07/03/10
Posted in Interface, Languages, Programming | No Comments » 
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I just found this weird dummy text in the tutorial for the Symphony CMS.
He aquí al Oso Eduardo bajando las escaleras con la cabeza—plom, plom, plom—de la mano de Christopher Robin. Es la única manera que él conoce de bajar las escaleras, aunque a veces piensa que deber haber otra forma mejor que seguramente la descubriría si pudiera dejar de darse golpes en la cabeza y pararse a pensar.
Some questions came to my mind after reading it:
- Why is Oso written in capital O?
- Why is he walking down the stairs on his head?
- Why is he holding hands with Christopher Robin and who is Christopher Robin.
- If they’re so close as to hold hands while walking down the stairs why doesn’t Christopher Robin tell Eduardo the Bear the right way to walk?
- Who chose this sick example to create a dummy text when there’s clearly better texts such as:
El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.
(Weirder than the Oso Eduardo story but at least it contains all characters in the Spanish alphabet plus all the accented vowels)
Link: Learn – Tutorials – “Say Hello to Symphony” – Symphony.
09/06/08
Posted in Apple, Design, Programming | 2 Comments » Tweet This Post
Apple got so carried away with the launching of the new iPhone 2.0 that didn’t take into account the lenght of the headers in some languages. Bad CSS.
Snapshot taken with Safari on Mac OS Leopard.
21/12/07
Posted in Design, Programming, Typography, Web 2.0, Wordpress | 3 Comments » Tweet This Post
An excellent pick of resources for web designers. Blogs, tutorials, fonts, themes, stock photos, CSS templates and many more for you to choose from. Not the usual free-for-all crappy stuff you find around.
Head to forwebdesigners.com (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) and start browsing and downloading.
A word of advice: you can spend so much time browsing cool stuff that you may end up doing nothing. But you probably know the feeling if you’re reading this.
02/12/07
Posted in Programming, Quotations | 4 Comments » Tweet This Post
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t
08/06/07
Posted in Interface, Music, Programming, Radio, TV, Videoclips, Web 2.0 | No Comments » Tweet This Post
If you are a Web 2.0 freak, own a Last.fm account and spend countless time digging in YouTube, LastTube is the right web service for you
The best of both worlds comes in the shape of a Mashup called LastTube that uses Last.fm’s and YouTube’s APIs.
It’s a web service that reads your preferences from your Last.fm account and “scrobbles” YouTube for related videos. I have to say that it got my preferences quite right. It even found a Bestie Boys live act on Letterman’s Tonight show.
The good: great concept. Serving audiovisual contents according to our musical preferences.
The bad: Firefox freezes while trying to load some videos.
The ugly: the Flash interface. Still, I can live with this at this stage of the project.
Here’s the developer’s blog.
And here’s some of his notes (pay attention to the development time):
Motivation: Create a “useful†client mashup using Flex 2 and public Web Services and RSS feeds in only one day without write any custom server side code.
Total development time: One day (Includes coding, testing, googling and lunch time)
Number of Developers: Just Me.
Server Side Code Created: None
Data Feeds, Web Services and Web Sites Involved: Last.fm, YouTube, Yahoo Pipes, Google Analytics.
Programming Languages and Tools Used: Actionscript 3, MXML, Javascript, Flex Compiler.
Known Issues: Sometimes Firefox “freezes†after video playing. Flash Video that doesn’t have complete metadata can “crash†the app.
Lessons Learned: Datatipfield doesn’t work “perfectly†with xml datasources. Handling Flash Video Metadata is a little bit “trickyâ€. ExternalInterface Rocks!
Btw, check the funny URL for the project.
Enjoy!
Via programmableweb.com
31/05/07
Posted in Art, Interface, Programming | 2 Comments » Tweet This Post
(Life Blogging from Espacio Movistar)
18:00: Introduction of rhizome.org Special del.ico.us page created by Lauren Cornell for the presentation. Media and art links.
10:05: Presentation of various Net-Art projects Alexei Sholguin Desktop Art
- Bust Down The Doors by Young Hae Chang.
- Pioners and most influential artists from the 90s Jodi. (I often show their works but often crash your computer)
- A project that shows what happens when you totally screw up with blogs.
18:10: Talks about her involvment in Rhizome.org in 2005 Database, lo-fi, dirt style, public art, online celeb, on and off line art. How online art translates into real life. Internet art takes a lot of different forms even offline.
18:15: How internet has gone offline and moved into galleries in the form of objects
Artist felt the pressure to make money with internet art. Need to make objects to make money (bits don’t sell, atoms do)
- Rhyzome supports this artists through grants, exhibits, shows, etc.
- Michael Bell-Smith electronic tapestries on FoxyProduction.com
Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad super Mario Movie
18:20: How artists with web 2.0 and social networks MyOwnSpace.fr
18:25: Shiftspace
- Application you can download and use it to paint space in the internet. A kind of a second layer of the net and color your own spaces and see other people’s. Artists as contextual content producers online.
- Networked Nature
- The representation of nature from the perspective of network culture. You don’t need a connection to talk about how digital culture.
- The C5 Lansdscape Initiative: A community of nerds looks for sublime spots in California. Technology used to give a different perspective on nature.
18:30: Timeshares shows on Rhizome.org Fultilines:
Automatedbeacon.net: Monitoring what people search on Google
The Dumpster: A visualization of romantic breakups for 2005 taken from letters in MySpace, Friendster, etc.
18:35: What makes an artist? People posting to Flickr?
- Zidane’s headbutt festival. How fast temporary communities spred out about a common subject.
- 13 Most Beautiful Avatars on 2nd Life
Professional surfer. Web surfing considered art.
18:40: Nastynets.com. Ars Electronica Award winner for this year.
- Trevor Paglen works on uncovering confidential information and transforming it into art.
18:45: Artists produce tools. A trend in today’s art. Fundrace.org: A database about who gives money to each candidate in the US campaigns.
18:50: Rhizome.org an online comunity created 10 years ago. Now with presence online and in art galleries.
05/03/07
Posted in Interface, Music, Programming | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
Talking yesterday with artist Polo Sur about music (?), an all time favorite of mine came to my mind: Russian cyberpunk rock band 386DX. A mere 386 DX processor PC with 4MB RAM and 40MB (yes Mega) with synchronized text-to-speech midi synthesis and a human who perform together.
The computer is programmed by Alexei Shulgin who performs onstage operating the archaic computer’s keyboard slung over his shoulder with a guitar strap. 386DX’s repertoire spans from Mamas and The Papas with California Dreamin’ or Doors’ Light My Fire to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, all in beautiful 8-bit Midi.
Since 1998 they have performed all over the world including a performance in the Sónar festival in Barcelona in 2002. The computer itself has also done some solo appearances and in some occasions even played in the streets of Graz in Austria.
Here’s 386DX’s website.
Don’t miss the California Dreamin’ videoclip with 386DX performing solo on a stage and Nirvana’s Rape Me with 386DX and Alexei playing together.
Enjoy!
16/02/07
Posted in Interface, Programming, Usability, Why didn't I think of that? | No Comments » Tweet This Post
As per a Xavi Vergés request in my post about the redesign of this blog, I introduced a whole new Archives section in the blog so all posts can be accessed by chronological order. I also tossed in a calendar that can be found at the bottom sidebar. All this for free!
I used Kates Gasis’ great KG Archives plugin to implement the Archives pages with just some CSS tweaking.
Enjoy!
12/12/05
Posted in Design, Programming | No Comments » Tweet This Post
Hope for the frustrated programmer in every graphic designer and for the graphic designer in every programmer.
If you are on the net you fall into one of this two categories:
- the graphic designer that never quite made it to Flash programming because never understood what an iteration was
- the computer engineer that one day discovered Photoshop but never went further than using a lens flare filter
Well your troubles could be over thanks to NodeBox, an open source automated design bot that will allow you to create appealing visual output with really simple programming code.
Initially, the application targets an audience of designers, with an easy set of commands that is both intuitive and creative, but seeing the result of the algorithms one can see that any programmer capable of using NodeBox can learn a great deal about shape, color and composition. And if you get tired of static images, just change some parameters over time and you’ll get yourself a a nice piece of animation too.
NodeBox is being developed by Frederik De Bleser and you can download the Mac only version at Nodebox.net
It’s quite easy to discover the beauty in both the algorithm and the visual output. Who knows who will be the next John Maeda.
Here’s the output image:
Here’s the algorithm that generated the image:
size(320,320)
white = color(1,1,1,0.9)
red = color(1,0,0,0.9)
black = color(0,0,0,0.9)
for i in range(100):
fill(choice((white,red,black)))
font(“Arial Bold”)
fontsize(random(320))
text(u”â„¢”, random(500),random(400))
text(u”®”, random(500),random(400))
text(u”©”, random(500),random(400))
fill(choice((white,red,black)))
font(“Arial Bold”)
fontsize(50)
text(“ganyet.com”, 50, 300)
15/11/05
Posted in Programming | No Comments » Tweet This Post
Let’s face it you’ve never written a poem. Probably you’ve hardly read one. With the Catalan poetry generator you can generate more than you can read. Click and enjoy! (some basic Catalan language required).
Pinzellades etèries d’una mà cansada
Transparència de mirall
dins un cos de dona, un súcube
pinzellades etèries d’una mà cansada
vull perdre’m en l’acohol
trobo una mirada
potser un secret
(I did this by myself! ; )
Generate your own poems and impress your soulmate.
I just found this weird dummy text in the tutorial for the Symphony CMS.