Source Monitor

7/04/2008

A while ago, I decided to write a simple monitoring tool for check-ins into a source control repository. I debated for weeks on what medium I wanted to use: Flash, JavaScript, Processing, or Cocoa.

I ended up selecting JavaScript, which allowed me to hone my jQuery skills. Unsurprisingly, the hardest part of this process was extracting metadata out of the source repository. I wrote a super simple change-set parser that targeted SVN repository (pysvn came in handy). The parser was subsequently wrapped within a simple Python web server that output an appropriate JSON data structure. Let me tell you, jQuery loves munching on JSON.

I ended up bringing this code base to MySpace, the land of TFS. It was astounding to see dozens of change-sets fly across the screen in such a short period of time. While I cannot offer up the code, here is a link to a video of a demo in action. The data in this demo is sliced from a local Newspyle repository.

Open and Therapy

7/02/2008

Astute readers will notice that I've already posted various camera shots of "Open" before. I realized that those photos were not well composed and did not do the piece justice. That post was consequently summoned to the abyss. Since then, I worked on another collage, entitled "Therapy." The constraint for each was to not rely on a computer or digital graphics at all.

Here is "Open":



Here is "Therapy":



Creating a piece like the above is simple yet involving. The basic tools required are: a sharp precision knife, a small cutting board, and a non-toxic glue stick. I already had a blank canvas and acrylics/brushes lying around from another abandoned traditional project. I wanted to try cardboard but felt that the acrylics would have done some funky things.

There important lesson from creating these pieces is that there is no undo button, making planning the composition paramount. Forcing myself to be creative away from the computer feels great.

Gamma

6/20/2008

I had a few moments last night and was able to generate another sketch for another iTunes advertisement. I managed to mix in some alpha channels of Photoshop brushes and am quite pleased with the output. I think it is time to move onto incorporating these techniques into a bigger project.

Brian Eno knows all

6/19/2008

Brian Eno's predictions from 1993 are intriguing. What follows are a list of particular predictions and my thoughts.

Abandoned highrise projects become the residence of choice for the new urban chic, changing hands for ever-increasing sums, until finally only lawyers and stockbrokers (skillfully posing as members of dispossessed minority groups) are able to afford them.

Abandoned industrial projects and warehouses are now being mildly renovated and re-branded as cool. Perhaps this is due to current economic pressures or another hipster trend. Whatever the case, I have seen this in both Los Angeles and Seattle.

A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.

Eno was right on! First we had feed aggregators. As content became less scarce, new sites that performed low quantities of link mining and clustering popped up - these agents were forced to adopt filters. Eventually, big media businessmen grafted "produced" content (the ever nebulous word) into the news.

News is understood to be a creation of our attention and interests (rather than "the truth") and news shows are redesigned as "thinktanks," where four interesting minds from different disciplines are asked the question, "So what do YOU think happened today?"

Another news-related prediction, but this one has not quite come to fruition. I would definitely enjoy watching people from different backgrounds talk and debate the daily headlines. Why has this not been done?

I am inspired to put on the futurist hat and take a stab at a few predictions.

Mandolin

6/15/2008

This particular post is a continuation of a previous exploration of Core Graphics. The above snapshot is another piece of random output of a Paul McCartney iTunes advertisement. I love how grungy this one turned out. I can picture doing an entire graphic novel with this kind of treatment.

Sonic

6/15/2008

I was playing around with some Objective-C this afternoon and ended up having some fun with Core Graphics the recent iTunes advertisement - you know, the one featuring Coldplay. Featured above is one of dozens of random experiments gone completely out of control. I will post another similar experiment shortly.

Trying out Twitter

6/04/2008

As the title states, I'm giving the microblogging service a try. As of now, I'm planning on using Twitter to informally rant about my creative and development process. Feel free to follow me (anandkunal).

Update - After a few weeks of playing with the service, I am quitting Twitter. At the end of the day, I don't want to be broadcasting an imperial ton of signals into the web. I prefer taking the time to craft meaningful posts over bantering about random things.

For the past six months I have been wanting to collapse all my online identities. Leaving Twitter is merely the start of something bigger; Flickr, Last.fm, and a bunch of other services are virtually useless to me. Even with all of its buzz, a service like FriendFeed just feels like a message board that has been decoupled from its content.

I think it is safe to assume that my productivity will probably increase from these actions.

MySpace Status Typography Experiments

6/01/2008

I have been feeling a bit under the weather this weekend and decided to experiment with Quartz 2D, part of the Core Graphics framework. While these experiments aren't useful in understanding the data, they are quite pleasant to look at. I plan on printing these out as large posters and hanging them in the hallway at MySpace.

Feel free to go ahead and view the project page.

Abbey Road

5/30/2008

I came across this fantastic photo of Abbey Road:



How would you classify this piece? The best that I could come up with is: traditional (non-digital) photo manipulation.

Static tweets

5/26/2008

It is pretty clear that Twitter has scalability problems these days. As an outsider looking in, I can only assume that their bottleneck has something to do with their infrastructure, comprised of cache(s) + database(s) + queue(s). This is of course nothing new. Organizations like MySpace and Facebook battle infrastructure scalability on a daily basis. I am ruling out Rails being a concern only because Twitter, like its Web 2.0 counterparts, has the option of allocating a brigade of web servers.

User landing pages are probably the most hit pages. I think it's safe to assume that Twitter has probably already primed these to be served entirely from cache. Upon looking at the Twitter design a bit closer there is one thing that boggles my mind: pagination on user pages. As people tend to look through the long tail of tweets, Twitter's database has to get slammed; storing every tweet in cache is an awful waste of good memory.

If this is in fact a pain point for Twitter then I propose adapting the site to follow the publishing model, which is something that Blogger already does today. Rather than having older/newer links at the bottom of every page, why not default to weekly/monthly archives that are statically generated? Otherwise, the publishing model falls apart. Imagine having to re-build more than one page for every user just for a single tweet. That could be some pretty high disk activity.

They could even present a message at the top of the page to indicate that they are still processing/distributing tweets. But this is where it gets personal. I think it's better to have a full featured site that's a bit behind on data absorption than it is to disable features.