I Lego N.Y.

Beautiful. Illustrator Christoph Niemann tells us how playing Lego with his kids during bleak Winter days in Berlin gets his mind thinking of New York in the most unexpected and imaginative ways. It also has the added bonus of nostalgia if you, like me, spent a good portion of your childhood playing with Legos.

Pure visual joy.

Paul Rand

"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." -- Paul Rand

Layer Tennis

While doing some research on web design and the likes, I've come across something incredible. And it's incredible because the people making it happen are nothing short of fantastic designers. The cream of the crop, shall we say.

To explain the concept of layer tennis, I defer to the wise words of Jason Santa Maria, who has played the game twice:

For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley” however they see fit. The matches are played live on Friday afternoons, and people follow along and comment via Twitter. It really isn’t about winning or losing, which is determined by voting on Twitter, it’s more of a exercise in visual literacy and design constraints. Also, it’s just a game and a fun distraction on a Friday afternoon.

Fuck if my fun distractions on a Friday afternoon are this good looking. To exemplify what's been happening so far, here's a few links to some of these "layer tennis" matches. Mind you that all of them are accompanied by some form of commentary, either written on the page, as an audio or even a video stream.

Without further ado...


Yup, this last one is hand made.

This has got me thinking how having tr00 Photoshop skillz is just a piece of the pie to be doing an exercise this constrained. You gotta have a great eye and a lot of quick thinking imagination to readily figure out what needs to be done in order step it up a notch from the previous "volley".

True artists, these guys. Yet another win over at Coudal Partners.

Negative Creep

Hard to believe it has been 15 years already since the passing of Kurt Cobain, legendary (whether you like or not) vocalist and guitarist for legendary (whether you like it or not) Seattle band Nirvana. Cobain put an end to his own life on April 5th, 1994.

I can't say I was a die-hard fan of Nirvana ever since its inception back in 1987 or so, but I did listen a lot to it around the time of Kurt's death and then as a true militant from around 1999 thanks to a very important friend. Ever since that time, I've gone through a lot of changes in my musical taste, always adding to what I previously loved, never substituting or dropping anything along the way. In that sense, I found myself totally immersed in progressive rock and metal at some point but Nirvana has always been a passion ever since becoming one. And no matter what goes on or what I might be onto at any particular point, there's always a feeling of exhilaration every time I pop one of Nirvana's record, from the rawness of Bleach, to the perfect punk pop of Nevermind, the craziness of Incesticide's b-sides, the intimacy of In Utero or the perfect live compilation embodied by From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, this last one released a couple of years after Kurt's passing.

Nirvana may be one of the most loved, and hated, bands ever to grace the face of the planet and Kurt Cobain as its leader, one of the most controversial rock figures ever. Genius or junkie? I don't give a damn. The music he and his pals created make me feel alive whenever I listen to it. Fuck the rest.

Mere Sketches

Truly astounding work from Mike Rohde on what are simply meant to be his sketch notes during this year's SXSW Interactive (click the image for the full Flickr set):


Truly inspirational and beautiful stuff.

Effective Learning

I've neglected what seems to be an important bet of my personal future for far too long, so I've recently been slowly getting back at personal side projects. One important aspect has been trying to get the basics right, or at least as right as possible. A lot of mistakes have been made in the past and while I live under no illusion that no mistakes will be made this time, I'm gladly undertaking the challenge of trying to learn from what went wrong before. Hopefully, things will simply be better, not necessarily good yet. And better means closer to success.

Yesterday, after my usual bike ride in the afternoon, I had a chance encounter with Cláudio in our porch and we ended up talking for a bit precisely about past experiences and in particular the challenges we face while designing web sites or web applications. As our joint ventures slowed down to a halt, he got more seriously involved in his girlfriend's startup in a sort of technical advisor/web [master,designer] capacity. He tells me when he rolled up his sleeves and got down to designing and building the company's website he came to the sad (yet somehow invigorating) conclusion that he simply didn't know how to build a website, all our past experiences notwithstanding. So he said his solution was nothing more, nothing less than reading a couple of foundational books, one about principles of (beautiful) web design and another about principles of Photoshop usage.

This got me thinking and wondering how foolish we've been in the past, not only going straight to designing and messing up with no basics under our belts whatsoever, let alone hitting the computer right from the get go by writing a bunch of HTML and CSS first thing. It obviously couldn't work, because we simply aren't geniuses and no house has ever been built from the roof down. Not to my knowledge, anyway.

So, armed with broadened abstract reasoning we have picked up from years of schooling and personal experiences in a multitude of domains, we must have what it takes to pick up any book on these subjects and effectively learn from them. With this in mind, while designing a roadmap for the development of my web application, I'm accounting for reading just as much as for anything else, like sketching screen mockups, surveying technology or figuring out how to pay for hosting.

Sounds like a step in the right direction, one that gets me closer to where I want to get.

Tada!

Getting things done is an elusive concept, especially for people who just can't wrap around their heads the concept of simply having too much to do with too little time avaliable. Getting things done for me also gets ridiculous when you waste way too much time understading the GTD concept... time probably better spent doing something else more productive. But anyway, I know little about GTD and David Allen would surely prove me wrong, with one of his hands tied to his back.

In any case, one concept I am constantly going back to is the ancient thing called a TODO list. I've gone through a lot, from a simple piece of paper to a full fledged online organizer, with a bazillion reminders and what not. iCal works quite well for most things, especially for remembering things happening in a mid-term future, but the proverbial right tool for the job for me right now is 37Signals' TadaList. It's a simple TODO list web app that lets you create very simple lists with very simple operations to act upon them. You can add, edit, remove items and thankfully you can also easily reorder items inside a list by simply drag and dropping, which I use to re-prioritize tasks on a whim.

So far I've been using it for a few days and it's working like a charm. No bells, no whistles, I simply look for the top of the list to see what's really pressing right now. Long-term, not so important tasks right now are buried in the bottom, sometimes off screen due to the list spanning more than a single screen page. Perfect.

See it for yourself.

Yes We Can

Just a quick thought to write down how I currently feel about the Obama administration. I really haven't been paying close attention to every piece of news concerning Barack Obama, certainly not reading a lot of opinion articles in the international press, but there's a big sense of enthusiasm from what I can gather. Obama seems to be doing all the right things - yet who am I to judge?

One thing's for sure: this guy is intelligent and not a clown like his predecessor. And America's deadly enemies already seem to be developing a soft spot for this leader.

World peace and prosperity is the biggest utopia but certainly we can do away with the current state of affairs brought upon us by years and years of malpractice left and right. It's an hopeful start from whom I think may just be the most exciting politician I've ever known.

Where will we all be four years from now? And eight years from now? Hopefully, a little better off.

Crazy Day

After going to bed past 5am, the next day couldn't be too productive, now could it? Got up at 1.30pm! For Christ sake.

Anyway, up to that point it was really productive, Macbook wise, as I finally managed to install Leopard and spend a few hours getting all the apps I need up and running. Much, much better now, as I can smoothly run CakePHP for Hawkeye's sake, after much tinkering with PHP and Apache2.

Not much progress in the MSc front, more to come tomorrow.

Building Speed

Had an immensely satisfying meeting with my supervisor today. Happily enough, it was the first time I was actually able to approach him with something done and so we built from there. Learnt a bunch of Emacs tricks, namely how to compile from within the Emacs window and better frame/buffer handling.

After much head splitting, (mild) desperation and much Flex/Bison refreshment, put together the majority of the scanner/parser duo for wam2c. I'm now in the process of debugging it and gearing up to start devising data structures to hold the abstract syntax tree.

Interesting first day of the week... let's keep the ball rolling, shall we?

Bootstrapping

Proving to be harder than I thought to finally kick the MSc work into gear. It's been an atypical week with D. falling ill and then recovering, but then the weekend got in the way and we've just done a huge bunch of nothing. And let's not even talk about Hawkeye. Zé surely has a lot of on his plate with a new baby and all, but I should have been more active on that front as well.

BTW, I'm afraid this blog will turn quite technical for a while now...

Anyway, first steps for the masters work is writing a scanner/parser pair using Flex and Bison. This should parse a subset of Prolog used in GNU/Prolog to represent WAM instructions. It looks something like this:

predicate('$$find_existing_stream/3_$aux1'/3,41,static,private,built_in,[
    load_cut_level(3),
    try_me_else(1),
    allocate(4),
    get_variable(y(0),0),
    get_variable(y(1),1),
    get_variable(y(2),2),
    get_variable(y(3),3),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    call(current_stream/1),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_structure(file_name/1,1),
    unify_local_value(y(1)),
    call(stream_property/2),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_value(y(2),1),
    call(stream_property/2),
    cut(y(3)),
    deallocate,
    proceed,

Beautiful, ain't it? If I have something working by Tuesday, I'd be a happy man.

Daniel Levin Becker on Isis

"But the clincher is the vocals. Turner uses them not to convey the lyrics, which are all but incomprehensible anyway, nor to fulfill that de facto part of the hardcore formula, but as a honest-to-god instrument. His singing voice is a raspy and by all accounts ugly one, but it blends perfectly with the tuneful abrasion of everything under it."

(Source)

Mike Armine (Rosetta)

This release ["Wake/Lift"] is more of a social commentary on my first year teaching, and the kids whose lives I've seen destroyed by poor parenting. I seriously believe people should legally need to have a dog for three years before having a child. I've seen my knuckles turn white at some of the things parents do and say to their kids in the name of guilt, denial, power, and neglect.

(Source)

Scott Kelly (Neurosis)

I think that all business is fucked. That is the nature of it. The sooner that you recognize that, the easier it is to exist in that world.

(Source)

Back to Work

9:22 in the morning and here I am back at work. Not in the best of moods, but not feeling great either. I feel like not talking with anyone, anyway, but that's not an option right now. In fact, I feel like telling most people to stick it where the sun don't shine.

In any case, looking to sort priorities here as far as daytime work is concerned and then I have that (useless) MSc appointment with my advisor at 6pm. Must go home for lunch and pack the gym bag. If there's ONE fucking thing I WILL do today is go to the gym at the end of the day.

Eat better, exercise a lot. Things must improve.

Learning

The blog tutorial went nicely, everything fitting much better after my experience with CakePHP at work.

Next steps:

- wrap up the initial database schema (namely devise a scheme for player positions) with an eye for extensibility/scalability of player attributes.
- code up MVC for that schema
- think up a plugin/role architecture and tie it in with a user authentication mechanism (possibly using Auth built-in controller: see CakePHP docs)
- player attribute filtering: inspect and possibly adapt/port Icing's Filter component (but first survey 1.2's filtering capabilities).

So, off the top of my head, version 0.01 should package the following:

- basic CRUD for players & teams
- search players (using basic filters a la SIIUE at first)

That's pretty much it. Waiting on D. to wrap up her project work at her colleagues place so we can hit the sack at last. I'll be sleep deprived tomorrow, but what the hell. But it sucks to have an MSc appointment at 6pm.. considering I'm not as prepared as I would've liked to be.

Did I mention how fucking great Mogwai's latest album is?

Mogwai

Oh My God, Mogwai's latest is the perfect chillout album that isn't chillout. Ideal for late night working sessions...

Sea of Tranquility

Apparently music like Mono, Mogwai or Russian Circles (especially the first two) is a catalyst of productivity and concentration.

Just Do It

It may well be the slogan for Nike but it's also a slogan I most definitely should heed right now.

Today is Day 0 of Hawkeye.

Hawkeye is the codename for a web app I'm developing in order for me to a) assess its commercial viability and b) get filthy rich from. It will be a long and winding road, but I'm hopeful it will be a lot of fun within some time of developing it. This blog will now become something of a personal notebook for this stuff, which means it will most likely be sketchy and hard to understand. No one reads it anyway, so that's alright.

So, having used and coded upon CakePHP 1.1 at work, I've decided that I should no longer fear 1.2 and so I will dive head first into it. Sucks that I won't have ready made stylesheets and the whole Icing stuff, but then again, this is also a learning project. I shall not stagnate.

Decided that the best course of action right now is to follow the classic blog tutorial for 1.2 and see where this goes. Hopefully will get educated on some new stuff, such as model behaviors which are pretty much a puzzle to me right now.

Off I go.

Thom Yorke speaks about "Let Down"

"I was pissed in a club, and I suddenly had the funniest thought I'd had for ages - what if all the people who were drinking were hanging from the bottles... if the bottles were hung from the ceiling with string, and the floor caved in, and the only thing that kept everyone up was the bottles? It's also about an enormous fear of being trapped."