Technology

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25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y.  11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

Business / Technology — No Comments
29
Aug 09

The pen to paper transformation

The physical practice of writing, drawing and doodling is at the heart of constructing high-bandwidth content for low-bandwidth fluid consumption. Yet, there are few people that actually practice these methods. Of those that do, the technology mediated construction of content vaporizes the artifacts associated with the experience. People still benefit from keeping a digital diary, but all the edits typical of pen are erased to leave a final pristine form.

Simplicity is often thought of as minimalism, however there are plenty of complicated things that appear simple – look into biomimicry for examples and inspiration. Simplicity is possible with more thoughtful design. Being thoughtful requires clear understanding of evolving thinking – a reason people love to study the work of others to help define their own.

Zack Arias has become a wonderful source of thoughtful content. Recently he posted a photograph of his whiteboard where he was thinking through the end-to-end experience that his clients have when working with him. It conveys an enormous amount of information that clearly transpired of a much longer period. The final product is something the viewer has the honor of appreciating, while Zack had the hard work adding and editing the realities of his business and priorities. Zack gets the transformation in how he thinks about his business, while the viewer simply gets to peer onto the artifact.

Dr. Michael Wesch has been working with the LiveScribe SmartPen which records the audio and markings of the author in digital form. It can then be explored and shared in video progression with others. The author gets additional benefit being able to play audio associated with any note by tapping. What is wonderful is that Dr. Wesch is also sharing how he filters, structures notes and draws relationships with his content, all in the context of the presentations of his students. This is an improvement over the whiteboard where the viewer is regulated to one state of a product. While a lot can be teased out with Wesch’s smart pen experiment, we do not in fact understand what he is thinking. We do not know his transformation.

A sample of what the Behance Action Pad looks like.

A sample of what the action pad looks like.

Behance is a company that creates products and services that help provide order to what can seem like creative madness. In fact, they help bring simplicity – clarity – to the numerous aspects of thinking. They break things down into preparation, actions steps, back-burner thoughts and unlined but dotted work spaced that facilitate diagrams and writing the same. This is an example of encoding a structure to help replicate behavior. It comes from patterning after a methodology that mediates the structuring of creative thinking. As a tool, this method and its papers facilitate – we hope – more clarity and hopefully more simplicity. Again, there is no way to capture someone’s transformation, except possibly in his or her progression through the framework.

Now, if only more people took a pen to paper to write, draw or doodle. There is no shortage of content creation, but we lack the records of the experience. We snap endless photographs and videos to simply flood and archive the world. People love to say it is the journey and not the destination. What if there is no destination and not enough people are journeying?

Consider the complexities in your art or business. What are your most complex challenges? Can you gauge from your work products how evolved your thinking is? What we present is a direct representation of how clearly we think and evolved our thoughts are. Yet, the majority of examples of slides and diagrams show the garbage dump yet to be wade through. When was the last time you saw a white paper? When was the last time you read one? There is a class of people that know, writing anything at all puts you in a position of leadership. There is another class that actually reads it and sees the mess. The only way to come to deep understanding is to work though it, be it with a whiteboard, a SmartPen or Behance pad, and allow the transformation to occur with your thinking. It can be done digitally, but there is something more impactful in picking up a pen and placing it to paper, that captures the evolution as you think that represents to the author the journey and to all others, the result.

Design / Technology — No Comments
20
Jul 09

Obsessing on color: Getting i1Display to calibrate dual-display video

Color calibration is one of those things that you buy relatively expensive gadgets to asses and correct deviations in visual displays. If you care about your digital imaging process, calibration is critical – buying the gadgets that help simply provide a piece of mind that what you see is as close to what it should be as possible. Add an extra display, as I did, and suddenly you are thrown into the depths of color correction. You never knew how different displays could be.

I use an Eye-One Display 2 by GreytagMacbeth on my two Lenovo ThinkVision L201p displays driven by an NVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL. Xrite, the owners of GreytagMacbeth recommend using two different video cards as not many dual-display cards allow different profiles to be applied independently. They rely upon the underlying operating system to automate the monitor selection and profile setting. Naturally, Microsoft has a utility that will allow you to apply a different color profile for each display attached to a given system. That is where their guidance stops.

If you have tried this yourself, one of the things you will notice is that simply setting the “primary display” setting on your display properties control panel doesn’t do the trick.

Microsoft Windows XP Display Properties

This will tell the i1Match software where the i1Display 2 device is, but from what I can tell, it continues to work with the other display’s color profile. At first, I thought it was enough to save the different profiles out with different names and then activate them with Microsoft’s Color Control Applet. Short answer, is that the two displays looked wildly different. Here is what I did to get it all working.

Calibrating two displays driven by the same video card with the i1Display 2

First, download the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP (that’s what I run so maybe there is something else for other versions of Windows).

Second, calibrate you first monitor. I use the i1Match Software that came with my i1Display 2.

Third, save the profile with a name that will indicate which display it is for. For example, “Monitor_6-29-2009_Full_Left.icc”. This tells me not only the date, but how much of the calibration process I followed and for which monitor, in this case, the left one.

Fourth, swap your monitor cables. I know, so simple! Repeat steps 2 and 3.

Fifth, swap your monitor cables back.

Sixth, open up the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet and assign the new color profiles to your displays. iMatch Software will have certainly screwed this part up, so remove all the profiles that are no longer relevant. Assigning a profile to a display is easy after you have “added” it to the possible selections.

Microsoft Color Control Applet

At this point, your displays are calibrated. A simple verification test is opening a photograph and dragging it across the displays to notice any variations. This is what let me know there was a problem the first time, one was noticeably warmer than the other. After following the above, each represents the image the same way – let us hope faithfully!

Technology — 1 Comment
19
Dec 08

Winding down. Hacking PERL.

Vacations are for getting away from work and resting from the daily grind. Yet, almost everyone seems to need a week to unwind before getting to relax. My week of unwinding was productive.

During my last workweek, I was helping an employee configure Apache to simplify her life. While poking around on the development machine I noticed that the team was creating multiple WebSphere Application Server profiles. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is IBM’s J2EE platform and it supports the ability of running multiple instances of the runtime environment without installing the product several times. This can be a very powerful feature and in the case of my team, they were simply doing it for isolation. It allows each of them to manage an instance of WAS without worrying about affecting other peoples work. While this is a development machine, apparently one of the applications it ran is less “in the works” than the others. This presented a problem, when I wanted to front-end my employee’s application (the one I just configure Apache for) with the web server.

You see, in a typical WAS setup, there is a web server that receives requests from an end user’s web browser. Web servers are extremely good at serving static content, executing CGI scripts and connecting to FastCGI applications. To hook into this layer, WAS loads a plugin that reads an XML configuration document to understand what it should do. This document, among other things, maps which URL paths should be passed on to WAS. For each WAS profile, a new plugin-cfg.xml file is generated. This makes sense, because each of these profiles is a different environment. The challenge is that the WAS plugin Apache loads can only read one XML file. So, what do you do when you want to map multiple WAS profiles to a single web server?

A few months ago, I remember the manager of the systems team we work with describing how this was a manual process and when he had more time, he would automate it. This led me to search and find a link for Lotus Connections documentation, “Mapping multiple WAS profiles to a single IBM HTTP Server,” that described the manual procedure. Using this as my guide, I updated the plugin-cfg.xml file manually and my employee was all set. It worked as expected and that was that. My last workday was the following day and yet I was compelled to automate this during my wind down week.

PERL is my programming language of choice when it comes to working with text and it fits perfectly for this task – merging two plugin-cfg.xml files. There are four XML nodes to consider when merging these files: VirtualHostsGroup, ServerCluster, UriGroup and Route. The latter three are easy because they just need to be copied “as is” into the merged XML document. VirtualHostsGroup however needs to be merged. Moreover, while the example from the Lotus Connections documentation shows a VirtualHostsGroup stanza named “default_host” and because this is XML, to do this responsibly we need to presume there could also be a VirtualHostGroup named something else. So, not only do we need to combing the children of all VirtualHostGroup nodes, we need to persist these nodes even if the named node in one XML file is not in the other.

With the help of XML::LibXML and XML::Tidy this task is simple enough. The following script takes three arguments, the file name of first XML document, the second XML document and the new XML document. It merges the second document into the first, inserting changes after the existing XML nodes. This approach ensures the file appears in a more logical human readable fashion. The formatting options available in LibXML disagreed with my aesthetics, so I added a dependency on XML::Tidy, which while cleaning up the document, makes it too neat. Oh well. The script could be used multiple times to merge several plugin-cfg.xml documents. For full disclosure, the IBM documentation for Lotus Connections mentions:

Do not complete this procedure if you are planning to add the multiple profiles to a node in a network deployment. In that case, you can define a Web server for the node and map only the node to the IBM HTTP Server.

I have not looked into what happens or what would need to happen to support multiple profiles in a network deployment. My last disclaimer is that I have tested this many times with a few edge cases. As with any software, it may have bugs, so test it on your documents before using this in a production environment. I will not be held liable for damage you create using this script. For that matter, if you plan to use it commercially, you should email me to discuss a license. Let me know if you find a bug or have suggestions.

Download wpcMerge.zip.

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30
Nov 08

Copyright doesn’t mean don’t use

When the Creative Commons forged a more progressive look copyright law, enabling content creators legal power to elect specific use of their works, a cultural movement ensued. Until that point, copyright law reflected a historical component of intellectual property protection vital to commercial endeavors, but presented obstacles to reuse. Any of the various combinations of the Creative Commons license permit specific opportunities to a consumer of the assets, turning copyright into a layman’s device, clarifying for both creator and consumer a license that is compressible and deliberate. Copyright doe not mean “don’t use,” it just presents additional barriers because it lacks the varietal nature of the Creative Commons. Copyright is very specific, that the author of the content holds all rights and in order to use it, one would need to contact the author for permission or license. This appears to be a great inhibitor and makes a great compliment to the more explicit Creative Commons licenses. As the Creative Commons site explains, “Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.”

So, while it is possible to permit some level of sharing and remixing in the end the license still reserves rights to the work. Copyright on the other hand reserves all rights. In cases where you want to know and be in control of your work, copyright is what you want.

While people tend to understand that they usually own the copyright of their creations, they do not realize the limitations of restitution if the work is not registered. Specifically in the United States, failing to register your work limits the amount of damages one can seek or be awarded in court. While my living is not made based on my photography, I have chosen to explicitly copyright my work, which includes registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Several sites discuss how to do register work with the U.S. Copyright Office. (e.g. ASMP and Peter Krogh) More recently, there is a great series that Photoshop User Magazine is running, “The Copyright Zone” and some great posts over at Scott Kelby’s blog.

The online copyright registration tool is your typical solution that was constructed to the letter of the requirements, which is to say that most people will find it rigid and cryptic. There is a lot of documentation to help bolster your confidence, but at some point, you simply need to take the plunge. Here are three tips that made my life much simpler.

First, if you decide to upload your work, you are sure to notice the warnings of 30 minutes per upload. This might cause some panic depending on your connection to the Internet, but you need not be concerned. Interestingly enough, no one mentions that you can upload many times. In practice, this means any specific upload is limited to 30 minutes, but you can continue to upload as many times as is required to transfer your collection. Each upload is logged and displayed as part of your submission. It takes a few minutes for the system to show each transaction (my guess is they scan for malicious code), but if you do not see your uploaded work, then they never received it. You can call or email for verification or upload again to make sure. For those of us registering an entire years worth of unpublished work, this is important!

Screenshot of one of my submitted applications.

Second, you will read about the format of submission. Some people advocate for individual images and yet others talk about contact sheets. Having called the U.S. Copyright Office for guidance, apparently, a digital contact sheet is acceptable. This really simplifies the registration of unpublished works. I used Adobe Lightroom v2 to generate digital contact sheets (4 columns, 5 rows) with the filename and date taken under each image. All the guidance says that the image needs to be clearly visible on small displays. I chose to export at 300 dpi and in JPG format. At 300 dpi the contact sheet will effectively show 20 images to a page while allowing the individual image to render beautifully at over 580 pixels in the longest dimension. Digital contact sheets allow for fewer uploads, while presenting the work in high quality legible form. If you are a Lightroom user, you are welcome to the template I used.

Screenshot of Adobe Lightroom digital contact sheet.

Third, the online copyright registration site recommends using ZIP compression as a means of uploading many files. While using zip on JPEGs yields less space savings than on other files, I used it to simplify my uploading. I numbered them 1 of X to ensure my logic was clear. Additionally, this will allow a copyright examiner to reconcile uploads just in case I submitted an archive twice. Finally, WinZip is offering aggressive compression mechanisms, specifically for images. I used legacy compression to ensure compatibility. Compression programs have come a long way, but in this case, interoperability was the priority.

WinZip settings

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. My comments here are a documentation of how I approached registering photographic works and may not apply for your use. Please consult an IP lawyer or the U.S. Copyright office if you want to verify you are following acceptable procedures.

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