a looking-glass book

hp working on digital blur for faces in photos

now i understand why kurt said i should have this feature in my thesis down the road. he just wants to be the one to sell it to me. it all makes sense to me now. way to go hp!

link from /.

queue system

i envision this a bit like a playlist, a way to navigate through the movies, a way to make custom 'edits' (a tricky word, since you arent actually making a 'cut' but rather jumping from movie to movie).

this obviously isnt going to be a pretty version, as load times will make it tough. (see previous post about segmenting video for thoughts on that. its something i dont mind acknowledging and, if time allows, tackling. but for now i want to pretend it is a perfect world and we can get files in a flash.)

so you add things to the queue and can navigate like that. i dont have a good sense on a way to make it like a playlist yet - where you add these items, hit play and it does the work of flipping through them for you.

in fact, i am not sure that is a path i want to follow yet. if at all. it makes some assumptions - namely where the outpoint is to jump to the next movie. that should be your decision to make.

so i like the queue as more of a navigation aid.

and its mostly built now.

you can click on an item and add it to the queue. you can delete items and clear the queue. you can specify items down to the frame to go into the queue. when you click on an item in the queue, the browser heads there and starts the movie from that point.

its an ugly implementation right now. but functionally, it exists.

the obvious next step with it is the downloading/cookie-ing of the queue. does it get saved from visit to visit? or can you save it out as a querystring to send to friends? (though you hit the limit of 255 pretty quickly then i think probably. esp if you have a long queue. assume 8-10 characters an item...queue maxes out at about 15-20 items then.)

opinions from anyone?

(i have movies ready to post, ill get them up real soon. and the queue, as soon as i can make it look a little less ugly...if thats possible.)

Thesis Project Production

(thank you kurt for allowing me to steal your template of dates for this. this explains the non-tripp formatting for the week by week headers.)

------

Jan 25 - class 3 - Production Document Due

Project in alpha. Published to the web.
10 hours published to the web.

Feb 1 - class 4 - Production

Finish queue system and release.
20 hours published to the web.

Feb 8 - class 5 - Production

Have ffmpeg-php running on server.
30 hours on web.

Feb 15 - class 6 - Production

Wrap up backend of application.
40 hours on web.

Feb 22 - class 7 - Production

Redesign layout and surrounding pages.
60 hours on web.

Mar 1 - class 8 - Base Production Completed

Move into beta testing. Launch new designs and have complete package.
80 hours on web.

Mar 8 - class 9 - [GDC San Francisco]

Solicit users and feedback.
100 hours on web.

[Spring Break Mar 14 –19]

Mar 22 - class 10 - Lock Down Final Details

Tweak UI and recode backend as necessary.
140 hours on web.

Mar 29 - class 11 - Setup

Dress rehearsal
Install project in Zemeckis 201 (or alternate performance venue)

Apr 5 - class 12 - Internal Presentation & Exhibition Opening

First official showing and performance

Apr 12 - class 13 – Feedback/Tweak

Apr 19 - class 14 – Feedback/Tweak

200 hours on web.

Apr 26 - class 15 (last class) - Papers Due

[Study Days Apr 30 – May 2]

May 12 - Thursday (day before Commencement) - Public Presentation

segmenting qt files

jim gemmell suggested to me the other day some ideas about segmenting my video files. this is a cool idea, because then you kids wouldnt be downloading 200 meg video files.

it would work technically because you can link qt files to each other in the browser. so smaller bits to download. everyone wins. except:

windows movie maker will do this.

but there isnt anything for quicktime. a little digging finds this google answer. qt pro is the best program for this? i would get to do it by hand for each movie?

yuck.
so for now, this is a great idea for dealing with current bandwidth. but i cant spend the time chopping up these movies right now. the payoff isnt worth the time.

but its worth noting as a nice idea that makes a lot of sense.

now if anyone wants to write a auto-segmenter for qt files...

3 minutes later and here is an applescript that might work...

dorm life in pictures

an interesting 'public vs private' story about a photjournalist freshman getting kicked out after taking too many pics of a private nature. i guess i need to wear the cam around soliciting sex with it on to get kicked out of my dorm. oh wait, i dont live in a dorm.

story

google video has launched

http://video.google.com/

havent played with it too much.
now kurt and i have launched into a fight over whether the implementation is good or bad. well, its really neither but it just makes me a little insane.

like video games, video on the web is the hot thing right now. but its all the same - its all thumbnails and a few keywords. ive said it over nad over so i dont have to again.

but i suppose all of this activity is better than nothing.
this is to prove to kurt i am not just a huge whiner.

sensecam pics

the first sensecam pictures. sadly, after taking these 3, it has decided it doesnt want to take any more. so here comes the support call to ms. but at least ive gotten this far.

sensecam

there is one in my hands as i type this. should be posting stuff with it in a few days at the latest.

im very excited to have the opportunity to test out this item.

ourmedia set to launch

it goes live this weekend.

what is it? from the link:
1. an open-source platform and registry to bring personal media to the desktop;
2. a destination website at www.Ourmedia.org -- preliminary docs are
up on the site, with a preliminary launch scheduled for January 2005;
3. eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization
dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, semi-professional, and
professional visual works and other media.

this is cool. it nails home that disk space is becoming less a problem and video over the internet is within reach.

the problem is this: its still just a front-end for a ftp server. (well, ym fingers are crossed that this isnt the case, but im not going to be surprised when it is.)

we still need some work actually getting into the files themselves. not only in interpretation of the content, but also in the representation. do we really need screens full of the first frame of a movie file? how much does this really tell you about what is there? why do i have to download then entire movie and scrub it to see what is in there?

surely i cant be the only one thinking about it in these terms.
nonetheless, a step in the right direction.

im famous...again

whee!
taken just a few minutes ago by the illustrious julian bleecker.

why...

why should books end at all?

couple of articles

this creates some sort of weird feedback loop i feel like. i hope this isnt too tasteless (and that if it is, that justin can forgive me). but the comments made below relate so well to things about my thesis, i cant not put them up...

from grand text auto:

"A more likely explanation is somewhere in the middle — since Justin knows he’s going to be putting this footage online as he lives it, it turns the experience of his real life into a simultaneous performance, that he’s surely conscious of as he lives/performs it. Which exactly seems to be the problem he’s dealing with.

Clever! And impressively gutsy. And pretentious, but that’s okay. It’s another flavor of fusing of fiction and reality within the computer medium, I suppose. Reminds me to write another blog post on the similarity between reality TV and interactive drama."

----

blinkx does tv. looks like more and more we will be delivering tv through the internet. sad to me that this is the next killer app.

but what is interesting is this:

these video searches arent real video searches. they are still just searching on title, date, metadata. we havent gotten to the point where we can find actual content inside of video easily.

and thats no good.

(and im not even going to go into the whole "having more content jsut means we have more to sort through." thing. or the "having everything as content means we can burrow into our narrow subcultures more easily.")

katamari damacy cosplay

also, a katamari damacy cosplay via waxy

iam is a go

the prototype shown at the end of last semester is live and online now.

it will obviously change a lot over the next several months - already several new pieces have been built and id like to get some new bits in by the end of the weekend.

for now though, the basic stuff is there. right now, there are only a few movies up - a few from oct when i was in nyc. again, i want to get a whole bunch more up in the next week or two. i have about 35 different ones sitting on my drive here. not too exciting though - most are of me reading or watching tv. these should expand in the next several weeks, which is another reason i want to get caught up quickly in what i am publishing. the newer stuff should get better and better as i get used to the system.

in the meantime, enjoy what is there and please feel free to comment on the system as a whole, feel free to leave comments within the system itself (using the small white bullets above the images) and enjoy watching these movies (they are on the large side - i think the longest is about 130 megs, so give them time to load).

link

m:robe 500

interesting new device passed to me by a friend.
looks like it take the photo ipod to a slightly more logical conclusion - it will make movies of the music and photos on the device.

could be cool - even if the device is bad, the idea of making these mini-movies is pretty cool. kurt, erin, will - any thoughts compared to all the stuff we are doing?

plrs

another old link. such good things happen when you clean off the desktop i suppose.

this one is just a few bits about the possibility of a 'personal life recorder', which seems like a silly post. we all know its going to happen and soon. we can stop talking about it as 'theory'.

link off smart mobs

edward tufte posts new chapter from his book

for the extreme dataspace people:

"Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations: New Chapter from Beautiful Evidence
Here is the first of several chapters on consuming presentations, on what alert members of an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the credibility of the presenter. Most of Beautiful Evidence is about helpful techniques in evidence presentations; these 3 or 4 chapters, however, will describe sources of corruption.

This draft will be posted for a month or so; I'd appreciate helpful comments.

Thanks,
E.T."

link

media lab europe closes

crap. this sucks. but it appears mit's media lab europe is to be no more.

dave's world link
business world link

(thanks to jen for helping me dig around on this one.)

2,000 cameras to watch city

this is several months old, i just found it on my desktop here at imsc.

looks like there is a new reason to (not) move to chicago.

"Mayor Daley officially opened a new city operations center Tuesday that will include a dramatic increase in camera surveillance on Chicago’s streets. The new addition to the 9-1-1 center will help manage and coordinate in response to emergencies such as a terrorist attack...The new system also has the ability to instantly report the sound of gun shots within hearing distance of the microphones planned around the city." [emphasis mine]

http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/local_story_321123518.html

comments

i just turned comments back on on here. ive got to approve them before they go live, so hopefully itll be the best of all worlds - people can freely comment and ill just be responsible for cleaning out the dregs of spam.

guess we will give this a little time and see how it works out....

urls

so im going to buy a url to point to the site 'proper' when it goes live (hopefully in the next week). anyone have any domain ideas?

iam is taken in every version. and im not sold on iam-lifelog. or iam-blog or anything.

anyone have any strokes of genius here?

dev thoughts

there arent any markers for the white board in the lab, so im reduced to making dev notes here. i suppose this will do. please skip if you care not about database dev, html, javascript, etc.

so.

two things. 1 is the timeline, the other is comment weighting.

1. the timeline. pretty easy to do - a php loop writing out a span for each hour. pull the movie(s) data from the db - start time and length. you can find a start and end time then, round to the hour and assign a class to each span based on that. thats the basic code. then the placement on the page is somewhat tricky. thatll really have to be dealt with later as i refine the layout. for now, if i put it in the top right of the screen, then its sitting in the top iframe with the dropdown. which is ok. it just means that as you pick from the dropdown, then you need to reload that top iframe as well. and we need to tweak the drop to only show per day instead of per movie.

whew.

2. the comment weighting. without dealing with all the math yet, i just want to deal with the number of times a thumbnail is clicked on. i can keep track of that with a javascript array i suppose and then write that data out to the db on page unload. ill have to test this and make a new db table - itll hold 3 different counters: comment count, author count (which is really a boolean flag) and the clicker count. there will be a primary key, a timecode and a main id which links back to the main movie file. whew. thatll be some fun juggling too.

time to start on #1 in earnest and see where we land.

sorry, just had to reason some of this out so i knew where i was about to head.

equipment from the ces

i'm telling you - a year from now, hell, six months from now, this project would look very different. announced at the ces last week were two different cameras that would rule:
samsung announced one that looks a little like the isight.
toshiba announced one based on a tiny harddrive that can shoot 2 hours of footage.

sadly, apple didnt announce an isight2 yesterday. (note to apple: everyone would love to pulg an isight into a ipod and have it record to the harddrive. do it.)

(and failing that, why not make the isight available as a wireless bluetooth camera?)

unsecured webcams

privacy? webcams?
wanna spy on people on the other side of the world?

check out this story on boingboing. way too cool not to repost and besides, id just lose the link on my desktop somehow anyway.

(and usc is destroying in the orange bowl. 48-10. werd.)

ffmpeg-php fun

well, the good news first: this thing is designed to be built on a linux box. this means that it should be pretty simple to get it up and running on the server here at school in a week or so with some help.

the bad news is that it isnt made for osx. so im running into all sorts of problems getting it running on my powerbook. im enlisting help from people trying to figure out how i can make this thing compile but it isnt looking too good right now.

the current issue: what the flag '-d' means for gcc compared to cc. the makefile isnt cooperating obviously and im working what little c knowledge i have to try and figure out the different switches in compilers.

ug.

any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated, those of you smarter in this area than i am.

how to pull images from a qt movie with php

for weeks i have been looking for a way to dynamically pull images out of qt movies. i couldnt dump every frame from a 90 minute qt file - i dont care what you say about filesystems, they arent truly designed to handle thousands and thousands of files in a folder.

i have sent out emails, set up meetings and talked to people about solving this particular hurdle. the best response i had gotten thus far was 'you could use java wrapped in python called from php'. i was to have a meeting on tues about getting this written.

and then, the clouds parted. the new year began with a bang.

it turns out there has been written (as i felt there must have been but i couldnt find it) an extension to php that allows you to pull images out of movie files dynamically on the fly.

i havent installed this on my server yet to play. but from reading the docs it sounds like itll do exactly what i want. bam!

so if you want to pull out images, frame captures or stills from a movie file for the web, on the fly and dynamically, ffmpeg-php might just be the thing you need.

big big thanks to kevin and meg for pointing me to this. (im amazed at how i havent met kevin yet still, but we manage to pick brains over web stuff coast-to-coast every 6 months or so. this time he really came through. big ups.)

expect a more complete review soon. (along with news of my other developments. i just couldnt wait to get this up and online.)