Coming soon?

But, you see, they were. At least fifty of them, hanging on his every indifferent word. Such is the metooism of the Internet, deserving of its proper-noun-capitalisation as one would capitalise the title of any film of the ‘my-life-is-falling-apart-and-oh-I-hope-something-interesting-would-happen-to-substantiate-sales’ variety. These days, however, not even all such films declare themselves worthy of said capitalised status. The deliciously ambivalent “definitely, maybe” sports no such accoutrements common to film, and, you know, things with names – but its name provides for fascinating displays of nothingness in all kinds of contexts, so it can perhaps be forgiven. I sat across from a workstation preparing the launch of this and other films in this country on Monday, and listened, enthralled, as the male lead declared he was thrilled to hear “definitely, maybe is releasing in Australia”. Well, that is a non-announcement, now, isn’t it? (Launching on V-day… vacuous?)

Still, when even our most influential and award-winning actors and directors lament the dearth (or, perhaps simply the death) of cinema’s golden age, we must pause to consider what is being achieved by the broad spectrum of media before us. All the trends of Internet media cannot save us from its dubious creative potential in the face of browser limitations (I have recently been working myself into a lather over the indefinite lag between multi-touch reaching the Internet compared to the rest of consumer technology — let it be noted, mobile client-side is the future?). All the films in the world cannot save us from the mediocrity of their scriptwriters, as all the blogs in the world cannot save us from trends of buzzwords and analysis and not a single real client or solved problem in sight. Neither can google (that not requiring proper-noun-capitalisation as it is used synonymously with ‘search’) save us, investing its vast resources into online platform advances. Platforms are not content. Content drives growth. Enough of that. Clooney says we should all watch TV, because that’s where the innovation is going on these days. I struggle to come to terms with that, somewhat. Part of me would (honestly) be quite content to sit and watch endless episodes of whichever series is available on DVD. DVD, because, as much as I occasionally enjoy advertising, I have absolutely no desire to see the same commercial over again fifteen times over the course of a single episode — get your bloody ads on YouTube and if they make consumers care enough, they’ll find you… nothing wrong with democratising TV advertising values, except, ironically, the potentially diminishing production values of such ads in light of the decreased expenditure on production — yeah, that’s what I thought.

The other part of me finds it’s all much the same. We all know The Simpsons is brilliant, because it pushes boundaries and made certain people in the 1990s acutely uncomfortable. Family Guy fills the void, now, only without the coherency. Its near-absurdist “we-don’t-actually-expect-you-to-get-this” irreverent take on pretty much anything is funny, but not for reasons we can comprehend. And it’s hardly going to stand the test of time. An animated analogue to The Chaser’s War on Everything, only less coherent. But let’s look at The Chaser for a moment — it is the news. Oh, wait, The Colbert Report used that line first. At any rate, The Chaser made international media before Stephen Colbert, for the audacity of — wait for it — actions beyond mere commentary.

And there we find it. The matter in which the public’s interest is held is not the simpering-yet-somehow-hostile satire, but in the violation of the sole sanctified role of government, the defence of its citizens. The noteworthiness of this act came not in the violation of this responsibility for security, but the triviality by which this breach took place. Such is the Leviathan in whom we are collectively engaged by social contract: without defence against the status hominum naturalis, bellum omnium contra omnes as Hobbes rightly presumes it, if we consider ‘nature’ after the fall.

The implication, of course, is that our government is powerless — or, at the very least, powerless to enact that which it is its duty to. C.S. Lewis expresses it thus:

“As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.” (C.S. Lewis, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, in ESSAY COLLECTION: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories)

One might argue this is merely the impact of democratisation of governance. That, as the Leviathan power is somewhat more dynamic in its headship in this present society, it will necessarily reflect ‘leadership’ over lives in ways unprecedented in history, as the will of the individual is closer to that of the state. What pluralist absurdity: the existence of democracy itself demarks the necessity of compromise, the inability of man to, independent of the state, agree. Democracy is responsive to and guarantees the persistent disparity of the will of the individual and the State.

The role of the state, therefore, should be constrained to that of arbiter and defender alone. Anything beyond that is an unnecessary infringement of the rights of the individual. Yet our political clime is such that we assume this necessary, and, historically, this is true. We accept the mediocrity of humanity, celebrate it even. There is nothing new under the sun.

And we still trust in our ‘leaders’ for potential change. Hello, Kevin, hello, Obama. You are mere men. Your revolutions will fade. Hello, those leaders who have come before them. Your names are not remembered.

Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned discrimination against the poor, the indigenous, the homosexual. Their voices are not alone. Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned secularisation and interest-rate-driven threats to their comfortably prosperous ‘but-not-too-much’ upper-middle class ‘christian’ existence. Their agenda is not that of the Christ.

“A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom”, Lewis continues in that same essay. What then, do we consider? We are hungry, though not for food. We are hungry for meaning that is not forthcoming. Hungry for the righting of wrongs in our eyes; wrongs that are plain to all, but persistent because of… well, how would you finish that sentence?

Let me find your grace in the valley
Let me find your life in my death
Let me find your joy in my sorrow
Your wealth in my need
That you’re near with every breath
In the valley

There is only one meaning, one absolute reality, one Lord, one faith, and one God worth trusting because he is over all and sustains all. Without him, the meaninglessness of this earth’s seemingly-perpetual ability to decay should have us surrender to that entirely. Instead, we are to surrender to Him, or embrace that ambivalent indifference so ultimately characteristic of the endeavours of humankind.

That place is magic. Gunlaug Sørtun came back in under six hours with another technique I hadn’t even heard of that looks pretty good, the companion columns method. He also has a page dedicated to CSS table– styled columns, but it looks like it could involve a bit too much browser hacking (yes, IE) in order to be worthwhile.

More experimentation doubtless to come.

I haven’t had to do any real CSS hacking in IE7 just yet, but was nonetheless surprised to discover that that Peekaboo bug is still hanging around. Thankfully the old faithful height:1%; still instantly resolves it, but… wow. Still lingering after so long?!

Yes, the twist is that they glow. Good times.

Not quite bright enough to provide useful illumination, but enough to be intrinsically interesting & entertaining.

I was concerned about battery life holding out: I should have been concerned about getting larger-capacity balloons in order to achieve the buoyancy required. The balloons we had (all 11″ metallic) all flew initially, when inflated to absolute-max capacity, but most of them were down within 5 hours. 14″ balloons probably would’ve performed a lot better, but we’ll never know.

We also polished off a CL tank (rated for 50 balloons) about two balloons from the end of the lot, so bigger circumference would obviously require a D tank.

Future enhancements: size, obviously; different LED housing for wider light; magnetic/RFID switching on LEDs (we were flicking them on at inflate time); and increased brightness to make them more effective as lighting, not just entertainment.

The direction I’d ultimately like to take it is non-latex/heavy-duty inflatables with permanently installed LEDs + wireless controller. At present it’s a tri-colour LED that automatically cycles between the three sub-diodes (I suppose they’re three real diodes, but whatever) that are RGB. I’d like to separate that out into three 10k MCD diodes (for a peak 30k MCD output at ‘white’) and a rechargeable supply… not quite sure what the best way to do that is. The inflatable would probably be about 15” with the luminaire (ideally) suspended in its centre so it could be used as a non-lighter-than-air device and maintain its effectiveness as a light. Think really big beach balls.

I’m looking at getting a prefab Bluetooth thing with an onboard microcontroller to manage it… would also like to add a microphone in to make it audio-responsive without wireless intervention (because wireless will suck lots more power, amongst other things). Bluetooth would be utilised primarily for fading the fixtures in and out rather than colour control, though obviously once one is in place it’s only a small step to introduce discreet faders for each colour channel.

All that said, I know nothing much about Bluetooth. I’m looking at a Class 1 prefab board with a microcontroller which looks good, but is rather uncharitably priced at 79€ per unit, and the only published unit discount step is a measly 2€ at 10 units. That’d make the cost of these little monsters (controller, LEDs, power, whatever funky kind of container I find for all of the things) at least AU$250/fixture after funding development, which does seem like an awful lot! But if they’re rechargeable and can fly and stuff I think there’s a possibility other people would buy them. On Thursday night a lot of people were pretty fascinated by them, even when they ended up on the floor.

Methinks I’ll try and build a couple for myself before even thinking about selling them, and if that comes close to happening look at other wireless options. I’m picturing something cool like walking around a room with 100 of these things flown on the ceiling (either tethered together or helium filled) holding a Bluetooth-capable PDA, the lights following you position. Processor-intensive signal-strength calculations would be done on the PDA itself, which would arrange the signals in a matrix and detect the nearest neighbour, setting its intensity (and the intensity of the surrounding signals) accordingly. There are other options, perhaps involving W-DMX512, but that’d require a separate microcontroller methinks.

Funnily enough, when looking through the wireless DMX catalogue for this year, it turns out the LD for Cirque du Soleil Delirium did basically the exact same thing (Wireless DMX + colour mixing RGB LEDs + 15” balloon)! Page 20 has an OEM TRX module in a 84x48mm form factor, but it requires an existing DMX interface. There’s an integrated device on page 15 that has a battery enclosed also and supports PoE, but it’s a bit bigger (115x40x70mm) and similarly lacks the onboard microcontroller that the Bluetooth device has.

The W-DMX might be better on power consumption, though, on account of the possibility of receive-only mode that Bluetooth lacks (though, of course, you can disable visibility on Bluetooth devices, which might assist). Both technologies use 2.4GHz spectrum, which is pretty much all fun and unlicensed games.

Possibly more to come on this front if I can track down a suitable container. I can shop for geek gear fairly effectively, but oversized pieces of latex are a bit less my thing.

Comments re: ideas, criticism, etc., all quite welcome!

The trace had to be a little eclectic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D transform ninja skills, but let the software trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDesign got a little upset about the complexity of — which is okay — and had to import as encapsulated postscript instead of as native vector data — which is also okay. Trouble was, it wasn’t just borderline too-complex, it was stupidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd filesize down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the content and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aiming for today… others apparnetly have different ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuffle and discovered the absolute pain of waiting for it to “render” (basically that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it creates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morning, went back to Photoshop with the source image and processed it to make it look similar enough before pasting the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the generated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hopefully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Internet only, then in New Zealand (with Internet, albeit with uncertainty about having a computer in the accommodation). Yes, busy as ever. On Facebook quite a lot, because status updates are more managable than full blog posts!

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know–I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2’s and Pentium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.

These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.

I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000–2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.

Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3–4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.

Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*

I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.

Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)

I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P

I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.

The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).

It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!

It does a lot of things right. CS2 was good in its integration but pretty mediocre in thumbnailing and metadata support, but this is finally an app worth having. The filter (bottom left) is magical; the thumbnailing isn’t horrifically compressed like it used to be; resizing using the slider is a lot faster; there are three different immensely-useful views built in…

It’s just good. And lots lots lots faster to use than CS2 is (load time is similar, but once you’re actually using it… pure gold).

A series of photos taken by Nic on a particularly wet day. Probably more to come.

Download: 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 2560x1024 (1280 dual monitor)

The dual monitor version is my wallpaper at the minute! It looks good, but makes me crave a good second monitor even more. One day.

To me this says: you can trust us to get even your sign wrong. Sell your house with us at your own peril.

Why is it people don’t give a crap about how they present themselves? Insert marketing rant here.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t paying attention when I bought CS2.

I somehow failed to realise that Production Studio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice having anyway) and more (Premiere, AfterEffects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Creative Suite 3 is launching later this month though I don’t know if that means the next version of Premiere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before purchasing Production Studio, which means I get CS3 versions of the stuff I actually use — Photoshop & Illustrator — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDesign, GoLive, etc. Acrobat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acrobat 8 because of relatively-late acquisition of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t particularly care about, though I’ve happily used it for various things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Production Studio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hopefully they’ll launch a new version of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My reasoning is that living at home & studying = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not losing money on it, but it’s not something I’d be able to afford to do if I were dependent on regular income for rent, or whatever. Speaking of regularity, John C & I ran job interviews yesterday and decided to get one of the applicants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actually going to be MakingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and stable — not in a financial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluctuated a bit depending on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obviously stabilise a lot as I move back to cutting code and actually seeing it develop!

Anyway. Can’t wait.

It’s finally starting to actually look okay. Amazingly, it’s become a resource that people will actually readily use — one of my TACKLES kids (he’s 11 years old) said that he’d just realised he could use the website to find out when TACKLES were having socials on Friday nights. Even better is that pretty much everyone on staff is prepared and willing to use the website to promote things. Its impact will always be pretty intangible, but it seems to be aiding the way we communicate quite a bit.