Having spent much of the last decade addicted to it, I have officially left Quora.

 

Full story here : http://exquora.thoughtstorms.info/

Expect to see me use the time to get back into ThoughtStorms and more blogging / writing in my own spaces.

Shut Your Facebook

So, I officially shut my Facebook account.

It seems I can reactivate it at any time, just by logging in. And I can keep the option that anyone sends me a message or invite I get an email. So it's not clear exactly how much I'm "gone". (Would be interesting to hear from someone else if they still see me and my posts. What my "absence" looks like.)

But I am (kind of) out of there.

At the Palais Ideal

Facteur Chaval is my new hero.

synaesmedia.COM

w00t!

Thanks to a tip from Aharon, I've managed to recapture synaesmedia.com.

Horrible things about getting old #2 :

My question to Quora : Now I'm old and overloaded with experience, how can I cultivate naive enthusiasm and credulity?

Horrible things about getting old #1 :

Everyone says you shouldn't get stuck in your ways and should be open to new ideas. You want to take that advice seriously and you know that you do seem to be getting fixed ... but you now know so many different ideas, that you can't tell which way to jump.

Apart from experimenting with input devices based on real pencils, and digital flutes, I'm still keeping half an eye on what's going on with magic wands.

Here's one that controls an LED candle.

Of course, I have a lot of thoughts and fantasies about doing a project in this direction. But not quite yet. I've got an essay to write, a masters project to do, and an application for the Goldsmiths DPhil programme to make (including a thesis proposal). Of course I want to play with it all : wands, swarm music, desktop manufacturing, magic. But I have to focus ... I think wands are out for the moment.

Still, they're coming. From someone.

My bike ... (sniff) .. stolen today, sometime between 2pm and 7pm, outside Goldsmiths.

BTW : having troubles with ThoughtStorms at the moment. You can still see it, but I can't update it.

Basically, it looks like some bots were creating user accounts even though they were blocked from updating pages. And so filled my file quota. I'm trying to fix it, but seem to have managed to break something. I won't break it further so you can still read the pages. But I need to do something about this.

Gone to Iceland ... back soon

What's up with Phil? A quick blurst of news.

It's a long story I may go into later, but I got kind of burned-out working on the last project I was on. So I decided to take some time off and apply to go back to university. I'm now at Goldsmiths college in London, doing the MFA in Computational Studio Arts.

This is quite a departure for me. I've tried being a scientist (but really don't have the attention to detail and statistical rigour for it), hung out with philosophers (and felt tempted by philosophy), and married an artist. But I've never thought of myself as *being* an artist. Or even *wanting* to be an artist. (Despite all the music I make.) I'm not sure I do now. There's still some puritan part of my brain which finds the whole thing rather self-indulgent and disreputable.

OTOH, here are two things I find really attractive :

a) the idea of being a "craftsman". That is, an expert maker of things.

And

b) the idea of artist as self-directed "gift-giver"; that is, someone who's work is inspired by what they want to give to the world rather than reacting to commission.

Of course, the world is full of programmers who say "I'm looking for a job where I can write what I want instead of having the pointy haired boss telling me what to do."

Well, artists are effectively living that dream. (Though, naturally, having to cope with the financial constraints that inevitably follow.)

So part of what I'm looking for on this course, is to stretch that part of me. Not so much the part which makes stuff up, which is fairly extended anyway, but the part which turns vague dreams into real things. A lot of it is to do with observing and modifying my own attitude and values. Even getting a bit more disreputable if it helps me push things forward ;-).

Inevitably the course is starting with some "learn to program for artists" type courses. Which aren't exactly an issue for me at the moment. But we're getting shown some nice graphics and sound related tools like Processing and openFrameworks (the latter of which I hadn't seen before).

And, soon, we'll start working with multi-touch, audio processing, and what Goldsmiths call "Physical Computing" which is all the magical, device-swarm, circuit bending electronics stuff. This is something I've wanted to get down to for a while, but haven't had the structure or time. I hope this course will give this to me. And if all goes according to plan, some of my device ideas may become reality.

Meanwhile, you can look at my ongoing course sketch-book (starting with Processing sketches.) I'll keep using this blog as my main "artistic" blog. So expect to see more art and music appearing here. I'll also use ThoughtStorms for further notes and ideas. And any swarm music I make will probably also find its way to the Gbloink site.

Lot going on in life at the moment ... big changes coming.

Keep you all posted ...

Shunt Lounge, London. September, 2009

Been quiet again, hasn't it?

I'm busy.

Hopefully over in a few weeks though ...

meanwhile, some random news / thoughts :

1) I have a bike! And biking in London is wonderful. Especially if most of your commute is along the canal tow-path. :-)

2) ThoughtStorms is blowing itself out!

Yes! Really!

I used to love that wiki. Now, for the umpteenth time in the last couple of years, it's frozen up on me because of file-system restrictions on the hosting service. Spammers forced me to close it to other contributors. I rarely update it, and then only as a LinkBin. It needs a bloody good refactoring and clean out of old, redundant, information.

And suddenly, I'm sick of it. I need something new ...

What that is, I don't know. My rewrite of SdiDesk in Python is ... well, 5 years late. I don't like all these new fangled wikis with their wysiwyg editors and massive plugin configurations and a markup-languages that I don't know. (Hrrrumph!)

I don't think it's blogging, although, as you can see, I do more blogging that wikiing now.

In fact, I'm starting to suspect that BillSeitz was right and I was clever but wrong in thinking that blogs and wikis couldn't really be integrated due to conceptual rather than technological incompatibilities. I'd love to be able to pool the best of ThoughtStorms writing with Composing / SmartDisorganized / PlatformWars etc.

I'd love refactoring tools to help sift and mine and reorganize my writing from one place to another.

I'd love the power of git or mercurial distribute source-control behind my writing on different devices.

Yeah, but do I love it enough to sit down and write it?

3) Watch this awesome talk by Tim O'Reilly. Good inspiration for anyone thinking what to do next.

I have to say. The London Eye is great! More fun and interesting than I expected.

Being unemployed / post-Christmas holidays are great!

:-)

Here's roughly what I'm up-to at the moment.

jQuery / Javascript / Titanium

I've pretty much got jQuery under my belt. (Not hard, really) and am playing a lot with Javascript, now in Chrome. (Which is nice and fast and hasn't caused me any problems so far Kaunda).

This doesn't, of course, mean that I'm now a great Ajax UI designer (yet); but at least it's not javascript / or DOM-wrangling (via jQuery) which is stopping me.

I've done a number of cute experiments which I hope to show you soon. And then I'll try them in Titanium which looks pretty sweet too. This could be what I was hoping for from Adobe Flex / AIR.

Django

I started playing with Django because a lot of the Python job adverts I've seen are mentioning it. (Far more than, say, Zope. And Turbogears is clearly of infinitesimal interest to prospective employers.)

The most striking thing for me is that it's almost exactly like Google Application Engine. Or rather, I suppose GAE is heavily derived from Django.

The only differences seem to be that you have a relational database behind the scenes rather than Google's own BigTable and I guess I'll need to come to terms with the templating language which I ducked out of when I was writing Mind Traffic Control.

Anyway, Django looks pretty straightforward.

A couple of days ago I was looking at the Blimpduino site. I was thinking it would be cool to have one, but my own electronics and model making skills probably aren't up to it. Same with Johnny Chung Lee's cheap multi-touch Wiimote whiteboard. I'd love to have one. And I was kind of expecting that, by now, someone would have started making and selling a pens + wiimote package for people who want this but don't want to build it themselves.

But that doesn't seem to have happened.

So I started wondering whether there's some kind of site where you can ask people in your locality to make stuff for you. Something like a cross between Rentacoder and the Alchemy part of Etsy. There are undoubtedly people with a good understanding and feel for electronics projects who could knock off a couple of IR light-pens with alacrity. Whereas I'd bumble around not doing it for months.

So where's the site which creates a market for such things? Is it Etsy? If not, and if there doesn't seem to be anything similar, I'm thinking that this is going to be my Django learning exercise. It could be a useful service. (Think that you're encouraging small-scale, on-demand local production and helping stimulate economic activity during what's going to be a pretty bad year for many people. I'll probably add the option of offering and bidding using alt.money (eg. LETS) or even barter too.)

I'll knock together a draft site over the next week or so (it *is* my Django learning exercise too) and then, as I'm off to various entrepreneurial meetups I'll talk about it to them.

If it really looks like there's nothing similar out there, I may take this further. It's a definite "should exist". OTOH I can't quite believe that it doesn't. So if someone tells me about an existing one in the meantime, I'll leave it at that.

Music

I just discovered Chuck which appears a very interesting music programming language. I've been looking for something like this for a while, and it sounds pretty good on first listen. Time to go back to some of my more simulation oriented music experiments again.

Finally, merry circuit bent christmas and new year to you all.

My first poll on Composing : Is Phil too cynical?

Results : Yes : 3, No : 7

30% of you find me too cynical. If I'd have voted, I'd have voted that way too. Thanks to all the others who saw my good parts, but I think I'm going to tone it down.

Not totally, of course. There are times when cynicism is the best response. ;-)

Note the new poll in the right gutter.

Genuine question. What do you think?

TopThoughts is a kind of (IMHO) "best of" my writing in various places over the last 5 or 6 years or so.

It's not finished yet.

I wonder if I can import my StackOverflow rating into my CollabFinder profile.