If only I could juggle

Currently working on...

Realtime 08: Rewriting the app that displays the videos because I have a better understanding of how this junk works then when I first wrote it. Fix the existing bugs or write better code with few bugs in the first place. The school of thought is that you should fix the existing bugs instead of refactoring but this code is really ugly.

Twitter Language Analytics: I've talked about it on here earlier but before I work on the core animation view for it, I'm going to write a twitter crawler using ruby on rails and mysql to start a database of all words said on twitter. This way I can have access to other language information if I want to do something else in the future.

Advanced Game Developement: Writing a daemon for windows mobile 5 that scans for bluetooth mac address and compares them to a database. Our game has a special type of weapon that acts like a virus. When an infected player comes in contact with another bluetooth device (player or non-player) the infected player will push up the newly found mac address to the server. The server will mark the new address as infected. The virus has a kill rate and once that rate expires the player will be killed or the non-player won't be contagious anymore.

Old oldie but a goody.

Yet another lyric title

I'm thinking the focus of this blog should be public transportation. More specifically DFW/North East Texas transit. Gas prices are getting ridiculous and I'm a "green" fanatic anyways, so why not. I was telling my neighbor how one of the most exciting factors of getting a job in downtown was going to be the fact that I would hardly ever have to drive anymore and his reply was "We can finally act like we're living in the city." Ummm, perhaps it's everyone else who is acting like they aren't. I keep hearing people talking about how the down side of public transit is that they have to live on someone else's schedule. http://www.dart.org put in a starting and ending location and an arrival or destination time. Most routes take less then 30 minutes unless you're going to the urban boonies. I would love to get a candid view of anyone who uses that excuse on a typical day to see what other important activities they are doing. I don't mean to say that you should never drive because obviously there are some days when need to break away from your day to day to go off the beaten path but, if your driving up and down 75 for 5 days out of the week why not use the rail? You'll free up the highway for those who need to drive that day and if there is a common practice of using the transit system, the roads will be less congested when you need to drive.

As a daily patron of the DART system, I've grown very fond of the whole social interaction that goes on between people who are forced to share space for short spurts of time. It's not always a positive interaction but it does bring a new experience than you would get from driving east on 35 during afternoon rushhour (and it's usually quicker too!).

Anyways, I think that's going to be the topic for this weblog as a lot of development of the transit system is going to taking place in the next few years.

Did you see the drummer's hair?

Another lyric as the title...

And so as the header of this blog suggests, here is a random entry. I got fed up with me hair (tired of it falling in my mouth when I eat and I look goofy if I tuck it behind my ear) today so I whacked it off, well some of it. I am usually meticulous when it comes to cutting my hair but I decided to dive into it tonight by cutting the front left (my left) side really short. I decided to match the other side to the same length and then I noticed that I had a fuckin' sweet mullet. So I added some texture (made it look like shit but on purpose) and it came out pretty jazzy. I also picked up a new pair of black Imperial dukes from http://www.gotocentre.com as I was waiting for the 1 route at Mockingbird Station. They were the last in my size and half off ($148.84). My indigo pair is starting to get really stanky again but I'm not sure that they are ready for a wash. I need to work off some beer gut before I wear those jeans around town because they are beyond tight. I'm going to go for a spin around the lake tomorrow on my inline skates. I'll post pictures of the jeans and hair tomorrow but it's almost 3am and I had to wake up earlier than usual to catch the train from West Irving (Yeah! go public transit (I have a car, i'm just green and hip like that (cheap))).

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update

pictures as promised... click on an image to go to my flickr account and see the rest.

new haircut

new jeans chillin' with the old pair

What is love? (baby don't hurt me)

Currently working on: SoEmotional

A Leopard app that reads in a public timeline from twitter and counts the usage of emotional words like love and hate. I would eventually like to be able to do a mash up with flickr and the hype machine that pulls in pictures and songs based on subject of the emotion. For now i'm going to have a little fun with core animation and see where this goes.

On the back burner:

I have to develop a bluetooth daemon for windows mobile using c# (gross) so that flash lite can communicate with the bluetooth module on the Samsung i600. I've had the idea of making a "living" contact list on a mobile device for some time. Since I'm already going to be getting dirty with visual studio and the i600 I figure I should go ahead and give it a shot. The application would allow the user to create a small profile containing their picture and phone number. As the mobile device moved around it would sense other bluetooth connections. If the devices both have the application they would trade their profiles otherwise the application would simply take note of the bluetooth mac address. As the two devices spend more time around each other, the importance of the connection would get stronger. If a device gets the application after two have met, the device which sensed the mac address first will send an update to the other device with the importance of the connection. Another cool feature would be adding locations to a google map for each time the devices run into each other so that you will never have to experience the "Oh man! I know I've seen that guy before but where?" feeling again. I wish I had a Iphone iPhone so I could write it for that instead =[

So I've noticed...

The title will be an on going recurrence...

Anyways, since I've moved into Dallas I've never posted my status as bored, wether it be facebook, twitter or aol. I wonder if that's because there is more to do in the city or if when I moved into the Dallas city limits happens to be around the same time I sold my soul to UTD and Dean Terry.

Adventures in Cocoa

Back in January, I obligated myself to write an app for http://www.intersectartcollective.com and http://www.realtime08.org that would display video and still photography captured by a mobile device. The mobile lab was using a solution which relied on an applescripted folder to open an new movies with quicktime in fullscreen. The problem with quicktime and applescript is that every time a new movie would come in quicktime would have to leave fullscreen, close itself, reopen itself and animated back into fullscreen which interrupted the show. The scripts back end used a mail application called eudora to save the attachments to a specified folder so as users emailed their content, euroda save the attachments in the scripted folder which opened quicktime.

Problems

Quicktime can't be scripted to perform like a slideshow dynamically. Inter.sect needed to be able to display multiple videos at the same time. Inter.sect wanted to display the text of the current prompt. (go to their website to see what that's about)

Solution

Cocoa! I decided to write an application for the Mac OS 10.4 platform. I had wanted to use 10.5 for core animation but some of the machines that we were going to be using weren't 10.5 capable. The application utilizes the core video package using the opengl and quicktime libraries. The applications opens a quicktime movie from the saved attachments folder, grabs the latest frame and slaps it onto an opengl primitive as a texture. I decided to switch to Mail instead of Eudora so that I could have more flexibility using applescript and the Mail rules. I used one applescript to save the attachments and another to save the prompts.

 

Download and Install

I've uploaded the latest build and xcode project for the applications that realtime08.org will be using. The source is hacktastic right now but it builds on an updated 10.4 machine.

spectacle download

To Install:

1. Create a new folder in your ~/Movies directory called "Realtime."


2. Add a new account to Mail and set up a rule for any mail whose "To:" contains your new accounts email address. Set the rules action to run the save attachments script which came in the zip file. saveAttachments.scpt is for leopard and the other is for tiger obviously.


3. Run spectacle

New content will appear as you email new content to the email address in mail.

I love twitter because...

anything over 140 characters and I will start to ramble. Someone should write a blogger pluggin that lets the user limit the character count.