Life & Research Notes

MIT Media Lab: Design Ecology / Information Ecology david small’s design-oriented research group at the media lab. the next vlw/acg/plw? mit research medialab design

Lady Cadogan’s Teapot ~ Made Of Pyrex Borosilicate Glass ~ You Flip It Upside Down To Fill It… And Then It Can Only Co… – #20141 – NOTCOT.ORG very nice notcot coverage of an awesome teapot in the electric works store. design tea electricworks

Home – ruby-processing – GitHub jruby + processing, with support for live, interactive coding a la ogfx. sweet. ruby processing processing.org graphics art programming

THE ENTREPRENEURS REPORT: Private Company Financing Trends – Winter 2008 advice and trends in the vc financing world. via nivi. entrepreneurship finance business venturecapital

Field – Trac interpretted exploratory visual coding system with live updating, similar in some respects to ogfx. uses java+python, with interface to processing. art development programming graphics python processing

JBox2D Demos very friendly, nice looking rigid body physics in java processing.org library physics java

Google’s Irene Au: On Design Challenges – BusinessWeek “A lot of designers want to increase the line height or padding in order to make the interface “breathe.” We deliberately don’t do that. We want to squeeze in as much information as possible above the fold. We recognize that information density is part of what makes the experience great and efficient. Our goal is to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.” web business design innovation google ux

Goodbye Google | stopdesign “When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.” business design google

Army Surplus, Military Surplus Clothes, Tools, and Equipment at Sportsman’s Guide so i can get awesome used swedish military jackets shopping military surplus

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand aaron koblin’s latest mturk work. long way since the sheep market! web2.0 music art collaboration sound mturk crowdsource mechanicalturk

Safari Client-Side Storage and Offline Applications Programming Guide: Introduction client side storage for webkit. makes native iphone apps seems a little less necessary development database iphone sqlite safari html5 webkit

MATIAS NAJLE in case you have not taken enough acid today music graphics animation flash

Periodic_Table_of_Typefaces_large.jpg (JPEG Image, 3150×2100 pixels) – Scaled (28%) via kjhollen, top typefaces organized in a somewhat retarded but interesting periodic table visualization design typography fonts type system:filetype:jpg system:media:image

At eComm Jeevan and I heard some intriguing stuff about a service called Tropo, a cloud-based scriptable VOIP system designed to let web hackers start working in the voice and telephony world.

The app provides a pretty damn slick interface to quickly set up a real phone number (plus SIP plus Skype, all in one place), then assign it to a script written in javascript, groovy, python, ruby, or probably whatever other BSF language they support.

Here’s one I wrote and deployed in about 20 minutes to read off all the Miniature Monster descriptions from the RSS feed (Tropo calls highlighted). You can test it out by calling (650) 273-5382 (or +99000936 9991428654 on Skype, though I haven’t tried that):

require 'net/http'
require 'rexml/document'

answer
wait(3000)
say "hello, welcome to professor engd's miniature monster hotline. here are your monster updates."
wait(1000)

url = "http://feedproxy.google.com/miniaturemonsters"
xml_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url)).body
xml_doc = REXML::Document.new(xml_data)

xml_doc.elements.to_a( "//description" ).reverse.each do |desc|
  if (m = (/\<div id=\"description\">\s*\<em\>(.*?)\<\/em\>\<\/div\>/i).match(desc.text))
    say m[1]
    wait(1000)
  end
end

hangup

I’ve worked on some projects recently involving Asterisk-to-web-to-hardware style hacking, typically using something like Gizmo to register a regular phone number assigned to a SIP number, then setting up asterisk as the SIP softphone and messing around with a retarded dialplan syntax to get things going. Tropo seems to simplify all that… substantially.

The documentation is solid if a little thin, but it’s so new, and the app is so slick and well done, so I’m sure there’s more coming. It’s unclear at this point which Ruby libraries and gems they support, if any. And it all feels a little like a toy, but no more than, say, Google App Engine, and for me it’s actually more potentially useful. What I can say at this point is that it’s a solid way to sketch your telelphony ideas quickly and with zero setup time, which is very cool. Are you listening ITP?

Anyway, happy voip hacking.

Tropo.com cloud based telephony system, with browser integrated development of call scripts. basically this makes asterisk hacking unnecessary for 99% of us. cool you can code in a couple different languages. they must be using bsf. api phone programming cloud voip telephony

Twilio: Web Service API for Making and Receiving Phone Calls, building hosted IVR and PBX telephone applications makes it possible to code telephony apps via rest api. very sweet. see also tropo. web api mashup mobile phone programming voip telelphony voice

The Neuberger’s ‘New Media’ – Brain Trees, DNA, Receipts and Bells – NYTimes.com burak is in the NYTimes! web design art media network burakarikan nytimes

(Sonic.net) this is what andy is using, so it must be fast/good. web2.0 internet dsl isp

TwitterSheep tag cloud of your twitter followers. mine kinda sucks. web visualization twitter folksonomy tag

Our (and Your) RISD » Blog Archive » Daddy? Where does art come from? Our minds and bodies naturally move in the direction that we face. In driver’s ed it is not uncommon for the instructor to say, “Look where you drive, and you will end up where you are looking.” design art mit medialab johnmaeda risd

git ready » what git is not another nice git intro, focusing on the benefits and distinguishing features. reference programming blog versioncontrol tutorials git introduction

Git Community Book ok, it’s definitely finally time to make the switch. once again visnu was way ahead of the curve on this one. reference programming tutorial book howto documentation git

gist: 67060 – GitHub nice piece by the github founder, with insights into failure and success business startup entrepreneurship advice github

Republic Bike | Track bikes, fixed gear bicycles, fixies built by us and you lovely custom single/fixie bikes! design shopping bike

PICOL – Pictorial Communication Language – Icons & Pictorgrams “PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication. PICOL is free to use and open to alter.” web visualization design graphics icons

Internet Famous Class this is like the first hands on internet grass roots marketing class i’ve heard of. how great it’s at an art/design school. weird and wonderful and ridiculous. definitely smart. via arikan. web media culture blog internet designer education class famous

Taco Lab Blog web design blog electronics mit medialab interface siftables sanfrancisco brent jeevan david

Josh’s Blog » OSCemote cool iphone app for input via open sound control (osc). very handy looking. interaction osx iphone multitouch osc

Just saw this very cool project presented at eComm by Stefan Agamanolis from Distance Lab.

“People lost track of time, they called for 5 minutes and thought they were chatting for 30 minutes. The nature of conversations was more creative, callers visited a lot of topics. They also gestured more, even with their legs.”

Stefan presents this project in a larger design initiative he’s dubbed slow communication – communication technologies explicitly designed to harmonize with natural human pace and sensitivities. It’s similar in spirit to some of the slow computing ideas I was tossing around a few years back.