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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I’ve been thinking a lot about software tools these days. As E15 continues to mature, and we start to consider it for installations, our OS X reliance has to be re-considered because of cost. The general trend in many open source projects, of course, is to be cross platform. At this point, I’m not particularly convinced that being strictly cross platform is the best approach. However, I’m definitely keeping it in mind as future E15 features get implemented and existing functionality upgraded. The determination of which features can remain cross platform and which ones should be platform specific is still in progress.

I’m currently working on a system that requires some simple realtime blob tracking from a webcam. The tracking results will be sent to E15 instances and iPhones. The easiest way to do simple blob tracking with the appropriate amount of programmatic flexibility is to use OpenCV, which doesn’t yet have a particularly stable home on OS X. As mentioned in my blog, my task was to find out how to use the most appropriate OS X technologies (in this case, CoreVideo) to grab the video, and then pass those pixels straight on into OpenCV. It turns out that a number of people have been trying to figure out how to do this, apparently without success. After getting the application to work, I was surprised to find that the performance was 7x faster than the cross platform approach using OpenFrameworks, a collection of utilities for making C++ programming more accessible to artists. In a sense, I see this as one example of what I call the cross platform tax, which exists because cross platform approaches tend to leverage only the most common set of functionality, which cuts down on implementation complexity and development time. The result is that the platform-specific and more cutting edge performance benefits offered by new OS features are lost. When I think about these kinds of tradeoffs, VVVV (Windows-only) comes to mind as a demonstration of the benefits of platform reliance.

This is where all the work gets done; thankfully we don’t have cable.

Well, according to my “List for a Successful Business,” it is essential for a business to have a Fax Machine. It’s kind of crazy how many people still use faxes. But I guess you need to sign things all the time, and getting a fax machine is much easier than trying to understand how digital signatures work.

We now have a fax machine, well, a multipurpose machine; the Canon MF4270. As expected with most consumer electronics devices, it sucks.

First, you can blame the 10lbs of the shipping weight to the inclusion of printed manuals that are completely unnecessary. Thanks Canon, that Portuguese manual really helped me out. Seriously…talk about a company that doesn’t want paper to go away any time soon. You think a company like Canon, who has been making this stuff forever would have these devices simple and easy to set up without requiring you to read hundreds of pages. To its credit, it does work well, as long as the machine is used on it’s own (as a copier and fax machine.)

I think Canon employs monkeys to write their drivers. First off, none of their features (like scanning) are supported on the Mac. Only network printing and faxing are supported. That is fine, but even then, good luck setting that up. The driver installation is a disaster. They use an old VISE installer that forces you to quit every application before installation can start. Also, don’t expect wireless printing to work with a Linksys WRT54G. For some reason, they don’t like each other. It’s pretty obvious they don’t bother with user testing.

I called Canon support a few times. The one tech I talked to admitted he never used a Mac before, but still insisted on me to “right click and select properties…” even though I kept telling him I’m not using Windows. He was like Sarah Palin, just sticking to his talking points written specifically for a Windows machine, and ignoring every question I ask.

Anyway, I write this to say, how horrible consumer electronics still is. Why do companies do such a bad job of writing software that bridges between devices and the computer? Is it intentional? Maybe it’s time we make the Laws of Simplicity required reading.

As Moto sets up shop in Chinatown, I’ve been setting up shop in Austria to do some contracting at the world famous Ars Electronica Futurelab. The Futurelab is known for its ability to produce cutting-edge large-scale multimedia installations around the world. There’s really no better place to see how these types of things get done. Upon my arrival, I was immediately reminded of something my dad tells me I said when I arrived at MIT: “Wow. These people aren’t fucking around here.”

I’m currently down at the Rhode Island School of Design giving a talk about E15 as part John Caserta’s Fusion Arts Workshop. I gave my presentation yesterday, and the students engaged in an E15-inspired activity about re-thinking the current web interface. Notes and references can be found on the buzamoto wiki.

I’ve spent part of my summer fixing a number of things in E15, including using the iPhone as an input device. Having spent a number of years working on embedded devices (and the software that runs on them), I think the iPhone has a bright future with respect to the design of interactive installations. A surprisingly large and diverse set of individuals already have iPhones today, and these numbers are likely to increase with the coming of the 3G version.

I threw together a little demonstration of using the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone to navigate and interact with a collection of images from YouTube in the 3D E15 context. If you’re so inclined, I’ve written a slightly more technical description of these efforts in my personal blog.

If not, I’ll get straight to the point and give you the video. Enjoy!

Thanks everybody for drawing us logos! It’s great since we don’t have any clients or any money to hire ourselves to work on our own identity. BuzaMoto is poor, so we take donations in creative form. I forgot that I internally generate PDFs of all the logos that are submitted. I have now placed a link to download each of them. Just click on one of the logos, then you’ll find a download as pdf link at the bottom.

Keep the logos coming!