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))).

---

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.