Henry's blog

I remember seeing a prototype of this about two years back, and a few days ago I again stumbled upon something called Monome. It’s a really interesting experiment in design and interaction by way of a silver slab of shiny metal with 64 buttons on its face. What you do with them, however, is where things get interesting. Primarily, it’s been used as an interface for MIDI software applications, with each button acting as a trigger for a sound byte; this allows for some unbelievable live performances, with the actual construction of the song being a performance in and of itself. Several examples of this can be seen in the videos on the site.

The real beauty of Monome, however, is that it gives tactility to what is usually cumbersome software. Say, for instance, you want to create a song with several looping instruments. To do this, you need only select buttons on the grid which correspond with sound files on your computer. As seen below, a sweeping bar of illumination literally passes over the buttons you selected in chronological order, playing its assigned sound, and voilà, a song.

The best thing is that this is just one out of a near endless amount of ways you can interact with Monome. More or less, the only limitation to its flexibility in how the buttons interact with your computer and how you interact with the buttons, is your imagination (and some software, too).

Sometimes it takes something really simple in design to allow room for extensibility, in this case via ingenuity and creativity on the users’ end. Monome is a shining example of this.

Ah, ’tis my favorite day of the year. What day is it, exactly, my birthday? No. My half birthday, even? Of course not, it’s Pi Day! Today’s date — 3/14, or alternately, 3.14 — just so happens to be the first three digits of one delicious mathematical constant. Accordingly, I have prepared some celebration ideas.

Idea One: Bake a pie!

Bonus points if you bring it to your school or workplace.

Idea Two: Show your dedication

How do I presume you do this? By watching this a few dozen times and calling an assembly to show off your newly memorized mathematical prose.

Idea Three: Spread the gospel

That’s right. Get out there, show the non-believers the power of Pi. Bonus points for using Pi to determine a circle’s area in front of a live audience.

Whatever you do, embrace your geek-hood and show some love for Pi today.

A note to fellow fans of the rockin’ band Wilco: tonight, at 11:00 PM EST, there will be a live streaming of the band’s entire new album called Sky Blue Sky, set to be released May 15th!

I’m extremely excited for this, not only because Wilco’s one of my favorite bands, and this will be their newest album in almost two years, but also because Wilco realizes the power of the internet for distribution and garnering hype — something the rest of the music industry largely doesn’t. It’s groundbreaking for a band themselves to put a pre-release copy of an album on the net, and my hat’s off to Wilco.

It had been quite awhile since I’d last been on vacation, and after returning from one last evening, I realized that being away from my computer for a mere four days had a far larger impact than I’d ever imagined.

When I came back home, it wasn’t even the 30 emails (only 5 of which weren’t spam) waiting for me in my inbox, or the 200 odd-some unread articles in my RSS reader. No. You see, when I first booted up my computer, it even felt strange to use a mouse, or drag a window about. It was as if I’d never used a computer before.

Now, this didn’t last too long, but what did was all the catching up I had to do — the missed messages from my friends on AIM, trying to find out the happenings in #randomshapes on IRC, making a feeble attempt to read 20 pages worth of Digg content. Believe me, the list goes on.

When I think about it, the fact that, if I had been home, I would have consumed all of this content is honestly a bit sad. It made me realize that I spend a truly huge chunk of my time basking in the glow of my monitor.

Maybe I should go on vacation more often!

Some very strange things are happening on the photo pages of users of Flickr. As of my first sighting of this at 8:00 PM tonight, it appears that on the second page, halfway down on some Flickr users’ photo streams, there are one or two photo’s whose thumbnails do not match the higher-resolution pictures viewable when the thumbnail is clicked on. Typically these thumbnails are pixelated and poorly scaled.

Two examples of this can be found on the second page, halfway down on my photostream for the fourth picture titled “Ice Storm” and the third entitled “The Nintendo Wii”.

In addition to this, it appears that for some, if not all photos, when the “all sizes” option is selected on the individual photo pages, an entirely different image is displayed.

An example of this can be found by clicking the “all sizes” icon on this page.

Hopefully this is just intermittent data center issues Flickr’s having and will improve soon.

Updates as they happen.

Update x1: Flickr’s typical ’system down’ message — “Flickr is having a massage.” — is up. Hopefully it’s just a minor glitch in the software and things will be back up soon.

Update x2: This entry was just posted on the Flickr blog. Apparently they had a small issue with their image cache and things should be up and running shortly. Hooray!

Update x3: According to the Flickr blog, everything should be in order now. If you still see mismatched images on photo pages, try emptying your cache, or do a hard refresh (I believe it’s shift + ctrl-r on Windows, not sure about Mac).

After putting it off for a while, I finally got Ruby on Rails running on OS X 10.4 (Tiger) the other night so that I could take a look at it. Crazily enough, I actually had an install from last May that I must have given up on. Luckily, all I had to do was update it with new Gems and everything was in working order… except for MySQL. Wow was that a headache.

In the end, after getting some very kind help from Jake, I found out that in my /usr/local directory were a number of failed MySQL installs that were preventing it from running. I simply cleared out every install, re-downloaded the latest MySQL binary and within minutes finally had my basic program from a tutorial, interestingly enough by Apple, up and running!

I played around and tinkered for a little while after this, and maybe it’s just my lack of understanding of the Model-View-Controller architecture, but it’s just not something I could see myself learning. In fact, as much as I get bashed for it, hell, I love coding basic webapps in Perl. When it comes to simply querying and inserting into a database, it gets the job done!

With the version 2 release of the ever-popular Mint web analytics software two days ago, a part of me got to thinking, are stats I already get for free with a combination of a WordPress plugin called FireStats and Google Analytics really worth $30, just so that they may be delivered in a more attractive package?

Well, unless I’m terribly misinformed, and there’s some killer feature of Mint I’m unaware of, I really don’t think so. But, then again, another part of me got to thinking that there is that jaw-droppingly beautiful interface, and the UI is the most important thing next to, of course, functionality…

Still, 30 bucks, who am I kidding!?

I was playing around with the status service Twitter the other day. I’ve known about it for a while, though hadn’t signed up until recently. Basically, it’s a quick and easy way to inform your friends (or whomever else, for that matter) of what you’re up to, or alternatively check on their status (all of which can be done via IM, text message, or through the site itself). As the site puts it:

Consider Twitter the medium between your friends and yourself; we just relay the information.

Aside from its convenient intended uses, I think an interesting aspect of the site is the many ways in which you could adapt it to fit your needs. You could this by simply being creative (read: makeshift link/tumblelog–hey, that’s a good idea), or by utilizing software that makes use of Twitter’s API. One interesting use of Twitter that I’ve seen is syndicating your blog’s feed through the service, with each Twitter update being a new item in the feed.

Twitter’s been fun to use so far and is really quite a good idea, if not, heh, a bit stalker-friendly (though you can set your profile to only be viewable by friend). I’ll have to see how my use pans out, though, and typically my litmus test is whether I still use it throughout the course of one week when I have other things to do than play around with status updaters and other fun time-wasters!