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WebWalker 1.2

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Christmas has come and gone, but this post is still going to be Christmas related, unlike some blogs that have self-imposed moratoriums on such posts. My Mother always told me Christmas is a season, not a day, so I feel within respectable guidelines posting these things. Pentagram redesigns Christmas. Pretty interesting idea, and the results [...]

X.Mas from pentagram Elf Yourself Smart Objects and Smart Filters 15 Minutes of Fame

Christmas has come and gone, but this post is still going to be Christmas related, unlike some blogs that have self-imposed moratoriums on such posts. My Mother always told me Christmas is a season, not a day, so I feel within respectable guidelines posting these things.

  • Pentagram redesigns Christmas. Pretty interesting idea, and the results are a mix of intrigue, ah-ha and ha-ha (but no hint of ho ho ho). See also: The New York Times reports, or listen to Michael Bierut with Kurt Andersen on WYNC’s Studio 360.

  • Everyone in my family elf’d themselves (yes, that is me). It truly seems that user generated content has hit the mainstream when this kind of site is a smash hit.

  • If you’re not reading the Adobe blogs, you should be. John Nack posted about The Secret Life of Smart Filters yesterday, which is an interesting read. I’m always interested in the history and inside workings of Photoshop. Arguably, Photoshop is one of the most indispensable and influential tools used in the process of creating new media work.
  • Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (hint: it’s you) has generated some controversy in the blogosphere. Whether or not you think it was a good choice, you should read the last page of the magazine. Andy Was Right:

    But YouTube is Pop art in a form far closer to Warhol’s original, uncorrupted vision than he could ever have imagined. And 15 minutes has been replaced by a new prophecy: “On the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people.” Appropriately enough, many people share authorship of that one.

We’ll be back in 2007.

WebWalker 1.1

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“Design of ordinary things to palaces of art seeks our attention and our dollars.” – Great conversation about the Design Economy on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show today. Tom Fisher of the UofM’s College of Design is a guest on the program. Beth blogged about a “teachable moment” regarding the creative commons. It is also [...]

Minnesota Public Radio CC on ligh dyne screenshot rhizome campaign

CC on light by yamabobobo. Animated gif from Rhizome. p:d screenshot from CDM.

Botanicalls

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I just saw Botanicalls at the ITP Winter Show. It is a cell phone information system that connects people and plants. A person can call a plant on their phone and get information about the species of plant and check if the plant needs watering. On the other hand a plant that needs watering or [...]

I just saw Botanicalls at the ITP Winter Show. It is a cell phone information system that connects people and plants. A person can call a plant on their phone and get information about the species of plant and check if the plant needs watering. On the other hand a plant that needs watering or more sun can call a person up and ask for help. When the plant gets successfully watered it calls again to say thanks.

Botanicalls

WebWalker 1.0

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Like Paul Schmelzer’s Centerpoints, WebWalker is a compilation of interesting stuff–things that catch our attention but don’t necessarily generate a full post. We’ll be publishing this column every couple of weeks so if you’ve got things to share, please send your ideas to any of the WebWalker authors. We’ll be sure to thank you for [...]

Like Paul Schmelzer’s Centerpoints, WebWalker is a compilation of interesting stuff–things that catch our attention but don’t necessarily generate a full post. We’ll be publishing this column every couple of weeks so if you’ve got things to share, please send your ideas to any of the WebWalker authors. We’ll be sure to thank you for the link.

What’s in a name? WebWalker was first launched in May 1999 by Steve Dietz, founding director of the Walker’s New Media Initiatives department. WebWalker was a “ newsletter about the Walker Art Center Web sites and digital culture on the net.” The last issue (#28) was published April 23, 2000. An archive of the previous issues–minus #22-27 which appear to be lost in the ether–can be found in WebWalker archive.

Ms Dewey She’s not quite the Dolphin Oracle but Ms. Dewey is a search helper that aspires to rule your world (would we expect anything less from Microsoft?). Not very useful and of questionable entertainment value, Ms. Dewey is a better example of viral marketing than an interesting search interface. In the end, Ask.com (formerly Jeeves) is more useful and Google’s under the radar Web 2.0 search, SearchMash, gives better results. (Robin)

Pachyderm The Walters Art Museum recently launched Integrating the Arts: Mummies, Manuscripts and Madonnas, an educational unit built with Pachyderm 2.0. Pachyderm is an open source multimedia authoring tool designed to make it possible for content experts with limited technical knowledge to publish rich-media presentations. Integrating the Arts is a model project meant to demonstrate Pachyderm’s potential. Stay tuned to see how Walter’s museum staff and teachers use the tool. The Walter’s project was directed by Sandbox Studios. (Robin)

Museum of Modern Betas In the rapid-fire Web (Bubble?) 2.0 world, it seems like a new site pops up every hour. How can you possibly keep up with them all? TechCrunch is good and has in-depth writeups, but MoMB is better for pure reach. It’s the Museum of Modern Betas! (ironically, still in alpha.) (Nate)

Christmas Tree Get into the Christmas spirit by decorating someone else’s Christmas tree via the web. Matthew Knight of de-construct has set up a little site where visitors can suggest decorations to be placed on the tree. A new decoration each day. (Justin)

Hacking Keynote for digital signage

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In the process of looking for digital signage software this afternoon, I ran across this great hack using a keynote developed by Kendrick Erickson and Eric Perrino at the University of Minnesota. Essentially, they pulled info from the school’s database and used XSL to translate it and insert it into Keynote’s XML-based file format. They [...]

Digital Signage at UMN with Keynote

In the process of looking for digital signage software this afternoon, I ran across this great hack using a keynote developed by Kendrick Erickson and Eric Perrino at the University of Minnesota. Essentially, they pulled info from the school’s database and used XSL to translate it and insert it into Keynote’s XML-based file format. They also used a mac mini to do the displaying, since, of course, Keynote runs only on the mac. Even geekier, Kendrick and Eric managed to turn the display on and off from the mini via serial and (presumably) a cron job.

I have often wondered why I haven’t seen more signage developed using OS X, since it’s superior display capabilities make it extremely well suited for this type of application. As Kendrick and Eric note:

Other benefits such as OS X’s BSD foundation made it easier to update slide content from Crimson and develop supporting software. We’ll also be able to expand the capabilities of the display framework later on by developing custom software using the Quartz 2D engine or OpenGL directly.

It is something we’re looking into.

Testing regular expressions

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Today I’ve got two good tools for web developers. Lately I’ve had to write a number of regular expressions for the upcoming mnartists.org calendar – most in Java, and a few in Javascript. In theory a regexp is a regexp no matter the language, but in practice that’s rarely the case. Between these subtle differences [...]

Today I’ve got two good tools for web developers.

Lately I’ve had to write a number of regular expressions for the upcoming mnartists.org calendar – most in Java, and a few in Javascript. In theory a regexp is a regexp no matter the language, but in practice that’s rarely the case. Between these subtle differences and the maddening wait for compiling or reloading a page, it’s clear some sort of live testing environment is useful:

  • Javascript tester – allows replacement testing as well
  • Java tester – really nice in that it gives accurate feedback on your regexp errors and even helps you format the matching text as a java String

If you’re a developer messing with Java or Javascript regular expressions, IMHO it’s worth bookmarking those two pages.

Here’s a Java one – looks complicated, actually pretty straightforward. Anyone care to take a stab at what it does? :)

line = line.replaceAll(“\[([bi])\]([^\[]*)\[/\1\]“,”<$1>$2</$1>”);

(or can you do it better? I get by, but I know my regexps are sometimes clunky at best…)