Archive for the 'Technology' Category

I’m out on the East Coast, and I’m attending Flash Forward 2007 in Boston. It’s been a great trip so far, meeting new people and seeing new places (my first time in Boston, can you believe it?). The conference is good, but, as usual, the most rewarding parts of any conference are the in-between and afterwards where you get to geek-out face-to-face over lunch, dinner and drinks. Some personal highlights to date:

Finding a Starbucks before the opening keynote
Though I’m quite sick of Starbucks coffee lately, it sure was critical to information retention that I get that morning injection of coffee after a late night and jet-lag. Also, there was entirely too much applause going on at this keynote. Ok, some AIR apps are cool, but c’mon…

OOP for N00bs
Peter Elst is a pleasant chap from Belgium who finally straightened out some ActionScript 3 OOP concepts. Well, at least for me anyway, judging by some of the blank stares around me.

Grabbing some quick snaps of Boston during lunch
Boston is a beautiful–and pretty clean–city. I was impressed by how small it is, relatively. And the fact that most of the major traffic arteries seem to go underneath the city.

Reconnecting with mod7 Alumnus, Jeff Weir
Jeff came out to FF2007 because his amazing Viscosity project was a finalist in the Festival. We eat fresh lobsters afterward the awards show. Sweet.

“Receiving” an award
My friend, Loc Dao, couldn’t make it to the festival so he asked me to collect the award for him, should his project win. It won. I collected. I acceptance-speeched. The award and I celebrated on the town. I just hope it isn’t too sticky… congrats to all the other winners for Flashforward Film Festival 2007.

Craig Swann’s Session
Craig Swann dazzled the audience at FF2007 with creative experiments using webcams, onboard mics, time, and alternative interfaces like the Wii remote. Neat.

Mario Klingeman
Mario presented his project to quantify the essence of Art into n-dimensional space using genetic algorithms and Flash, thus allowing a program to generate “art”. Very cool. Very German. Very Berlin. Oh, and he gave out pins! Awesome touch.

It’s strange being in place where you can talk to a group of strangers about properties, event handlers, and document classes, and they know exactly what you are talking about. 

More to come…

This is one of the neatest things I’ve seen in a while (if you have a webcam). Try letting the snow pile up on your head and shoulders and then brushing it off. Pretty cool, eh? Thanks to Darren for sending this one over.

Zoho: Here’s a full suite of “100% free” MS Office-like online applications. Import/export common MS docs, create web-enable apps, build your own apps and widgets to extend the functionality… it’s amazing, really.

Am I ready to make the switch to complete web 2.0 100% free virtual desktops? Maybe… it’s pretty nifty, but would I trust my sensitive corporate data to their servers?

 And am I out of luck during those rare times that I’m not online? Nope, they have a downloadable app version.

http://blog.bigsnit.com/index.php/2006/12/08/387

Ha ha! Sounds like a Futurama character.

Will keyword representation on blogs be yet another measurement of the technology divide? It certainly an indicator of public focus (mainstream and geekoid), although I’m not sure what that means in the big picture.

Regardless, before Gnibber gets too widely accepted, let me point out some statistical shortfalls:

1. I suppose Technorati is the premiere blog aggregator, but is it truly representative?
2. A standard measure of time would need to be established as a baseline, or the numbers are meaningless. GNP is usually annual for obvious reasons. I think a Gnibber should always be daily. Just because. (But then we would need accurate population numbers on a daily basis. Oh dear, this is getting too complicated.)
3. Any number that needs to resort to negative exponents is retarded. Therefore, a Gnibber should be per thousand to bring the number up to something more meaningful. (Gniberths? Wouldn’t that be fun to say over and over again - instant lisp.)
4. Places with higher Gnibbers aren’t always the coolest places. However, the comparison of Vancouver to Toronto does indeed confirm that Van is far cooler than TO, as does this comparison:

“Canada” posts the past 1 day
(12/10’s avg Gnibber = ~0.22, using the new per thousand metric).

“United States” posts in the past 1 days
(12/10’s avg Gnibber = ~0.03).

Granted, there are more variations on United States (USA, US, the States, the Great Satan, etc.) than on Canada, but it sounds odd that the Canada should outrun the US by a whopping 7 times.

Touch screens are kinda cool, but you’ve probably never thought about one drawback most of them share: the “mouse” mentality. Most of those devices are just glorified mouse pointers. That means you can only “click” or “hover” on one tiny part of the screen at anytime.

That all changes when you go all multi-touch interaction like these dudes (and dudettes?) from NYU.

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