MYTIME was recently featured on SPACETV’s The Circuit. Many people have reported difficulty viewing the show online, so I’ve pulled the stream down and re-encoded it here for convenience. You can download the video in .mov format or watch it here.

 

 Space TV - trimmed to CFC part: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (29)

theRetailSaver.com was built and deployed on Drupal 5.x. When I started development, I think Drupal was at 5.4, but with the flurry of recent updates, we’re up to 5.10 as of this writing.

The site is a business listings site, intended to partner with a mail print product put out by Exposure Marketing Solutions. Listing pages incorporate google Maps, a Lightbox photo gallery. The site makes heavy use of hook_form_alter via a custom module.

The basic content type is a business listing, to which can be attached one or multiple coupons. Coupons can be printed individually and brought into the stores. A listing can be sold as a “featured business”, thereby appearing in the sidebar, and at the top of search results.

Anonymous users can submit a basic listing. The site admin is then notified to approve the listing, and can offer the client a photo or video gallery, or featured business for a fee. Businesses awaiting approval appear in a custom block for the site admin, to facilitate editing.

The site makes heavy use of imagefield and imagecache – two modules that aren’t yet production-ready for Drupal 6.

modules used:
nodewords, globalredirect, update_status, forward, ad, xmlsitemap, workflow_ng, workflow, views_fastsearch, views, token, tinymce, theretailsaver, suggestedterms, site_map, relativity, print, phone, pathauto, nodeteaser, mimedetect, location, link, lightbox2, jstools, jquery_update, javascript_aggregator, imce, imagefield, imagecache, imageapi, google_analytics, gmap, filefield, embedded video field, email, diff, date, countries_api, contemplate, cck, admin_menu, action

westqueenwest.ca was built for the West Queen West BIA (Business Improvement Area). BIAs are associations of commercial property owners and tenants within a defined area who work in partnership with the City to create thriving, competitive, and safe business areas that attract shoppers, diners, tourists, and new businesses.

Toronto’s BIAs play an important role in urban development, and are responsible for defining commercial districts, adding to thier character by commissioning public murals, banners and street signs, benches, and much more.

In 1967 the Bloor-Danforth subway line was completed and shoppers who formerly traveled along the surface on Bloor Street in streetcars began disappearing underground. In response business owners banded together to legislate the creation of a levy-based organization dedicated to revitalizing thier neighbourhood, and by 1970 Bloor West Village was. You can find out more about Toronto’s 65 BIAs on the TABIA website.

This is a Drupal 5 site built around a business listings model. It incorporates a lot of custom content types, including press clippings, photos, photo galleries, news, and events. Other features include HTML email newsletter subscriptions and delivery, advertisement management.

The site was a lot of development work and I did some new, more advanced coding here. In the end, I wish I’d had more time to spend on the design, but in the end, the functionality of the CMS is leagues ahead of their old site, archived here.

DrupalCamp Toronto 2008 took place on Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24 2008 at the Bissel Building at U of T. Thanks to organizers André Molnar, Alan Dixon, Jane Zhang, Jamon Camisso, Dan Kurtz, myself, and William Roboly (last-minute chauffeur extraordinaire), the event went off pretty well, in my estimation.

Some photos of the event were tagged on flickr here.

We had about 150 attendees, and 21 sessions over the two days, as well as a reception on the Friday with free booze and cheese. I’m especially proud of the t-shirts this year, which I think were totally rockin’.

The event website http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org/ lists the sessions we ran, participants, and also, our generous sponsors, without which we would never have been able to pull this off. This year again, excellent catering was provided by Vert Catering and the Afghan Women’s Goup.

The organization happened in a free form manner, mainly out of the Linux Café on Harbord St. I’d definitely consider helping out again next year. I’d like to see a bit better communication and role definition, though. I also wouldn’t mind upping the event profile a bit more, maybe with a keynote speaker.

I was personally quite jazzed by John Resig’s jQuery presentation. I’ve always been offput by most Javascript, but am now totally jazzed at how easy it can be. I’ve already been toying around with the starterkit. I’m hooked. I’ve got to order me a book or two.

Another notable session for me was Wrestling the Octopus: Using Pageroute and Nodereference to Manage Complex Node Relationships which also introduced me to the node relativity module which seems like it will address a development issue I’m having right now with a couple of business listing sites.

I’ve recently started using Rimuhosting’s VPS services. The server is running CentOS 5 and bundled with a bunch of goodies. A VPS offers more control, but is also more susceptible to hacking attempts, and requires a bit of preventative medicine. This is just a log of my experiences setting up a more secure environment.

Continue reading ’securing SSH under CentOS 5′

I have a piece in the upcoming Framework Foundation Timeraiser. It’s a great cause and concept. In a nutshell it’s an art auction. Bidders bid their time as professionals. It isn’t a statement about how time is money. Rather, it’s a great way to get new people involved with worthy organizations which simultaneously supporting the arts.

The (juried) selection this year looks really good. Actually, Sanaz has a photograph in the auction too! The printed materials are already out, but, at the time of writing, the website is a little behind. Check out frameworkfoundation.ca to learn more about what they do, though.

My piece is from an ongoing series I’ve been working on called “The Corruption of Art” – an ongoing series of digital images, some of which have been realized as chromagenic prints. The origins of the work are for the most part analog: drawings, documentation of artworks and reference material, since digitized to become part of the artist’s filesystem. Through deliberate manipulation of the file structure, the images have become corrupted – their meaning annihilated, their raw content reconfigured. They make structure apparent to the point where it becomes the subject of the work, twofold: structure as an encoded sequence that is ordinarily hidden, and structure as it conforms to the formal artistic canon. In altering the raw digital material, almost everything recognizable is lost, which speaks largely to the fagility of our encoded reality, and directly to concerns of representation, fidelity, and permanence.

After 5 months, my residency at the CFC Media Lab has come to a close. It’s been an extremely rewarding experience. It was beyond a doubt the best thing for me to do at this time in my life. It was quite a leap from full-time employment to full-time ideation.

There are still some lingering tasks like completing our video documentation and fixing a few software bugs, but I’m mainly off and focusing on other things right now.

The softlaunch went well. Way more people showed up than I thought would, given the terrible 30cm snowfall we had that evening. The aforementioned bugs meant that we had to hold hands demonstrating the prototype, but people got the idea and were generally excited about how MYTIME could impact their lives in a positive way.

We’ve got a site (barebones right now) outlining the scope of MYTIME at mytimeworld.com where we’ll soon be posting the video. I’m excited – I think it’ll be a solid piece.

This Arcade Fire promo site for their new album, Neon Bible has got to be one of the most beautifully executed and elegant sites I’ve ever seen: neonbible.com

On the same topic, I really like Lou Reed’s site too: loureed.org.

My posting on this site has been protracted of late, due to the ongoing work I’ve been undertaking at the CFC Media Lab. I’ve put together a drupal-based content management website to manage our development process, which is accessible at http://cfc.andrewmallis.com.

It’s a pretty complex site whose core functionality supports wiki-style page entries, while simultaneously bringing together blogs, forums (unused so far), photo galleries (and gallery integration using tags, views and thickbox – pretty snazzy), an events calendar and minutes which attach themselves to meetings. There’s also some solid audio integration, and I originally had a custom content type for sticky notes, styled all nice too, but we found it more effective to just take pictures of our sticky note exercises and post those instead.

Things are going well in our group. There is no shortage of ideas, inspiration, or enthusiasm. The five members of team GUSTA (Geneviève-Ulysses-Simone-Tristen-Andrew) have had to face the challenge of narrowing in on a project they can all care about. Consequently, we began a journey of thematic exploration with a view to find commonality (and difference) and spiral in towards a precise manifestation of our core values – all by consensus! What a challenge.

We moved in from The Human Experience to The Need to Consume and have come up with a project tentatively titled Pimp My Bot – a modular physical computing project where each component has encapsulated, functionality. The forms promote modular thinking of the sort seen in electronics kits, but with LEGO-like ease of assembly. We are looking at a highly configurable, product-based design, where user contributed content plays a key role. If this all seems a bit vague at the moment, it’s because we’re working on clarifying and streamlining what it does and how it does it.

Running a test server has never been easier than with the advent stand-alone Apache distribution packages. If you’re interested in mucking about in Open Source software package distributions (see my previous post, How to Be Your own Webmaster) or even a hard-core developer the fastest, and safest, way to roll a project out is to work on it locally, then push it live. Working with your files on your local machine, versus going back and forth with FTP will keep you more organized, and working faster. For one, you won’t (as easily) bring your live site down if you do something wrong, because you’re testing it out first. Second, downloading and uploading is tedious and error-prone: which is the right file and where does it go again?

MAMP stands for Macintosh-Apache-MySQL-PHP and is a software package that lets you run the AMP parts on your M part without the hassle of installing them all separately – and yes, it can be quite a hassle to install all the parts, or even impossible if you don’t know what you’re doing.

WAMP is still AMP but for W – Windows. I can also recommend XAMPP (the extra P is for Perl) which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris (I’ve seen more movies by this name than users) – it also has great integration with Eclipse, if you use that IDE.

There are a couple of really great video tutorials on Lullabot that show you how to install MAMP on Mac OS X and WAMP on Windows XP. Click on the view or download tab there. It’ll walk you through things and hold your hand all the way.

Go ahead, download a package, it’s really painless and easy.

UPDATE: It seems to me that WAMP, upon further examination, is less flexible than XAMPP. I’d only advocated WAMP because there was a video tutorial of it, but save yourself a headache and go for XAMPP instead.

I put together a 16-slide powerpoint that outlines the basics of what you’ll need to know if you’re thinking about hosting your own website. It includes information about hosting plan types, security certificats, registering a domain name, and, most importantly, an outline of a few open source software packages’ features (Joomla!, Drupal, phpBB, Wordpress, Gallery, Ruby on Rails) with links to the example sites built with them and links to the developer sites.

download the presentation here:
How to be your own webmaster (6.3 MB)

whirling confessions – the hum and the blur
the cracking and the creaking,
the groaning, the whirr

the deadness of deafness, the soft burley beats
a shifting to alcoves of flows and deceit
inside monumentals that buttress routine

A capital method – to seek is to glean:
a cage is a window and its pane is a place

Ahead metal weather leaves its deep trace
a manner of being, of rushing for a pace

A haphazard exit, a flame-like transition
that births me to comfort, to forgo my mission

written during an audio walk tour through the CFC main house and around the grounds

Carnavalistic incantations –
a flutter in a storm of flowering mutations
band-together in fluvious migrations
defined, in-boxed by the knowledge of an end.

Cremated instructions defy not-time
to capture the death of the Births in mime.
This anti-memory, in a houseless window,
giving in to no body, no evidence.

Summoning itself before it was, the phrase
verbed without compliment until
the motion’s shape died.

Written at a concert by the experimental noise band, The Gravatons/Jack Vorvis during Nuit Blanche, a Toronto art fest.

Firefox 2 is awesome for so many more reasons besides not being IE or Safari. For one, I find the spellcheck really handy. Until today, I didn’t know you could load additional dictionaries as easily as other extensions. Just go here and click on your language of choice. Now if you’re in your webmail and typing in another language, no more red lines!

my other top 6 FF extensions:

• developer toolbar -  great for checking out form info, CSS, clearing cache, disable JS or images and lots more
• firebug - inspect page elements, and edit CSS, HTML and JS right on the page. I use this every day.
• del.icio.us bookmarks - add and tag pages to del.icio.us easily and while you’re there.
• colorzilla - eyedropper for web pages and also a colour picker/palette
• screen grab! - save a whole web page as an image without having to scroll down.
• measure it - draw out a ruled box to measure pixel dimensions on the screen

There was a long hiatus of a hundred years where drawing did not play any role in mathematics because hand and pencil and ruler were exhausted. They were well understood and no longer in the forefront. And the computer did not exist…

One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition, as it was trained by the usual tools — the hand, the pencil and the ruler — found these shapes quite monstrous and pathological. The old intuition was misleading … I’ve trained my intuition to accept as obvious shapes which were initially rejected as absurd, and I find everyone else can do the same.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Fractals are mathematical representations of the workings of the universe. Their geometry is the result of iterative algorithms that change over time. They describe what is considered randomness with mathematical accuracy.

Twenty years ago, in his seminal work The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot derived the term “fractal” from the Latin verb frangere, meaning to break or fragment. Each fragment (or fractal) is self-similar, meaning that each part contains the basic structure of the whole.

My use of fractal imagery plays on the idea of representation in art (especially in painting), while simultaneously figuring within the realm of the abstract. Even the physical act of painting is abstracted, subsumed by an artistic process in a Duchampian tradition. However, my pronouncement of these digital ready-mades does not imply finality, as the nature of these images is Nature itself – ever changing. Continue reading ‘Heralding the realism in abstract painting’