The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect living and working weekdays in New York City, and spending weekends at home in Baltimore.

 

"I surf as much as I eat."

 

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past monthly...
2000:
10.11.12
2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06
07.08. 09.10.11.12
2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06
07.08.09.10.11.12
2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06

 

 

 

 

 

[?]

Last sunset



On the ferry ride back to Manhattan tonight, I caught the last sunset of 2002. Amy's on her way up from Baltimore and we've booked an evening on a yacht where we'll get dinner, dancing and music until midnight, when the boat parks by the Statue of Liberty for fireworks. If I get some good shots, they will of course be posted here. Happy New Year!

P.S. Snag this photo as a desktop wallpaper (188k JPEG).
posted 6:33 PM +

Snow crystals cradled



When I made this image of snow crystals yesterday on my way to a visit with my grandmother, I thought we were just getting a dusting.



Today, the snow turned into three inches of accumulation here in Baltimore, but now it's melting fast. The white Christmas was great while it lasted.

Happy holidays everyone...

Evening update: Here in New York City, they're calling it the whitest Christmas since 1909. The storm hit some areas such as Long Island and Connecticut fast and hard even as we had melting in Baltimore. The Amtrak train from Baltimore to New York was packed tonight because many plane flights were delayed or cancelled. Getting a taxi from Penn Station to my hotel took an extra ten minutes and I'm snug in my room now. Tomorrow's commute is a non-issue for me because I just stumble out of my hotel in the financial district and take the ferry right to the entrance of the office in Jersey City. While I'll be rarin' to go, the office will be pretty deserted.

posted 4:39 PM +

Very Claire

One woman who I would firmly place on an altar with my wife as Smart Babe Whom I Worship is Claire. Now, apparently extending a class project, she's blogging. In a recent post, this raging Baltimore girl offers a very concise and Very Claire review of The Two Towers. I'm adding Claire's site to my list of Sidekick-compatible blogs and my first New Year's resolution is to hook up with Claire in person because it's been too long.
posted 7:20 PM +

On foot in SoHo

Sidewalk art by the late Keith Haring at the NW corner of Prince and Broadway in SoHo.

Our day: The hotel, A train, Bagels on the Square, Desk 'n Desk, Galbrill Ichak Design Studio, Moss, Kate's Paperie, Apple Store, New Era Cafe, A train, Century 21, hotel, parking garage, and finally home in Baltimore.


posted 11:21 PM +

More posters

This next batch widens the circle of themes, but they are all still geek-a-licious.

CAIDA's Skitter Graph Internet Map Poster will be updated with 2002 data soon. I like the vertical version with the Harry Truman quote.

The Spamdemic Map is an incredibly dense chart of the relationships between e-mail spam companies and related entities by Bob West of Clueless Mailers. Take a look at the high quality GIF image, download the EPS to print your own, or buy the poster.

The Creative Process, Inc. offers a series of educational portrait-posters of famous creative thinkers. Elsewhere on their site, they do a great job organizing Art.com's educational posters collection which include Inventions that Changed the World and Earth & Space. At Art.com, I found a nice celestial maps gallery, this beautiful image of daybreak over the Rockies, and an unusual map of the ocean floor.

The Long Now Foundation sells a poster of their 10,000 year clock prototype, and the same diagram is freely downloadable in PDF format.

Jessica sent this great link to England's Crop Circle Makers to add to yesterday's list of posters. The site offers t-shirts, a 10 x 15" print, and a what looks like a must-have manual on circlemaking.

Digging further back in my memory, I checked at U.S. News & World Report and saw that the poster of Bill Gate's House is still on the site. Since the poster dates back from 1997, I would call to verify that's it's still available.

And lastly, because I miss my dog in Baltimore, here's a charming book of Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World on Amazon.

posted 11:54 PM +

Techy posters



Not posted in time to order for Xmas, but still cool anyway, are these new and not so new posters of various kinds of data visualization. The links here add to, and update, my November 2001 post on posters. Some of these will make nice replacements for some of my current cubicle decorations.

ThinkGeek offers a poster-sized map of the Linux 2.4 kernel (close-up shown above). The scripts to generate the image were coded by Paul "Rusty" Russell. The Boston Consulting Group and ODSM offer a zooming interactive version online called KernelMapper.

Textarc is a project by interaction designer W. Bradford Paley that beautifully renders the entire texts of literary works twice in a unique data visualization. A poster of Alice in Wonderland is now available. If you can't wait for a poster, you can download PDF samples. Zoom in with Acrobat to lose yourself in literature in a totally unexpected way.

The Public Internet Project offers an amazing five foot poster of 13,707 WiFi access points in New York City. At $100, it's a splurge even if you're a computer history buff—the distribution of access points is constantly changing and getting denser by the day so the map isn't too useful for really finding access. But the poster is way cheaper than the $5000 full research report.

The folks at XPLANE, who are known for their distinctive info graphic illustrations in Business 2.0 magazine, have now opened a poster store. Most of the posters would look good in any business conference room, but others would be great for the bathroom.

Peacock Maps, one of the first sites to offer maps of the Internet, has updated The Whole Internet poster.

I'm going out for a late night walk to scout out food places near my hotel and visit the Xmas tree at Ground Zero, so I'll continue this list in a couple days.

posted 11:29 PM +

Train reading for tonight on Naked Objects ...

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Naked Objects Meet the Interface

An unpublished paper by Larry Constantine.

Abstract: Naked Objects, the latest incarnation of the persistent notion of object-oriented user interfaces, proposes to eliminate the need for visual and interaction design of user interfaces by always presenting users with unadorned domain objects in a standard form and by constraining all interaction to the same few interaction idioms. Such simplistic user interfaces can be generated automatically through a software framework. This article examines the likely impact of the Naked Objects approach in light of its strengths and shortcomings as well as its undeniable appeal to developers and decision makers seeking shortcuts to user interface design. The ultimate significance of Naked Objects may be in the lessons it offers for practicing professionals, lessons that highlight the need for empowering users as problem-solvers by giving them better tools that enable them to achieve diverse ends by diverse means.

The six page paper as a 143k PDF.

Are Naked Objects really signaling the impending the death of visual and interaction design? This will occupy my mind for the next week...

UPDATE: Beth adds to my train reading. Thanks.

posted 12:35 PM +

Perpetual portraits

Since I've been working and living in New York City, I've noticed the proliferation of cheezy laser-imaged crystal glass blocks in souvenir shops. 3D images of The Statue of Liberty, The Twin Towers, and flags are common subject matter. Here's an example showing The World Trade Center towers that sells for $10 across the street from Ground Zero.



So for a couple weeks during lunch or dinner, I ignored a store here in Manhattan at South Street Seaport called Crystalix thinking it was just another showcase of bad souvenirs. But upon closer examination, I saw they were selling 3D images of real human faces. And I learned that they could scan your face right in the store, and embed your facial contours in a solid block of crystal in 20 minutes. I was quickly enchanted by the very accurate pointillistic likenesses. They were only asking $99 for the small single portraits. But by the time I returned to actually have a scan made, their machine was down.

I found another Crystalix franchise at Tyson's Galleria II Mall in Virginia, and better still, I could have Amy scanned as well. After doing some web research on how the process works we went for a session a couple weeks ago and I documented some of the production steps.



Amy is sitting in the scanning booth facing a Minolta VIVID 300 3D Digitizer [see also this PDF ]. The incandescent focusing lights are on. The computer console operator centers the face on a live video preview. The digitizer can scan a 15" square field of view. The operator triggers the digitizer from the computer, and a low power laser light stripe scans from top to bottom to capture a surface contour and 400x400 pixel continuous tone reference image in 0.6 seconds. The digitizer itself is about the size of a desktop computer tower, weighs 15 lbs., and has a big carrying handle on top.



A couple seconds later, the 3D contour mesh appears in the VIVID Utility software with the 400x400 pixel image mapped on. The utility was running on a Windows NT machine and there's also a version for SGI IRIX. The system operator then cleans up stray data points and adjusts the contrast of the 400 pixel reference image. You are called to view and approve the image on screen as the operator arbitrarily rotates it in 3D space. Approval is captured as a signature on a form, and then the file goes into a queue for conversion to a cloud of laser burn points and is imaged into a crystal block. The imaging process can take a little as four minutes, but the night we were there, we had to wait two hours because of a backlog of orders.



The machine which images the crystal blocks is aptly named the CrystalMark 2, and is the size of a small refrigerator. At the base is a big power supply, in the mid-level is the laser and mechanism that modulates the laser beams, and at the top is the felt-covered imaging platform where the crystal blocks are placed and covered with a protective box lid. Looking through the smoked glass window, you can see the pure white beam traverse points within the glass block. The machine was very quiet. The picture above shows a group of five family portraits being imaged into one large block.





The result was amazing. This is a close-up of Amy's portrait in the 50mm x 50mm x 80mm 3D PhotoCrystal block. Here are the front (71k) and side (60k) views of my image.

What affects me the most about these images is that short of using a milling machine to carve your bust out of stone, this is an affordable digital imaging process that produces an image that can last for hundreds of thousands of years. As much as I love photography, printed images are fugitive, especially compared to the time scale of a crystal block. Traditional photographic prints might last 80 to 100 years, but more commonly, color prints fade even in dark storage after a few years. And digital data can be unreadable in a little as a few years when storage and file formats change. Indeed, there are people thinking hard about the problem of the legacy of our digital files.

I imagine our portraits will live on into another generation and at some point end up buried in a landfill hopefully to be found and pondered by an archeologist of the future.

For some technical background on the Crystalix process, which is technically called Laser-Induced-Damage Image (LIDI), you can read a scientific paper and the text or images of the patent.

Oh, you want one of these portraits? There are franchises all over, so you might start by contacting the parent company:

Crystalix USA
5720 S. Arville, Ste. #114
Las Vegas, NV 89118
Tel: 702.220.6581
Fax: 702.220.6583

And here are a few locations that I know about:

Crystalix of New Jersey
1 Garden State Plaza
Paramus, NJ  07644
Store Phone:  201-368-3400

Unique Imaging, Inc.
Tyson's II Galleria
2001 International Dr.
McLean, VA  32102
Store Phone: 703-790-0490
This where we had our images made. Very nice people too.

Crystalix NYC at South Street Seaport
Pier 17
2nd Floor
New York, NY
Store phone: 212-233-9236
This is where I saw my first samples. Their system has been down a month(!) So call ahead.


Crystalix Washington State

Crystalix Colorado

Crystalix Las Vegas

Crystalix of California
The first storefront location which opened in May 2002





posted 6:00 PM +

An early segway arrival ...

I am excited about the Segway Human Transporter again reading Phil Torrone's new site about the Segway HT-i he just recieved. In addition to shelling out $5000 to Amazon, Phil won an essay contest that landed him in Manchester, New Hampshire for a private product orientation and tour of the Segway factory. Then a couple days later, his Segway arrived by FedEx—four months before general shipment. Phil also presents a detailed case (probably to his wife originally) for how he could justify the cost of the Segway. The crux of his argument is that with his commuting patterns and lifestyle, he can replace a second car with the Segway. Hmmm, since Amy and I are getting rid of our second car, I feel some case-making coming on. Phil's other justification might be that he's a book author, and we might see a book titled something like The Segway Bible before long.

From elsewhere in the gadget-laden Torrone Universe, check out these POV Shoes.
posted 11:26 PM +

It'snow!

People sent me photos of the snow in Baltimore, and I made some images too:

  

Wife Amy snapped and transmitted in near real-time a nice self-portrait from her Sidekick, and some other shots of our dog and the neighborhood back home.




Jessica got the day off from Hopkins, and sent the scene from her window at home.




Brian wandered around his house in Columbia, Maryland and sent some shots, including the dog above, made with his spiffy new Nikon D100.




And from here in the New York City area: this is the view from the Jersey City offices of the Corporate eBusiness group of AIG. The commuter ferry emerges here from a white wall of snow that completely obscured the New York City skyline.




This is what our view normally looks like.




And the lighted pillars of The New York Stock Exchange from this evening.

posted 11:52 PM +

Lists of words are my life (this week)

Taxonomies are all the buzz at work. Everyone has a need to manage lists of words that are important to them, and the corporation is looking for a way to associate across everyone's lists of words to deliver web content more effectively. Then there's the whole task of figuring out what users think our content organization should be. Out of all this discussion I'd like to get some topic maps to use for web site navigation. The possible solutions are not simple, and there are many myths to dispel.
posted 5:06 PM +

34 years later, a revolution still resonates

I noticed a reappearance of blog posts on the videos offered by the Stanford Research Institute of Douglas Engelbart's seminal demonstration of the computer mouse on December 7, 1968. Back in December 2000, I posted some links to some SMIL files I coded that collected the set of video snippets into a single RealVideo stream. I fixed those links and present them here again.

The Stanford computer history web site still offers RealVideo of the event chopped into 35 pieces, so you have to click on each clip to view the whole event. Here are links to view the entire 76 minutes of video non-stop, 8 minutes of highlights, and the clips individually (you need RealPlayer). On Mac OSX, you may have a file association problem with the .SMI files being opened by Disk Copy. These files, which are just small pointers to the actual videos, should appear on your desktop. Control-click on the file and open with Real Player. You can also drag the file onto an open RealPlayer window. I also added thumbnail images and run times to the Stanford clip captions—all in a pop-up scrolling window.

Here's an excerpt from Howard Rheingold's chapter on the demo from his Tools for Thought, the complete text of which is available online.

In the fall of 1968, when a major gathering of the computer clans known as the Fall Joint Computer conference was scheduled in nearby San Francisco, Doug decided to stake the reputation of his long-sought augmentation laboratory in Menlo Park -- literally his life's work by that time -- on a demonstration so daring and direct that finally, after all these years, computer scientists would understand and embrace that vital clue that had eluded them for so long.

Those who were in the audience at Civic Auditorium that afternoon remember how Doug's quiet voice managed to gently but irresistibly seize the attention of several thousand high-level hackers for nearly two hours, after which the audience did something rare in that particularly competitive and critical subculture -- they gave Doug and his colleagues a standing ovation.

The audience, in the same room where the first "computer faire" for microcomputer homebrew hobbyists was held some years later, witnessed a kind of media presentation that nobody in the computer milieu had ever experienced before. State-of-the-art audiovisual equipment was gathered from around the world at the behest of a presentation team that included Stewart Brand, whose experience in mind-altering multimedia shows was derived from his production of get-togethers a few years before this, held not too far from this same auditorium, known as "Acid Tests."

Doug's control panel and screen were linked to the host computer and the rest of the team back at SRI via a temporary microwave antenna they had set up in the hills above Menlo Park. While Doug was up there alone in the cockpit, a dozen people under the direction of Bill English worked frantically behind the scenes to keep their delicately transplanted system together just long enough for this crucial test flight. For once, fate was on their side. Like a perfect space launch, all the minor random accidents canceled each other. For two hours, seventeen years ago, Doug Engelbart finally got his chance to take his peers -- augmentation pioneers and number crunchers as well -- on a flight through information space.

Fortunately for the historical record, a film of the event was made. Those who were at the original event say that the sixteen-millimeter film is a poor shadow of the original show. During the original presentation, an advanced electronic projection system provided a sharply focused image, twenty times life sized, on a large screen. Doug was alone on the stage, the screen looming above and behind him as he sat in front of his CRT display, wearing the kind of earphone-microphone headsets that radar operators and jet pilots use, his hands resting on an unusual-looking control console connected to his chair.

The specially designed input console swiveled so he could pull it onto his lap. A standard typewriter keyboard was in the center, and two small platforms projected about six inches on either side. On the platform to his left was a five-key device he used for entering commands, and on the platform to the right was the famous "mouse" that is only now beginning to penetrate the personal computing market -- a device the size of a pack of cigarettes, with buttons on the top, attached to the console with a wire. Doug moved it around with his right hand.

In front of him was the display screen. The large screen behind him could alternate, or share, multiple views of Doug's hands, his face, the information on the display screen, and images of his colleagues and their display screens at Menlo Park. The screen could be divided into a number of "windows," each of which could display either text or image. The changing information displayed on the large screen, activated by his fingertip commands on the five-key device and his motions of the mouse, began to animate under Doug's control. Everyone in the room had attended hundreds of slide presentations before this, but from the moment Doug first imparted movement to the views on the screen, it became evident that this was like no audiovisual presentation anyone had attempted before.

Engelbart was the very image of a test pilot for a new kind of vehicle that doesn't fly over geographical territory but through what was heretofore an abstraction that computer scientists call "information space." He not only looked the part, but acted it: The Chuck Yeager of the computer cosmos, calmly putting the new system through its paces and reporting back to his astonished earthbound audience in a calm, quiet voice.

posted 10:56 PM +

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past monthly...
2000: 10.11.12
2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12
2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12
2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06

 

 

 

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The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. [?]