liberal provocateur’s Neighborhood

Today's stupid software idea comes courtesy of the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, which featured (as some previous stories have) the Hybrid, the organic controller of a Cylon base star (aka the big pointy bad guy space ships). This week, though, saw probably more Hybrid than any other.

Hybrids, you see, continually babble, a stream of consciousness mixing what sounds like system diagnostics, physics and poetry. After the episode ended, I thought "wait, system diagnostics? Well, if I open up Console, I have those. What if there was an additional process - call it hybridd - which emitted poetry to go along with the more prosaic debugging and whatnot that my computer spits out?"

I have an idea how to do it, too. Algorithm::MarkovChain is a venerable Perl module that puts out almost, but not quite, meaningful sentences, based on an input corpus. Tie that in to the syslog function, a bit of Launch Services, and there you are. (I'm sure you could do a bogstandard Unix version too.)

A further step would be to replace the Console UI with one that boils down the actual computer stuff and tries to fit it in with the hybrid's poetry, but that idea's a lot harder to do well, I'm sure.

Anyway. hybridd - an idea whose time has come. And now, thanks to Tom Insam, here's a Perl version. Requires the aforementioned module, along with File::Tail and Unix::Syslog, both available at your nearest CPAN mirror.

You know, I almost forgot today was monday. Again.

I was convinced that for part of this video Gaz wore an Ushanka

An Ushanka, yesterday

When Adobe first launched Photoshop Express (from hereon in, PX) a month and a half or so ago, it featured integration with three online sites: Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa. Unfortunately, I don't use any of those for photos. So when I saw that there was an update to add Flickr support, I dug out my old registration - the one that required me to claim I was living in the US, sigh - and had a very quick look.

Construction (Original)

Flickr appears under the "Other Sites" heading on the left nav - or is it a palette? - of the main window. Clicking the "Flickr" item asks you to authenticate, although somewhat oddly it uses desktop-style auth, so instead of using a nice redirect, PX instead uses a pop up window, which was naturally blocked. It also means you manually have to click about three more buttons than you would with web based auth. Perhaps this is explained by the amount of client-side code, but it still jarred for me. I expect users who don't have to wrangle API auth code would probably cope, though.

Once logged in, Px starts fetching images from Flickr. This is done pretty nicely- pulling each image is slow, so it will carry on if you're not doing anything else, and present the images it's already found for you. Images are sorted by date taken, which is odd if you're used to Flickr's photostream order, which is by date uploaded. (Dates are, naturally, in American format, which annoys me no end, but let's try and ignore that for now.) However, for me it stopped after just over 550 images, which is only about a tenth of the total. I'm not sure why, or how to get it to look for the rest.

Once the images are listed in the Flickr album, they're editable just like any other image available to PX. The tools aren't as sophisticated as those in the main desktop version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or even iPhoto: there's no "levels" tool, and minimal highlight and shadow controls, for example. However, the white balance editor is pretty good, and there's a "Pop Color" effect for those images where you want a red London bus in a monochrome city. Beyond desktop apps, I'd also say that it compares fairly shabbily to Picnik, which is also web-based, but manages a much richer set of tools. Handily, Picnik's integrated into Flickr, making it even more likely to be used.

Construction (Edited)

After editing my image, I wondered where the "save" dialog was, and where I'd get to choose whether the original image was replaced, or who'd get permissions on the new image. It turns out that this is all done automatically. An edited image gets uploaded as a new photo, with your default permissions. The title and description are preserved, but tags and date metadata aren't. To me, this is a killer flaw. Firstly, I want the option to replace an existing image. Secondly, throwing away image metadata is something Photoshop hasn't done since about version 7; it's appalling that PX does this today. Thirdly, I want the option to set privacy levels.

Once again, Picnik's Flickr integration gets all of these things right - in fact, it even seems to have an option to bump images up your photostream with comments intact, which is a very clever trick indeed. In contrast, PX looks like it's hardly trying.

One place that Photoshop Express does try very hard - for publicity - is with images that are copied from its library to Flickr. You can explicitly copy an image into the internal library, create an "album" on Flickr (what's more usually called a set, there), and then copy it back to Flickr in that set. Doing this creates a description that lets everyone know you're using Photoshop Express, and, hey, would you like to use it too? I know everyone is after viral exposure these days, but please let me know you're doing it first and let me set something more sensible.

On the subject of albums, PX loads your Flickr sets as a list of albums, although for some reason this didn't happen the first time I tried it. They're listed in alphabetical order, which, like the "date taken" ordering, is a little odd - Flickr preserves set ordering, and it would be nice if PX would honour that, at least as an option. Opening an album, unfortunately, shows an empty screen, even if there are images in the set. I assume the photo download process is linear. Hopefully a later release will change this, and let the UI take priority, as well as adding caching - each time you open the web app, it has to fetch the list of photos and sets from Flickr afresh.

For all this criticism, I do recognise that Adobe's product is just a beta. On the other hand, given how slick Picnik is, and how nicely it's integrated, it's hard to see how Photoshop Express has much to offer Flickr users, other than a brand name.

quirkafleeg

Opera just launched their alpha of Dragonfly, "the foundations of Opera's upcoming Developer Tools", which prompted Tom to note that

"Firebug seems to have defined the universe for this lot."

('This lot' includes Safari's Web Inspector, which is actually not that similar to Firebug - the JS debugger is a seperate app for a start - and IE8's developer tools, which I really should look at once I get a disposable Windows image.) It means that all four of the major browsers now ship with developer tools - an impressive change in the last year.

Tom's observation is mirrored by Michael Smith of the W3C: in his XTech presentation when he says that Firebug sets the standard by which all web development tools are to be judged.

The discussion reminded me of Steve Yegge's point in his long, but worthwhile, post about XEmacs in which he said

IDEs are draining users away, but it's not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It's the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox. Each has what the other lacks, and together they're pretty damn close to the ultimate software package

To be honest, I suspect what he really means here is Firefox + Firebug. At least, if he doesn't mean that, he should be. For me, doing serious web development now requires that combo, even though I dislike Firefox otherwise.

The really interesting point for me is that Firebug, unlike the three other browser development tools, is actually not under the Mozilla Foundation's control. Firefox ships with a DOM Inspector, but this is more of an internal developer tool. Firebug, a third party tool, builds on DOM Inspector's abilities, and it's built for Firefox because Mozilla have developed not just a browser, but a platform. Maybe when I criticised Gecko for their choice to build a platform as well as a browser I was missing something very important.

I actually forgot that yesterday was Monday. I can't decide if that's tragic or not. sigh

I have a soft spot for Mark Romanek videos - especially the sublime "Hurt" for Johnny Cash, "99 Problems" for Jay-Z (although for the last I couldn't really tell you quite why) and the fantastically creepy "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. No body seems to do lurking menace quite as well as him. Two of his videos - "Closer" and "Bedtime Story" for Madonna - are in the permanent collection at MOMA in New York (although I have to admit I don't really like either the track or the video of Madonna one).

One thing about his work - it ages incredibly well.

It kind of blows my mind that that video is 11 years old - if you showed it to me blind you'd have no problems convincing me that it's was a completely contemporary promo.

And like the rest of Romanek's work it's achingly stylish - hell, I hate 70s retro chic and yet watching this I find that suddenly it looks appealing.

And Ms Apple - worryingly thin yes (the New Yorker described her as "looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model") but somehow a seamless blend of coquettish innocence and wanton knowing. It's not often that you see a someone who manages to project remorse and relish at the same time.

Tell a lie  -  dogs do it when you catch them eating something they shouldn't but it's not quite the same, is it?

I've never been one of the people who's seen a need to use any terminal application in Mac OS X other than the one supplied by Apple in Utilities. It does the job, uses Monaco 9, doesn't anti-alias (or at least, can be made not to). It starts up in Mac-ish black on white, and generally Just Works.

10.5 saw a bit of an overhaul, with a much saner configuration interface (all in Preferences, rather than hidden in a rather baffling out-of-the-way inspector) and tabbed browsing. Now, I still don't use tabs on the Mac OS, personally; I like the established app/window split and don't see the need to bring a third level of indirection into play, especially when it doesn't even have consistent shortcuts. (Tabs on Windows? Now that's a different story.) In fact, for years I'd quite happily got by with a bunch of scripts in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal/ that would neatly stack all the windows.

Sadly, the new version of Terminal also introduced an annoying AppleScript bug which renders these scripts less than useful. When positioning a window, the vertical positions aren't honoured correctly: instead, the window ends up 320 pixels up the screen from the desired location - OK if you want a window at the top, but certainly not if it's meant to be at the bottom right, which is my usual position. I mention this now because the bug in Terminal that broke my window arrangers will also affect a script to centre windows that TALlama (no really) posted in response to a lazytwitter invocation by John Siracusa. If you try to centre a Terminal window, it ends up jammed at the top of the screen, for no apparent reason.

Now, I'm not down with the cool kids who post radr:// URLs, so if anyone who's reading this is, it's really easy to replicate the error: get a Terminal window towards the bottom of the screen, run this script - which should do nothing, as it's merely putting the window back where it started - and watch your window shift around. Do that, report it, and hopefully eventually I'll be able to retire my "set voffset to 320 -- work around AppleScript bug" line.

tell application "Terminal"

    set b to bounds of window 1

    set bounds of window 1 to b

end tell

Anyway, thanks for listening, and here's hoping for a better Terminal AppleScript interface in 10.5.3.

Chris Heathcote has a great post - everything ie anything - which looks at a couple of points in Clay Shirky's much-linked Web 2.0 conference keynote about television, web 2.0 content creation, and the "social surplus". Chris says

I find it a flimsy argument that grinding in World of Warcraft, watching Youtube videos, or I dunno, playing Sim City for 40 hours straight (Spore is going to kill me) is in any way better than watching TV, merely because it’s ‘doing something’.

Get a Life!: The Little Red Book of the White Dot

Last week, I noticed Iain Tait taking part in Mental Detox Week. Previously, this was Turn Off TV week, and years ago, when I read the White Dot book about television, and recognised a lot of what it was saying, and decided to do what it said. In the ten years since then, I've lived in a house with a TV for only three.

Did I ever miss TV? Not really. I had the radio for news, and much more besides - and the reports seemed much more raw, without the need for a camera crew to tag along (although I know usually the BBC was using the same people for both). Newspapers and magazines brought information to me. I still went to see films - in fact, one year early on I nearly saw a hundred films, many of them foreign or classic.

You'll notice something missing from this. Back then, home internet was still a luxury, with dial-up charges and per-minute call costs. It wasn't until 2000 that I got always-on internet. Over the years, I've slipped more and more into using the laptop for more and more of my leisure time. At first I was easily able to convince myself that this was different. I was creating and communicating. Look, here's all my friends on IRC. Here's the website I just built, and the photos I've taken.

Recently, though, I'm finding that belief harder to sustain. I can produce, but I also consume more. There's Flickr friends to surf, a dozen news sites to read. Along with IRC, there's Twitter- and I don't feel comfortable holding conversations there*. Instead of creating websites, I pour content into Vox and a blog - and there's less and less of a personal touch, more a sense of a piling up of stuff. I can spend an hour flicking though videos on YouTube, surfing through Orbital live performances, or I can spend an evening on iPlayer watching BBC Four documentaries.

Wait. I can spend an evening on iPlayer watching BBC Four documentaries. Isn't that what I was trying to get away from? Is it really that much better for me to be watching TV with the ability to be snarky about it via instant messaging? So it's tempting to switch the computer off, and do something less boring instead. No wonder Mental Detox Week includes computers as well as television now.

It's hard, though. It's harder than it was with TV. There, I was ignoring imaginary people. Now, I'd be ignoring friends, family, along with random - but real - strangers, whose work I've liked for one reason or another. I'm also finding it harder to socialise, now I've let ties wither down to merely digital connections. I have to use a computer at work, whereas avoiding TV there is trivial. Nonetheless, it's something I think would be worth some effort.

If I can't do any of that, though, I do need to make sure that I make my time at the laptop worth as much as possible.  The Internet isn't inherently better than TV, but if I make the right decisions, I hope I can at least make sure it's not worse.

* I know plenty of people do. I don't.

Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.

In the wake of Zeldman's post, two definitions:

• Shallow Aggregation: what I do. A single home page that pulls in concept from other sites, but where the links leave my site to go instead to the place the content is hosted.
• Deep Aggregation; what Tom Insam does. An entire site fed on and republishing content from other sites, in so far as possible. Allows a consistent look.

Questions.

• Are the joins better when they're more obvious (shallow) or better hidden and (arguably) less predictable?
• Is there a market for software for either sort of aggregation? (MT provide "Action Streams", which are shallow. There's Django code for deep aggregation.)
• Is there a future for either kind, given Friendfeed et al? 
• Given the questions above, is it even worth defining the above?
• Is aggregation the right word? Republishing? Personal mirroring?
• Why am I so keen on defining things as a way of understanding them?
• Does anyone else care?