Syntaxis will save our future

http://www.flickr.com/aguamineral

My somewhat unsteadycam footage from the Agua Mineral liveset on new years eve. Chopped into bits and pieces by Coen.

http://www.aguamineral.nl/coen/AMLiveSet.mov

watch this space for more.

I had a great holiday, literally raved my ass off. Met up with the most of my friends and family, drinking beers. Been almost everywhere around Holland and even Belgium. For a few days I became a hardworking helping and soldering blonde god for the Agua Mineral team, which had an gig on New Year’s Eve. Footage soon!

As you can imagine, it was quite intensive holiday. Therefore I managed to get a cold just before flying back into the Swedish snowstorms which I am supposed to do Today.

So the last weeks there hasn’t be many updates on my blog, actually quite none. People started to question if I was still alive, I noticed the exponentially raising request for an update. There are several other motivations for not updating my blog this much anymore, but I will now to please you all.

First off there is “The Complete Lack of Time” to do this. My pipeline is kind off clogged with projects to be finished. To give you an idea on the workload: the backend of the new ProSafeSecurity website, the backend of the Buisness Management Class website. These sites will be finished before the end of January. And developed for both sites: Asphodel, which is my custom build easy expandable CMS system for future freelance websites to come.

Second in the series “The Complete Lack of Time” there is this portfolio module we are in right now. I have been thinking redoing my portfolio again, but with crazy images to pixel noise ideas. I have been thinking to create an row of images on the website, which explodes into autonomous pixels, which travel around the screen on their own way. When your mousecursor is close to the hotspot where the image was supposed to be, the pixels return to right place in the image. For those who are getting scared of visiting: I will make a plain html version with just blue links and images. Oh well, experiments are going nice. Still im thinking of a way to provide a page with work/lab/blog, therefore i try to keep it low profile on this blog if i am going to move things around.

Then on top all this I hijacked the role of “The Interactive Art Director” for the crewsite, or to be said better, the class website. An prestigious project where like 30 classmates work on and is supposed to be finished somewhere in February. More I am not allowed to say.

And I have been pondering about my future on Hyper Island but I didn’t have “The Great Amount of Time” before the holidays to think it completely through. So before “The Final Conclusion” I intended to keep it a bit quiet. As you can see im going code all the way, therefore I chose my specialisation to be Tech. I had an Design specialisation before on my previous education, but because the world is crowded with designers it’s hard to stick your head out. I intend to nurture my design passions in this specialisation. I’m developing myself more to an area of computer generated motion & design, combined with a development towards a better understanding on interaction design. Therefore my first purchase of 2008 (next to a hangover) is the Processing Handbook because i want to make Processing my own (ActionScript is as well on that list).

In the end I want to make you aware that all my inspirational blogposts have moved here, and I would motivate you to keep track of my del.icio.us

Oh, Reclaim Magenta has become one of the 25 most discussed posts of 2007 on Computerlove.

Have a good 2008. I will.

a beautiful Win 386 promo video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

thanks to my friend Pieter

(still i believe its afaik (mission impossible theme?))

Me and Tore went to Expo C today, a tech conference at Marin Museum. They offered Hyper Island a couple free tickets and me Tore took the chance. Basically most of the stuff was far beyond our hat. It was adressed to software developers in general, which we aren’t. For the first time since ages I felt n00b again. We are just media developers who know a little bit of Actionscript, Java, Processing, XML, Html, PHP. But nothing such as C++ and projects of 10k+ LOC (which means 10.000 lines of code (yes i’ve learned a new short today)).

Anyhow there was some intersting stuff on DuckTyping, for flexible XML webservices and some interesting views on Agile software development, which seems to be a new trend or a Buzzword. This Agile stuff felt really UGL and probably should improve the atmosphere and the effectiveness of work on the workfloor.

No time to go in depth right now, so to summarize it: some mad german professors, some debugging and most of all, free food, candy and some new contacts! And maybe some more freelance stuff as well. We will see.

New Burial Album Mix
by Kode9

this is what a post apocalyptic film noir should sound like.

Allright, I will confess, I have been hiding under a rock for a while. Max has learned me some revolutionary stuff. How to use and read RSS feeds. It was necessary step, I didn’t want to go all RSI on checking up 51 hyperblogs a day.

I was aware the existance of this all along. And I actually had some lessons about RSS and XML on my previous education a time ago. But back then the brilliance of RSS somehow didn’t seem struck me. Maybe because RSS wasn’t so exstensive implemented as it is nowadays. Today 95% of the sites I follow use RSS.

For those who don’t know how this thing works, I shall give a small explanation. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. But actually the name makes it more confusing, although the use is really simple. Very big amount of newssites/trendsites/websites/blogs and whatsoever have RSS implemented nowadays. And I quite expect that almost every regulary updated site in the near future is going to do this as well.

At this point it starts to get interesting. You see, all these newssites, blogs and whatsoever are using the same protocol to encode the updates. What if you can manage all these equal encoded updates into one programme that checks for updates for every single one of them on a regular basis, let’s say once an hour and pops up in your tray bar when there happens to be an update on some site. OMFG! (excuse my h4×0r). Here you have it, the new definition of newspaper, and it’s about the things you are interested in.

It sounds radical but this is about to save me 10 to 15 hours checking favourite websites, a week. No more do I have to go round clicking every single bookmark every single moment I feel like this ( and this happend to me multiple times a day). I just open my RSS reader hit Shift + F5 and Im updated again.

KK: “I’m taking the shortcut.”
…
JM: “Now what did you gain?”
KK: “Like 30 centimeters”
JM: “And wet feet…”
KK: “Yes, but that’s another experience you gain”
JM: “And the possiblity stepping into dogturd”
KK: “Those are the risks you take, and in the end, it makes life more engaging”
JM: “Yeah and the risk of the experience for the whole class smelling dogturd”
KK: “I like to share my experiences”

After using my indestructable Siemens A50 for about 6 years now, I finally bought a new phone. It’s a neat Sony Ericsson W200i, looks decent. It has good design written all over it, even within where the accu is located. And for the most important part not too much fancy stuff. The fellow in the shop told me that this one dont have as many megapixels as the Samsung phones have. I was like, yeah if I want to make pictures, I will buy a camera instead. And another thing, about those samsung flip-open ninja phones. I really don’t like the design and I will probably break them right away, get stuck between elevator doors or something more improbable.

So yeah it looks real neat and feels decent. I can probably hang on to it for like 4 years. I got prepaid because I am the foreigner around here (discrimination I would say!), it’s a Comviq prepaid thingy, so those swedes who have Comviq, I can call you for free!

And now comes the most brilliant part of it, my phonenumber:
07 04 082 082 that would be in dutch +46 7 04 082 082

I love it!

“All rights reserved ­ all wrongs reversed”

I actually don’t know if I am legally allowed post this. But I was busy mailing Elin Renck today. He is a art director at tonium and I saw this brilliant text in his signature. I felt it was worth al log.