Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Processing 0121 is ready
A new version of Processing is available now.
If you haven't looked at Processing for a while, it's definitely worth picking up again. It's maturing very nicely - this week I've been using it at work, and the ability to create a single app with full-screen OpenGL graphics, PDF and movie output (thanks to Dan Shiffman's movie maker library) is absolutely great.
Processing 0116 is out
The beginning of the acadmic year must be upon us, because Ben Fry and Casey Reas just released the latest round of bug-fixes and updates to the Processing libraries and development environment. The changes are meticulously documented here (update: corrected link!) . There are also changes to the structure of the learning resources and discourse forum and Casey is collecting links to third-party tutorials here.
Software that speaks for itself, or: are you sure you need Powerpoint?
Euro Foo began with introductions to the group: name, affiliation and three words (tags) that describe you. So tough! I picked simulation, architecture and design (I think), but that was way too narrow. Conference introductions are tricky beasts... Aaron Swartz asks "what have you been thinking about?" and Simon Willison asks "what are you excited about?". That's better!
I've been thinking about software that - for the content it generates - is a better presentation tool than Keynote or PowerPoint. Stop, wait, come back! This isn't a Powerpoint bashing post. Of course it will depend what you are presenting and who is doing the presenting. Powerpoint and Keynote are great tools in the right hands, but I'm coming to believe that they often involve doing work for presentation's sake, when you already have good presentation tools in your workflow or - more importantly - when your work could speak for itself.
A colleague once talked me through a detailed 3D model that was built in Sketchup, using Sketchup's views and geometry tools to show things from different angles and manipulate the data as she spoke. Stills in Powerpoint would never have done this justice. Animations would have to be scripted to perfection. She had constructed a solid narrative inside the software, and the ability to manipulate things and show/hide different components came for free inside Sketchup itself. The same narrative could have been retold in a slideshow format, but why create extra work for a less effective result?
In the case of Sketchup, it's easy to see why the CAD software says more about the design than presentation software does - in many cases the Sketchup model is the design. The same thing happens with software like Photoshop, where stepping through the layers and changing filters or moving things around can often tell a better story than a selection of stills.
Google Earth is a great example of software that speaks for itself. With a bit of practice and a little planning you can make a presentation within the software that is far richer and more persuasive than out of context screen shots. Likewise with Excel, almost the entire point of the software is that everything is out there for everyone to see. And a live spreadsheet has currency too - you can pass it around - just like KML in Google Earth. Sure you can pass around a presentation or report with charts and tables to explain your analysis, but the live spreadsheet data is the analysis, and there are a few simple tools (like Juice Analytics' slider for Charts) that make the analysis even more accessible.
My own work in architectural simulation arose out of a dislike of "black box" models, where assumptions and specifications would be prepared and then a simulation would be run by an external agency who would deliver their findings in a report. Our reaction to this was a granular, individual-based model presented in a dynamic interactive way - not sure about a particular result? Interrogate the model to find out what went wrong. The result of the model was an experiential way to understand a particular scenario, a story telling tool. Just like most of the software you have on your desktop.
Perhaps people do want just the answer, and not the journey, but it's still worth asking: are you sure you need Powerpoint?
Double Take
One of those "pardon!?" moments using Excel:
How does a message like that sneak into version 11 of a product with millions of users? Roll on Office 2007, please!
Flock
Hype alone is usually enough to make me go "meh" and ignore something until it's part of the furniture. Something finally made me look at Flock though, and I'm glad I did.
Flickr integration alone means that if you're already a Firefox/Flickr user it's worth checking out the latest beta. I'm still working out how it interfaces with del.icio.us and multiple blogs, but it's found all my Blogger blogs already. If you're reading this then the blog editor works!
It seemed a little laggy in the interface, but I think that was whilst it was indexing my history in the background - it's better now. We'll see if I'm still with it in a week or two, but for now I'm using it as my primary browser. I even uninstalled Firefox... imagine!
txt msg bg
I can reliably crash my new Nokia 6230i, with overuse of ellipsis in the SMS editor. If I end a message with a trailing off thought (like I never do, right...) and press down in order to jump to the top of the message to re-read it, the UI freezes and the phone resets itself about 10 seconds later. That shouldn't happen, should it?
In other news, the 6230i is an improvement on the 8310 because its T9 predictive text dictionary can spell "custard". This pleases me greatly, as does the fact that efficiency and deficiency are T9 twins. Simple pleasures...*
* See?!? I can't help it... This is a problem.
Ruby on Rails? PHP + Smarty? C# / VB.NET? Something Java-esque? Python? Perl?
There's been a great deal of fuss recently about Ruby On Rails. Is it just hype, or is it really so simple?
I've got a few ideas for simple web-apps, and I'm looking to learn something new (you know, for fun). I like to code. I like elegance and neatness. I wouldn't mind being able to leave the graphic design to a real designer. I think I know what I'm doing, but I don't know where to start.
I'm not a databases person, but I know a reasonable amount about SQL Server, and I think I know how it differs from MySQL. I don't really know how things talk to databases - when I've done it in PHP/MySQL or ASP/SQL Server it's just been magic. I've played around with phpmyadmin (if that's what it's called).
I know what code-injection is. I know what session variables are. I know the difference between POST and GET. I know about HTTP headers and meta tags. I know why not to use client-side VB, and I'm pretty handy with javascript. I know the difference between HTML and XHTML. I know what a socket is. And a port. I've never really understood CGI. I don't really know what XSLT does to XML, and I don't think I want to either. I like the look of xpath. Unicode is pretty good, and essential.
I'm very Java-literate - that's my day job, and my hobby with Processing - but I've never looked into JSP seriously. Somebody said something about a TomCat. I can write proper C++ with templates and namespaces and exceptions and everything, but I probably write it like a Java programmer (and I never understood all the arguments about strings, and pointers). Would I like C#? If I'm familiar with ASP and VBscript, would I like VB.NET? I'm not a Microsoft person.
I've done a bit of bad C programming using cURL and OpenGL. I know a bit of Python, but I've never done anything serious with it. I know a bit of Perl, but it gives me the creeps. I know a bit of VBScript, but much of it seems back-asswards. I know a bit of PHP, but it likewise seems a bit messy (though intuitive, and I like the look of Smarty). LISP isn't out of the question. If someone wrote web-apps in Prolog, I would probably find it fascinating but it too would give me the creeps.
So... What are you using, and why? If you were learning from scratch, what would you choose, and why?
Why shouldn't I use Ruby On Rails? And what should I use instead?
Bear in mind you have to get me away from Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby...
On The Internet: A Social-Software-centric Summary
(This is a re-post of my earlier Everything2 review)
"For Kierkegaard, a world-wide electronic agora is an oxymoron ... [he] allows us to see it is not an agora at all, but a nowhere place for anonymous nowhere people. As such, it is dangerously distopian"
On The Internet by Hubert Dreyfus is a short but stimulating philosophy book addressing the implications the internet has on our current and future life-styles. In the book, Dreyfus argues that when people are disembodied and detached from a point of interaction, as web-surfers are in virtual communities, they cannot perform as effectively as their embodied and situated counterparts can in an equivalent real world scenario. In essence, he tries to show that, "if our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning". On a widely sourced tour through relevant parts of modern philosophy, the book covers the effects that world-wide interconnectedness is having on topics including politics, remote prescence, distance learning and document retrieval.
The book begins with an eye-opening account of research into the effects of spending time on line. In more than one study (see here and here), researchers have found that time online increasingly comes at the expense of time with family and friends, and often brings with it a sense of despair and loneliness.
Chapter one (The Hype about Hyperlinks) covers document retrieval on the web, including a Wittgensteinian analysis of Data vs. Document, and an explanation of the fallacy of abundancy (or: how Google manages to look good simply because returning a small fraction of billions of documents is normally satisfactory). There is also some discussion on the failures of Artificial Intelligence (harking back to Dreyfus's best-known work, What Computers Still Can't Do). Dreyfus still has little time for so-called common sense databases such as Cyc. Of prime importance in this chapter, though, is the assertion that a loss of embodiment leads to a failure to recognise the relevance of things in the world.
Chapter two (How Far is Distance Learning from Education?) leaps into a critique of distance learning, discussing what it means to be expert in a domain (chess being one example, teaching itself being another). The key point here is that it matters to matter. If things don't matter to you - if you don't feel wins and losses in "the pit of your stomach" and "the seat of your pants" - you will never make the transition from novice to expert. Dreyfus also places emphasis on apprenticeship and imitation as key to progression. In other words, without being truly immersed in what we are doing we cannot achieve our full potential.
Chapter three (Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real) deals mainly with telepresence and how technological advances in virtual reality and remote action/perception will always be lacking the critical involvement we get for free from our bodies. Dreyfus emphasises risk and challenge as being fundamental to presence, and lacking in telepresence. It's not all criticism though, since he acknowledges the benefits to his students of webcasting his lectures and providing audio recordings for revision purposes. An embodied presence is essential however, and to Dreyfus these technologies seem best summed up as better than nothing.
In chapter four (Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age) Dreyfus introduces the writings of Kierkegaard and from here on, it gets pretty heavy. Kierkegaard wrote in the late 19th century of the levelling effect that the press and coffee shop discussion (or the public sphere) had on the general public. He wrote of the seemingly inevitable despair following any degree of commitment to expanding one's knowledge outside of areas upon which one has a complete grounding. Dreyfus sees the internet as the ultimate extension of that which Kierkegaard feared most, concluding that the internet is where,
"anonymous electronic kibitzers from all over the world, who risk nothing, come together to announce and defend their opinions"
In other words, anonymity and lack of commitment leads to an electronic nihilism, to a life without meaning.
It is back to the notion of risk, along with relevance and commitment, that Dreyfus comes in the conclusion of the book. He rescues himself from committing to a complete damnation of the internet by summarising the short-comings outlined in the previous chapters such that they stand as a warning not to place too much faith in the powers of the web. Surprisingly, nothing is really made of the differences between books and the internet. It's not clear why reading the book is acceptable, whilst internet-based learning is flawed. I can only assume it's another case of better than nothing. The main conclusion seems to be that there is still potential for the web to be put to good use, but not in the ways that people intuitively expect, and we aren't there yet.
I've had On The Internet for a while, but prompted by this Penny Arcade strip (via plasticbag) I thought my Everything2 review of it could do with wider exposure in the context of other online communities.
Interestingly enough, I haven't really had to edit my concluding remarks about what Dreyfus's findings mean for Everything2, in order to make them relevant for the weblogs and social software in general.
So what does all this mean for Everything2 Online Communities?
Clearly, much of this book has a bearing on how we view this place. Not least because many of us are exactly the sort of "anonymous electronic kibitzers" Dreyfus is bemoaning. Appropriately enough, in 2003 the standard answer to "where can I find...?" is "on the internet". But can you really find Everything on the internet?
It's clear that those who stick around here find something, but is Dreyfus right? Is it at the expense of contact with the real world? Does the experience lack risk, relevance and commitment? Are we disembodied to the point where any and all knowledge is free territory, but expertise and true skill are destined to be lost art-forms? Have we really got to a nihilistic state, where nothing is worth dying for (and consequently, nothing is worth living for)? It's not so clear...
Based on the web's short-comings outlined in the book, my advice would be to keep on mentoring, keep on chatting, keep on specialising and (possibly most important of all) keep on gathering.
Just-A-Tool Fallacy (Seymour Papert quote)
In the foreword to Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, Seymour Papert identifies the "just-a-tool" fallacy. He says:
By this I mean the failure to distinguish between tools (reasonably described as "just tools") that improve their users' ability to do pre-existing jobs, and another kind of "tool" (of which this book offers an excellent example) that are more than "just tools" because of their role in the creation of a job nobody thought to do, or nobody could have done, before.
Another quote for del.icio.us/TomC/quotes.
Agents, Behaviour, Emergence and Embodiment
Here are my online references from a lecture I gave today at UCL.
- Wikipedia on AI, includes a paragraph on "neats" and "scruffies".
- Desire-lines & Emergent paths: a light-hearted presentation of a predictive model / apparently it wasn't Berkeley, Irvine, or the Oregon Experiment who tried to use it... has anyone actually tried it?
- Craig Reynolds' boids / Steering Behaviours (the individual steering behaviour examples are essential viewing) / an HP labs tech report on not evolving collective behaviour for fish / well explained pseudocode for boids / my quick 2D processing implementation of the pseudocode (commented code and 3D version available on request).
- Pedestrian Simulation: Alasdair Turner's EVAS agents / my post on the MSc VE weblog about a pedestrian sim project in the Alps / Crowd Dynamics (the design is terrible, but click main menu and scroll down to the "Myriad" section).
- Brandeis's DEMO lab: The Golem Project / Evolutionary Design / Evolution of Buildable Objects (LEGO)
- Stigmergy: a good academic intro (pdf, HTML summary here) / Dan Ladley's termite constructions.
- Karl Sims: evolved creatures / the "blockies" MPEG / a retrospective.
- The books I mentioned, all very accessible: Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology / Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams / Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
- The software/libraries I mentioned: steering behaviours work has spun off into a free open source library called Open Steer / Breve is a 3D environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life / Framsticks doesn't require programming knowledge / there is a demo of BEAST at David Gordon's homepage.
This will all be assimilated into my del.icio.us page shortly.
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