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'"We have a real culture of thrift," [Kotick] said. "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games." And then, to ensure there was no confusion in his message, he added that he has tried to instill "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the economic downturn into the corporate culture at Activision. "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression," he said.' Bobby Kotick. What a guy. What a CEO. What a leader.
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"Designed by Oliver Rokison a teacher at St Paul's School. This project connects to the Tower Bridge twitter account and mimics the movements of the real tower bridge." Fun.
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"Larva Labs proposes an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. Designed for an Android-based handset, our home screen is intended to appeal to Blackberry owners and people struggling with information overload." An interesting experiment; I like being able to vary the level of personalisation on the fly, but am not sure the screen is nearly dense enough for people with "information overload" – it only handles a couple of items in each category without drilling down. The Blackberry's appeal in part is due to its hyper-dense list of information.
22
September
2009
September
2009
Links
Tagged as:
activision, android, arduino, asshat, bobbykotick, business, ceo, design, electronics, games, hardware, interaction, internet, mobile, phone, soulsucking, towerbridge.
24
June
2009
June
2009
Links
Tagged as:
fail, journalism, lazy, sloppy, towerbridge, twitter.
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"The Tower of London tweets every time it opens and shuts…" Nice sub-editing, Daily Mail!
22
December
2008
December
2008
Links
Tagged as:
advertising, culture, evangelism, excuses, future, games, gettyimages, marketing, messagingbus, photography, play, prediction, riverthames, stock, stockphotography, towerbridge, twitter, ubicomp, videogames, writing.
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"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
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"I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand… These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.
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"The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.
28
February
2008
February
2008
design
Tagged as:
api, blogject, bridge, design, london, programming, spime, towerbridge, twitter.
Making bridges talk
I’ve written before about how wonderful Twitter can be as a messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful.
So when I found an untapped data source for such an object, I thought it was worth having a poke. Half an hour of scripting later and Tower Bridge was on Twitter. It tells you when it’s opening and closing, what vessel is passing through, and which way that vessel is going. The times are determined by taking the scheduled time for the “lift” and subtracting five minutes for the opening, and adding five minutes for closing – the official site suggests that, at rush hour, lifts should take five minutes to open and close tops.
That’s it, really; it’s just a simple case of scraping some data and outputting it. It’s not a hugely frequent event, so won’t disturb you very much; if anything, it’s just a little insight into the heartbeat of the Thames.
As a note on its design: it’s very important to me that the bridge should talk in the first person. Whilst I’m just processing publicly available data on its behalf, Twitter is a public medium for individuals; I felt it only right that if I was going to make an object blog, the object should express something of a personality, even if it’s wrapped up in an inanimate object describing itself as “I”.
And, if you want proof that it works… how about this:
I’d set the server up yesterday; suddenly, this morning, it twittered into life, and we charged out of the office around the corner to the bridge, where the MV Dixie Queen was getting into position for its lift. As it went through, I took a picture. That was a very satisfying moment.
(Thanks to Tom for helping me bash a crontab and a few other server-shaped things into shape. If you’re interested in the technology, which is really not very relevant, it’s about thirty lines of Ruby that glues together a combination of: wget, Hpricot, John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem, and cron.)
Links & notes for this month
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"Trism uses the touchscreen to manipulate the triangles on the screen, but in a really smart twist, the blocks will fall down in a different way, depending on which direction you're tilting the phone". Wonderful. Watch the video, and try not to grin.
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"[GitHub] is my kind of social software. You want to "friend me"? Send me a patch. Fork me." Nice post from Ryan Tomayko looking at GitHub from a slightly different angle.
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"Webby is a fantastic little website management system. It would be called a content management system if it were a bigger kid. But, it’s just a runt with a special knack for transforming text." A nice idea for simpler, single-user sites.
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Some nice notes on using Webby to build sites. Now, if only I could get the gem working...
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'Each bet costs $10 and all the money bet will go to First Book, "a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books."' Ten winners will get a prize. Lovely idea.
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"In this year's Hollywood Portfolio, Keira Knightley, Javier Bardem, Seth Rogen, and other stars channel iconic moments from [Hitchcock's] greatest hits." Strange, wonderful, ersatz photo shoot from Vanity Fair.
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"Castanaut lets you write executable scripts for your screencasts."
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"I’ve written many times that the two most important skills for a programmer (IMHO) are communications and learning. In this book, I’m taking a hard look at expertise, thinking and learning." Interesting looking new book from Andy Hunt.
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Exciting-looking new title from O'Reilly, being developed and written via a wiki. Interesting seeing the emergence of several titles on software engineering as craft rather than science at the moment.
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"I live in ... Point Hope Alaska, the oldest continually inhabited settlement or village in ALL of North America." Wow. Some remarkable photographs from Point Hope resident of 27 years.
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"Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world." Fun physical computing project.
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"TimesMachine can take you back to any issue [of the NYT between 1851 and 1922]". Some lovely flourishes in the interface, and some remarkable content, as you might expect.
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"A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It ... should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel."
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"Graticule is a geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations. It supports many popular APIs."
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"Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design is a booklet I wrote and designed to introduce advocacy organizations to basic principles and techniques of information design."
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Wow. Bookmooch has some seriously comprehensive data available from it, if you fancing munging their entire dataset (security-sanitised, obviously).
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"With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom." Wonderful article about education.
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"The problem exists only with binary distributions of MySQL and is related to the installation location of the libraries for the MySQL client that DBD::mysql uses." Ran into this problem today; wasted an hour on it. Never again.
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"Finally some new footage of IGF competition finalist Fez." Oh wow. This looks like it could be very good indeed.
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Looks like a great diff-ing application; shame it's Leopard only, as I'd be on it like a flash. Beyond Compare is still the one Windows app I kind-of miss.
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...and I still haven't finished _Les Gommes_. Time to dip back in, I think; a shame Robbe-Grillet is dead.
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"When he has mastered tone, and with it exposure and development, he knows the most difficult part of his technique and practice, let him then proceed to picture-making." Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 1889.
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"C is prickly, so its affordance is care."
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Short story from 1909.
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