blacklog

It has been a week already since we (Takashi, Kyle and yours truly) went to WWDC, Apple’s yearly conference for developers in San Francisco. Leopard feels great and features all kind of goodies to work and play with. As usual, Apple makes it sure to deliver cool crap, but I can’t talk about it in detail until october, because I signed an agreement of confidentiality when I signed up for the conference. No descriptions of new NSCrap here.

One thing I found most interesting is the implicit partnership between a community of software developers and a corporation like Apple. After all, an operating system, as advanced as it can be, is almost useless if there are no applications to run on it. Real world applications that solve real world programs are the only possible connection to the non technical end users. At the same time, software developers depend so much on whatever is provided to them that it’s a little scary. What will happen to a community of developers if their platform collapses? Now that I think about it, they will probably just migrate elsewhere with ease. Digital technology is approaching the time when standards will become commonsense for those who know, regardless of the platform.

Another interesting thing, this time of a statistical nature, was the male-female ratio out of the 5000+ attendees. I would say there were at least 100 men per woman. A-t-l-e-a-s-t. That was the no fun part, but its not so much of a problem when there is all this much technology around to compensate… did I just say that?

And another thing, these Apple guys do know how to treat their nerds; free candy, free cookies and free espressos all day long, everywhere in the convention center. I mean, dark chocolate m&ms? yum! The only thing they were missing were the smoothie bars =).

Some HOT Apple related topics: CoreAnimation, CoreImage, QuartzComposer, iPhone, WebKit, Leopard of course…

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Even though today is already tomorrow, it still is today for me. A very long and memorable day. I did some Ruby on Rails here and there, worked on my PLW 3D model for a new layout proposal of the workspace, had lunch with media lab legend Josh Lifton at an indian buffet in central square, organized my digital crap, went to the mall with Takashi to buy stuff for our upcoming trip to the WWDC in San Francisco next week, organized my physical crap, and had dinner at cuchi-cuchi with Amy and our guests from L.A.

The PLW remained almost empty all day and kind of quiet, as most of MIT was attending this year’s graduation ceremony. Occasionally, somebody would show up with their parents. I remember last year, Brent was looking at the live webcast of the ceremony in his computer all excited, waiting for his friends that graduated to show up when they received their diplomas. And I was just sitting there, clueless of what was ahead. One year later, today, it is me looking at the webcast as Brent and the others get their degrees.

Congratulations everybody! Campai!

I stole this picture from the MIT graduation website 2007, pure pure pure MIT graphic style…

And this is a closeup of Brent’s diploma, taken by himself with his cellphone camera during the ceremony, and submitted to Burak’s flickr account via email, from where I grabbed it.

Four years ago, when I came back from Memphis, I started meeting every other tuesday for lunch and after with mathematician Javier Bracho a.k.a. Roli, to talk about symmetry and art, and help him translate part of his talk about tilings into a script for a television capsule.

Some of those times we would just fool around with shapes to see what we could come up with, por example, using tiles that don’t fit to see what patterns we could find. Without knowing much about tilings back then, I happily rediscovered Kepler’s pentagonal tiling one day, and came back excited to the tuesday meeting with a giant hand made drawing of a massive portion of it. Roli told me about the history of this tiling, about Kelper and the archimedean tilings, and then we spend a few expressos looking for a set of rules that would procedurally generate kepler’s pentagonal non-periodic tiling. We wanted to write a set of instructions that the dumbest person, or even a machine, could follow to tile an arbitrary region of the plane this way. By the end of the evening we still didn’t know how to tell a machine how to make that tiling for us. I was astonished because I had no problem making the tiling myself based on observation and intuition, but I couldn’t figure out the rules that determined my decisions.

Then I took the Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming class this spring, and for the final project I considered revisiting the tiling problem. What if a program could be wrote that could figure out good enough rules (when possible) by looking at a given shape, kind of like I do when I make a tiling? Of course I am not In a position to write such a program (yet), but with the help of my super smart fellow classmates Kyle and Justin, maybe we could get something done. And we did.

Our system is a work in progress. Much still has to be done to it. For detailed information on its implementation and some background on tilings you can visit our project website here. You can also download the Scheme source code there.

The final project for the World Design class is due tomorrow. Frank asked us to create a world, make the corresponding world map, describe the cultures that inhabit our world, and choose a city to explore in more detail. I chose the sacred city of Kum from the world I created. It is located in a mysterious crater at sea level in the northwest of the island of Hurakan. A legend says that the crater was caused by the crash of a spacecraft that gave birth to the Cosmonaut civilization. It’s a long story, and here is the drawing. It is a nice Sumi ink drawing made in Arches hot press watercolor paper, 30x22in, 140gr, one of my favorite materials.

And the map:

My friend Laura Nichols asked me to help her with material for the MIT humorous magazine Voodoo. I thought of making the Stata Center come to life as a Transformer that would go hump the Green Building. It is full spring now, and after all, the Stata Center does look like a broken Transformer. I don’t find it hard to imagine that some crazy genius in there could find a way to turn it into a horny robot by rewiring the ventilation, the plumbing or the heating system in a non trivial manner.

Here is a link to Brent’s note on the Transformers for the nostalgic.

Here is the Stata Center last friday:

Here is the Green Building a few minutes earlier:

And this is why I love Photoshop:

An Interview with Frank Espinosa, author of Rocketo

Interviews are a tricky subject. It can be difficult to find the balance between the inquisitive observer that just wants his questions answered, and the compromised listener that cares about his subject. There is a space for attempting to shape the interview according to what is planned, but there is also a space for learning, that comes from the unexpected.

In the class I am taking with Henry Jenkins at CMS, we were given the task to interview the media creator of our choice with the goal in mind of exploring their thoughts as theorists of their own medium. It was very rewarding last wednesday in class to look through the diversity of projects put together by my classmates, and to see how the different subjects everyone chose would network together in a set of relations across the broad variety of Media. Singers, comedians, journalists, cartoonists, filmmakers, and all other genre creators you can think of, from any possible cultural background, and any possible combination of them (like cartoonist-journalist Joe Sacco) could come out of that pot of interviews.

I asked my friend and professor from another CMS class, Frank Espinosa, if I could visit his studio to record a conversation about his experience in the animation industry, and the creation of his personal comicbook project Rocketo. Because of my Production Design background, where we like to think of atmosphere as an important active character in film, I like to approach interviews from a documentary point of view, thinking that the audiovisual information captured by the camera significantly enhances the meaning of what the subject of the interview has to say, and specially the one represented by the subject’s habitat.

After a couple of great interview sessions where I realized Frank is not only a cartoonist, and almost as good a storyteller when talking, I came back to my computer with around three hours of footage to try to make sense of what Frank told me, in terms of what interested me for class. Even though I let the conversation flow in an almost freeform manner, I had in mind three axes that would serve as anchors to explore Franks theories and methods: I wanted him to describe how he works, to tell me about the things he likes, and to describe his motivations and his message. After talking about his childhood in Cuba, his favorite books, and the birth of Rocketo, I recorded him explaining how he makes a comicbook page, while drawing a panel on it at the same time, and when we were done he gave me the drawing he made for the camera. This is a link to a rough cut of the footage where Frank explains how he can produce at the crazy rate of 12 pages in one weekend. Here he talks about storytelling, film and comics, and here he talks about his motivation for creating Rocketo. This last clip is interesting because it explains a little about Frank’s obsession with traveling and exploration, and in particular the journey as a search for one’s own home. In Frank’s eyes, the very process of delivering Rocketo as a long time serialized tale is itself a journey, that makes him close to the timeless heroes he reads and writes about.

And this, of course, is a digital copy of the drawing I’m so proud of owning: