Life & Research Notes

I’ve finally upgraded myself to flickr pro, and I’m in the process of dumping in years worth of photos. Flickr isn’t exactly cutting edge these days, and it’s clunky for stuff like quickly setting permissions, deleting, rotating, etc. But I have friends and family on it, and despite flaws and the yahooness I find it a friendly feeling interface.

Still, it takes awhile, even cutting corners with bulk tagging and titles, so for the next couple months I’ll be semi-regularly pushing these little bits and pieces of my past up into the web. There are some good memories captured in there, and some that evoke feelings that are still raw, but it feels healthily therapeutic to go through it all together. It’s a fitting way to start the new year.

For my Hacking Second Life project I was interested in the trails of data each Second Life resident inadvertently generates without any awareness or control of its usage. While content creators in Second Life have some control over the licensing of their work, how do we navigate and manage the digital content created simply as a result of ‘living’ in a purely digital world in which our speech, gestures and actions are made of the same stuff as our code, clothes and cars? How do we decide whether others use this content? Can we set up personal license policies for our personal data?

To begin thinking about these issues, I wrote a small script that may be attached to any object, and that sends all locally overheard chat to a “Permanent Record” web application via an HTTP post. On the web, visitors may then view a list of the names and unique keys of all people recorded and all listening devices, and can view a live updating audit of all chat.

The site acts as a real time observation post of all conversations taking place within range of any of the listeners, revealing speaker identity, content, location and time. Check out the screenshot and screencast (24MB) of the permanent record and recorder in action.

I plan to put up a more permanent version of the site as soon as possible, and I’ll install a few listeners around some MIT or Media Lab sanctioned land. I’ve been tempted to attach the script to a variety of different types of objects, especially projectiles so I could launch them towards interesting things happening. It would be interesting to have these things distributed all over the place, though at some point I’d probably be violating the Linden Lab ToS.

Luis and I tested out the recorder a little…

Unfortunately he felt compelled to sit on it.

Check out the LSL source code. If nothing else, it at least has some generalized little functions for sending RESTful HTTP posts. Since Second Life only allows 20 HTTP requests per 100 seconds, my code queues up overheard statements and sends them in batches.

I just now added a quick and mellow search API for Tiny. The url looks like this:

http://tiny.media.mit.edu/search/<term>.<format>

Formats can include html, xml, or js, with html as the default. Try out some samples:

sign (xml) (json)

coffee (xml) (json)

face (xml) (json)

world (xml) (json)

Update: Check out the Tiny Search API documentation. I also added support for an optional callback parameter for the json format. Explanation and examples are on the search page. Should be ripe for mashups now.

Luis has released the OS X dashboard widget for Tiny. It’s true to the web version in its interaction, yet as a widget provides a more accessible, always-available interface. Check out related posts by Luis and John, and be sure to download the widget from Apple.

Florian Jenett sent me some code he recently wrote that grabs the Tiny RSS feed to place icons in the dock…

or a status item in the menu bar…

With Florian’s blessing (he’s sitting here in the lab right now), here are zip files of the xcode projects: tiny docklet app and the menu status item app.

On Thursday I joined forces with Brandon Roy and Jeevan Kalanithi for the Simplicity consortium 24 hour build-a-thon contest. We created foodstckr, a little social web application that tells the stories of food via simple user designed food stckrs that can be printed out on labels and placed on food items.

Exhausted after working all night, we presented on Friday morning. Despite being obviously juvenile and irreverent, foodstckr is in a way quite lovable, and we were lucky to win first place in the build-a-thon’s popular vote. I think it helped that we played a little King Tubby as the soundtrack to our demo pitch. Jeevan registered the domain, so look to see foodstckr.org up and online eventually.

1. Signup, then login and create your food stckr…

2. Go to “print assorted” and generate a sheet. Print it on labels or sticky backed paper.

3. Now cut it all out. Each stckr has a permalink url on it, so a curious stckr discoverer can find it online, see who made it, and possibly press charges.

3. Apply to food items, optionally with picture taking. Avoid eye contact with store employees.

Tiny’s traffic had slowed to a steady crawl, but yesterday we saw a major spike in new visitors. Turns out we got covered on lifehacker.

This latest spurt in traffic reminds me that Tiny has lately become quite a bit slower. We need to do a little database and file system optimizing. We’re on ext3, but I can’t help but think that 133,000 little files in one directory is maybe not the best idea. And I know the database probably needs a little tweaking. Perhaps Luis and I can find a few hours during this busy January IAP to speed this thing up a little.