A blog about some things I know and love. I.e. Design, Technology, Music and Art
Was introduced to Andre Michelle’s latest stroke of brilliance last week. Based on the pentatonic scale over two octaves, at a fixed tempo with 16 multiplications of each note, ToneMatrix is too goddamn addicitive, not to mention creates a pretty damn good sound. Excellent stuff. http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix
Just been struck by an idea to build a multiple LED based light (probably spherical), controlled via an open web API. Web users will control the bulbs by programming the open control, and changing my lounge experience in whatever means they feel fit. They could program patterns, messages, images, etc, etc.
Food for thought at least!
Kutiman’s YouTube mashup’s are just god-damn ridiculous. How he’s achieved such high production standards from often questionable assets baffles me! The fella obviously has some Logic serious skills. And the whole idea, for me, takes the art of music production to a completely different era.
Via Ian Tait’s Crackunit
Lovely afternoon in North London, feels kinda like spring.. almost. Thought I’d try out the amazing Lomo iPhone app, QuadCamera on some bleaching sunlight. Not bad for 3 seconds clicking.
A while back (actually too long than I care to think) I wrote my degree dissertation on the distention of technology within modern society; examining it’s impact, state and future. My examination was in part to technology as a whole, but in the majority it was focused on the internet and it’s rapid evolution and uptake in society.
One of the most poignant references in my work was to Marshall McLuhan’s work. I recall being fascinated by his idea and discussion of the “Global Village”: How the world has shrunk through advent of communication and transport technologies. Allowing societies to traverse distances or time, without the constraints or considerations of previous generations. His work, to me, seemed to echo not only the evolutionary movement of technology as a whole, but very specifically that of the web and related social trends.
A few years after my graduation Facebook arrived on the scene, surpassing all previous efforts (MySpace, Friends Reunited) and really hammering home the claustrophobia of the modern, digital world. Other technologies quickly followed suit: cloud computing, the iPhone, public open Wi-Fi, cheap GPRS. To a point where information is not just at your fingertips, it’s in your pocket, plugged into your ears, quietly following you down the road via satellite streams.
Now, of course, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Amazon, Google and Facebook certainly wouldn’t want you thinking so either. Your friends are always there to chat when you need them, you can lookup the state of your finances on the way to work, via your iPhone, even make a few new friends via your out-of-body experience on Second Life. In fact life’s dandy for us information rich folk. But some of the arguments McLuhan made in both Global Village and Medium is the Message - which formed the core of my dissertation - seem to ring more loudly now than ever before.
To me, our increasing technological consumption, whilst decreasing the property of time, has substantially increased our abstraction from the physical world. The news regularly reports cases of online social events spilling, badly, into the real world. Marriages existing in Second Life, but failing in the real world, people being fired for status messages, even murders caused via state changes online. And these are almost always due to the inherent discontinuities between online and the real.
Don’t get me wrong, I think technologies like Google Latitude, Second Life, and all the others, are pioneers of the medium. But society needs to examine and learn from the digital mistakes we make now, rather than chasing the biggest cash or personal advancement. And I do wonder what mistakes will be made before we learn what to do with it all. The massive impact of technological contraction has already been felt on the financial world, and I can only wonder if increasing levels of youth crime can be, in-part, blamed on the increased social online activity of the younger generations and the removal of control/moderation/mentoring on such social platforms.
I think the next decade will be a very interesting one, but I for one, will be taking all these technologies with a substantial pinch of salt.
Sometimes The Onion get it really spot on. Some of their US election spoofs were brilliant, and the No-Keyboard AppleMac was inspired, but this spoof on Sony really takes the biscuit. Maybe it’s my distorted techy sense of humour, but I just thought this was spot-on.
Turns out we haven’t discovered the lost city of Atlantis via Google Earth. Gutting.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/atlantis-no-it-atlant-isnt.html
I doubt even 5 years ago people were expecting an online search engine to predict trends in human diseases, especially to the level of accuracy that Google are demonstrating in Flu Trends. It does make me wonder how far they can mine our personal data… as they’ve certainly got enough of it.
Finally got round to sorting out some of the issues I had with my blog, redesigning and rebuilding along the way. Hopefully the change will allow me to post up more small and mid-sized posts, rather than vastly over-written articles!
I ran into numerous problems on a recent Flash build. Mainly as I was compiling via the FlexSDK on the command line and testing in an open browser. Not ideal, and I really hit some problems when cross-domain restrictions came to play.
Lucky for me Mr Apache and his best friend PHP came out to play, and I wrote a snippy little proxy class to request the files through. Bypassing the need for a cross-domain as all the files we’re being hosted on the localhost. Beauuutiful.
So in true Open Source style, here’s the proxy class in all it’s glory. A couple of things:
The source code is below, otherwise download this ZIP: Proxy.php
requestURL = $queryVars[ self::$QUERY_URL ];
$this->headers = isset($queryVars[ self::$QUERY_HEADER ]);
if(isset($queryVars[ self::$QUERY_MIMETYPE ]))
{
$this->mimeType = $queryVars[ self::$QUERY_MIMETYPE ];
}
if( $this->startCurlSession() )
{
if ($requestType == self::$REQUEST_TYPE_POST) {
$this->makePostRequest();
}
if($repsonse = $this->makeRequest())
{
if ($this->mimeType)
{
header("Content-Type: " . $this->mimeType);
}
echo($repsonse);
}
$this->stopCurlSession();
}
}
}
/**
* Initiates CURL session into current object
*
* @param void
* @return void
*/
private function startCurlSession ()
{
if($this->curlSession = curl_init($this->requestURL))
{
return(true);
}
return(false);
}
/**
* Closes current CURL session
*
* @param void
* @return void
*/
private function stopCurlSession ()
{
if(curl_close($this->curlSession))
{
return(true);
}
return(false);
}
/**
* Generates and commits CURL command to external server
*
* @param void
* @return string
*/
private function makeRequest ()
{
curl_setopt($this->curlSession, CURLOPT_HEADER, ($this->headers) ? true : false);
curl_setopt($this->curlSession, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($this->curlSession, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
return(curl_exec($this->curlSession));
}
/**
* Creates POST headers (if needed)
*
* @param void
* @return void
*/
private function makePostRequest ()
{
$post_vars = Array();
$ignore = Array( self::$QUERY_URL, self::$QUERY_MIMETYPE, self::$QUERY_HEADER);
foreach($_POST as $key => $value) {
if(!in_array($key, $ignore))
{
$post_vars[] = $key . '=' . $value;
}
}
curl_setopt ($this->curlSession, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt ($this->curlSession, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, implode("&", $post_vars));
}
}
// Instantiate
$cdpr = new CrossDomainProxyRequest( CrossDomainProxyRequest::$REQUEST_TYPE_GET );
?>
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