Art

"Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony . The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important."

- Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique

Debugging

"The word bug has been used to describe an 'object of terror' ever since the fourteenth century. Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper, the inventor of COBOL, is credited with observing the first computer bug - literally a moth caught in a relay in an early computer system. When asked to explain why the machine wasn't behaving as intended, a technician reported that there was a 'bug in the system,' and dutifully taped it - wings and all - into the log book." -Hunt, Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer

Non Language

"Two people are talking together. They understand each other, and they fall silent - a long silence. This silence is language; it may speak more eloquently than any words. In their mood they are attuned to each other; they may even reach down into that understanding which ... lies below the level of articulation. The three - mood, understanding, and speech (a speech here that is silence) - thus interweave and are one. This significant, speaking silence shows us that sounds or marks do not constitute the essence of language. Nor is this silence merely a gap in our chatter; it is, rather, the primordial attunement of one existent to another, out of which all language - as sounds, marks, and counters - comes. It is only because man is capable of such silence that he is capable of authentic speech. If he ceases to be rooted in that silence all his talk becomes chatter."

-William Barret, Irrational Man

The birth of the internet

Well, not really, but still pretty cool is this old recording from Stanford. This isn't quite the internet as we know it, but it's the first public announcement of a number of technologies that birthed what I'm using right now to type, upload and publish this blog to you. Some highlights are

Clip 11 - Doug talks about why an online system is useful.. I can't think of any reasons..
Clip 12 - The introduction of the Mouse and his pointer friend 'bug'
Clip 15 - The hardware running the NLS and generating the performance for the audience. This isn't quite the dawn of personal computers... that comes in the mid-80s.
Clip 25 - Two mouse pointers collaborating, reminds me of the recent mouse demo of node.js
Clip 30 - Doug describes two systems being used. One - the hardware system that runs everything - and two - the logical system that is used to organize and relate data in human terms.

The NLS online system project at Stanford

Big thanks to @d33rheart who came across this gem in her digital art class and saw instantly that it was in my taste.

Web Comics

Above, a strip from Married to the Sea.

Web Comics. Bite sized entertainment. Sometimes witty, occasionally insightful, always ridiculous. Need there more be said?

Favorites:

Wondermark
Married to the Sea
XKCD
MS Paint Adventures

and the daddy of all, Ryan North's magnum opus:

Dinosaur Comics

(if you Google his name and stalk him via image search you come across ROFLCon, best Con evar)

Mini game demo with jQuery and HTML(5)

I was inspired by Dextrose's Aves engine and a Google Tech Talk by Paul Bakaus to play around with HTML5/javascript to build a little game. Paul is spot on when he says the technology is ready for it, and because HTML was built to be visual and javascript is event oriented, the wedding of the two is surprisingly efficient for game creation.

Here's a little mini-game I whipped up over the course of a few hours.

To play, click the board to move your defender. Stop the 'invader' balls from reaching the yellow ball (the mothership) by running into them. Reload the page to play again.

http://www.clumsyfingers.net/projects/game/tableit/index2.php

This will not work on non-HTML5 capable browsers. You will need the latest Firefox, Safari or Chrome. As of this writing IE does not support HTML5.

I'm hoping to take this idea further and possibly build a light-weight engine around it (using my limited game programming knowledge from college). It doesn't work well on the iPhone 3G (which the game board was sized for), so optimization and usability are still significant (and interesting) challenges to deal with in making js/html5/css a viable option for multi-platform development.

jQuick Note

$('#idofdiv').function();

is the same as

var obj = document.getElementById('idofdiv');
$(obj).function();