MudLog

My two year vacation is over. This blog is now closed. See you in another life.

It’s been almost two months since my last post. E15 development was in full swing as well as thesis writing. We’re thinking about distributing the binary soon, and we’ll definitely have to rework the website. The best way is to probably make E15:Web as the E15 site. Anyway, this blog is going to close soon. Graduation is on June 6. My thesis was submitted today…so I’m done!

I know I haven’t updated with a new entry in a while. I’ve been working on this post for the last three months or so, but every time I try to write about something, I find it difficult to finish. But here it goes, another attempt at writing.

I said last year that I will work on a web application every month. I failed. Not because it was particularly difficult to implement, but because I thought it was a waste of time. I also don’t particularly enjoy making web applications or designing web pages. I’ve been doing it for a while, and the technical challenge isn’t so exciting; and it seems like everybody these days claims to be a web designer, and it’s true, being a web designer isn’t difficult (of course whether they are good is another question). With frameworks like rails and relatively compliant web browsers, it’s becoming simple to deploy web applications. Of course it is a nice change from the days of writing endless lines of redundant php code, but at this stage, it’s really about the idea and not about technological challenges. Ideas are hard, therefore I failed.

As a designer I feel the limitations of web browsers growing every day. Of course limitations can be due to security restrictions, and I feel like spending time to circumvent restrictions is a waste of time. Also, we have powerful computers, yet none of the graphics capabilities on the browser takes advantage of powerful graphics cards. This is why I don’t really spend much time working on web applications anymore. In a research context, when I think about what the “next thing” is for the web, I think it’s about the web as an environment we interact with, without a web browser; and give web designers a whole new set of graphical and interaction possibilities.

I’m focused on working on E15, and it’s been great. Implementing a desktop application comes with more complexity, but rewards with more flexibility. For the first time in a while, I feel like I can finally build things that I think, without discovering later that it is impossible. I’ve been knee deep in Cocoa, and I think I’ll probably focus more on writing about problems and solutions I’ve come across in future posts…if I ever decide to write onto this neglected blog of mine…

I spent the Thanksgiving break being sick. I got sick a couple days earlier, not because the Lions got their ass kicked by none other than Joey Harrington, the Quarterback (who was drafted as a first round pick) they traded to the Dolphins for a future sixth-round pick. I love the Lions, but every year they manage to fuck up worse than the year before. Last week Michigan lost to Ohio State, which was a real heartbreak, but Yale killed Harvard, so in a way that made the loss less painful (especially with the MIT streakers and all. No it wasn’t me.) But enough with the football…

The past few mornings, I’ve been coughing up some funky stuff. It’s disgusting. No need to describe it except to say it’s amazing how something so unnatural can be produced by my own body. I say it’s unnatural because its color is highlighter green. I haven’t taken biology since high school, but how can some natural process create such artificial color? Maybe this is because my body no longer consists of natural things. Everything I eat is artificial. I don’t really know what is in the stuff I eat. I eat student food, under a student budget. This means I eat things I wouldn’t normally, just because it’s fast and cheap. This is the only place where the don’t ask, don’t tell policy works. Mmm…don’t you just love the burrito of mystery?

Where am I going with this? I wanted to tell this story, because I thought it would be a clever way to come up with another reason for why computers and digital work is important to art and design, but I don’t think I’ll be doing a good job. Remember I’m still sick. Thinking makes my head spin.

Over the years, I’ve met many artists and designers who resist the use of computers and technology to influence work. They bitch and moan every time they have to use a computer. Normally, I would ignore them and not waste my time, but the problem is, most of these people are stubborn professors who are in the position to influence students excited about computers and technology. I don’t understand why they are so critical. I can only assume it’s because they fear the unknown, and this thing called the computer and the internet confuses them to no end. This is why I think future artists and designers need to skip art school and come to MIT instead.

Now the analogy. Computers and technologies are much like the artificial products we eat. Whether you like it or not, it is already within us. It’s okay if you don’t like it, but resisting and rejecting computers and technologies is like being an organic preaching hippie. But these days organic food isn’t even organic. It’s what hipster Williamsburg girls eat at Whole Foods at Union Square.

I probably spend more time writing code than anything else during a typical day. Since I started joined the Lab in June, I have gone in every day (except for the day we went to New York to see Tufte) and spent time programming.

It’s a little odd. I hated programming. I thought it was useful, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I love computers, but I use computers to make visual things, not to write programs. In undergrad, I avoided programming at all cost. I never took a computer science class. I was a physics snob, and I viewed people in computer science to be future programming robots – great hackers were all burnout physics majors anyway! At some point I started liking programming, but I forgot when that happened.

Perhaps it’s the lack CS classes, but I always thought programming was just a tool and was never curious about why certain programming languages are the way they are. However, since spending the whole summer hacking away at Ruby and JavaScript, I got curious as to how and why the two are so different.

Ruby, much like Java is a class-based object oriented language where objects are created by instantiating a class, whereas JavaScript is prototype-based and objects are created by copying the prototype. I’m reading Prototype-based Programming and beginning to appreciate the flexibilities offered by JavaScript. Maybe there’s a reason why many applications which provide scripting layers use JavaScript. It’s also interesting to see that JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme if you take away the syntactic differences. This means you should be spending more time hacking with JavaScript!

Off to decide what classes I should take this term…now that I think about it, I probably spend more time daydreaming.

I finally got a summer haircut. I cut my hair above my eyebrows when summer arrives, and I repeat that process after a year when it grows down past my chin. It gave me a sense of time during my “working years” after my first grad school, since I no longer had the academic calendar to rely on.

I hate how my hair looks when I cut it that short. It looks just like the picture above. Total helmet-head. It’s a functional hair cut, since hair doesn’t get in the way and it just feels good. Usually I choose aesthetics over function, but every summer when the sticky disgusting tropical storm weather comes along, I opt for the functional.

This is the same with web applications. There are so many web applications out now, but most of them are purely functional and completely ugly. Google’s numerous services are good examples of where function dominates over aesthetics. Just look at the mess they call froogle.

The thing I like about all the Web 2.0 hype is that there is a concious effort to make things look good (and to make things move fluid and smooth.) For instance, Burak showed me Vimeo, which is basically the same thing as YouTube, except unlike YouTube, it doesn’t look like vomit. Also, they use Prototype.js, so they get a thumbs up just for that. The more I compare the two sites, the more I wonder why anyone will tolerate YouTube’s complete lack of aesthetics. I thought consumers where much more demanding of visual goodness ever since the iPod craze, but it still doesn’t translate over to the web world.

Maybe function always wins over aesthetics…I think I like my haircut now.