bad:
Artistic interpretation by sjdunphy [without being aware of the connection, knowing that I exist, nor giving a damn about my terrible cable situation] of the mess previously below my desk.
better:
Actual photo of the organized state of my cables, taken 10 minutes ago, after 10 minutes of sweeping, culling, zip-tie-ing, etc.
Over the past few months, I've been getting a fair amount of AIM-bots *randomly* messaging me. Their usernames usually end in 'coho' - and could be quite entertaining... Unfortunately, I fear that to validate them with a response would in fact validate that I want to be spammed further.
Today, I got hit with a doozy - the most hilarious AIM-bot spam message EVARR:
Maybe the spammers should take this as a hint. Turn spam into something useful, even if it's a tasteless joke. Or provide a fun fact before the message turns into a request for help from a government official in Nigeria, or an offer for cheap penis-enlargement magic dust.
I was recently going through my archive drives, and stumbled upon some work I did for a data-visualization class at ITP taught by Lisa Strausfield (of Pentagram). My final project was a visual abstraction and exploration of the FCC cell tower database.
I remember the pain of normalizing the vast amounts of data, and being extremely dissatisfied, frustrated at its incompleteness and difficulty of use. The regex required to parse that data into something MySQL would import was among the gnarliest i've ever written - multi-line nests of pain.
But when I did manage to get the normalized data into a number of MySQL tables, I was a kid in a candy-shop. With a [then] rudimentary working-knowledge of Java/OpenGL, I was able to wrangle out maps based solely on the tower geo-coords, and display a number of ancillary data-points.
After I had my fill mapping out the towers and displaying their cell id's, I started to explore the height of the tower structures:
The beauty of custom code allowed my to write controls to drill down and explore the structures that came out of the data.
The roughly rendered tower abstraction reminded me of poorly realized sci-fi imagery of cyberspace.
These images don't make good visualizations in and of themselves. The interactivity made them good. I didn't build these for anyone but myself. There was no GUI [aside from movement controlled via the mouse coordinates] - only a code interface &em; I controlled the visualization with code I wrote and could manipulate to show me what I wanted to explore.
For the non-hackers, interfaces are a must - as large data-sets like this are difficult to explore without control of displayed data-points, scale, base coordinate projections...
I'm happy to announce the debut of Pulse-Labs at ETech this week with a spatial metrics platform. Nick Sears and I pulled off a kick-ass system of wireless RFID reader units that we placed around the ETech conference space.
Even with the short dev time and limited attendee awareness, we got ~300 taps in the ~3 days the network was up. Not bad at all!
Look forward to more visualizations as we get further into the data. We'll be posting most of the code and hardware schematics on the pulse-labs github account.
In the spirit of consolidation and to support my own laziness...
Initial set-up of XBee ZB modules... for fancy-pants meshing:
in terminal,
# list serial ports
$ ls -l /dev/tty.*
# open usb port /dev/tty.usbserial-A9003QNn with 9600 baud
$ screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A9003QNn 9600
# in screen...
# enter command mode
+++
# get XBee Firmware (ctrl-A b for a break - pain in the ass, really)
# ATVR ctrl-A b
# get XBee PAN id
# ATID ctrl-A b
# get serial number high
# ATSH ctrl-A b
# get serial number low
# ATSL ctrl-A b
from aldwyn on this sparkfun forum post:
Which makes perfect sense, as the nodes route and identify dynamically in a mesh network. Unfortunately, the bulk of tutorials/documentation on teh interwebs is for XBee series 1, and Series 2 with the older firmware.
The documents from Digi are a must-read.
Last night's IgniteNYC was awesome. Tikva and the rest did a great job setting up and running the event. The speakers were great, and the crowd was amazing.
My slides, although no notes just yet. Soon?
I'll be speaking at tomorrow evening's Ignite conf here in NYC. On what? Muppets. And fur coats. And... data-visualization. I'm super excited for the talk.
Slides and notes from my talk will be posted later this week [i promise].
Looks to be a great event, with a kick-ass line-up of speakers. Info at ignite.oreilly.com and ignitenyc.org
I was going to post a thorough tutorial on how to get a Sinatra 0.9 app up on DreamHost... and it was going to be great. There are a few things to deal with, and documentation on all fronts is a bit lacking...
But then the MySql server went down for ~15 hours FOR NO REASON, so I'm saying fuck it.
This week, I'll post some Sinatra code, and maybe open up a few git projects... But I will not have anything more to do with DreamHost. Or launching ruby apps on ANY shared hosting. Not worth it.
Cyberspace is a dated term. Its patterns of use in discussions on topics Internet and computing have fallen the way of 'information superhighway' - and Neal Stephenson destroyed the term more effectively than I could have in that behemoth of nerd-fiction Cryptonomicon. But the term 'cyberspace' was coined by William Gibson [fuck citations, you can look this shit up yourself - footnotes FTL], when he was wearing his futurist [sci-fi] hat. When I say these terms died, I'm talking about various things, across multiple levels. The surface meaning is that it's unfashionable to say 'cyberspace' and/or 'information superhighway', or any of those speculative and whimsical terms heralding an age of technology unfettered by mundane things like REALITY, economy, etc.
While AOL was enjoying it's hay-day, I was re-reading Neuromancer, and fantasizing about a reality in which I could escape the meat and blast off into adventures with AI's and body-hackers and ninjas, all the while getting completely fucking ripped on some serious neuro-inhibitors and psychotics and banging mysterious cyber-and-or-extremely-human women. Such a romantic naivete did nothing for my social-life, but brought about an unrealistic reverence towards hackers (and ninjas) that would be blasted to hell once I actually started taking action and put the proverbial money where my desires were - when I started programming. I quickly learned that AI isn't simple. I learned that any given piece of functional software was actually an extremely complicated endeavor to undertake, and shit. I underwent a change in those first years. The fantasy buckled to reality. But neither died. I kept hacking, learning, doing... and I kept reading, fantasizing, staying cerebral and whimsical consuming and re-consuming++ Gibson and his buddies. Point is, I progressed.
Meanwhile, Gibson and Stephenson were right there. wet-dreams of cyberspace gave way to EveryWare, and ubiquitous computing, and neo-marketing. Fantasy was meeting reality in the middle, like Benjamin Button and that red-head of his. And I was doing the same. I spent two years working on a degree from ITP [such a vulgar way to put it!], applying skills I didn't have in order to learn not only the skills but the application, and the resultants... We didn't quite work on flying cars [if you'll allow that term], but we were just ahead of the widely-accepted while keeping it almost possible. We had one foot in cyberspace, while keeping the rest of our bodies in Cable prime-time.
I keep seeing this intersection.
