Life & Research Notes

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.

Over the holiday I spent a few hours here and there putting together a timeline for my del.icio.us bookmarks. The result is, well, Yummy.

Yummy uses the del.icio.us API to retrieve all your posts, then organizes them into a timeline. You can modify which portion of your timeline you’d like to examine by adjusting the two sliders.

I created Yummy because I was wishing for some sort of personal timeline capturing the phases I’ve gone through over the past year. Yummy is just bookmarks and tags of course, but it has helped be understand some of the themes in my life, both lasting and fleeting. Also, note that much of Yummy was designed and written while I drank my favorite Lagunitas beer.

Reload sparingly please! Yummy grabs big chunks of data from del.icio.us, and if too many people use it we may get throttled. If that actually happens I’ll figure something out.

Also check out the Yummy screencast (12MB) showing it in action.

When we got back from teaching MAS110 today, Luis noted that Tiny had gained approximately 15,000 new icons in the past day, almost double what was there before. The culprit? Flabber. Helpful babelfish translation:

I thought firstly that this nothing was for an item, but when I came that I already a kwartier was with signs, thought I: ‘ this wants do fixed more people ‘. The creative spirit must be also stimulated.

A bunch of javascripty types also discovered the joys of iteration and crammed thousands of swastikas and Flabber icons into poor little Tiny. Thanks guys, that’s great.

My friend Anita asked me the other day why I choose to have a public blog rather than simply keeping a private journal. I thought about it for a while, and I arrived at an explanation of why I like my blog and why I choose to keep it public.

1. An audience, however small, obliges me to write regularly. Perhaps a very self-motivated person can just keep it private, but that doesn’t work for me. Imagine you’re at home alone and you have a nice big Milka bar sitting there next to you, and you know you should work out and eat vegetables, but instead you eat the candy bar and look at youtube all night. You feel kind of lame. That’s how private blogs are for me. I feel bad for being lazy, but not bad enough to make me write. Knowing that I have even a few friends and family that expect something is the extra little boost of obligation to counter my natural laziness. Hey, at least I know myself.
2. A public blog is a nice way to keep the people I care about up to date. I’ve been getting some more traffic in the few weeks since the Tiny thing, but I’m actually more interested in communicating to the people I already know. Burak and Kelly and a few friends around the lab check on it occasionally, Jenn subscribes, my parents read it, etc. My group also looks at it, including Henry and John, so it’s a nice way for them to know that I am doing things and when something is interesting they ask me about it. A few of my group members also keep blogs, and we can easily reference one others’ work and ideas as they come.
3. It is a dynamic portfolio. If/when I am someday looking for work I will point to the blog as a partial explanation of what I’ve been doing here. I feel that it is a nice way to mark certain ideas as my own. The contract stuff I’m thinking about seems new because I haven’t found any other people thinking about it the same way. If I get enough material up on my blog it will serve as a record that I was pushing these ideas early on, and if others find my work interesting they are more easily able to find it, and there is greater chance of collaboration and idea exchange.
4. The public blog serves as an excellent self-reflection exercise. I enjoy looking back on how my thoughts have shifted over the past eight months since I started writing. I’m also looking forward to using it as a tool for composing my thesis. I plan to write a good chunk of the thesis as blog entries. My blog is pretty safe; for the most part I can write what I like, and in the process I learn my voice and style. I’d like to approach my thesis with the same exploratory, meditative mentality, so the blog seems like a natural tool. Perhaps someday I’ll develop books, stories, or articles in the same way.

For something that started as a little “PLW Basic Research” project, Tiny is turning out to be a lot of fun. Now seems like a good time to post a screencast (Quicktime / 6.4MB):

The next iteration will include a fancier tree-based browsing system to reveal which icons are created based on others. I hope to have that up before the end of the week. Fatbit love…

Yesterday Luis posted on some of our recent collaborative activities revisiting the simplicity of the straight line, and he included some images and examples showing our attempt at recreating Bresenham’s Line Algorithm. What he didn’t mention was our very happy accident when we screwed up the horiz vs. vertical condition in our algorithm:

The buggy part of the code looks like this:

public void drawLine(int x, int y) {

    fill(0);
    noStroke();
    rect(x,y,1,1);

    if(x == M || y == N) return;

    int xDelta = M - x;
    int yDelta = N - y;

    if( (M - xDelta) / xDelta < (N - yDelta) / yDelta) {
        drawLine(x+1,y);
    }else{
        drawLine(x,y+1);
    }
}