1. links for 2008-07-31

    July 30, 2008
    Categories: bookmark
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  2. links for 2008-04-17

    April 17, 2008
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  3. links for 2008-04-09

    April 09, 2008
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  4. links for 2008-03-17

    March 17, 2008
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  5. links for 2008-03-16

    March 16, 2008
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  6. links for 2008-03-11

    March 11, 2008
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  7. links for 2008-02-25

    February 25, 2008
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  8. How to work better – Design and process lookup

    <img src=”http://textasplayground.net/assembling/wp-content/uploads/how-to-work-better-picture-collection.png” />

    Richard Ziade at basement.org has a very nice article with an interresting quote about the software development teamwork and workflow. I read this article after the memo Pierre send to me via email for the (future) organisation of our company, Electronest. They are echoing each other in my mind: it’s nice to see Electronest is already able to do things quite differently.

    And along my morning’s reading – there are more echoes, memories and thoughts:

    Maki gave me a little piece of paper once – we were working on the Never Odd or Even website for the Serpentine Gallery with Patrick at that time. It never leaved me: first in my moleskine, and then it finally made its way to my desktop.

    This is a piece by Fischli & Weiss, and the title is ‘How to work better’, below is a couple of images from my collection.

    How to work better

    1. Do one thing at a time

    2. Know the problem

    3. Learn to listen

    4. Learn to ask questions

    5. Distinguish sense from nonsense

    6. Accept change as inevitable

    7. Admit mistakes

    8. Say it simple

    9. Be calm

    10. Smile

    Ryan Gander who amongst other thing makes lectures he calls ‘Loose Association’, wrote a wonderful book ‘Appendix’ (where Stuart Baileys is a bit more than involved) and created a word: the Mitim, which I spoke upside down. Ryan Gander wrote an exquisite short article about the ‘How To Work Better’ in ‘Working it out’ – where he speaks also about the artists’ process:

    Taped to the wall of my studio is an A4 photocopy of a short ten-point manifesto by Fischli/Weiss entitled “How to work better”. I don’t know who put it there, but it has been in place for at least three years. It’s a tongue-in-cheek work using a motivational statement, which is a piece of found text they subsequently enlarged and had painted on the exterior of a building as part of a public commission. I sometimes show it to students at the beginning of slide lectures, and always point it out to assistants who come to the studio.

    (Maybe Maki put it here… )

    There are a couple more links to follow the ongoing reflections:
    - In computing, lookup usually refers to searching the internal and specially crafted database for an item that satisfies some specified property.
    - ‘Appendix’ by Ryan Gander, designed by Stuart Bailey is findable at Amazon – the ISBN is 90-75380-60-7
    Stuart Bailey & Ryan Gander: Appendix Appendix (Christoph Keller Editions)

    - Here’s is the my re-interpretation/citation of ‘How to work better’ as a desktop background – GTD, efficiency, design and process always in mind; you can download and use, the picture size is for a (black) macbook screen (1280×800) but should be easy to crop/expand with the black zone all around.
    - On the 14th of January there will be a simultaneous launch of DOT DOT DOT #15 and F.R. DAVID #2 in London and New York. Both publications will be available and accompanied by a live lecture transmitted from the other location. According to the international dateline, Cubitt Gallery in London will launch at 7pm GMT with a live talk by Stuart Bailey, DDD editor, from New York, while Dexter Sinister in New York will also launch at 7pm (12pm GMT-5hrs) with a live talk by Will Holder, FRD editor, from London.

    London, 7pm CUBITT Gallery and Studios 8 Angel Mews London N1 9HH

    New York, 7pm Dexter Sinister 38 Ludlow Street (Basement South) New York, New York 10002

    January 12, 2008
    Categories: designing, offline, thinking loud
    Tags: , , , , , ,
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  9. ‘Copy, Paste and Meta’ – part 1

    A while ago at Electronest, Pierre and I discussed about an application which could use the clipboard to create a book. Since this, the idea received a bit of attention from my graphic designers friends and this evening it came to my mind that this bit of code was in fact quite close from what Internet was supposed to be if for some reason it didn’t take the path of the World Wild Web, but the path from Xanadu.

    Here is a schema of how it could work:

    • 1/ I copy the bit of text (in this example)
    • 2/ I paste it
    • 3/ the pasted text is accompanied by information about the source

    COPYPASTE_META.png

    December 19, 2007
    Categories: book, designing, electronest, experiments, project, thinking loud
    Tags: ,
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  10. Time (mis-)conception and discoveries

    Recently I have been asked to create a non obstrusive interface for a kind of GTD – a 5 items list time elapsed representation.

    tasp-15112007.jpg
    (I am still on it – it should be coming soon…)

    I decided to use this a sa pretext to teach myself a bit of Java and to pull the gears on Processing – much more suitable for people like me to learn and develop things.
    This was also the occasion for a brilliant personnal discovery:

    The Time

    As I was programming a bit of server side things, I knew aleady a bit about Unix timestamp, and how it is used, and why we need such time representation. What I did not know is that Unix Timestamp is not the only one out there:

    * January 1, 1 – Symbian epoch (using microseconds) and Microsoft .NET’s DateTime epoch. Also used as base date in REXX counting days. This epoch is known as Rata die.
    * January 1, 1601 – Windows’ Win32 file time-stamp epoch (using 100-nanosecond ticks). COBOL date/time function epoch.
    * November 17, 1858 – VMS epoch and the base date of the Modified Julian Day used in celestial ephemerides by the United States Naval Observatory and other astronomy organizations.
    * December 31, 1899 – Microsoft Excel epoch, using the Julian calendar leap year rule for 1900 (hence with leap day February 29, 1900) and the Gregorian calendar for the years 1901 – 9999 ; thus for dates from 1 March 1900 a time is stored as the number of days in the Gregorian calendar from December 30, 1899, 00:00; optionally Microsoft Excel can also use the Apple Macintosh epoch, which avoids the complication by starting later; its count of days is 1462 less.
    * January 1, 1900 – Network Time Protocol epoch. IBM CICS epoch. Microsoft Excel (and Lotus 1-2-3) technically consider the epoch of December 31, 1899 as January 0, 1900 or a serial date of zero (consequently, December 31, 1899 cannot be used). January 0, 1900 can be processed and formatted in Excel Worksheets, just as any other date.
    * January 1, 1904 (local time) – Apple Macintosh epoch, through Mac OS 9. Palm OS epoch. According to Martin Minow,[4]

    January 1, 1904, was chosen as the base for the Macintosh clock because it was the first leap year of the twentieth century. [...] This means that by starting with 1904, Macintosh system programmers could save a half dozen instructions in their leap-year checking code.

    * January 1, 1960 – S-Plus
    * January 1, 1970 – Unix epoch, Mac OS X, Java.
    * January 1, 1978 – AmigaOS epoch [1]
    * January 1, 1980 – MS DOS, OS/2, and other environments supporting a FAT file system encoding dates from 1980 up to 2107 in 16 bits.
    * January 6, 1980 – Qualcomm BREW and the GPS epoch.[5]

    (Retrieved from Epoch#Computing on Wikipedia)

    Each of those epoch represent or more exactly are the result of a decision process which is argued, logical and aimed at solving specific issues (apart maybe the FAT16, but that might be purely a personnal hate since the morning I lost all my work for my Bachelor – it’s also why I switched to Apple, so maybe I should be a bit more grateful to FAT-whatever-its-number).

    While I was googling on the topic in the search of date/time conversion for processing/java, I came across a very nice ressource I enjoyed reading:
    Date and time in Java – http://www.odi.ch/prog/design/datetime.php which I am quoting below:

    UNIX time stamps are the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight 1.1.1970 UTC. Uh… here appears a “date”. Never mind, we’ll get to that in a minute. Java’s java.util.Date class effectively encapsulates a UNIX time stamp. It represents a point in time by a millisecond counter in a 64 bit long variable. While 32 bit representation on UNIX will overflow in 2038 the 64 bit signed long will last for roughly another 18 billion years. Please note that the all the deprecated methods and constructors of the Date class should never be used. They are from a time when the Sun people were confused about time themselves. javax.management.timer.Timer has some convenient constants for the most used millisecond values.

    As Unix Timestamp is a 32 bits based time encoding – its overflow limit (the kind of y2k bug) is in 2038. You can spread the word and advertise this fact by wearing this:
    tshirt.jpg

    There’s not that many useful info about date and time on processing.org website (I might be wrong however – I am certainly, please correct or update in the comment), so I thought I would share a bit of my diggings and notes:

    Basics of time in Processing:
    int NOW = year()+month()+day()+hour()+minute()+second();

    Here are a few class you might like to check – they contain essential things when you want to talk Time with Processing
    import java.util.Date;
    import java.util.Calendar;

    it’s usefull to have this in hand:
    int ONE_HOUR = 3600000;
    int ONE_MINUTE = 60000;
    int ONE_SECOND = 1000;

    This let’s you write “in 8 hours”:
    Date in8Hours = new Date(now.getTime() + 8L * ONE_HOUR);

    December 17, 2007
    Categories: experiments, thinking loud
    Tags: , ,
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  11. you are reading upside down – uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıpɐǝɹ ǝɹɐ noʎ

    I received this very nice link to a tool which let’s you write upside down via Adam Hayes; it basically allows anyone to switch characters from a text string into either ones which looks like or have been effectively drawn upside down (reversed 180°) in the characters table. In order to see the effect, you have to use a special font (pre-installed), a unicode compatible – no big business it’s pretty much a standard nowadays.

    u -> n (using the “normal” n latin letter)
    o -> o (staying the same)
    y -> λ (using the greek letter lambda, whose html code is &lambda; – it might use sometime characters designed with specific purposes like the phonetical alphabet)

    ichat

    Picture 3.png

    Not only it is a very nice feature to show off on iChat or Msn, it’s also remembering me experience like the MITIM browser from Pierre which make a fair and clever use of simple technology at our direct disposal to explore the territories enlightened by Ryan Gander and his MITIM.

    rg_8_big.jpg
    image found on The Store’s website, Ryan Gander MITIM poster.

    July 20, 2007
    Categories: typography
    Tags: , , , ,
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  12. Neveroddoreven – Serpentine Gallery

    We, åbäke and I, just released our last collaboration, with the Serpentine Gallery:


    Picture 3.png

    Picture 2.png

    The website is projected in classrooms where workshops are being held. It gives the teachers a sort of toolbox for activities around dyslexia as a way of empowering creativity. It delivers pdf documents to print, explaining activities and how to design your own based on a few examples. Each of these examples is «illustrated» by sections of the website which are an introduction for children in the classroom, a visual stimulation.

    Workshop projects have been initially developed by artist Michaela Ross – and the initially established processes are now supported by this new tool and the friendly help of designers åbäke. First common workshop was held on last friday, after the launch on wednesday the 28th of March at the Serpentine Gallery. It received good feedbacks and we are definitely looking forward for more experiments of this kind to be co-designed.

    April 02, 2007
    Categories: designing, electronest
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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  13. recent web projects


    cityprojects


    ibidprojects


    squarecircle

    October 22, 2006
    Categories: designing
    Tags:
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  14. Sun Tzu – KD01k (memory)

    KD01k est une édition du traité de Sun Tzu «l’art de la guerre» en 13 volumes. Chacun des volumes donne une lecture de ce texte écrit entre le IVe et le Ve siècle avant Jésus Christ. Chacun des volumes est une lecture générative du texte; elle est basée sur une analyse statistique de la ponctuation, cette dernière engendrant la mise en forme du texte par lui-même, jusqu’à l’abstraction.

    suntzu_kd01k_1.jpgsuntzu_kd01k_2.jpgsuntzu_kd01k_3.jpgsuntzu_kd01k_4.jpgsuntzu_kd01k_5.jpg

    May 27, 2006
    Categories: data beautification, designing, memory
    Tags: , , , , ,
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  15. Automatic Guess System – AGS v0.1: cheating search

    Currently under development, AGS should provide combined with some url rewrite rules (.htaccess) a kind of search box but directly in the url. By using the semantic CMS on the back-end, with a specific element called so far ‘url’ and pre-published (not publicly visible), the administrator has the possibility to influence the guessing system.

    May 25, 2006
    Categories: info hub
    Tags:
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  16. r-echos – micro map – information/interface design

    r-echos

    Inside the side bar a sort of micro-map of the page has been inserted; it works as follow:

    - the color are representative of categories, it gives a glimpse of the repartition of the topics on the page , with no clear indications about what the topic is (point to work around and fix)
    - on roll over, if an image is present in the post, it’s displayed along with the title of the post
    - by clicking on the expanded coloured surface you expand the corresponding article on the left

    The ideas it brings: The multi-categorised post should possess many colours, or – maybe – a gradient fill. The tags used for each post could modify the hue of the post as well – but on a more subtle way (there it needs a kind of semantic bundles of tags – à la delicious). Also it needs a more restrictive set of rules to distinct and establish colour’s categories.
    The access to the information leads almost directly to the researched article’s page because of the link directly on the title – might be a good idea to move the link to the post inside the layer, and use the javascript which extend the layer there as well, instead. The sidebar should follow the scroll, meta-information should be removed from it and transfered to a place right under the Header (where there’s already 3 of them recently displaced) – in an unique layer which would be opened/close and populated by some h2 button in the sidebar; the sidebar remaining a simple navigation tool with no content at all inside.
    On another hand, an ajax-like interface might be useful to populate article on the fly instead of (hard) loading everything from the beginning. This might allow the interface to incorporate much more articles at once. The sidebar could then remains permanent and host some specific tools – like note taking, bookmarking, etc.

    May 20, 2006
    Categories: designing, r-echos
    Tags: , , , , ,
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  17. r-echos v0.3 b / a color adventure in an electronic presence

    r-echos v0.3 b / a color adventure in an electronic presence

    an ongoing experiment around mapping the topics constituting the base ground structure of th incoming info_hub projects leaded r-echos in a slight redesign.

    First:
    no more black and white for the title, but rather using colors which lets identify the subject/topic/category. Possible feature would be to have more color organisations – thinking about a stronger system. At the moment it’s a very simple hack in the r-echos theme based on the id of the main category of the post.

    Second:
    no more complete view of the whole content in the page, this should clarify the whole thing and allow a different perception of the activity.

    Third:
    as image consequently disapeared – installed a simple preview of the first image inside the post. This feauture is at a very early stage.

    Planned development:

    More on the category/color relationship

    Making tags visible – the same way as colors, maybe the tags colors could influence the category color.
    ie: a blueish/redish grey, would say same category but different amount of tags. This would need a semantic approach of tags (del.icio.us’ bundles)

    Mapping the category, evolution of topics through time (zeitgeist), simple preview of page in the top, no more right handed menu, but rather a bunch of links that would push content in the dedicated placeholder – the one right under the banner.

    Connection with the spiderbot project – automation of content discovery through keywords lists. Development of filters for information retrieval in the various tools already in use. Experimenting with new ones. Conducing specific research for tools that might be of any help.

    May 18, 2006
    Categories: designing, r-echos
    Tags: ,
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  18. notes and comments on a possible to do list for r-echos

    on /r-echos/

    stattraq from http://randypeterman.com/StatTraq/ produce stats of access. even if i installed the last version (b), the (a) still is there – weird. side note: it seems not to appreciate the url_rewrite i have installed. still have to investigate but no time at the moment.
    common tools are there, so it’s fine – maybe having a look to the db could be bring some new alteration in the process.

    ultimate tag warrior from http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ let you insert tag by hand in your post with [tags][/tags]. neat! also it can put the mess in your category to transform them in tags. i did it! it works very well! some older posts completely change of category – which lead me to use simple categories system instead of full range of taxonomy. but still: most pf the oldest post have some weird tags…

    url rewrite seems ok for the most recent posts (i’m using /year/month/day/title/ ) – not for the oldest archive; the given link on each post reflects just the date, not the name. certainly during the transfer something got squeezed and broke it.

    the zeitgeist and visual_zeitgeist are on hold at the moment. they haven’t been transfered/converted to / r-echos /

    March 24, 2006
    Categories: r-echos
    Tags: , ,
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