Leonard's IM Blog

301 Moved Permanently

FYI: I've withdrawn from this program to persue my projects in an environment better suited to my needs.

I'm sure I'll see everyone around. You can find me online at random($foo).

INDUCE considered harmful

Ernest Miller has been following the new INDUCE Act over at his Corante blog The Importance of... closely recently (see also: Copyfight, Shoot people but don't share files with them).

Interestingly (and unfortunately), I've found that the troubling IP trends, and IP issues in general is often given very little consideration by my artistic peers. Throughout my first person encounters with otherwise bright and creative individuals, I've primarily encountered extremely naive or misguided, underdeveloped, and unconcerned attitudes towards the concepts, origins, and implications of both intellectual property and IP policy.

Granted, it's slightly abstract, but when your livelihood (and these days, your very freedoms) are so deeply intertwined and dependent upon the subject matter...

Maybe as a species/culture/society we just aren't up the level of criticality and discourse required. At the crossroads of technology, creativity, and freedom, however, we collectively sit on the knife's edge all the same.

MSRDE04

Well, our project isn't going to Redmond. Congrats to the chosen team.

Also, congrats to all the Speck team members, who put in a lot of work on a great design expo project. I'm proud of what we accomplished, the methodologies that we used, and the presentation we gave.

I'm very happy with our adherence to the spirit and letter of the design guidelines, the set of deliverables we had, and the answer we came up w/ for this year's question: How can we design our communication tools to better reflect the different levels of closeness/trust in relationships?.

Related:

• Speck on Technorati
• Close Proximity Cellphone Attribute Sharing

Priced to Move

• Nomad Expert Technician System - MSRP $3995 - w/ built in wifi, running Windows CE, 800x600px 60Hz, monochrome red (specs). I'll break my piggy bank open as soon as the color version hits.

Lots of interesting hardware at affordable prices coming down the pipe. (See also this Forbes article which lists a number of other products: Wearable Wireless Displays Are In Sight).

Fun Things To Do Next Year

If you paid full price for each and every one of these, you'd come in at about $10K.

Project: keep track of interesting (free/cheap) academic events on campus and surrounding area (UCLA, UCI, Stanford), organize calendar w/ Art and Music events.

crunch

Still crunching, trying to catch up on things. Too easily distracted by shiny things.

Not my primary area of interest, but probably useful for classmates interested in game-world type development

• Blender 2.33 Re-enables Game Engine - check out what people have been doing with it.
• 3DEngines.net and Python3D are great places to start to see what's out there; Pygame if you want to do 2D

A Manifesto for A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.

TODO: Cross-reference with CTWR 518 final project.

See also (earlier):

• On the augmentation of human social networking abilities...

(misc thoughts: link object, extend class w/ propertis/methods for finding, caching relationships [google, technorati, popdex, blogdex, et al], metadata; think: what should be one click away? what can be generated automatically? integration w/ existing workflow, link stacks)

Awww

"Marriage is the act of making public what is written in two people's hearts."

Some GDC Pics

Here are some shots from GDC. Maybe more as I have time:

User Testing

Focus group went well this week. The Cool Ranch Pepsi is a hit!

Movieoke!

Apparently something that came out of New York, but seems like it'd be a perfect match in LA.

Movieoke - A form of entertainment in which a person acts out scenes from a movie while a silent version of the movie plays in the background.

USC Digital Connections

As part of the university's Communications Critical Pathway initiative, Todd Richmond, USC Annenberg Center for Communication, has been pushing for increased collaboration/information exchange by using distributed publishing and aggregation w/ RSS/XML. They've launched a USC Digital Connections Portal and an aggregation site at weblogs.usc.edu.

For more information on what they're doing, see their about page and white papers.

Grey Tuesday

What are you doing for Grey Tuesday?

First Post

Like Andrew before him, Erin has just made a thoughtful first post to his blog.

At some point, I will have to gather and expound on my own thoughts on hypermedia. Ted Nelson's quote is definitely one that I very much like, for a variety of reasons:

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Semi-Interesting Things to do with an IM Division Website™

A combination of publication, community, and kb features. For future reference:

• Unified userspace, authN/authZ
• Fine grained authZ, semi-perm, pubsub
• Int/ext announcements (see above)
• Events, meetings
• List of courses, links to course sites, semester blog posts (aggregated)
• Project/thesis/concept/publication repository
• Shared KSpace
• Collab workspaces
• Discussion space
• Annotations
• BB/'wall' functionality
• Presence
• Profiles/Bios; stud, res, fac, staff
• Aggr/display/link/mining tools

Not a very organized list, a lot of overlap; nothing that hasn't been done before (but nothing that's done all of it as well as I've imagined). More thoughts as they flit through.

Extra-curricular Priorities

I've realized that my todo-list is in need of some rearrangement. Moving up on my list:

• Distributed Social Software - beginning documenting, diagramming and coding proof of concepts; work on XMPP xml/rdf interchange, transitive trust models, content-based hashing, id/key exchange
• pubsub - working on event and microcontent pubsub tests; mod_pubsub, iCal, CAP
• RT KB - working on better bookmark, blog management; JSRS, del.icio.us, mozdb
• Looking at other on-campus programs/initiatives; IML, IMSC, ICT, etc

Things that have been taking up time but will soon be moving off my plate:

• Classes for IM/Animation study group; taught intro to programming the previous week, will be teaching UNIX basics/tricks this week; this will be the last session I'm teaching, although I may help out on the C/OpenGL classes
• CNTV-IMD server and blog maintenance, updates; I've been working on this since no one else has, however, perhaps this should move down on my priority list, at least until I work on my own blog and I believe there are other people who can take up slack

Better than TunA?

/. is reporting on a new device called the Aireo, a $300 device with built in wi-fi and fm tx... If we could get devkits, it'd be interesting to develop a publically available TunA-like patch...

First new feature...

Put up an initial version of a 'last updated' blogroll on the main page. I moved it out of MT so that it's updated dynamically. TODO:

• Option to order statically
• Storing said viewing option in a cookie
• Updated since last visited highlighting via cookies

Also, in the interest of leaving no child behind, I'm processing my main blog's RSS feed, displaying the last ten entries on the right side.

Second Semester

Now that I've had my first week of class (a much more sane schedule this semester), some first impressions:

• CTWR 518, Introduction to Interactive Writing, Peggy Weil - This class will be split into three main blocks: hypertext fiction, games, AI/bots. The approach thus far seems to be exploring/analyzing/understanding interactive writing as a function of structure. Should be interesting.
• CTIN 511, Interactive Media Seminar, Scott Fisher - this semester the seminar will be about bringing in speakers to talk. Scott wants us to post comments attached to the speaker announcements. Perhaps using something like Rotisserie, or at the very least installing MTThreadedComments might be a good idea for substantive commenting.
• CTCS 564, Seminar in Digital Game Studies, Tracy Fullerton - an unavoidable scheduling conflict meant missing the first half of class today, but the part that I did attend was fun. We played a hilariously bad game of Werewolf and then talked about gaming in general. So far I'm liking Tracy's approach.

So there you have it, I'm looking forward to the upcoming classes, and also to be able to have enough time to commit time to work, class, and my other projects. It'll still be rough, but hopefully something possible to do and still get some sleep.

Also, from some colleagues' comments, it looks like this will be the second semester I've dodged (well, time-shifted at least) a bullet as I won't be taking the Interactive Animation class this semester.

New Year

Not a lot of posting going on here towards the end of the last semester. Mostly a product of lack of time/interesting stuff going on in the IMD program. I survived the first semester, and am looking forward to a significantly better schedule this fall. As a result of improved schedule, there are a few things that I plan on working on for the IMD site. I've pretty much inherited both the server and site by default, and now that I'll have some time to work on it, I've committed to getting some (hopefully) interesting things up and running in the coming months:

• Calendar Sharing - I've been mulling over the problem of calendar sharing (pubsub) and iCal integration over the past couple of months. I'll be trying to implement a workable (80%) solution... More elaboration on my main blog soon
• MT work - installing some plugins (SmartyPants comes to mind) and also working on multi-blog aggregation. I'm currently converging toward the idea of using categories for aggregation, although there'll need to be more specificity of for memberships in classes
• KB - nebulous plans for working on a KM tool. Will probably spill over as a summer project

Personal projects for this specific blog is to figure out a good way of comment aggregation (shouldn't be too hard), and possibility experimenting with some blogrolling/presence tools/integration. Also, setting up Mimerdesk and integrating authentication might be interesting...