Quick Look-like interaction in the browser! Read more here.

This morning I checked our site and was welcomed by this:

Hilarious, but it’s so true. Ask anyone who has a public drawing site what the most commonly drawn “thing” is. Better yet, take a look at what people draw on bathroom stalls next time you’re at a bar.

Like I mentioned earlier, Village 2.0 features the all new MudTyper Version 2. MudTyper 2 has two components: MudTyper Server, a light weight Cocoa HTTP server and MudTyper Renderer, the font renderer. On the Village website, MudTyper is integrated behind the rails application.

The Architecture

An overview of the architecture is shown below:

A POST request from the browser is sent to a Rails Metal URL periodically (as opposed to responding to keystroke events). The Rails Metal method verifies sessions, and request parameters and forwards them over to the MudTyper Server. The MudTyper Server then sends a request to MudTyper Renderer to create either a file that is saved to disk or a base64 encoded string depending on the user’s browser. The browser receives the image as a response and includes the rendered image into the page.

Scalability

With this architecture, it is possible to scale for increased load. We can run multiple instances of MudTyper Server+Renderer, and use mod_proxy to get Apache to handle the load balancing.

Font Rendering

The new Renderer adds a lot of new support, including support for OpenType fonts with full kerning support, as well as many OTF features. For instance, we can now render Galaxie Cassiopeia’s contextual alternates, adding smooth transitions between letters.

Over the course of the past few years, I’ve found myself spending a lot less time on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. In contrast to popular opinion, I feel like they tend to enhance existing social relationships as opposed to being a replacement for them.

Even though I spend less time with them, I do acknowledge that they are good at keeping me up to date with news and projects that I wouldn’t have otherwise been made aware of. For me, it’s the the links people post that tend to be much more interesting than the comments. This observation, coupled with an interest in saving myself the time of visiting every link that passes through my Twitter and RSS feeds that might be interesting, has resulted in Feedabot.

Feedabot is simple. It monitors feeds (RSS, Twitter, etc.) and looks for links. When it finds a link, it renders and image of it, and places that image on the site. This provides me with additional information about whether or not it’s worth my time to visit any given link that passes through my feeds. Pages are marked when read, and can be placed into groups. Groups can be made public by adding some additional metadata (image, description, and title). I’ve created a few sets in my account here as an example.

While the current list of feeds that Feedabot monitors is fixed, Feedabot users are allowed to submit their own URLs that will be rendered and added to their profile. These can then be added to groups or sets.

Feedabot is a work in progress. It’s growing every day, and could benefit from some additional users. If you’d like to give it a try, send us an email and we’ll create you an account. If you’ve got feeds (Twitter lists, RSS, etc.) that you think would make a great addition to the current set, feel free to suggest one.

We think a lot about the Web. Mostly, we try to imagine new ways to interact and visualize the data we find on it. E15, for example, is a way to allow end users to take a step away from the browser and take it apart, one div at a time.

I’m often surprised at how thinking about the web in this way feels so new and unexplored. A lot of people I know seem to be so comfortable with the browser that they can’t imagine anything that could enhance their web experience in any way. We here at BuzaMoto are still taking steps at trying to change that.

In my most recent attempt at creating a new vantage point from which to view web data, I’ve recruited the Sunflow global illumination renderer, thousands of lines of C and Python, and hundreds of hours of CPU time to create a few visualizations of web data “outside” of the browser. The visualization above, for example, is a collection of data from various web sources (Flickr, Delicious, Google, Facebook, and Twitter), affiliated with myself (or user name), all piled up. The end result is a summary of the data I interact with on the web on a daily basis, put into perspective. What sometimes feels so large and formidible is actually rather small when viewed from the right angle. Maybe if everyone was able to see their own data in this way, they would realize how thin and shallow many of the Web 2.0 social networking sites are.

I’m currently in the process of trying to make this happen. I’d really like to streamline this process and make these visualizations accessible to everyone that wishes to see them.

In the meantime, check out the “Piles of Web Data” Flickr set that I’ve created to host my most recent creations.

I recently sent my MacBook Pro to the Apple Store for repair, and it came back all fixed up. A new display for the backlight banding problem, a new top case for a failing keyboard and a new logic board for replacing the nvidia card. I have a Lacie 2Big Triple that I use as a Time Machine backup for this computer, but I realized the backups kept failing.

Time Machine apparently uses your MAC address to keep track of which machine your backup corresponds to. So of course if you get your logic board replaced, you’ll have a new MAC address and Time Machine will think this is a different computer.

I did some google searching, but this method did not work for me. I had to combine this other method to make it all work. Anyway, here’s the list of what you have to do. First, make sure you go into System Preferences and turn off Time Machine. Then fire up the Terminal and run:


$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive/Backups.backupdb
$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress NameOfMac


This should spit out your old MAC address. In the backup drive, you will have a hidden file with the values of this MAC address. Now, look up your new MAC address with:


$ ifconfig en0


Write the new MAC address down. What you will now do is rename the hidden file from the old MAC address to the new one, then tell backupd your new MAC address. In this example, your old MAC address is aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff and new address is 00:11:22:33:44:55, and your computer name is My Computer. We also turn off ACL and turn it back on after we make the changes.


$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -d
$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive
$ sudo mv .aabbccddeeff .001122334455
$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive/Backups.backupdb
$ sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:11:22:33:44:55 "My Computer"
$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -e


Now, you just need to remove your drive, then remount it. Go into Time Machine, and turn your backup back on. This will start indexing your drive again and for a long while, it will say “preparing…” It took my computer about 20mins to complete the initial backup. If it begins creating a new backup with “My Computer 2″ you did something wrong because it’s starting a new backup.

Apple should probably make this easier since I’m sure a lot of people are going to have their nvidia cards replaced.

I’m pleased to see that Jamie Zigelbaum of the Tangible Media Group has posted some of the work we did at the MIT Media Lab in the summer of 2008 on G-stalt: an interface to manipulate complex data sets with the hands.

During that summer, our emphasis was on designing a flexible software architecture for easily obtaining and manipulating all types of web content within the G-stalt interface. Pleased with the resulting design, that basic architecture has since found its way back into projects like E15 and others. In many respects, much of the ideas explored in G-stalt are those we explore in E15 — finding new, flexible ways to get traditionally browser-only web content into applications altogether distinct from the browser itself.

After watching the video, I was reminded of the similarity it has to and older demonstration I made with E15 and the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone. Still a very nice demo, in my opinion.

One project I worked on recently required to set up a mongrel cluster on Webfaction. On a typical Rails setup, I have a mongrel cluster running under apache2. I thought it would be easy to set this up on Webfaction, but it wasn’t so straight forward, so I’m going to document it here.

First, the one-click rails app on webfaction assumes you will run one mongrel server per application. However, in order to handle multiple instances with load balancing, we will need to make some changes. The setup is not too complicated, but we need to run our own apache2. But before you install additional software, you should first make sure your app runs on the server with one instance of mongrel. Once you do that, you can follow the instructions below.

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I’m currently spending a few days in Sanibel Island, FL for the Intelligent User Interfaces conference (IUI09), where I presented a short paper about some of our old projects (OpenCode and E15:Web). The paper was part of a IUI workshop entitled Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web, with a keynote from MIT alum David Huynh. One point that struck a chord with attendees was the need for increased focus in visual aesthetics and presentation with respect to technical projects involving the semantic web. Having presented OpenCode at a design conference (AIGA) as well as a technical conference (IUI) placed our work in a unique category. Thus far, visual aesthetics is something that appears to be almost nonexistent here at the conference, which is a bit unfortunate as we’ve known about the gap between design and technical innovation for a very long time. A strong feeling of déjà vu has fallen upon me as I have discussions about this subject that, for me, I was having nearly a decade ago.

The issue is that when doing research that involves the web, these researchers need users. To get users, they need to produce something that people might want to use. If they produce something that’s ugly, difficult to use, and overly esoteric, they’re hard pressed to find anyone that gives a sh*t. Without users, they can’t get results. In my opinion, in order for much of this research to move beyond the prototype stage, researchers need to do more than talk about the need for aesthetics. AFAIK, that’s all that’s ever happened.

That’s not to say that everything here has been atrocious, however. I’ve seen a few visualizations that could be welcome additions to data visualization sites like Information Aesthetics and Visual Complexity with a little polish. In general, however, I think that IUI09 lends at least some confirmation to the notion that intelligence and attractiveness are mutually exclusive.

Most of our client work involves Rails development. It seems everybody wants a website that allow them to change the content, anytime, anywhere, whenever they like. But I always tell my clients to think about how often this “change” is going to happen. It’s certainly a waste of money to pay for developing some feature that you don’t end up using.

Even with Rails, having an “admin” backend requires extra design and development time. Also, with Rails and most other web frameworks, it’s not completely trivial to deploy and maintain these sites. For the client, it most likely means they need to ditch their current hosting provider and go with someone who will support Rails. Rails support on an affordable host is a hit or miss. I’m still surprised that Dreamhost still claims that they “support” Rails. In the world of VPS, the deployment is an easy thing, but for most clients, maintaining a VPS is a responsibility they don’t want. Why can’t it just work? I agree.

But this post isn’t about Rails. Instead, it’s about revisiting an oldie and ugly [but still sometimes a goodie] friend, PHP.

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