I was just settling into a quiet evening of reviewing material for my A to Z class tomorrow when I stumbled across something quite shocking.

Mind you, I was in a fragile state, having finally released myself from a rather unhealthy personal obsession with the StringTokenizer, silently weeping (inside) while adjusting the examples to use split with regular expressions.

Back in the old days, when using some form of Java Collection, one was required to cast elements retrieved from that collection into the type of element that stored in the collection. According to Sun’s site: “Besides being inconvenient, this is unsafe. The compiler does not check that your cast is the same as the collection’s type, so the cast can fail at run time.”

Generics allow you to specify the type of a collection to the compiler. This means that the compiler can confirm that you are using the collection consistently and cast the values themselves as they are taken out of the collection.

What was:

ArrayList strings = new ArrayList();
strings.add("Hello World!");
String s = (String) strings.get(0);

is now:

ArrayList<String> strings = new ArrayList();
strings.add("Hello World!");
String s = strings.get(0);

Frankly, the syntax is a little ugly and awkward, but I’ll play along for now. . .

Like, for example:

A 20th century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything, whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can.”

It’s Alan Kay, summing up in his wonderful “Early history of Smalltalk”

tags:alan kay easy magic words smalltalk alan kay, easy, magic words, smalltalk

• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Date: February 16th, 2007
• Time: 15h00
• Location: University of California Davis
• Building: Social Sciences & Humanities (Google map)
• Room: Andrews Conference Room 2203

I have been invited by the Technocultural Studies department at UC Davis for a conference, followed by some meetings, and since the conference is open to the public I wanted to post it here. I know a few people read this from the Bay Area, but Davis is a pretty far drive for most of you, especially for an approximately 1-hour presentation. So I’ll understand if attendance is low. But I will be in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley from the 14th to the 18th, so let me know if you want to meet. I’d love to see what people are up to.

Here’s the yada yada yada :

• « Abstract Machines »
• conference by Douglas Edric Stanley
• > http://www.abstractmachine.net
• Friday, February 16th, 2007
• Technocultural Studies, UC Davis

Over the past decade Douglas Edric Stanley has been tracking the evolution of aesthetics in relation to the spread of algorithmic machines, and the increasing role of these devices as both our new technê and our new epistêmê. In 1998 he created the Atelier Hypermedia in Aix-en-Provence in order to work with young artists responsive to the proposition that computer code could take on the same qualities of plasticity as any other artistic material. This research and production has led to various installations, conferences, performances, exhibits, networked objects and theoretical positions. In his presentation at UC Davis’ program in Technocultural Studies he will present this corpus, focusing specifically on work in algorithmic cinema, gaming, robotics, and rock’n’roll.

Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Douglas Edric Stanley emigrated to France where he has been working for over 15 years as artist, theoretician and researcher in Paris and Aix-en-Provence. He is currently Professor of Digital Arts at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art where he teaches programming, interactivity, networks and robotics. He has taught multiple workshops on the production of code-based art and has participated in several prominent museums and festivals dedicated to digital art: InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; ZeroOne/ISEA, San Jose; Villette Numérique, Paris; Festival Arts Electronica, Linz; Arborescence, Aix-en-Provence; Centre Pompidou, Paris; EnterMultimediale, Prague.

Robert of Flight404 fame has posted his initial dabblings in Quartz Composer.

I find it rather exciting that a Processing Ninja such as Robert can find inspiration in QC. I have a terrible head for languages - both human and machine - so I’ve been wondering whether a node-based environment may be easier for me to grasp. processing.org, programming, quartz composer, webcams

Antecedent:

A couple of months ago, having a look at some old stats in my last.fm profile, I realised how much I could remember a given time by just seeing the music I used to listen to (that old (unfinished?) project by marcos weskamp and didier hilhorst came to mind inmediately).

The source:

Last.fm keeps weekly data about what we listen to. We also can (could) construct a radio link based on various artists. For example:

lastfm://artist/bibio/similarartists

The application

A web page that, given some artists that I used to listen to in a given time (e.g: december 2005), constructs the url of a last.fm radio with those bands, so I can somehow “transport” myself to that time by listening to similar music…

And I’ve done it, but…

Last friday, the multiple artists station feature stopped working. In fact, I had some suspicion, but I thought that… nothing. I didn’t think of it and kept working.

So it is basically useless in its actual form, but it was finished (as a proof of concept, at least), so here it is:

Last.fm time machine (if it had worked i’d have looked for a better name).

I’m not sure if the idea can take another direction to become useful. I’ve thought of having a look at xspf to see if I can generate playlists instead of radios, but by now I don’t really know. If you have any ideas…

At the very least, it’s been useful to clean the dust over my php, use the last.fm webservices, a little bit of ajax (thanks mr.sofa naranja) and above all, to finish something.

By the way, avidos let me stay in their hosting to do some tests while mine hadn’t php5, and ignasi tudela tried to help me with the design, but apart from using Georgia and taking his colors for the different seasons, I didn’t pay him much (deserved) attention, and you can see the results. Thanks to both.

tags:ajax audioscrobbler last.fm php xspf ajax, audioscrobbler, last.fm, php, xspf

There are some words I’ve put under suspicion. They’re like magic. When they appear everything seems better, more pleasant, more adequate…

I still don’t know what it is, but I’m somehow annoyed. Perphaps they appear too frequently in advertising, products, speeches… I think they hide some… swindle.

3 come to mind now:

• New
• Easy
• Original

do you have more? do you know what it is?

tags:easy magic words new original easy, magic words, new, original

This won’t work for the next hours. If you were thinking of sending me an email (quite unlikely unless you do spam for a living) use jesusgollonet … gmail

See you soon.

update: wow. It didn’t hurt. Should be ok by now. If you see anything strange, please let me know

tags:No tagsNo tags

I’ve been reading Goldhaber’s “What is Attention?” chapters as he posts them his blog. (Highly recommended btw.) The phrase “Attention Economics” sounds like bullshit, but I really think Goldhaber is onto something. This post isn’t about attention economics but rather a related subject I’ve pondered since I first heard the famous quote from Andy Warhol:

Q: Can everyone actually be famous for 15 minutes?

This obviously leads to another question: what constitutes “fame”? For the sake of argument I propose a few different definitions and examine each.

Some Proposed Definitions of Fame:

1. You are the subject of a global television broadcast lasting at least 15 minutes.
2. n > N people pay attention to you at during the same time 15 minute interval at any point in your life.
3. n > N people pay attention to you for 15 minutes each, cumulatively over the course of your life.
4. n > N people pay attention to you for 15 minute each, cumulatively over all time.

Where N is some arbitrarily large number, perhaps even proportionate to world population. Obviously there are other ways to define “famous” and I’m sure they’d be interesting to ponder, but I had to start somewhere.

I’ve created a google spreadsheet to share my calculations.

You are the subject of a global television broadcast lasting at least 15 minutes.

For everyone in the world alive today (6.5 billion) who is awake 1026 minutes a day for each of the 1.9M days in their life to appear on any one of the major TV channels (say 500 of them) for fifteen minutes at least once before they die would take 372 years. In this model, lots of factors are ignored in order to see if it’s even possible, like using the average #hours we watch television instead of the #hours we are awake each day. So that number is actually a lot bigger if you make the the model more realistic.

So I’d say the answer to Famous(1) is NO.

I had written up an exploration of the other three types of Fame from my list, but after discussing it privately with some esteemed colleagues I think I need to do some more work on it.

My initial approach treated the “n > N people paying attention to stuff” as a sort of Global Network of Directed Attention, where each person has one outgoing edge (their attention) which connects to another person. This forms a scale free network, so I piled up a bunch of calculations based on the power law and came up with what I think are some interesting results.

Then I ran the question by a PhD student friend of mine who got his masters in Operations Research. He naturally came up with a completely different way to look at the problem: machine scheduling. You’ve got one bin for each person, and each bin has slots for each 15 minute segment of a person’s life. You can then schedule each person’s attention to other people into those slots. The down-side to this approach compared to the scale-free network is that the answer becomes NP-hard, meaning I’m probably not going to solve it.

How would you model the problem? What other interesting definitions of fame would you consider?

I’ll elaborate on the scale-free network/power law/Global Network of Directed Attention thing in future post.

I always seem to forget how busy I’m usually becoming at the beginning of each new year. There does seem to be a pattern emerging or maybe it has to do with a combination of long winter nights and my lack of new years resolutions (okay, I’ve got a single one: need new website!) which keep other people busy with other things in January. Am currently engaged in various really exciting (albeit commercial) projects again and so any noticeable developments on the Sunflow P5 library front had to be delayed before I feel more comfortable to release it publicly. The important stuff works already (i.e. exporting triangles), however camera support, shaders and lighting still are an incomplete mess… There’s also a separate command line tool I’ve written to batch renderer frame sequences. Working on this stuff in my spare time also makes it really quite hard to realistically predict when things become ready. Someday I’ll learn not to do that anymore…

Speaking of Sunflow though, Christopher has released a new version (0.07.1) of the renderer and the website has been overhauled too. There’s also talk about changing the scene file format and Stephen Williams of Fluidforms is interested in writing/collaborating on a generic (RenderMan format based) external renderer for Processing. All great stuff on the horizon!

Speaking of more maintenance, Florian Jennett has kindly modded the Processing forums to export the most recent posts as RSS. This is great stuff, since my current feed of the same content (launched almost exactly 2 years ago) was semi-broken for quite a while now, ever since the forum’s HTML template changed last. I’ve tried to keep up with these changes initially, but had to succumb sometime last year. Unlike this old feed which was created via screen-scraping, the new one is coming straight out of the forum, so hopefully will not miss out posts or truncate them anymore…

Finally, my “digital self” is still fragmenting more & more since I’ve started contributing to Matt Pyke’s Everyoneforever group blog.

Tags: processing.org, rss, sunflow, everyoneforever, toxi