Enlightened Confusion

Evening Photo Walk: Downtown Indy’s Westside

mas — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:58:32 +0000

It has been a while since I shot downtown. I recently purchased an excellent wide angle zoom lens, and I wanted to give it a workout. Downtown seemed like the perfect subject, so off I went. Given the evening light, I decided on the west side, shooting mostly east. Turns out, there were three major events going on the west side. Despite this, my super secret street parking location was still available, and, no, I’m not going to share.

The 10-22mm was a lot of fun, and I’m pretty happy with the results. The light was kind of harsh, so many shots would have benefited from a UV or other polarizing filter. Here’s one of my favorites; the rest are on the photos page.

Evening Photo Walk: Coxhall Gardens

mas — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:36:03 +0000

A stroll through Carmel’s newest park.

See more on the photos page.

Lightning strikes twice for the Google Maps Team

mas — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:43:52 +0000

Okay, so eight to ten years ago, when IM was just starting up and ICQ was the next big thing, I started following the work of an open source project called Jabber whose goal was create an open source instant messaging system. Being open source guys, they didn’t like the idea of being tied to a single company’s system. They much prefered a federated system, like email, where anyone can run a server, and there is an established protocol for servers talking to each other. So, that’s how they set their system up. XML was also a ‘next big idea’ at the time, so they decided to make a DTD for messaging, another for presence and contacts, and have the server, at its core, just by an XML router which routed the appropriate message documents to the appropriate contacts. Being forward looking guys, they knew this would make the system extensible, and, even at the time, had big ideas about adding DTDs that would support things like real-time white boarding and other collaboration tools. The Jabber guys established their niche, but the general public had already chosen one the handful of proprietary messaging platforms was happy enough that they saw no reason to leave.

What, you are probably asking, does all of this have to do with the Google Maps Team and lightning? Well, as good internet citizens, the Jabber guys documented they protocol and went through the hassle of getting it established as an ITEF standard known as an RFC. This standard was called extensible messaging and presence protocol, or XMPP. Many organizations have used this standard as the basis of their own messaging platforms. Among these was Google, who used it as the basis of Gtalk. Which, finally, bring me back to the Google Maps Team. After their technology was bought by Google and turned into Google Maps, they decided to work on something new: a real-time messaging and collaboration platform. After eighteen months work, the results, called Google Wave, were previewed at this week’s Google IO conference, and the results are astounding. I won’t attempt to explain it you just need to watch it:

Much as I suspected while watching the video, when I read their published protocol specification at waveprotocol.org, I learned that the whole thing is built on a extensions to XMPP. At the guts of the Wave are XML DTDs for wave detlas being streamed around, serialized, and sycnronized. This is going to be huge, and the Maps Team deserves the praise. But, it all started with the vision of the Jabber folks.

Robots != Machine Intelligence

mas — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:34:23 +0000

I watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. For the first hour and a half, it was wholely befitting of a show which has attracted the cult follow that BG has. The last half an hour was a bit of a disappointment for me, particularly the ending. The close featured a montage of the crude humanoid style robots that the current state of technology can muster, and a goofy warning that it will all happen again.
It has always amused me that people associate robotics with machine intelligence. Having worked in robotics, I can assure you robotics is much more about PID loops, sensors, and servo motors than it is about an artificial self awareness or machines having a soul. Anyone with even a passing interest in AI knows that it’s going to be an awful long time before we have to worry about an army of sentient machines taking over the word. Really, there is no need to fear your Roomba.

Hearty Brews on a Cold Day

mas — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:13:31 +0000

Last weekend I visited the 1st annual Indiana Microbrewers’ Winterfest at the state fairgrounds. Wow, who knew so many people in Indianapolis were into craft beers. When I arrived, there was a line wrapped around the side of the building waiting to get in…and it was 16 degrees outside. They eventually sold out. With your admission, you got tokens for ten 4 ounce samples, and there was plenty to choose from. Highlights for me were Upland Brewing’s Bad Elmo Porter, Barley Island Brewing’s Oatmeal Stout, and Warbird Brewing’s Shanty Irish Ale. My only complaint was that they needed more food as I arrived on an empty stomoch.

All in all, it appeared to be a smashing success for the organizers. So, I look forward to the second annual event.

Adieu to the Dome

mas — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:35:15 +0000

While checking out the Indianapolis Auto Show, I got a good view of the results of the RCA dome implosion from the parking garage across the street. What a mess. Here’s hoping the expanded convention center will bring in the type of revenue need to pay for this…and the bonds from the original construction.

Christmas Pics

mas — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 04:21:05 +0000

I’ve been organizing the pictures I took over the Christmas holiday with my family. Here’s a couple of interesting low light pictures. I had the forgot to adjust the focus point on the manger scene, my bad. The slow shutter really made it hard to hold the camera still enough. I really wish I would have brought my tripod with me.

[Show as slideshow]

Playing with Animoto

mas — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:45:12 +0000

On a recent episode of This Week in Photography, one of the hosts mentioned a new Web 2.0 site called Animoto. This site does slideshows right!. I gave it a try today. Within minutes, I was able to throw some photos I snapped of Stephanie Browning performing at Indy Jazz Fest this year, along with one of her tracks I bought on Amazon, to produce this:

Seriously, it took maybe two minutes total of my time, and another five for their servers to render the video. That’s just awesome. I need to play with it a bit more, to see how much customization they will allow, before I give it an unconditional thumbs up, but it is definitely worth checking out if you are into this sort of thing.

If they don’t have iPhoto or Aperture plugins in the works, I sure hope they are thinking about it. A way to post to Flickr would be nice as well.

Small Town Indiana

mas — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:36:28 +0000

I traveled home last weekend to the small town of Hebron, Indiana to visit my family for the Thanksgiving. It was a great time, but a horribly dreary couple of days for taking pictures. Still I managed to snap a couple when the sun temporarily poked its head out:

One Month with Boxee

mas — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:00:44 +0000

My last posting float the idea of Apple expanding its App Store to the Apple TV. In it, it held up Boxee as the type of compelling application that would result. Well, I have a cofession to make. At the time, I hadn’t used it. My exposure to it was solely from videos posted by the Boxee people on their site. I had applied for an alpha invite, I just handn’t been granted one.

Shortly after that post, I received my invite, and, within an hour, had used the wonderful atvusb creator to create a patchstick and install XBMC and Boxee on my Apple TV. The patchstick leaves the Apple’s software complete functional, it simply adds an menu for Boxee, XBMC, and updating the two, to the main frontrow menu of the Apple TV. So, you can still purchase / rent Apple content, if that is your thing, and still have the whole iTunes syncing functionality going on, you just have this orthoginal Boxee funtionality as well.

So, has Boxee lived up to my expectations? Absolutely. Its interface is slick. The social media recommendations are nice. The local media management could use some work in terms of organizing your media. There are better methods that hierachial directory organization for this sort of thing. Quite frankly, since I’d already had to convert every thing to iTunes compatibile formats for the Apple TV, I still use Apple’s interface for that sort of thing. The codec support is fantastic. However, its the internet media interfaces, particularly last.fm integration on the audio side and Hulu, CBS, and WB on the video side. I used it for a solid two weeks before Apple’s automatic 2.3 software update wiped it out. Fortunately, the atvusb creator was updated after a week, so I just got up and running again. I find myself using the Apple TV on a daily basis now, and that certainly wasn’t the case before.

There’s definitely room for improvement. The aforementioned interface for orgainizing media, the lack of direct access to your iTunes content, and little tweaks here and there. The Flickr module should grab high resolution versions if available, give you access to your group pools, and let you browse the forums. Boxee will play VOBs from ripped DVDs, but there is not way to navigate the menus. You find little things like these all over the place, but there are several updates to the software a week, and it is evolving rapidly while remaining remarkable crash free (they do happen on occaision).

I am, however, finding that the Apple TV is becoming a limiting factor in the equation. The CPU, GPU, memory constraints, and @#$#! six function remote of Apple’s $229 hobby product keep an upper limit on what you can do with non-Apple media, and even that is limited (2.5 Mbit HD, indeed). With the recent announcement of Netflix support the Mac and Boxee’s integration to it in their latest release, I would seriously consider a Mac Mini if I didn’t already own an Apple TV.

Overall, I’m very impressed…to the point that I may even consider upgrading my hardware just for Boxee.