informal dialogue

Schweinsteiger looks on in concern..

See instantoilspill for more

My buddy Steve wasn't feeling so great, so I made this poster for him.
Maybe you're also in need of a good cheering up, in which case..

enjoy!

Click here to see more

Here's another mini sketch, using the tester from the wordpress processingjs plugin. Bear with me, folks..

Here is the latest in a small series of tests, embedding processing sketches on this blog. This one uses the wonders of processingjs, John Resig's fantastic port of processing to javascript. This animation is nicked directly from the processingjs website, so please don't hold that against me. Some oddities notices so far - I can't seem to work out how to include text in processingjs sketches, apparently there's some kind of glyph-y magic which helps - and the mouse interaction seems broken. Hmm..

Below is a small experiment I'm currently running; very informally I'm updating a pachube feed ('cups of coffee today') with the current location data. It's a bit of an odd experiment - I'm not really always drinking coffee, but once I set it up (using the pachube iphone app, which is pretty simple to use) I discovered that it logged the location of each coffee cup consumed. Not so exciting I know, but I'm interested in the notion that my daily activities and movements can be logged, tracked in some sense and collected to form an image - be that automatically or manually logged data. It's by no means new territory, but I'm keen to see how it all works out. There's a chance that the 'update feed by twitter' tool will come in handy, but who knows at this point.

So as I said, It's a bit of a mish-mash, however there are a few things of interest. 1. I can log 0 cups of coffee, which will update the location but keep my caffeine intake low. 2. When i do have a cup of coffee the daily tally will increase and I'll be able to see where and when it all happens (at work, that's a no brainer..). 3. Along comes this openstreetmap based project from the pachube apps page - Trails.

Have a look for yourself, just how well or unwell my coffee consumption is going over the last 24 hours.. Hopefully, if you're reading this you'll see a map below, with a gps overlay of location (x,y) and consumption (z) data. If not, then perhaps I've not updated in a while. Nonetheless, it's got me thinking about these new consumer (no pun intended) tools which are now readily available - and free.
Not sure where this will go, not exactly sure where it belongs, but it's worth mentioning at least.

Drink up!

This post is more for my benefit than others, but you may in the end find it useful anyway. I've recently come across a handy batch conversion technique for switching image formats in a snap;

1. Put a load of images in a folder
2. Open the Terminal
3. cd to the current directory
4. type in

mkdir jpgs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpgs

done.

I found this one whilst looking for a quick and easy way to switch a folder of .pngs to .jpgs, without needing to download/purchase any additional software - and programming something quickly in Automator seemed like more work than was necessary!

If you're looking for other solutions to this problem, this page had a few other alternatives.

Happy converting!

This might come in handy to some of you, it has made life remarkably easier for me in recent months;

Steps involved;

1. navigate to a desired location in google maps
2. paste this script into the url bar + hit enter

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

3. a window will pop up showing you the gps coordinates of that location
4. done!

Hope it helps!

Are you going to Index tonight? It's the end of year show for the UTS Architecture school, with work being exhibited from all 5 years.  Go check it out!

Shouldn't a URL 'shortener' service make the URL shorter? perhaps even a google search term would have been appropriate, but then again that might have used up enough energy to boil a kettle*.

* I'll have to explain this one later..

I'm heading down to Melbourne tomorrow for the 2009 OZCHI conference with Frank Maguire, Bert Bongers and Dan Hill, to attend and present (with Frank) some research work we've done recently.  I'm looking forward to it, one of the add-ons for this conference is a workshop on Street Computing organised by the ubiquitous Marcus Foth.  Dan and Andrew will be presenting some of their research, as will Bert - so it's shaping up to be a really great day tomorrow.  To anyone who's going to be at the workshop, I look forward to meeting you, the same goes to anyone else floating around the conference...

Catch you later in the week, hope this bizarre Sydney weather doesn't get the better of you!

J

You should use GREP.
If you haven’t heard of grep before, it’s a very fancy pattern search tool for text editors. Think of the ‘find’ function but with more advanced capabilities such as searches for whitespace characters, end of line/file or particular character patterns.
I’ve become accustomed to some of the more trivial but useful tricks available using grep, some of which might be handy to you, dear reader.
Grep comes built in with a series of useful wildcards, key combinations which refer to specific text items. Examples of these include $ (end of line), [aeiou] (any vowel), r (carriage return) and s (whitespace character) which can be combined in clever ways to make text searching much easier.

To put all of this into context, I’ll give an example. I have recently been doing a bit of manual HTML scraping to isolate data contained in html tags from a number of pages. For this example, what I want to do is parse a series of html documents to extract the title text contained in each document, or;

 
<title> everything contained in here </title>
 

Say your example html reads like this;

 
<html>
<head>
  <title>Sample Title</title>
</head>
</html>
 

To do this you could manually open each and every file, select the text to delete, delete it and then save/close the file - a very time consuming process. There must be a better way, surely! Thankfully there is - Grep. My grep tool of choice is the very handy freeware application TextWrangler, which combines the very powerful grep pattern searching abilities with an absolutely essential multi-file search option.
So how can we do this quickly and painlessly?

1. Open a few of the documents and check that the syntax and layout are all similar. In this case lets assume that all files follow the aforementioned layout.

2. Select ‘find’ (command+F), making sure to choose the ‘use grep’ and ‘start from top’ options.

3. Type in the following search pattern;

(select from start of file[any space or nonspace character]zero, one or more chatacters until is found).

4. This will select all text from the start of the file, to the end of your tag. Test this as a multi-file search on all open documents to make sure your search was accurate.

5. Do a find + replace with the same search pattern, making sure to replace with nothing (blank replace field).

6. Next is a similar search pattern but now we’re looking for everything from the tag to the end of file.
The search pattern is;

Which will select all text that is not the actual title text.

7. Do the same find and replace function for all open html documents, however this time it will be useful to replace all text following the title with a single comma ‘,’. This will come in handy for automatically building lists.

So now we have a lot of text documents with only the exact text we’re looking for in them, but we’re still faced with the problem of scale. We may be able to open each file and copy/paste the contents into another, but what if we needed to do this 1,000 times over? Or 10,000 times? Surely there’s a better way to do this?
Happily there is. Another built-in feature of TextWrangler is the Edit - Insert - File Contents menu item. Once your html text files are stripped of all extraneous content and ‘comma-delimited’ the next step is to combine them.

9. Open one document, select Edit - Insert - File Contents, then select all of the remaining documents you wish to combine into one.

10. Once the text files are combined, save this new document as a new document.
Done!

Naturally this also applies to other text components in other types of html tags. If, for example, you had another set of tags which were nested - say if you wanted to select all items in a

but not the

<a></a>

items, you could follow the same process. I recently used this technique to strip out all text that wasn’t usable from the cityrail.info timetable pages - something which could have taken years had it not been for the abilities of TextWrangler + Grep. Highly recommended. Click here to read more on TextWranglers' features.

J

(Update: I ended up pasting in images of the search patterns because the "" character doesn't seem to show up on the page - so copy+pasting the text to try yourself would fail, somewhat missing the point of this post. You will need to copy them out manually, which is also missing the point of this post, but it's not a whole lot of text to copy so it isn't too much of a problem. Shame I couldn't resolve the html parsing, not sure why).

I’m really enjoying the work in Michæl.Paukner's Flickr photostream, which includes some of the most fantastical analytical graphics, illustrating scientific/theoretical concepts. Most of his work is just gorgeous, bringing clarity and simplicity to what could otherwise be convoluted diagrams. Some of my favourites are the solar eclipse and the circular periodic table of elements;

Circular Periodic Table of Elements

He’s not shy of dealing with less-rigorous concepts either, such as the hollow world theory or the ancient hebrew concept of cosmology. Definitely worth a look-see;

Hollow Earth

The Hundredth Monkey Effect

One of the reasons’ I’m enjoying this work is the dedication to taking complex ideas and presenting them in ways that they can capture an audience and convey an idea or message in a really simple, elegant way. It’s something I’ve been dealing with a lot in my work - somewhat as a side effect of observing people through the ‘eyes’ of buildings - which is the representation of data or information to the people who have a part in creating it. It’s a complex challenge and I often look to graphic designers for ideas on this very subject. Nice to see someone putting it all together in such a clean manner - not driven purely by data or image, rather a balance between the two. Message and medium, not an easy gap to bridge.

via kitsunenoir
J

Today I spent some time going through earlier posts, making small tweaks or edits to image sizes - bringing the site back up to date with the new theme (courtesy of subtraction.com). Something that came to mind during this was that I haven’t been using this site as a sketchpad or notebook as much as I should. Tracing my mindspace through those earlier posts was quite fun, even the ideas I’d written even as little as 6 months ago seem so alien to me now - which is somewhat fascinating considering it’s all so open and public.

The immediate comparison this draws is that of the private diary or journal. Two very different writing positions emerge;
a) Write down ideas (which often feel quaint at a later time) in a private journal or diary, possibly withholding private thoughts or ideas not yet ‘finished’, or
b) write it all down, in the aim of joining this community of thinkers collectively working out what to do with this crazy world.

Which is more productive, more useful, more inspiring or which makes you feel happier? All very difficult questions to answer decisively, since we’re talking about personal preference, so I think the criteria for ‘better’ in this case needs to be regarding what happens to the ideas or information contained within. What happens to the gems, those sketches and ideas wrapped up in these journals - be they bound or ‘pressed’?

In my experience, pocket journals are an absolute pleasure to scratch away in, all those project ideas, sketches for potential designs and even secrets such as the meaning of X - but after all that the pocket journals get filed away, shelved, thrown out. All those thoughts - as dated and meaningless to us now - are lost and never reemerge.

So to this end, my pocket journal is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t think I could ever do away with a pen and piece of paper - it’s just too important to go without - but the text/image journal surely has a place. Which, in short I suppose, is why I (occasionally) maintain this blog.

Now the private journal (imagine for a moment, that Corbusier’s sketches or Eisenman’s diaries had been made available) is the published journal, complete with inner thoughts, misspellings and newly formed ideas. The diary is also distributed, indexed by Google, out there for all to see.

Why is this worth writing about? What does this change in the way the mind works?

This has a number of effects, one of which I’d like to spend some time on. This is that the translation from paper journal to web journal means my notes and sketches don’t get lost! They get filed, tagged, categorised, slugged, indexed and even searched for - meaning it’s much more difficult for me to not be able to find for that thing I was thinking about last year and maybe even last decade (not just yet, but in a years’ time I’ll be able to test this one out). Furthermore it’s possible for others to find these thoughts, which may even prompt a response or conversation.

It’s not too hard to see the benefits to this, in the sense of important information retrieval. This week I had a meeting with a client and at the last possible minute (before it became too unimportant to worry about any further) I remembered that I could retrieve a portfolio piece illustrate a point, from one part of this blog. Suddenly these incidental notes, ideas and occasional examples are the easiest examples of my work to find and display - which is not a trivial thing at all.

These days I have as much trouble locating or finding my things as I did before the digital trend took off (the main difference being that now I have more of them, or at least more copies). To mediate this, lately I’ve been dabbling with the more trivial pieces of cloud computing - I write all of my emails online, I write and edit using google docs and I store my photos on flickr (yes, hardly using the potential of cloud computing, I know). Whilst these elements might seem minor they certainly have had an impact on the way I operate. I now use dropbox to store my commonly used and referenced files, which means that I can find them anywhere. I use google to index my own filesystem in gmail and now the pages on my own site. I will one day make the upgrade to synced contacts and all those other geeky things which I always thought should be effortless and never seem to be. It all points towards a life spent on the web rather than a life spent off. Just think of a life augmented by elements of ‘reality’ (kicking a ball, laying on the grass or getting some sun) rather than the other way around. It’s all fascinating to consider and seems in many ways to be already here –– rather than some distant future possibility.

I want to leave this post with a few concluding thoughts;

1. I will from now on be posting more unfinished ideas, thoughts and notes here;
2. This will be for both my reference and yours and;
3. I’ll be revisiting this post in 6 months time to ponder more on how things have changed.

J