonus gun gif:

Thanks to Bill, Andrew, Nate, Chandler, and Nicole for their ideas and help at various stages.

When adding a page to your homescreen, the iPhone creates an icon for the page by rendering the whole thing down to a square format. I took advantage of this to create half-filled dots on the screen.

Naturally, I had to write something with the pixels I was making. It being party time and all, I decided to encourage celebratory behavior with my downsampled display. Keeping with the spirit of lo-res, here is a video of the display in action, converted into an animated gif.

In the end, I rather like the simple visual weight of the 50/50 webpages: 01v 01h 10v and 10h. They are flexible minimalist works; they scale to fit any size real-estate. Use them to create your own iPhone cum lite-brite or just enjoy your monitor’s ability to crank out pretty, high-contrast black and white pixels.

I spent the last week at my parents’ house back in Oxford, Ohio. While it’s normally your typical small, college town, there was quite a bit of awesomeness afoot this time around.

You’re probably aware that Processing 1.0 was released this past week. I’m not totally clear on the details of why, but the final development was happening in Oxford, thanks to funding from Miami University. I was really fortunate to be able to spend some time with all of the people working on the 1.0 release over the weekend.

Obviously, I spent a lot of time with friends. This entailed the requisite time in bars and apartments dedicated to making sure we’re all on the successful side of things. Fortunately, they’re mostly up to some cool stuff. Mike and I recorded harmonies for one of his tracks and I got to mess around on his les paul for a bit. Christian and Hillary had their BFA exhibitions up, and you can see some photos from them on flickr. Steve went to jail because of a clerical error by the state, and his cop-car relay from Oxford to Cleveland makes the best Thanksgiving story I heard.

Points of failure: 1) A former professor who I’ve asked to write a recommendation for me was unable to access my sites and see my work. I thought this was strange, since I hadn’t heard anything about my hosting being compromised.

2) HTTP access to my sites failed completely for three separate 15-minute blocks of time today. I noticed because I’ve been developing a personal project (which I will document here once I’ve migrated and completed the project). This obviously led to frustration and also caused some unnecessary debugging time on my end.

3) MediaTemple never said a thing about the failures. After I opened a support request, a Media Temple representative responded with a short email. They claimed the issues had been fixed (they had not), and that they were due to problems with the database server. I question their placement of blame, as I was able to run my application locally while accessing the online databases even when HTTP access to my server failed.

I was about ready to forgive and forget until the third and fourth failures today. It’s too bad there doesn’t seem to be an option out there that just works. Then again, I haven’t even begun to run on Dreamhost yet. Don’t be surprised if things are a bit wonky over the next week or two. That will either be due to MediaTemple passing the buck or crazy DNS reassignments I barely comprehend.

I finally returned to a 3-d random walk sketch I set up in Flash a few months ago. Happily, Papervision3D now reliably initializes the graphics context and actually renders the cubes inside the flash player (I downloaded the latest Great White and patched my code over tonight).

The cubes bounce along on a random trajectory and fluctuate to the music. Michael Lengel, aka mlerin , provided the sweet audio tracks.

Interact with the walking cubes.