Author: gulley

I’ve talked about sodaplay here before, the wonderful, whimsical, Java-powered world where people from around the net build matchstick monsters and bugs and lizards. The thing started out simply enough, but since the creators had done such a good job of making it extendable by visitors, a huge community of sodaplayers has built up. Visit the sodazoo and you’ll see dozens of new contributions for every day. More recently, they’ve added the sodarace, in which these little robotic bugs race each other in a Darwinian battle for supremacy. It’s a great proving ground for ideas about design, AI, and natural selection.

On the sodaplay pages I found a link to this extraordinary “real world” example of sodaplay matchstick monsters: strandbeest is a site devoted to the mechanical creations of artist Theo Jansen. He is building animal-like constructions out of plastic yellow tubes. The results are both disturbing and exhilarating. Be sure and look at the remarkable movies and images. The robots are here. Please take care not to disturb them.

Paul Falstad is a software engineer who likes to make nifty applets. His Math and Physics Applets site is just loaded with beautiful illustrations of interesting phenomena. I remember fifteen or so years ago when the Mac was young, my physicist friend Dan at Stanford was busy (among other things) writing fun little graphical programs that illustrated various physics experiments. But it really seems like this kind of demo-ware really needed Java and the web to fulfill its promise.
Anybody can go to Falstad’s site and browse quickly for the good stuff. And there’s a lot of good stuff here. Recommended: the Fourier visualization, the 2-D vector fields demo, and the 3-D vector fields demo.

My friend Kristin got two fish today for her office. One is black and the other is gold. She also got some fake underwater grass that glows in the dark. I think instead she should have bought transgenic mutant fish that glow in the dark. They really exist. Take a look at this SFGate article: One fish, two fish, red fish … blue fish?. Apparently transgenic fish are illegal in California, but not here (Massachusetts) and not in Nevada. So if a transgenic fish is swimming in Lake Tahoe, do the California authorities make sure and corral it onto the Nevada part of the lake?

More fun stuff from the digital artist/UI designer Ben Fry. Go to zipdecode and type in your zip code. Then type in the zip code of some other place. This is a good example of how zero-latency response encourages experimentation. If there was significant lag each time you hit a digit, it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. For instance, 44444, which will send you to Newton Falls, Ohio, is the only five digit repeater in the entire United States. And they’re pretty darn proud of it, from the looks of their URL: http://www.44444.com/.

Do you suppose, assuming you were basically in the right place, you could pay the US Postal Service to assign your city 00000? That would be worth some serious Chamber of Commerce money. Make a great tourist attraction. I’d get off the highway in Kansas to see the 66666 post office. Send a few postcards. Maybe drop by the Greyhound Hall of Fame while I’m in the area.

A few days ago, in the violent throes of a severe case of buyer’s remorse, I let fly at my poor trembling iPod. Ranting was both therapeutic and surprisingly entertaining. It went like this: I was uncertain about the big purchase. I finally got nudged over the edge, hesitating late adopter that I am, and made the big purchase. I brought home the big purchase and plugged it in. Not only did the big purchase not work, but it broke my whole computer. Then I got plenty mad you bet.

Since then I have upgraded my PC to Windows XP, read the iPod manual, and talked to several helpful and sympathetic people. Now all is well… I pulled out of the death spiral. I am across the divide and perfectly insufferable. Let me show you my sleek and lovely beautifully designed iPod! Steve Jobs is a genius!

It’s interesting to watch myself go through the compressed hate-to-love trajectory, because I see it all the time from the manufacturer’s viewpoint. I make sofware for a living, and I have often listened with grave concern as a customer absolutely rips into my product and my company. Wait long enough, provide a few well-timed hints and WHAMMO! they’re your new best friend. I like those customers. And now I am one.

My shiny new iPod makes me think about the old BBC radio program (sorry, programme) Desert Island Discs. The premise: what records would you take with you to a desert island? Suppose instead we made a show called Desert Island iPod. It might work something like this.

HOST: Hello and welcome to our show. Tell us, what would you put on your Desert Island iPod?
YOU: Every single piece of music I’ve ever owned or thought about in my entire life.
HOST: Oh I see. Well, thanks awfully for joining us today. Cheers!

ZOMBO.com is one of the more remarkable sites I’ve seen in a long time. I highly recommend a visit. The intro animation takes a little while, but it’s worth the wait. Take in the site for a few minutes… maybe buy a ZomboTee t-shirt. Then go to the “NewZletter” news sign-up page. You don’t have to actually sign up for the newsletter. It’s just an entertaining page.

All eyes are on Mars tonight. The latest rover has officially landed, but as I type these words we haven’t heard yet whether he’s taking phone calls just yet. I was poking around the JPL Mars Rover site tonight, and I’ve been impressed that the pages seem to be loading quickly. Either nobody cares or they’ve solved some of their bandwidth problems since the last rover mission. They’ve also got some terrific videos about the mission. My favorite was about the entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission, affectionately known as Six Minutes of Terror. The probe has to go through an insane pyrotechnic metamorphosis with split second timing on its way to the Martian surface. The video describing all this is very slickly produced, including some nifty mission animations. (See the MPG version or the Quicktime version). It’s nice to see flashes of the old exciting NASA that makes you proud to pay taxes.

I bought an iPod for Christmas, and it’s been making me crazy ever since. I have a PC, and the Mac side of my family (everybody except me) has been prancing around for years now bragging about their cute iPods and darling iMacs. Even so, I wouldn’t have bought an iPod except for the fact that a PC-packing friend at work also got a iPod, and he verified that the experience is very good on the PC, and gave the thumbs up, along with everybody else in the universe, to the iPod’s lovely design. So I broke down and bought one.

Yes, it’s cute, but it didn’t work with my PC out of the box (no FireWire on my PC) so I had to go to the austere Apple Store temple to get the USB 2.0 adaptor. But if you use the USB connection, it doesn’t recharge your iPod while it’s in the docking port. The battery runs down like mad while you’re transferring songs, and then I have to switch the little fiddly dock cable to the charger to juice it back up again. Then I download the iTunes software, and it doesn’t know how to talk to my Samsung CD player. All my other CD players can manage it (WinAmp, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, etc.). If I try to play a CD with iTunes, it plays each song for exactly zero seconds and is done with the CD in about five seconds.

Worse than that, by the time I downloaded the latest Windows 2000 service pack (to make iTunes happy) and installed the latest QuickTime, iTunes, and iPod transfer software, I found myself with a mysterious system slowdown bug that makes my computer crawl like a dying donkey. Now I’m stuck in an upgrade death spiral whereby I have to keep upgrading one thing after another in order to reach equilibrium again. Why is it a death spiral? Because nothing is working right now (well, to be specific, everything is working at a miserable crawl), so I can’t stop until I fix the whole computer. Now I’m in the process of upgrading my whole OS to Windows XP. Will it help? I’m not sure yet, but I’ll let you know.

Among the many clever things they did with the iPod, there was this: you can engrave whatever you want on the back of it for free. Pretty neat! But they say in the fine print: all sales of engraved units are final. I put my last name on mine. I wish that I had instead emblazoned it with the words: I AM AN UNRETURNABLE DONKEY.

I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time at the mall this Christmas season, and I’ve been amazed to see how many little knickknack stands, kiosks, and wagons there are in the main concourse these days. There seem to be at least five different cellphone booths (do they all make money?), several devoted to Beanie Babies, and various “put your smudgy digitized picture on a t-shirt/bib/necktie/cap” counters. More disturbing than this is the fact that now I regularly get accosted by these people who want to sell me mobile phone plans, back massage widgets, and flapping-wing airplanes. It’s as if our commercial culture has come full circle from the old noisy high street market to a quiet climate-controlled mall back to a noisy high street market.

It’s easy enough to see the economic incentive for the mall: that space is going to waste otherwise. Why not turn it into cash? I found a good article about this phenomenon in a Knoxville newspaper: Temporary retailers becoming holiday fixture. According to the article, rent for one of these wagons (in Tennessee) can run as high as $6000 per month (and if you want, I can set you up with a can’t-miss espresso cart for a bargain $12,999!).

From the mall’s point of view, it looks like a good deal. From my point of view, it feels like I’m applying lessons I’ve learned in the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Mexico: how do you avoid aggressive crap vendors without ruining your mood? I’m trying to think of it as a little tropical vacation in the middle of a New England winter.