It’s been a bit quiet on this blog lately, mostly due to complete exhaustion and sleep deprivation – ahh, the life of new parents… :)
There are a few things to talk about, but before I get back to the usual blogging routine, here’s an update on my daily commute: It still rocks!
Last Thursday was a beautiful day in the Bay Area, warm and not much wind, so I was really looking forward to my bike ride back home across the Golden Gate, and I was rather disappointed to see the fog move in from the ocean just before I made it to the bridge.
And the fog was as thick as pea soup by the time I’d made it to the south tower, so I didn’t expect any photo opportunities… near the north tower, visibility was down to about twenty meters, when suddenly from one second to the next, the sun broke through!
It was glorious! Here is a still picture taken from the north tower:
Click through for a large version.
What no picture can can show is the amazing speed of the wind-whipped fog as it blows through the narrow gap of the Golden Gate. Here is a short video of the same scene – sorry for the shaky camera, but the wind was strong enough to almost blow the camera out of my hands.
Also commute-related, I’ve started a Tumblr blog as a little experiment. It’s linked here in the sidebar and it’s called Bay Crossings – I’ll try to post a picture or two every day from my commute across San Francisco Bay.
Unfortunately I couldn’t go, but it looks like the Audio Data API presentation at the Mozilla Summit 2010 in Vancouver was a big success.
Here are two videos of David Humphrey’s presentation on the state of the Audio Data API (same content but different angle):
What blew me away when I saw the video is that one part of Dave’s presentation (at about the 2 minute mark) was based on my JavaScript Spectrum Visualizer – let me just say that I am honored! [virtual happy dance]
Everybody in the web development community owes a big Thanks! to Dave for working so hard and tirelessly to bring full, interactive audio to web browsers. Over the next year or so we will see some HTML5/JavaScript experiences that will blow your socks off – and that is in no small part because of Dave and the team of audio/video coders and artists that have been pushing the boundaries of what browsers can do.
My photo “Dancing across Broadway” has long been a favorite of mine and so I was delighted when I got a request from Amanda Spencer if she could use it as inspiration for one of her watercolors…
Amanda did a great job with this picture – I really love the way she captured the dark & wet atmosphere of that evening, with the glittery lights of broadway reflected in the rain-splattered street.
The textures in this painting are amazing – it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done in watercolors before.
My Spectrum Visualizer has made quite some waves across the blogosphere and it’s been a lot of fun to check out the considerable traffic to the Stories In Flight server.
Of all the writeups I’ve found, here is the one I’ll use for my resume:
OK this must be the bleedingest-edge project I’ve seen in a while. To actually see it I had to download a pre-patched version of Firefox 3.7 alpha pre1 and it uses a draft recommendation of a Mozilla extension to the HTML5 draft specification.
This is from the Awesome But Useless blog, which certainly has one of the most entertaining blog titles I’ve seen in a while. And I am honored to be featured there – it’s great company. Thanks!
On March 18 at 1:13am Luke Akira arrived, changing our lives forever. And while he is not always as peaceful as in the picture above, he has already enriched our existence beyond words.
Welcome, Luke. We’ll have an amazing time together…
This is very cool: I’ve just done a lazy flight around San Francisco Bay with FlightGear – an open source project that has been going on for about fifteen years now. Not sure how I managed to not hear of this before, since I’ve been having bad withdrawal symptoms since I’d ditched Windows and Flight Simulator a few years ago.
FlightGear is very far advanced at this point and much about the architecture of the platform is very attractive. All the scenery files, plane models and the AI traffic definitions are done in XML – there is a lot of stuff to poke around in… not that I really need another time sink at this point…
Flying in FlightGear was very nice. Similar to Microsoft’s FlightSim, but maybe a little bit more of a realistic aircraft handing (which is not always good for the casual pilot!). The scenery around the Bay was gorgeous and the clouds and sky (which is what a pilot will see the most) are near perfect, at least as good as FS9.
With versions for Mac and PC and as a free download, what is there not to like?
Here’s another one of those things that is quite amazing in that special Internet kind of way: The German Alfred Wegener Institute maintains a station on the ice shelf in Antarctica and some enterprising scientists have lowered a microphone through the ice into the water under the ice shelf and the resulting audio stream – after bouncing via satellite to Germany – can be listened to live by anybody who has an Internet connection.
Now what would you be hearing there? From my casual listening, there is a constant low roar in the line, almost like white noise, which is actually kind of relaxing, and then suddenly there are loud cracks, booms and whiplashing metallic noises whenever the ice shifts.
From what the institute website states, there is a good chance of catching the songs of various kinds of seals and whales, but today I’ve only heard faint, low noises that may have come from whales. I’m looking forward to hear them close up.
But even just the echoing booms of the ice are fascinating and the stereo effect of the microphone is quite startling. Not sure if that makes me sound weird, but I could listen to this audio stream all day!
A full month without a post! Time is truly flying right now. On the personal side, I’ve been busy with helping to prepare for our little family as the arrival of the Little One(tm) is getting closer and closer…
And work-wise I’ve spent as much time as possible reading up on the new HTML5 and CSS3 features – and there are many.
On my more experimental site – Stories In Flight – I’ve started to create a whole section with small cheatsheets and tutorials around things in HTML5 that have caught my eyes:
There is the master cheatsheet for HTML5 and CSS3, which gives you a good overview of some of the highlights like box shadows, rounded corners, SVG and Canvas tags.
I’ve created a little tutorial around the basics of Ruby Annotations and there’s also a suggestion of a practical use in language training.
An exploration of CSS3 multiple background images and – rather a surprise – how this can be used quite efficiently for JavaScript animations. I will revisit this feature in the near future with several interesting new ideas…
A quick look at the basic HTML5 audio tag, including a script solution that allows to easily create whole soundscapes with multiple channels of sound that will come in handy for JavaScript games.
The more I research all the new HTML5 features, the more excited I get for the future of interface engineering – after years of very little progress, where almost all interesting new interface developments came from the Flash side, we are now seeing a renaissance of HTML.
Yes, there will be browser incompatibilities, and yes, Flash will not go away, but I think we will be able to define a much better model where Flash will really only be used where it is necessary. No more reason to kill accessibility and SEO with Flash navigation elements.
We will see exciting new HTML websites exploding onto the scene, lightweight, accessible and kicking all kinds of visual butt.
Alex Roman has spent a year creating one of the most astonishing CG short films that I’ve seen in a long time: The Third & The Seventh (HD version at vimeo).
The film can be best described as a meditation on architecture, photography and the sense of space and depth in the world around us.
Alex Roman recreated several modern buildings as 3D renderings and then uses some quite amazing craftsmanship to give the viewer a sense of depth with very subtle animations where the virtual camera slowly floats through the buildings, with ever so slight changes in focus.
Many of the effects are so subtle, especially in the first half of the film that I didn’t even believe that I am looking at CG rendered versions of the buildings. Alex has a great sense for lighting and clearly must have spent many hours tuning the lighting set ups to create extremely photorealistic settings. Only in the second half of the film, when he introduces surrealistic effects, does it become apparent that we have been looking at computer graphics all along.
Here is a video with some of the scenes as compositing breakdowns in case you want to see a peek under the hood of several of the scenes in the film.
It should be mentioned that Alex also created the soundtrack for the film, making this all around a major tour de force.
Today I noticed a surprising spike in traffic to FlickrPoet, and after a little bit of digging I found the source for all this sudden interest: FlickrPoet has been mentioned on the Flickr Blog!
It’s been interesting to follow the buzz that the Flickr Blog can create – within hours I saw hundreds of users come to the site, mostly from an ever-expanding tweet cloud on Twitter.
The comments in many of the tweets as well as emails to me and comments left on the Flickr API page for FlickrPoet have been great – it’s fun to think of so many people spending a few minutes on that site and playing with the creative options of the app. Several people mentioned that they wrote small poems right there on the site – how neat is that!
