I’ve temporarily relocated to NYC to join the Occupy movement. I’m going between things a bit still. Come Dec I will be working full time on tech projects to support not only Occupy Wall St., but the broader community.

I originally entered publishing as a vehicle for activism in founding OCAD’s newspaper, Bite. I’ve for many years supported non-profits and artists by enabling their expression with technology as principal of Ideograph.

I will not be taking new paid work for a while and living meagerly while I work with a really great group of inspirational people on building a better world today. We are not a leaderless movement, but rather a movement of leaders.

I call on you to ignore your doubts, to believe in yourself, and to exercise your democratic rights and freedoms. You are the 99%.

It will not always be easy, but it will be honest. There are many obvious things wrong with the world, yet the solutions are not so obvious. By working together, we can fix what corporations are destroying. We can rethink government, economies, and social welfare.

peace,

Andrew

Thanks to everyone who helped to make the event happen. And happen it did.

A special note of appreciation to Shawn and UCSC and Zach and Stanford, and Will and Chapter Three,  and the amazing volunteers, and participants that made the prequel event something of note and the beginning of a promising future for Hi-Ed summits.

Thanks to all the presenters at both events. It was the sum of all participants at every level that made the event something of note for everyone, I hope.

Continue reading ‘badcamp 2011 shoutout’

I’ve been thinking lately about how our experience of film, as it has moved on to more portable devices, revises the intimacy of narrative.

Most contemporary television drama employs the steadycam – sometimes exclusively – using cranes and dollies mainly for establishing the scene. These perspectival qualities can be seen as far back as the 1962 documentary Lonely Boy which employs cameras newly made portable and lending them well to intimate settings like automobile interiors.

Today’s screens are ubiquitous with portability. The receiver in the model has looped back to propose a paradigmatic inversion, where new affordances aren’t opportunities for expression, but rather serve to define the parameters of engagement (consumption) and inform the mandate for content creation.

This video work introduces a new modality of steadycam awareness on an older production style (1983′s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman). The strong contrast between inside (the Mercury space capsule as state-of-the-art technology) and outside (the natural world) on which this movement is imposed shows how modern modes of shooting consistently define a space in which our first-hand perspective is simulated.

I am really happy that  my MacFuse+Macfusion is working again. While the command line and version control are (most of the time) my friends, sometimes a client doesn’t use a VCS and I am forced to work directly on the server. MacFuse lets you mount these file systems over SSH like any other Mac volume. This makes it easy to work on the whole codebase at once on the mount point, vs. the download-upload FTP client method. Using the finder to browse around the server also makes it far easier to locate assets like image files.

This post builds on the the already well documented concepts outlined in this blog post to provide additional details for a Snow Leopard, and handle some additional configurations for the 64-bit kernel. The previous post explains in detail how these technologies work, and provides screen shots to guide you in your configurations.

MacFUSE

The latest version of MacFUSE on the google code page is not compatible with the 64bit kernel. You need to download the 2.1.9 beta from this link.

SSHFS

Download the sshfs-static-leopard.gz from this wiki post and replace the sshfs-static executable in the MacFusion.app package.

To use sshfs from the command line, symlink the new binary to a location in your path, i.e.:

sudo ln -s /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static /usr/local/bin/sshfs

If MacFusion still refuses to complete a connection to a remote server, quit MacFusion, open up a terminal and:

$ cd /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/
$ mv sshnodelay.so sshnodelay.so.bak

source: http://rackerhacker.com/2009/08/28/fix-macfusion-on-snow-leopard/

LINKS

• How to manually compile svn checkout of MacFUES for the 64 bit kernel: http://www.5dollarwhitebox.org/drupal/node/97
• How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629

My work has been out of circulation for some time and you keep asking me what I’m up to. A new website IS forthcoming, but in the meanwhile, I’ve put up a gallery that samples some of my recent work.

I hope this keeps y’all in the loop.

click the image to view the gallery

Traffic in Tehran is hard to describe, and even harder to photograph. Driving in Tehran is quite creative. The rules of the road seem to be more like guidelines or suggestions.

This video consists of about 2.5 minutes of footage taken at dusk, just as Eftar is announced. Most people are at home breaking their fast; many of these individuals seem to be on their way there also.

The moves you’ll see in this video may seem exceptional by certain standards, but I can assure you that they are quite the norm here. Compliance with driving protocols is an active topic of conversation. Recent government initiatives include a media campaign and in-school program encouraging seatbelt usage, and signage pleading to use lanes as they are painted.

Urban traffic in Iran is as extreme a paradox as any other here. People will sit down for tea and conversation for 6 hours, but the conversion to pedestrian is accompanied with a need to cross the street immediately. Doorways are slow to traverse, as one person will plead the other pass first, but on highways right-of-way is replaced with right-away.

A little while back ideograph launched mollycrealock.com – a nice, attractive gallery for commercial Toronto photographer, Molly Crealock. It was a challenge to meet the requirements of automatic circular thumbnail generation and custom positioning.

The site also incorporates:

• private client galleries visible based on either user role or user names.
• Multiple simultaneous file uploads.
• Easy image captions and re-ordering of galleries through drag & drop.
• jQuery interface elements

You can see more screen shots of the work on ideograph.ca

Did I tell you about Sequel Pro?

You can use it to connect to your local MAMP and also to remote LAMP mysql servers (via SSH). Why is this so awesome?

Well, not only is it 100 times faster than that phpMyAdmin, but you can edit your DB super easily, like a spreadsheet. It is a snap to filter/search/order a table for viewing and editing.

Caveat emptor: what I am about to show you can do tremendous damage. You can accidentally kill your entire application, so BACK YOUR DATABASES UP! Test on a copy first. Continue reading ‘Sequel Pro: look at the nerdy things I can do at 1 AM’

My presentation on Device Art and My Time for TEDxSoMa on January 22 has been put up online. The event was lots of fun and a great experience.

I’ve been told that the organizers that about 100,000 people tuned in to the live stream (though not simultaneously), which kinda turned upside down my whole perception of the event and my experience with audience.

Other artists in the presentation: Machiko Kusahara, Ryota Kuwakubo, Toshio Iwai, Theo Jansen, Sachiko Kodama, Maywa Denki.

I finally got around to putting together video documentation of the Off World installation!

Off World is a 24-hour, month-long interactive public installation part of the 2009 Contact Toronto Photography Festival. It is an exhibition of photographs and video by filmmaker Mateo Guez and commissioned by curator Sanaz Mazinani, realized in situ as a 24-hour interactive public installation by me, Andrew Mallis.

The exhibition ran all of May 2009 at CAMERA, an extension of the Stephen Bulger Gallery, located at 1028 Queen Street West, in Toronto, Canada.

the video is intended to be played vertically. Just tilt your head.

Using the Processing language, an image of da Vinci’s La Jaconde – the most reproduced image in the world – is corrupted over time. With each conversion between image formats, a frame is recorded. The title coyly references Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade.

Continue reading ‘LHOOQ HD’

Users often require a limited set of stylistic controls over content on their site. We implement this in Drupal using the wysiwg module and TinyMCE.

Commonly, users need to create subheadings in their posts. Markup should always be privileged over wrapping content in classes. For example, it is much better, both from a structural and a maintenance perspective, to use an h2 tag to create a title, rather than adding a class of, say, .title to a paragraph tag, then forcing the paragraph to look like an h2. It will make a mess of your stylesheet, plus render your site less accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Continue reading ‘Configuring TinyMCE to handle a subset of styles’

Net Change is a week-long event designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change, presented by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS.

I heard about an art competition over email, entered, and ended up winning. I really don’t think they should have called it an “Art Show”, as it ended up being more of a branding experience for the event. Nevertheless, it was really nice to be associated with such a great event, many of whose participants are also my colleagues at the CSI.

Read about the art competition on netchangeweek.ca

Back ups are important. Like brushing your teeth, it’s something you should do routinely. And, as you’d brush before important events, like going out on a date, so should you too backup before upgrading software.

I’m going to show you how to use phpMyAdmin to back up and restore MySQL databases. In my next post, I’ll show you how to graduate to doing the same thing using the command line.

I use MAMP to develop websites locally. I’ve written about this before here. The examples I’ll be showing come from the phpMyAdmin packaged with MAMP, but apply just as well to any other environment. Continue reading ‘how to back up databases using phpMyAdmin’