Brent Fitzgerald » media lab

E15:oGFX Demo Video

brent — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:17:59 +0000

Luis Blackaller and Kyle Buza just released the E15:oGFX site, with software downloads, tutorials, and documentation. They’ve made it incredibly easy to get up and running. Nice work dudes.

John Maeda’s inauguration speech

brent — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:09:02 +0000

I felt a lot of PLW and MIT Media Lab pride reading John’s RISD inauguration speech, Start Here. I particularly enjoyed the last bit:

The creative mind is not limited to black and white. It is comfortable with ambiguity, and “doing both,” as I like to say. You can be both a designer and an artist, a humanist and a technologist, a student and a teacher, a hand craftsman and a Photoshop guru, a global and local thinker, a leader and a servant, a president and a citizen. And we can start as many times as we like when we are open to the spirit and rigor of the creative way of being.

It’s a wonderful start to just the sort of boundary-bridging creative imperative kick in the ass I’d hoped he’d bring to his new role. Read the whole speech…

wtf is plw doing?

brent — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:32:28 +0000

Evidently some new secret stuff is in the works. Looks hot, yet also makes me wistful thinking about all the great stuff I could be learning with those guys if I was still there. For more, see Luis’s post, and screenshots (1, 2, 3) and videos (1, 2) on PLWire.

Promiserver thesis complete!

brent — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:32:28 +0000

This thesis envisions the future of trust and social commitment in a highly connected society. Starting with a distributed, democratized labor force and economies of efficient niche production and consumption, we predict radical shifts in the meaning and methods of commitment and the institutions of trust. The central experiment of this thesis is Promiserver, a web-based service and toolset for creation of lightweight contracts—dubbed promises—that are written as code. The service decouples commitment logic from specific applications, providing a generalized tool and forum for dynamic creation, binding, and evaluation of promises. The goal of Promiserver is to facilitate new models of collaboration by offering a sensible, lightweight, and agile promise system as an alternative to traditionally heavy legal commitments.

Promiserver: Procedurally Executed, Socially Enforced Microcontracts
(100 pages, 12MB PDF)

Writing is Hard

brent — Wed, 02 May 2007 04:21:27 +0000

I sit here staring at this one section of my thesis, and I roughly know what I want to communicate, but maintaining focus on that core idea seems to require every single brain cell, and most of them are sleeping, busy or not interested.

Is self-discipline one small part of your brain bullying the other parts?

The Law: A Wayward Engineer’s Status Report

brent — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 04:40:54 +0000

My thesis reader, Brent Britton, is giving a talk here at the lab next week. I put together this poster for his visit.

Promiserver Poster

brent — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:42:34 +0000

Thesis time

brent — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:28:11 +0000

This is thesis time. I’m going to have to buckle down and crank out some code, then some writing. I figure if I start writing in March with an aim to have my drafts for readers by mid-April (wishful thinking?), I’ll need to produce two pages a day, every day. So I’m going to have to focus. This means:

1. Stay human by going to bed and waking up early.
2. Exercise regularly, at least 3+ times a week. I should have gone today. I will go tomorrow.
3. Take strategic breaks to let my brain cool off. Watch movies and read.
4. Stay connected with Jenn.

I’m laying it down here and now.

Blogging is Preservation

brent — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:01:28 +0000

Unless I’m mistaken, John is the only faculty member at the lab who consistently keeps a blog. Why aren’t other faculty members self-publishing their thoughts and work on blogs? In the emerging media landscape, blogging is no longer simply about promotion of one’s identity, ideas and reputation. It is about preservation. If the lab and its faculty continue to ignore this medium they will simply and quietly drop off the collective radar. And if they can pick it up like John, Henry Jenkins, and others, they will find an audience.

Late nights, dilettantes, the group, etc

brent — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:59:07 +0000

I really want to clear my brain and go to sleep, but instead I keep looping through the events of the past few days, and periodically checking the clock to see just how little sleep I’m actually getting. This does happen to me from time to time, especially when I slip off my wagon of caffeine-freeness and indulge in the mid-afternoon coffee. Like I did today. Well I figure the less I sleep tonight, the more tired (and hence less stressed) I’ll be tomorrow. Yup, tomorrow night I’m going to sleep just fine. But in the meantime tomorrow is my busiest day of the week, with two demos, a meeting, and an early morning (8:30!) Sloan class I’m trying to audit. Let me just stick pins in some of these thoughts…

Being a dilettante. With the web, there is so much to know, but we don’t actually have to know very much of it. We just have to know how to find it. This has been said before, but I don’t remember exactly who said it…

Mentoring. Relevant to the last point on dilettantes, I’m only now beginning to understand that I will never find that single mentor to teach me design, programming, electronics, woodworking, surfing, gardening, and cooking. Oh, and wheel building, finance and investing, and welding. I’m going to have to find lots of mentors. So I have to be my own meta-mentor.

Luis’s definition of the three eras of our group – VLW, ACG, then PLW – as direct consequences of a single element of the almost messianic McLuhan vision. The VLW were the explorers of the digital medium, remapping tools and techniques to work in new ways within the digital space. ACG played with the medium to create messages that were previously not possible. And now the PLW is shedding the VLW and ACG boosters, pulling out of the gravitational field of the medium/message dichotomy, into a future in which people’s lives are so tightly woven into the media as to be indistinguishable from it.

promiserver.org. That’s the old placeholder still, but note that I actually bought the domain. Oh, and the .com too. It just seems like a good name. The actual code is really coming along too. My goal is to have something up and usable online by the end of the month. It’s very important that I beat all the other procedural judicial systems to the market. Competition in this space is fierce.

Speaking of domains and tlds, somewhat related is Niue. They have a most excellent tld, free community internet, paradisical, and sovereign. Seem like it would be a place worth visiting, especially with Jenn.

iTunes plugin. Anita and I have decided this would be a nice side project. I see the SDK for the visualizer plugins, but how did iLike make theirs? I’m thinking they’re using an unpublished API. Some more investigation is in order.

Perhaps I’ll reread this post tomorrow, quickly realize I was sick with sleep deprivation, and promptly take it down. But it is, I think, perfectly blog-like, perhaps more so than anything I’ve previously written, so I may have no choice but to leave it up.