Stung Eye blog

Blog: Reading and Listening in 2011

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:10:00 +0100

This is what I read and heard over the past year. I beat my goal of one book per month. Maybe I should try for 24+ in 2012.

Fiction

It was a very sci-fi year. Pullman’s Dark Materials books were my favourites, although I’d say this was a 4 star year on average.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
The Captain and the Enemy - Graham Greene
The Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov
The Dogs of Riga - Henning Mankell
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman:
- The Golden Compass
- The Subtle Knife
- The Amber Spyglass
Childhood’s End - Arthur C. Clark
After the Party - Lisa Jewell
Calculating God - Robert Sawyer
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clark

Non-Fiction

In the non-fiction world, I seem to be on a bit of a “Ruby with Olsen” kick.

Eloquent Ruby - Russ Olsen
Design Patterns in Ruby - Russ Olsen

Audio Lectures

This was the year I discovered audio lectures. Most of these were heard while running in Assiniboine park.

Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines
No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator
Science Fiction - The Literature of Technological Imagination (Out of Print)
Art of Public Speaking: Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History
Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning

Comment

Blog: We Saw Each Other

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:02:00 +0100

“I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful.

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.“

— Ann Druyan

“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

— Carl Sagan

Comment

Blog: Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:22:00 +0100

I am enjoying Patrick Grim’s lectures on the Philosophy of Mind.

Grim starts the series with a historical look at the mind-body problem. He then introduces the major themes in the study of artificial intelligence, while exploring human intelligence, perception, behaviour and finally the hard problem of consciousness. Throughout this complex web of ideas Grim remains eloquent and engaging. Highly recommended.

For me, these theories of mind and human-ness are mingling nicely with Philip Pullman concepts of daemons and zombies in his Dark Materials novels. Also recommended. I finished the Subtle Knife yesterday.

Comment

Blog: Manitoba Election dot Ca

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:00:00 +0100

On October 4th of this year the people of Manitoba go to the polls to elect their next Legislative Assembly and Premier.

Making an informed choice for your vote requires that you know the candidates, their platforms and the issues they discuss.

This is why we built ManitobaElection.ca, a citizen created website for the upcoming Manitoba provincial election.

Currently you can view all the constituencies, candidate nominees and the incumbents. We have plenty more in the works including interactive maps, historical election results, candidate news feeds, an events calendar, candidate questionnaires, and educational resources.

Your feedback is much appreciated. Send your comments and suggestions to manitoba.election@gmail.com or @MbElection on Twitter.

* * *

ManitobaElection.ca was created in the spirit of openness, community, accountability and communication. In 2010 we created a similar website for the Winnipeg election which helped over 40,000 Winnipeggers research their mayoral, city council and school trustee candidates. After the election we released an open data collection including the website source, ward map polygons, and historical election results.

Comment

Blog: Chemical Etching For Artists and Hackers

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:29:00 +0100

This Saturday (April 16th) I’ll be giving a talk on chemical etching at the 5th Skullspace Hack-a-thon.

Etching is the process of using corrosive chemicals to cut into the unprotected parts of an object’s surface.

Etching has both artistic and industrial uses. I have experience with both types of etching and I’ll be sharing my knowledge of:

The History of Etching.
Etched Copper and the Printing Press. (Printmaking)
Etching Circuit Boards for Electronic Prototyping.

I’ll see you there.

In the meanwhile, check out the etchings of my father, Allan Geske.

Comment

Blog: TEDxManitoba Analogies

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:24:51 +0100

Last month I had the opportunity to attend TEDxManitoba, an independently organized TED event at the Park Theatre. It was a day of inspiration drawn from the various speakers and the conversations with fellow attendees.

During each of the seventeen talks I scribbled down my thoughts in a notepad. During the week that followed, I tried to distill each talk down to one compelling analogy. These seventeen analogies are presented below (in italics), along with links to each video (follow the arrows).

Some of the analogies are direct quotes, others are summaries of what I personally took away from a talk. Out of context these analogies may have little meaning, so watch the videos. I’ve marked my favourite talks with a star (★).

Len Brownlie

Helping the Swiftest Be Swifter ⇒

Luck as preparation plus opportunity.

Frank Plummer

Is There Natural Immunity to HIV? ⇒

Sleepy immune systems as HIV immunity.

Shaun Loney

Poverty, Crime & Greenhouse Gas Emissions ⇒ ★

Employment as transformative opportunity.

Phil Doucette

Between You, Me and Liberation ⇒

Forgiveness as freedom.

Rick Van Eck

How Video Games May Transform Education ⇒

Engagement as cognitive effort.

John Weigelt

Enabling Canada’s Economy Digitally ⇒

Prosperity gap as innovation gap.

Leslee Silverman and Columpa Bobb

The Moving Gallery @ the Edge of the Screen ⇒

Children as empathy glue.

Scott Stirton

Intelligent Buildings ⇒ ★

The Manitoba Hydro building as camel.

Hannah Taylor

A Cold Walk in Shoes Without a Home ⇒

Change as caring in action.

Terry MacLeod et al.

Finding Life Beyond the Gang ⇒ ★

Gang life as MPR (Money, Power and Respect).

Les Foltos

Peer Coaching: 21st Century Teacher Skills ⇒

Colleagues as co-learners.

Bernard McCoy

Social Entrepreneurism for the 21st Century ⇒

Love as seeking the good of others.

Terry Godwaldt

DeforestAction: Global Project Based Learning ⇒

Authentic tasks as education.

* * *

The following talks (the first four of the day) are not available due to an internet hiccup.

Robert Sawyer - Creating the Future ★

Consciousness as networked complexity.

Nicole Buckley - Canada Alive in Space

Space research as aging research.

Kerry Stevenson - How 3D Printing Will Change the Way You Think

3D printing as slow motion teleportation.

Karen Letourneau - A Breakthrough in Prenatal Ultrasound ★

Simplicity as the other side of complexity.

Comment

Blog: Stung Eye Year in Review

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:05:00 +0100

This weekend was nice. I have a new year’s tradition of re-reading my StungEye post from the previous year. I also re-read and update my resolutions. Here’s a recap of my 2010.

Doing Is Real; Being Is A Social Fiction^*

Most of my 2010 resolutions were about doing stuff, rather than thinking about doing stuff. ; )

As such, I:

Presented a talk on Internet start-ups at the RRC Directions conference.
Participated in the Google AI Tron Challenge.
Completed three courses for my Certificate in Adult Education.
Spent the summer working on various home renos.
Helped create WinnipegElection.ca.
Applied and was accepted to attend TEDx Manitoba.
Started a new programming blog, CodeGlutton.

To increase my productivity (or better said, to decrease my procrastination) I’ve been experimenting with a simple To-Do system based on video game “achievement theory”. Some inspirations:

WinnipegElection.ca

Our goal with WinnipegElection.ca was to increase citizen engagement in Winnipeg civic politics by creating an online information hub for voters, candidates and journalists. This past October we helped over 35 thousand Winnipeggers research their mayoral, council and school trustee candidates.

The site was inspired by openParliament.ca, which was inspired by howdTheyVote.ca and theyWorkForYou.com.

We will be announcing a new project later this month, built in collaboration with RRC Journalism students. We will continue to focus on organizing and sharing publicly available political data.

Intellectual Property and the Public Domain

Twenty-ten was the year I finally overcame my fear of the public domain.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” — Thomas Jefferson

Prior to this year I had been using a (fairly permissive) Creative Commons license for all my publicly available source-code, blog content and Flickr photos. After pondering the above-linked essay I no longer wished to force attribution or to place non-commercial-use restrictions on my works. I claim no ownership over the ideas I choose to share with others.

This year I released the following soure-code as public domain using the Unlicense:

Also:

Yesterday was Public Domain Day.
The Unlicense: The First Year in Review
Bill C32, the Canadian Copyright Moderization act is working it’s way through the House of Commons.
My thoughts on Bill C32.

Comment

Blog: Perils of Internet Voting

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:01:52 +0100

The following is an expanded version of my letter to the editor featured in the November 12th edition of the Winnipeg Free Press.

In their editorial Modern times, ancient system, the Winnipeg Free Press recommends internet voting as a means of increasing voter turnout. Senior city hall elections official Marc Lemoine has also expressed an interest in online voting. As a computer engineer who teaches web programming courses I would urge them to reconsider.

Internet voting would be much less secure than our current system and would mean the loss of a physical record of votes for auditing purposes. We would also lose the ability to verify that each vote was cast by a unique voter. For example, a parent might be tempted to ask their 18-year-old children if they could vote on their behalf, or vice versa.

Recently, election officials in Washington D.C. invited security experts to test an internet voting system designed for overseas voters. Within 36 hours a team of computer scientists from the University of Michigan had compromised the system, allowing them to read and change recorded votes. One member of the team, J. Alex Halderman, had this to say:

“Major web sites like Facebook and Twitter regularly suffer from vulnerabilities. These high-profile sites have greater resources and far more security experience than the municipalities that run elections. It may someday be possible to build a secure method for voting over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today’s security technology.”

Implementing internet voting in Winnipeg would require a change in provincial legislation.

More Information:

Hacking the D.C. Internet Voting Pilot - J. Alex Halderman
A Comparative Assessment of Electronic Voting [pdf] prepared for Elections Canada by the CETD.
Casting a Vote Against Internet Voting - Michael Geist

Electronic voting machines are equally troubling:

Comment

Blog: Stretching Your Wrists

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:59:00 +0100

These Aikido wrist stretches are for anyone who types a lot.

Paraphrasing from Common Programmer Health Problems:

Perform these stretches prior to every typing session:

To warm up, put your hands out in front of you and grab at the air as fast as you can 20 times. Then shake your hands, then rotate your wrists 10 times one direction and 10 times another.
Start with the video exercise you’re best at and do 5-10 of them at a medium speed.
Continue through each exercise. After each one shake your hands and arms and rotate your wrists to realign them. These exercises move the bones in your wrist, shaking them settles them back in to place.

Do just enough stretching to get your wrists feeling supple and relaxed. Don’t strain yourself, the motto “no pain no gain” will only damage you. Instead of forcing your joint to a certain position, bring it to that position and then think about relaxing it or “letting” it move a bit further.

I also like the ergocise wrist stretches.

Comment

Blog: Request for Feedback: WinnipegElection.ca

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:36:00 +0100

Hi folks,

On October 27 of this year the citizens of Winnipeg go to the polls to elect their Mayor, their City Councillors and their School Trustees.

Making an informed vote requires that you know the candidates, their platforms and the issues they discuss.

This is why we’ve created WinnipegElection.ca, a citizen driven website for the upcoming Winnipeg general election.

Our public launch is later this month, but we’d love you to take a sneak peak.

Send your comments and suggestions to winnipeg.election@gmail.com. You should vote in our polls too. We’ll use your feedback to determine how to proceed with the site.

Currently you’ll find:

Recommend WinnipegElection.ca on Facebook:

Follow WinnipegElection.ca on Twitter:

Comment

Blog: Canadian Copyright - Bill C32

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:59:00 +0100

On Thursday the Canadian government introduced the Copyright Modernization Act (or Bill C-32).

The CBC does a good job of outlining the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law.

The bill is an attempt to strike a fair balance between:

Our ability to monetize creativity. -vs- Our ability to re-purpose culture.
A creator’s right to control their works. -vs- A consumer’s rights to experience purchased media flexibly and in perpetuity.

There are things to like in this bill. The format-shifting, time-shifting and backup provisions are long-overdue, as is the expansion of fair-dealings¹. The non-commercial “mash-up/youtube” provisions are indeed progressive.

However, any and all use-rights provided by the bill are revoked if the work in questions is protected by a digital lock. This immediately makes backing up DVDs illegal. It also makes viewing DVDs using the Linux operating-system illegal². Copying a quote from a DRM-locked e-book for a book report or a news story would be illegal too.

The supremacy of digital-locks promoted by this bill must not be allowed to pass into law. If you value free-speech, your ability to re-purpose culture, and your right to use your purchased media as you see fit, I ask that you write your Member of Parliament to express your displeasure over the DRM provisions in Bill C32. (If anything, a bill that includes DRM provisions should mandate explicit labeling of all digitally-locked media.)

You can find your MP by searching for your postal code on openparliament.ca.

I recommend following these tips on discussing bill C32 with your MP. For the most impact, voice your displeasure using hand-written snail-mail.

Footnotes

Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire would not infringe copyright. Parody and satire were not previously considered fair dealings in Canada.
In order to view legally purchased DVDs using the Linux OS one must break the digital locks on the DVDs. The reason for this is that the DVD industry has not provided any other way to view DVDs when using open-source software. Since I use Linux for all my DVD viewing, C32 would make watching movies a criminal activity for me.

Comment

Blog: Glutton LastFM

Tue, 11 May 2010 23:20:00 +0100

Two days ago I released my first Ruby gem. In coding parlance gems are software libraries created to enhance the Ruby programming language.

My gem is call glutton_lastfm. It’s a wrapper library for version 2.0 of the last.fm API. The source code and documentation is available on my github account.

This gem allows you to query last.fm for:

artist information by name
top albums by artist
top tracks by artist
top user-submitted tags by artist
upcoming events by artist
album information by name

For example, here’s a program that searches for tags and images related to Buck 65: artist_tags_and_images.rb

I wrote this library to:

Learn the gem creation process. (Facilitated by the jeweler gem.)
Better understand the mechanics of web-based APIs. (Facilitated by the httparty gem.)
Brush up on my unit-testing skills. (Facilitated by the fakeweb gem.)
Distance myself from years of return-code function creation in favour of exceptions.

I also wrote it as part of a larger data-mining project I’m working on. (Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a post on datasets and the soon to explode dataset market.)

The glutton_lastfm source-code is released unlicensed into the public domain.

Comment

Blog: Mobile Development

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:15:05 +0100

This weekend I’ll be exploring:

PhoneGap - Cross-platform mobile app-dev using html / css / javascript.
JQTouch - A mobile plugin for my fav Javascript framework, JQuery.
iProcessing - The API from processing.js extended for mobile use.
MobiOne - Windows mobile emulator for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Pre.

Step one: Install Eclipse, PhoneGap and the Android SDK along with JQTouch, iProcessing and MobiOne.

Step two: Play around. Create a few sample apps.

Step Three: Tomorrow Andrew and I will deploy these apps to his Android phone.

Comment

Blog: You Know Who "Gets it"?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:48:22 +0100

The Hypemachine, Groveshark and SoundCloud understand that the future will be streamed.

You can listen to (in their entirety) every album of the Hypem top 50 of 2009. The top 50 was crowd-sourced from the top 10 lists of over 500 bloggers. The albums are hosted by Groveshark.

Yes, the Hypem leaderboard gets gamed now and then, and it sometimes get clogged with meme-ooze, but the web’s messy like that.

SoundCloud is a mix-hunters paradise. I’m listening to Dj Czech’s “Bucket Of Grease” mix right now.

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Blog: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:19:00 +0100

Rest in peace Mr. Salinger.

Comment

Blog: A Catch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:50:00 +0100

How’s life? I’m reading Catch-22. I laugh out loud on the bus. You know? Real life lols. It’s a little dated, but luckily I know who Henry Fonda is.

“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?”

The Canadian Copyright Consultation ended in September. The submission from the Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC) is quite enlightened, the submission from Don Hogarth of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) is not.

Meanwhile, Canadian officials are taking part in negotiations concerning a top-secret copyright treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that could see families barred from the Internet for a year if someone in the household is suspected of illegal downloads. [source]

Even though copyright was created to protect the commercial interests of content creators, the ACTA includes provisions for the criminal enforcement of “willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.” [source]

Might I one day be jailed for making mixtapes or posting my mixes to the net?

Listen, I’ve said it before, I’m not a pirate I just grog a lot.

Comment

Blog: The Loss of Parker Forest

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:37:00 +0100

Winnipeg city council has approved a city land-swap with developer Andrew Marquess of GEM equities. 59 acres of unserviced city land in the Parker neighbourhood will be traded for nine acres of serviced land in the Fort Rouge Yards. The city wants the Fort Rouge land for a future rapid transit corridor. Marquess wishes to build 3500 townhouses on the Parker land.

Nearly half of the Parker land being given to Marquess is forested. I spent a few afternoons in the summer of 2006 exploring the Parker Forest and I have returned to it often since. Here’s how I described it back then:

The forest is triangle shaped, with an estimated area of over 100,000 meters squared (or .1km²), and is composed of tall prairie grasses, dense forest (mainly Trembling Aspen with some Bur Oak), and (presently dry) wetland. It sits on what I believe to be CN land, south of Taylor Ave.

I discovered this forest during a Glutton University field trip in 2003. It remains my favourite secret forest in Winnipeg. It appears that I’m not alone; after following some human tracks we spied a campground, their tent fire red, camouflaged by the afternoon sunlight.

Hopefully this land is never sold for development.

The debate is complex. In-fill housing development is preferable over sprawl, especially if the housing is affordable. But the land they need to build this housing is of particular beauty and importance. Urban forests play a role in our communities as spaces of leisure, sport, relaxation and socialization. Most importantly they are home to numerous wild plants, insects, and animals. I’ve spied fire-files in the Parker grasses at night and local residents have spotted everything from deer to lynx.

The density of the proposed housing is also very steep. If we alot 5% of the land for roads, infrastructure and public space that leaves us with 56 acres. To accommodate 3500 townhouses they would need to build 63 townhouses per acre. (One acre is a little smaller than an American football field.)

For a better idea of what 63 dwelling units per acre (or du/ac) looks like, take a peak at these 40-60 du/ac communities and 60-80 du/ac communities in California.

Here are some excerpts of recent Winnipeg Free Press Letters to the Editor on the subject:

A Lot to Lose

If you woke one morning to find bulldozers tearing down the park that your kids play in to build a fire hall and had to open the paper or be called by a neighbour to find out what’s happening, would you be upset?

[…]

I live on Parker Avenue. I have a lot to lose. Collectively, our neighbours have a lot more invested in our neighbourhood than any developer or any elected official. I believe we have a right and a duty to speak out.

-Robert Lewyc

In Fill Instead of Sprawl

[The proposed development is] “infill” instead of sprawl. It is dense housing, compared to single housing farther to the south. And if rumours are true, it is low income housing, something the city needs more of desperately.

[…]

I hope city council will consider things like a linear parkway, bike paths and green space paralleling the busway, and I look forward to more decisions that recognize the value of building on lands inside the existing city instead of the constant sprawling so-called developments that left such areas vacant for so many years.

-Shane Nestruck

No Consultation

[T]his protest, for me at least, has nothing to do with keeping out low rentals. What it has to do with is the fact that nobody at city hall bothered to ask any questions before agreeing to this land swap. Nobody asked: What kind of community are we infringing on; what is on the current site; how is the current site being used; what would be lost if it was bulldozed; what is it really worth on the open market; is it even developable?*

All of these questions must be asked as part of a due diligence process, but were never asked. The people of Winnipeg deserve better.

-Cal Dueck

Comment

Blog: Vote for BabyLolly @ The Next Web

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:26:00 +0100

Hi pals. We need your votes for BabyLolly in the Rising Sun Startup Rally for this year’s The Next Web conference. Please lend us your support by clicking the “Vote Now” button.

With enough votes for our video we’ll be able to present at the conference later this month in Amsterdam.

Comment

Blog: Art and Code - Overview Part III

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:49:05 +0100

My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I & Part II)

Sunday Continued

The toolkit presentations continued after lunch.

Processing - Presented by co-creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas

I’ve written about Processing here before. It is still my goto tool for visual coding.

Jotted Down:

Fry, Reas, Shiffman, and Greenberg all in one room.

Should the concept of literacy be expanded to include programming fluency.

Max / MSP / Jitter - Presented by Luke Dubois

Max / MSP / Jitter is a graphical programming environment for music, audio and media. A patcher based languages that shares roots with Pd which was demoed in the morning.

Jotted Down:

I guess I’m a FLOSS snob; although this environment looks much more polished than Pd, I gave it less attention because it’s a commercial product. (There’s a 30-day trail version, but the full bundle costs $699 USD.)

Reminder to check out the work of Michael Joaquin Grey, especially Recapitulate: Retrace, Erase, Repeat which uses Goya’s The Disasters of War etchings as source fodder.

Also, check out Hello World, The Song (in Max/MSP)

VVVV - Presented by Sebastian Oschatz

Vvvv is a video-synthesis toolkit. The programming interface is similar to the patch-base language we’ve already seen (Pd and Max/MSP), graphical function-blocks connected with wires. For a more detailed look read Ctrl+B For Concurrency.

Of the visual languages presented at the conference, vvvv is the only one I downloaded and experimented with. Oh I do wish for infinite time to play with all these wonderful tools.

Jotted Down

Read the vvvv licensing page, commercial vs. non-commercial uses.

This language doesn’t contain any explicit looping structures.

Nerdy VJs would go wild for this.

And then we had a cookie break.

AIR & Extendscript - Present by Dr. WooHoo

A number of Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects) contain an implementation of Javascript (called Extendscript) which can be used to programmatically control (and potentially abuse) these products.

Jotted Down

Reminder to check out In the Mod.

openFrameworks - Presented by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson, Arturo Castro

openFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding. It was described as a glue languages wrapping together several commonly-used open-source multimedia libraries. Minimal Design: There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions.

Jotted Down

Looks fast! Might lend itself nicely to augmented reality projects.

Evening - Dorkbot @ Brillobox

The Dorkbot Pecha Kucha at the Brillobox was fun. I presented early having greatly under-estimated the length of my presentation. The 10 minutes were over quickly, and I fear my last few minutes were a muddle.

Delicious beers were consumed. I chatted with some wonderful people.

Floating-Lightbulb of the night, bringing Jonathan Brodsky idea of coding competitions to RRC.

Monday - The Warp Up

Panel discussions, CODE and FORM at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, pizza and beers with some interesting folks, and then a cab ride to the airport and home again home.

Comment

Blog: Art and Code - Overview Part II

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:12:57 +0100

My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I)

Sunday - Toolkit Overviews and Dorkbot @ Brillobox

Sunday was a day of presentations. From 8:45 to 17:45 we were treated to 45 minute demos of various arty programming toolkits. In the evening there was a Dorkbot Pecha Kucha-ish gathering at a pub called the Brillobox.

Some notes I jotted down during the presentations:

Alice - Presented by CMU’s Don Slater.

Alice is a 3D programming environment for creating animations, games and videos. 3d models of objects and characters are programmed visually by dragging/dropping/connecting various Instruction-Tiles together.

Jotted Down:

Five Fundamentals of Programming

Sequence
Decision
Repetition
Data Persistence (Variables)
Methods (Modular Abstractions)

Pd - Presented by Hans-Christoph Steiner

Pd or Pure Data is a graphical programming language for audio and video programming. Data (most often audio signals) flows through various specialized transformation or generation nodes/objects which are visually connected together by the programmer using “wires”.

1000 words == Picture

Jotted Down:

Closed tools split creators from consumers.

We need to think about programming as something every does / will do.

Scratch - Presented by John Maloney and Evelyn Eastmond

Scratch is a graphical programming environment for children ages 8 and up. Like Alice, the programs are created by snapping graphical blocks together.

Jotted Down:

Remixing of Scratch programs is encourage via their website.

There appears to be a nice learning path from Scratch through Processing to Java. Perhaps we could use Scratch as an introductory programming language at the college. David Malan has been using it for a intro comp sci course at Harvard.

Scratch is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.

May 16th is Scratch Day.

Scratch anime!

Hackety Hack - Presented by _why

Hackety Hack is a Ruby-based environment designed to make programming accessible for kids, (especially teenagers). Its motivation: The Little Coder’s Predicament

Jotted Down:

Why claims to be a freelance professor, in other words, half-way between a scarecrow and a seeing eye dog.

A logic/programming card game called kaxXxt is also in the works.

The ASCII sword-fighting program stirs-up long dormant memories of Monkey Island.

And then we ate lunch. To be continued…

Comment

Stung Eye blog

Blog: Reading and Listening in 2011

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Audio Lectures

Blog: We Saw Each Other

Blog: Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines

Blog: Manitoba Election dot Ca

Blog: Chemical Etching For Artists and Hackers

Blog: TEDxManitoba Analogies

Len Brownlie

Frank Plummer

Shaun Loney

Phil Doucette

Rick Van Eck

John Weigelt

Leslee Silverman and Columpa Bobb

Scott Stirton

Hannah Taylor

Terry MacLeod et al.

Les Foltos

Bernard McCoy

Terry Godwaldt

Robert Sawyer - Creating the Future ★

Nicole Buckley - Canada Alive in Space

Kerry Stevenson - How 3D Printing Will Change the Way You Think

Karen Letourneau - A Breakthrough in Prenatal Ultrasound ★

Blog: Stung Eye Year in Review

Doing Is Real; Being Is A Social Fiction*

WinnipegElection.ca

Intellectual Property and the Public Domain

Blog: Perils of Internet Voting

Blog: Stretching Your Wrists

Blog: Request for Feedback: WinnipegElection.ca

Blog: Canadian Copyright - Bill C32

Blog: Glutton LastFM

Blog: Mobile Development

Blog: You Know Who "Gets it"?

Blog: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Blog: A Catch

Blog: The Loss of Parker Forest

A Lot to Lose

In Fill Instead of Sprawl

No Consultation

Blog: Vote for BabyLolly @ The Next Web

Blog: Art and Code - Overview Part III

Sunday Continued

Processing - Presented by co-creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas

Max / MSP / Jitter - Presented by Luke Dubois

VVVV - Presented by Sebastian Oschatz

AIR & Extendscript - Present by Dr. WooHoo

openFrameworks - Presented by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson, Arturo Castro

Evening - Dorkbot @ Brillobox

Monday - The Warp Up

Blog: Art and Code - Overview Part II

Sunday - Toolkit Overviews and Dorkbot @ Brillobox

Alice - Presented by CMU’s Don Slater.

Pd - Presented by Hans-Christoph Steiner

Scratch - Presented by John Maloney and Evelyn Eastmond

Hackety Hack - Presented by _why

Doing Is Real; Being Is A Social Fiction^*