Picto Synthesis

The Moment

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:59:33 -0500

CNN's The Moment is probably the first official use of Microsoft's Photosynth technology for a major event. It was appropriate that its first use would be for the inauguration speech one of the most tech savvy administration to date. Since the collection of images is spread over time, the experiment is more than just 'a moment'. It allows exploration of the scene from both multiple points of view and multiple points in time. The result is a fascinating experience straight out of a scene from Blade Runner. Keep an eye on this site - it will only get better as more images are submitted. Update: As a bonus, here is a satellite view of the crowd assembled in front of the Capitol.

TED|Chris Jordan: Picturing Excess

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:35:05 -0500

Artist Chris Jordan shows a powerful way to give back meaning to often desensitizing numbers that are thrown in our faces on a daily basis. His goal is to make these issues matter more once we can feel an emotional attachment to them - like distorted images in a huge mirror. More examples of his work are available at Running the numbers , An American Self-Portrait.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Game

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:22:49 -0500

From time to time, it feels good to indulge in a silly self evaluation test. This one is a harmless game involving Flickr and a small list of personal questions. The result is a personal mosaic supposed to represent ... you ? Here were my answers to the questions : 1. Steven Meisel - Yves Saint Laurent - Spring Summer 2001, 2. O-toro Nigiri Sushi, 3. le chateau de l'Emperi a Salon de Provence, 4. ♫ YO Yo yo, there's no place like a green penthouse... so i told the genie i wanted to be well hung. ^o^ ♫ nah... wildlife from singapore♫, 5. Amelie On Ubuntu, 6. Ritas, 7. Vista de Machu Pichu - Cuzco, Perú Julio'07 - Ruta Inka 2007, 8. Flan, 9. Dad Painting, 10. ...beauty is everywhere..., 11. Follow the red line, 12. agiel

Painting with light

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:57:12 -0500

I just came across this remarkable series of light graffitis. Long before the latest round of Nextel ads, people were having fun with lights sources and long exposure cameras... More examples of light doodles on flickr.

TED| Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:22:33 -0500

A fantastic glimpse into the balancing act of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and why you should learn to visit your right side more often. This could explain that feeling of peace and fulfillment I get when I finally find time to work on something creative, as well as the feeling of loss and frustration when I am dragged away from it by interruptions from my surroundings.

Leaving the dark side

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:02:46 -0500

The time has come to move my computer to greener pastures.

After comparing my experience of MacOS-X on my laptop to my experience of Windows Vista, the choice was clear.

On one hand, almost three years of daily use of my laptop and barely any problem to report. On the other hand, Vista treated me with annoying reminders, slow down on file access and unforgivable issues with handling of large amounts of files.

The majority of applications I am using have a Mac version available. The rest can be handled easily by VMware fusion or even bootcamp for more demanding windows only applications.

When I came to replace my aging desktop, I decided to move to a mostly Mac environment.

After moving my files and my applications to my new and shiny 8-cores Mac Pro, I feel like I have moved to a new house. And from the look of it, this landlord is treating me much better than that Windows guy.

Websites updates

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:25:05 -0500

Several updates after upgrading to Movable Type 4.1. While I am looking into translating existing sites to the new template system, I took a chance to organize my flickr gallery, simplify my main gallery on Linfa.net, several bibliographic references to my resume, clean up the design of koumako.com and catch up with content updates to the Elder Scrolls Trekker. I also took this occasion to bring the sites under the umbrella of Google Adsense and Google Analytics. Cheers to our new Google overlords.

TED | Philippe Starck: Why design?

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:09:23 -0500

About evolution, civilization and our (already half-way) story ...

TED | Lawrence Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:38:59 -0500

Another brilliant talk about the reclaiming of culture by a democratization of content providers and how absurd copyright laws have become. A powerful call for a reform (not a replacement) of laws that criminalize anyone who participates into the digital culture.

iPod Touchy

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:08:29 -0500

So.. I received my iPod Touch today.

It was pre-ordered mid September through the Apple website, with a customization on the back. Announced to be available on the 28th. Shipped and received within two days - not bad. Nevermind the fact that the Touch was already available in stores at the same time the Apple site was listing it as 'pre-order'.

The packaging was as usual simple and beautifully designed. Maybe too simple. The only option provided out of the box to protect your iPod Touch is a small piece of cloth to wipe the screen from the inevitable fingerprints and greasy marks that will eventually accumulate on its beautiful glass surface. Cases are unfortunately now available yet... maybe in a few weeks.

Speaking of 'out of the box', the instructions simply state that you only have to plug your ipod on a USB port and get started initializing it. Not so fast.

Following these instructions left me with a blank screen and an unresponsive ipod within a few minutes. Restoring it on a PC just timed out. Trying on a Powerbook G4 (with USB2.0) resulted in an 'unkown error 1604'. the iPod Touch support site didn't have much references to this error.

A visit to the nearest Apple store was not very helpful. After checking that error message was reproducible on one of their docks, the only option I was left with was to go back home and arrange to return my unit to Apple through their website. You see - if I had bought it from the store, they could have replaced it immediately. Apparently, this is not possible for units ordered online.

I guess this is what you get when Geniuses run out of appointment slots.

On a hunch, I bought a wall adapter to make sure the ipod was fully charged before trying again. Charging it on a USB or Firewire port didn't take me very far... but as it turned out, the wall charger worked like a charm.

After 5 hours or so, and a fully charged unit, I could finally complete the initialization process without error. Well... almost. The ipod crashed twice during the initial synchronization with iTunes. From what I read on the iPod Touch user forum, the latest update of the ipod software (v1.1.1) introduced a few issues, including problems with missing cover art, incompatibility with iPhoto events and freezing synchronizations.

So... after spending the better part of a day getting set up, was it worth the trouble ?

Oh yes... the interface is as glorious as the previews and ads suggested it would be. Wireless connection works like a charm. Cover flow is beautifully fluid.

It may well be the best ipod yet ... once you get it to work.

Quiet menus for MT 4.0

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:29:29 -0500

I could not stand the default behavior of drop down menus in Movable Type 4 interface within 10 minutes of first using it. I want drop down menus that drop when I click on them, not when I mouse over them. So I came up with a simple hack to replace the default behavior of drop down menus by something safer for my sanity.

SIGGRAPH Wrap Up

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:57:25 -0500

To wrap up with this year's coverage of SIGGRAPH 2007, here are links to articles I wrote for the occasion.

For Renderosity:

Summary of the week

Emerging Technologies - Experience the future
Part I - Part II

Front Page articles on related technologies.
Back to the drawing board
Image Explorations

For VFX world - (free registration required)
Electronic Theater review

On Flickr:
SIGGRAPH 07 Photo stream

Switched to Movable Type 4.0

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:58:45 -0500

The upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 didn't go as smoothly as some people have reported soon after the release of the final version, but it wasn't all that bad either compared to past versions.

Upgrading, in itself, was an easy task. I just followed the Recommended upgrade instructions, starting with a migration of the database from DB::Berkeley to MySQL.

I only ran into some minor issues:

The database migration script was taking too long when it came to handling a large amount of junk trackback pings I never had the patience to delete. I had to edit the script to skip that kind of class when migrating database objects.

The CGI scripts in the main installation folder of MT 4.0 returned a message about invalid headers. I had to edit the scripts with the proper includes for the perl installation on my server :

use strict;
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), "lib");

Once the scripts were running correctly, I was missing all CSS formatting on the admin interface of MT 4.0. It turned out that was because I used to have my 'mt-static' folder outside of the 'cgi-bin' folder. Moving the folder where it belongs solved that problem.

The last problem was trickier. Although I could see recent entries on the dashboard page and the Entries RSS feed, the 'Manage -> Entries' page returned no entries whatsoever. A message on the forum and an official support ticket later, I came across a solution by accident - setting the number of rows to display from 5 to another value brought the entries back.

Very strange.

I was not able to reproduce the problem, except by opening the admin interface for the first time, on a different browser and different machine. I don't know if this is an issue with CSS, cookies or browsers. At least, there's a workaround.

Now the only issue remaining is the update of templates and plugins, but that is not really related to the installation process. So far, it seems to be working pretty well except for the missing QuickPost wizard. It looks like the convenient wizard from MT 3.3 was replaced by a single link for Quickpost on the Entry form.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone came with a plugin to restore that missing wizard.

SIGGRAPH 07 - Day 6

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:50:12 -0500

Thursday - Last chance for discoveries in San Diego.

The day started strong with an shared interview of Master "painter" Don Seegmiller with Lillian. Don graciously shared his experience as a proeminent Painter users, his philosophy teaching classes at the university as well as examples of his non-digital paintings - portraits full of grace and life.

After the interview, he went on showing his technique with Painter at Corel's booth (the picture above is the result of about an hour of work).

Before closing the day with a section of this year's Animation Theatre I missed on Sunday (Games and FX), I barely had time for one last walk through the Art Gallery and the Emerging Technologies displays.

Enough time to look at a few pieces I missed the first time around, such as the interactive, autonomous Glow Bots or the Digital Confessional. Just about time - coffee shops were being disassembled when I left the exhibit. Sure sign the end of the Conference had arrived.

Fortunately, this year, SIGGRAPH had happy ending - the Renderosity gathering ! We had a great time meeting several fellow members, vendors and guests. One of the best Renderosity parties I have been to so far.

This year's SIGGRAPH was packed with new experiences. As usual, it went by so quickly that it will take a few days to absorb the overload of images and start getting ready for ... next year's Siggraph Evolution in Los Angeles.

SIGGRAPH 07 - Day 5

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:23:23 -0500

Wednesday - Three major talks on the menu, with another quick run through the exhibition floor around lunchtime to get an autograph of Syd Mead himself at the Softimage booth !

First thing in the morning - "Digital Art Techniques" - where artists such as Kenneth Huff talked about their artistic approach and their experience bridging Science, Computer Graphics and Art. Their testimony provided invaluable insight into the elaborate thought process behind electronic art pieces too often dificult to make sense of.

In the afternoon - "Interactions Tomorrow" was a great occasion to review the latest advances in user interfaces, from multi-touch devices to tablets and even walls. Diamond Touch from Mitsubishi's MERL laboratory was particularly interesting to try on the Exhibition floor later on.

The last talk of the day, titled "Vogue!", featured papers around the capture and representation of cloth, with applications to virtual fashion. One of the talks 'High Fashion in Equations' showed an attempt at recreating ancient haute couture garments and show them in motion as a way to preserve them digitally (the originals being too fragile to be used on models anymore). That paper was also part of the selected papers at the Electronic Theatre.

The official reception was an occasion for everybody to meet and share experiences from the past few days around foods from around the world.