superluminous velocity

The Venture Bros is a show near and dear to my heart.  It showcases the kind of pan-generational pop culture collage mentality that is so crucial to modern nerdiness, and for that I give it my undying respect.    A few weeks ago, it was brought to my attention (by fellow NYC nerd Molly) that the show’s creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer would be speaking at the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art (MOCCA) near Houston St.  Seeing as I love the show, and visiting the museum was on my list of things to do anyway, I was immediately sold on the idea. 

Cut to the night of the event.  Molly and I arrive to the ‘Museum’ to find about 250 of New York’s Nerdiest lined up inside the winding hallway.  Apparently, the massive turnout was just as much as a surprise to the museum as it was to us; we were the last people allowed to enter, which turned out to be lucky for them. 

The space itself was extremely claustrophobic, a medium sized gallery space with every surface coverd by framed comic and cartoon works from all eras (think mickey mouse - hellboy) and crammed full of nerds.  We immediately saw the two animator/voice actor/directors sitting at a table with a laptop and a plasma screen tv in front of the crowd.  The excitement in the air was palpable, and agitation was visible on the face of the interviewer.  After a few minutes of idle audience chatter, the Doc looks out into the crowd and asks:

“Does anyone know Vista?”

Now, I am a computer scientist, and a bit of a microsoft advocate, so I certainly fit the bill, but, not wanting to be the tool to get up and try to show off, I kept my mouth shut, at first.  However, it soon became apparent that out of this small enclave of nerds, I alone was capable and willing to deal with whatever the issue was, so I stepped up.  Popping a squat between the two talented dudes who have entertained me so much over the years, I began to tool away (it was a dual display issue).  To my amazement, they began the panel while I was actually up there working! 

It turned out that they just had a mismatch on the resolution of the tv and the display out, so I fixed it pretty quick.  As I got up to leave, Jackson Publick said to me that I was now an honorary member of Team Venture!  I wanted so badly to interrupt the whole show and try to get him to do the V finger “Go Team Venture!” bit, but I restrained myself. 

The rest of the event was pretty standard, but informative.  We all got to see some sneak peak clips of season 4 (which I await with bated breath) and I got to briefly talk to the guys and shake their hands and get photos.  After it all, a woman who I presumed to be running the gallery and event comped me a membership to the museum too.  Double score.

And that my friends, is how I became a part of a fictional animated super science crime solving team.  

So I did it, I graduated.  It’s beenseveral months now, and life is great.  I’ve spent nearly all of those months with my “head down” on a new project called CitizenGroove.  CG is a network for musicians and a highly interactive media player for music listeners (infinite playlists anyone?).  We allow musicians to create highly networked artist groups with instrumentation information linked at the track level.  Also you can upload tons of music (if you own the rights).  We’re a real company, with trademarks and laywers and everything, so it’s very exciting.

  It’s in early testing phases, and there’s still lots more to come.  Lots of you out there have heard me talking about this, if you’re interested in being a tester, please contact me.  

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, Google has finally released a browser of their own, and it’s called Chrome.  As is explained in the launch-accompanying 30 page comic, Chrome is a little bit new and different.  While on the surface, the primary changes are tabbed browsing as a part of the core user experience, under the hood (cars have chrome right?) it’s quite a bit cooler than that.   

The Good: You see, the tabs ARE the core!  Each tab runs in its own process instead of in it’s own thread off of amain process.  In addition to this, they keep track of all the little bits (literally) of a webpage in memory, so when you leave that page, they can clear it COMPLETELY.  My personal favorite thing about chrome is that it doesn’t run JavaScript as a part of the rendering thread, so if it hangs, no biggie. Ok, ok, ok, so what does this mean for you?  It means that webpages, secifically webapps (things like google docs, meebo, and facebook that offer some interactivity)  will run at a bareable if not downright snappy pace.  I have noticed a distinct speedup on facebook in particular which is great for me because I build facebook apps so I’m in there all day.    

The Bad: So few things, I’ll put them in bullets points:  

• It only runs on Windows.  Grrrrr… Why is it that every time I get ready to jump off the diving board of Windows into the deep-end of Linux something always drags me back?   Google wants to hit the most people the fastest, so they developed for Windows first.  It makes sense people.  
• It has no add-ons.  This is probably a combination of Google wanting to maintain very tight security, and it being still quite an early product.  As a web developer though, I miss certain things like colorpicker, view source chart, and ruler.  
• It doesn’t support live bookmarks.  I don’t get this at all.  Considering all that Chrome ripped off (in a good way) from Mozilla, Opera, and Internet Explorer, why not this simple and incredibly useful bit of functionality?  I am an avid Del.Icio.Us user, and I keep all my browsers in sync by live bookmarking my rss stream of bookmarks, with Chrome I have to actually hit the web page.  Lame, but not terrible.  

The Ugly: If you are an average computer user, (a non-developing windows user who loves webapps) jump in and get your feet wet!  If not, you might wanna wait for the second release.    

Check out this cool new Microsoft research product called ‘InkSeine’. From the video and the InkSeine Blog, I have surmised that the software is essentially an updated version of MS OneNote that is totally powered by stylus gestures. Take a peak at this video to see what I mean.

Pretty neat huh? According to ArsTechnica, InkSeine will be released on Friday, so I’m pretty excited. I’ve coded up some lightweight gesture-based stuff in c# for playing with on my tablet, but nothing this slick. I hope it’s as cool helpful as it looks.

I have a beard. That’s right, a manly rugged tuft of scraggle protruding from my face. It keeps me warm in the cold winter, and I can dip my face in a river when it’s hot (evaporation is a cooling process). Because I so love my beard, I have decided to dedicate this post to beards in all their glory.

To begin, lets examine some notable beards from history:

• Confucius’s Beard
• John Lennon’s Beard
• Poseidon ’s Beard
• Merlin’s Beard
• Abe Lincoln’s Beard
• Z.Z. Top’s Beards
• Queen Hatshepsut’s Beard

The list could go on and on, so I’ll cut it off there (the list, not the beards). With so many influential people of beard, one wonders what influence the beard itself had on history. Would things have turned out differently if Karl Marx was clean shaven? about Jerry Garcia? We’ll never know.

Did you know there was a World Beard and Mustache Champion? I didn’t until my friend Jack Passion won the coveted title. Now that is a beard to aspire to.

On September 1, 2007, at the age of 23, Jack Passion won 1st place in the highly competitive “marathon of bearding” Full Natural Beard division of the 2007 World Beard and Moustache Championships, held in Brighton, England by the Handlebar Club. [Excerpt from JackpPassion.com ]

In a startling turn of events, I have just now, whilest writing this post, discovered a band dedicated entirely to beards. They’re called ‘The Beards’ and they sing songs exclusively about beards. The best thing about them is that they actually rock pretty hard. All their myspace friends have beards and apparently they are the first registered team for the 2009 Beard and Mustache Championship in Australia.Check out this quote from the begining of the live recording of their song, ‘No Beard, No Good’:

We’re gonna do another one about beards. We checked at the door and two thirds of you have beards. That’s a good effort. Two thirds of you are doing a good job.

Now I know beards don’t leap to mind when someone mentions Dexter’s Lab, but for a small percentage out there this episode leaps courageously to mind.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxiot3TM6RE 400 400]
And here it is, your moment of Zen, my favorite poem.

-Shel Silverstein

    Currently under development by myself and Dima Britvan,Zeugen is an internal Facebook application that utilizes the power of user-generated content to form a meta-tagged directory unrivaled in its precision and searchability.Folksonomy is the practice of collaboratively defining a body of data by allowing a community to tag the data with user-defined meta-data strings commonly known as tags (and thusly the common name of folksonomy is tagging). The idea behind folksonomy is that by harnessing the power of a massive user base, a massive (possibly user-created) and otherwise un-categorizable body of data can become labeled with a rich tapestry of meta-data. This meta-data allows other users to manipulate and search the body of data more and more easily as the body of meta-data tags increases. Essentially, more data emerges from normal user-data interaction creating new relationships between data that may not be easily seen as related by a computer algorithm.
The Zeugen application is an extends the concept of folksonomy by utilizing more complex tags than are usually dealt with. A normal tag consists only of a single string, whereas a Zeugen tag consists of 3 strings and a number. The first string is the main tag, the second and third strings describe the bottom and top of a scale on which the main tag can be measured, and the number (0-10 inclusive) represents the value of the main tag as associated with a particular user. Essentially, Zeugen allows Facebook users to navigate to another Facebook user’s Zeugen profile and tag them with a combination of information that is best summed up as a rating. Users can rate other users on any specification they see fit. An example of such a rating might be “Programming skills” (main tag) on a scale from “Poor” (minimum tag) to “Good” (maximum tag) where the value is 6.
To truly tap into the power of the user-base, Zeugen will also allow any user who is friends with or in the same network as any other user, access to their Zeugen profile, from now on these users will be referred to as “accessible” users. Accessible users have access to perform any of the following actions: view ratings, add their opinion to ratings, and search ratings. The act of adding one’s opinion to a rating is much like voting; it is the modification of a rating value by averaging in a new user opinion, thus forming a public opinion that should be self-regulating.
The system is currently in beta, and is thusly not quite “addable” in the Facebook system, but can be accessed directly here: http://apps.facebook.com/zeugentest .