love letter to the future letterpress, 2009 (alternate version)

I’m pleased to report that as part of the coverage of the Pulling from History: Letterpress show, an image of my print love letter to the future has been making the rounds. Well, it was on the artblog anyway.

The show runs from Nov 20, 2010 so if you hurry to the Print Center you can see it. If you can’t make it, I can assure you that you missed perhaps the greatest assemblage of works by contemporary letterpress printers possible at this time. Plus my print. Which I might add is for sale at the Print Center Gallery Store.

Thanks to Matt Neff and the Print Center for making the show happen, thanks to Katie Baldwin for having my print hanging on her cabinet waiting to be discovered, and thanks to Marisha for showing me how to set type.

I’m throwing this out to both Apple and the user community – frankly, the idea that the “old” AppleTV is unable to stream Netflix is insulting, since the “old” AppleTV is without doubt a more powerful computer than the iPad.

I also understand the contention/theory that it’s a different OS on the new so that it would be two separate efforts to bring Netflix to the AppleTV.

Awesome. Fine.

Here’s my point: I bought an AppleTV on the hope/promise that it would be improved… at the time, it seemed like a good time to try the device… word on the street (and from Apple) was that the device wasn’t perfect, but updates were on the way.

Frankly, it hasn’t been very impressive. It’s kind of neat, but after Wii got the ability to stream Netflix the AppleTV seemed lackluster at it’s finest, and shoddy the rest of the time, which is mainly when I had to use the abysmal remote control. As a media device, it was definitely the slow kid in the house.

So we arrive at a new hardware & software version with the old one never having lived up to it’s real potential, and Apple deciding that it’s going to cut it’s losses and kill the old model, announcing to it’s user base that to enjoy the new features they must buy a new hardware box.

I’m going to reiterate: the new features do not depend on “faster” or “better” hardware (like when Snow Leopard didn’t support non-intel processors — that was reasonable and understandable), they just depend on Apple being willing to support the product that I bought no more than 18 months ago.
So, after not needing much thought I’ve concluded that this is an absurd and anti-user strategy on Apple’s part. For the same price as the old one (less, really), I can buy a competitor’s box that will play the same & more media types, have storage, play Netflix – and also flash video from websites. Plus other things, maybe.

So, Apple. Thanks for convincing me I need a new set top box. That part of your pitch was really super convincing.

However, I’m sorry to report that it won’t be an AppleTV. Not just because your competitors’ products look better, but because in this case your product just *****.

On the bright side, I’m hoping I can get around to putting a real OS on the stupid thing, and using it for something else.

As a last aside, if you want to be amused by how spineless and ridiculous Apple is in it’s approach to shielding it’s users from objectionable content, consider the “expletive-deleted” ***** in the quoted passage. It’s the word “sucks.”

Oh Apple, if only you could come up with a way to not suck that wasn’t removing the word “suck” from the language. Actually, if you thought about that hard enough, it would solve about 30% of your problems.

I’ve been working with Processing lately, mostly for fun now but it got started by the Physical Computing class I took in the Spring. This is just from goofing around with some sample code that Ira Greenberg had written, I think just to show how bezier curves worked. I added the clock-type rotations and stuff, and the colors. But, yeah.

I <3 Proce55ing.

I’m very pleased with this particular multiple, and am currently contemplating what I like about it to see if there’s soething here I can pursue as a series of images.

What’s the punctum here, to borrow from Barthes? Is it the fracturing of the facial image? Is it the lighting? I suspect it’s the graffiti lipstick. But I could be wrong.

[They were m]y kind of font folks.

via: fontlover

“This wasp is nasty! It stung me one time, and my hand disappeared for a week. We gotta kill it!”

I see the wasp for myself. It has a goopy green/yellow translucent exoskeleton, and the morphology of a child’s plastic toy left by a fire, with a stinger unbothered by flame. It floats lazily in the air.

There’s another plot. Someone holding a shotgun. Something about an autistic girl who loves in the warehouse. There’s some running around, not nightmarish, more like the musical scene from a Scooby Doo episode. I end up on my knees, panting.

The wasp flies on to my forehead. I feel a prick, and headbutt the wasp into the floor crushing it.

“Do you remember how long it took your hand to disappear?” I ask Gidde.

“No, why?”

“Because it stung me on my head. I was wondering how long I had to wait.” I say, joking through the fear.

I was looking for any information about getting BlazeDS running locally on my Mac to take a stab at learning Flex remoting, and I found this nice tutorial over at Coding Cowboys, but got disappointed when I realized that while the author was working on Leopard, he was actually setting up BlazeDS on a linux server.

But in my normal “oh this should be pretty easy” fashion which has on other occasions brought down the boot sectors of powerful hard drives, I decided that following the instructions on the page would just work on a mac too.

And it did!

It should be pretty clear why I’m just not sending you on to the aforementioned post if you go look at it – he’s also setting up Amazon EC2 webservices, which I’m not as interested in at the moment. Also, I’d like to just play with Flex remoting for a minute at home, so I don’t need to get a server involved. Especially since I have this handy unix workstation right here on my desk.

Ok, no more silly patter. Here’s how to set up BlazeDS on your intel-based mac running Leopard. I should also mention that I have the developer tools installed, but I don’t know that that makes a difference.

Getting BlazeDS running on Leopard

1. Download the turn-key package
2. unzip it to a directory — /blaze is good. You now have a folder at the Root lavel of Macintosh HD called blaze.

   If that “unzip it to a directory” direction is alienating to you, just double click on the zip, let Mac OS unzip it for you, and rename the directory to blaze and move it to the top of the Macintosh HD. Pretty much the same thing.

3. In terminal, go to that dir – ls /blaze (just for fun maybe – I’m terrible at doing commands like sudo ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh … I usually just cd to the directory and do ./startup.sh)
4. You need to issue two commands in terminal:

   ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

   and

   ./blaze/sampledb/startdb.sh

   Note – when executing these commands either from the root (/) which is the command above, or from the directory they’re in, you still need the leading ./ — so if you’re in the /blaze/tomcat/bin directory, the command to start tomcat is ./startup.sh, not startup.sh which will give you an error.

   Note #2 – You can close the terminal window. It says “hey, closing this will end processes running blah blah blah” but BlazeDS still works after you close the window. If you’re just playing around, it might be worth leaving it open since it tells you in the console output how to shut the server down.

5. open http://127.0.0.1:8400/ in a web browser.
6. Play with the pretty flex remoting demos.
7. Learn everything else. =)