Ian Gilman - Blog

In Praise of Halloween

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-11-01T22:18:22-08:00

This was Caitlyn's first year to go trick-or-treating. Christina sewed a lovely tiger costume for her (by request), which she's been wearing at every chance, giddy with anticipation.

Ever since I was a kid, much has been made of the dangers of Halloween; don't trust candy from your neighbors! Trick-or-treat at the local shopping mall instead! It's almost as if there was a nationwide conspiracy to use fear to erode local community in favor of chain retail stores. Those stories have now been debunked, but their effects linger on.

Yet what we found this Halloween was how the night turned the whole neighborhood into a sort of giant block party for kids. Costumed groups wandering the streets and sidewalks, folks watching from their porches and doorways, everyone friendly and cheerful. Surely the candy was a good motivating factor, but Caitlyn obviously enjoyed the pleasure of interacting with her neighbors and showing off her fancy outfit.

So here's for Halloween, one of the few holidays where you're encouraged to introduce yourself to your neighbors!

Farewell to a Playhouse

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-10-12T21:53:25-07:00

We dismantled Caitlyn's cardboard playhouse today. She doesn't really use it anymore, and we need the space to make way for more big-girl additions to her room. We'd gone over all of this with her, but naturally she was still quite distraught when the time came to do the actual deed. Once it was all in pieces, she asked to have a quiet moment alone with it. Afterwards she explained that she'd said goodbye, and that she'd told the playhouse that when it had moved on and it found itself in some strange new house with a strange new family, everything was going to be okay, because Caitlyn would still be dreaming of it.

Shoulder Update

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-09-14T22:22:54-07:00

The surgery is complete, everything went smoothly (from my perspective, and from the doctor's perspective), I've had a somnambulant weekend on painkillers, and now it's more or less back to reality; that new reality being that I've got an arm in a sling for the next month, and daily physical therapy exercises for the next six months or so.

I am happy to report that I am in fact functionally ambidextrous, so eating, writing, shaving, etc. with my left hand is going smoothly (if a little slower) and improving. After all, what's the point of having the adventure if you can't enjoy these little challenges along the way?

Thank you everyone who wrote with well wishes! It was great going into the surgery knowing I was in your hearts and minds.

Shoulder Surgery

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-09-10T21:27:07-07:00

Ever since Fourth of July last year (and some overexertions on my part) my right shoulder has been a bit out of whack. I've given it time to heal on its own, done physical therapy, but it hasn't gotten better. An MRI and further diagnosis has shown that it's a tear in the cartilage on the backside of the joint, so tomorrow morning I'll be getting arthroscopic surgery to repair it.

Maybe a decade ago I had a couple of wisdom teeth removed; other than that I've never had any surgery before. After that procedure I was surprised at how violated I felt; something that had been part of my body my whole life was now irrevocably gone. This time it's repair (though presumably there will be a scar), so I don't expect I'll have the same feelings, but at this point all I can do is go with the flow and see how it all turns out. Afterwards I'll be doing physical therapy to get it back in shape; I intend to use this as motivation to be more proactive about my health in general. Anyway, it feels like a milestone of some sort.

The Hidden Value of Being Public

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-07-17T22:18:00-07:00

I've gotten so used to sharing my life and thoughts in public, on various blogs, Twitter, etc., I forget that that's not how everyone lives these days. For me, whatever situation I'm in, whatever I'm saying, I just assume it'll be available for all the world to see (should they choose to). Scary at first, perhaps, but the beauty is that thinking that way helps curb your bullshit (or at least keeps you to self-consistent bullshit). Imagine if the whole world did that!

Friend Seeking C++ Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-07-05T20:56:56-07:00

A project I worked on a while back is now nearing its initial public beta, and they're looking for a good developer or two to bring them down the home stretch. Here's the writeup:

We are developing a cross-platform multimedia player to showcase our new rich media packaging technology. We are looking for C++ contract professionals with Windows, Mac and Linux skills to become part of our team.

Areas of interest include:
Media format knowledge
Portable player integration
sqLite3 embedding
GUI development
This project is well advanced, so new developers must be able to dive into existing code.

Ours is a small, highly skilled team. We expect all teams members to be self-starters. These contracts have long term potential for the right persons.

The team is distributed across the globe, so you can work the job from wherever you live. They are especially interested in someone with solid Mac skills to round out the team. Contact me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch.

The Coming-of-Age of the Living Room Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-03-08T16:06:48-07:00

The "entertainment center" in my living room is a Mac Mini hooked up to an LCD TV, with a couple of nice computer speakers. I don't have cable or even an antenna; I grew tired of regular television years ago. Everything I want to watch is either online or available through Netflix.

I certainly enjoy sitting back for a couple hours watching a good movie, but I'm also intrigued by the many other possibilities posed by a computer in the living room. This is part of the inspiration behind Gimme Shiny, and this is why I'm enjoying Boxee. These are just single points in a broad spectrum yet to be explored, strange new experiences that are part game, part TV, part screensaver, part web, but also new unto themselves. I'll continue playing in this area, and I'm looking forward to seeing what others come up with!

Caitlyn on Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-02-10T15:15:00-08:00

I've been meaning to write this up for, well, a year and a half now. An exchange I had with Caitlyn when she was two left an impression on me:

We were talking about her quilt, and how all of her relatives and friends of the family had made squares, and she asked where were the squares that Mama and Papa had made? I explained that we didn't make any squares in the quilt because we had been busy making her.

She said, "You made me?"

I said, "Yes, Mama and I made you together."

She thought about this for a moment and said, "Thank you."

Happy 2009!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-02-01T18:59:02-08:00

It's been a while since we've done one of these year-end wrap-up things, but so much has been going on, I figure we're due (never mind that it's already February). So, let's see, where to begin?

The short version: I've been exploring and creating in the world of Web art and technology, Christina has been diving deeper into her role as techno-pagan urban homesteader, and Caitlyn is growing up fast! We are blessed to be part of a number of a thriving communities, from the many wonderful people in our local neighborhood to the international network of ideas we call the Web.

I'm managing a small team now (still in the Seadragon group in Microsoft Live Labs), and together we've released several projects: Seadragon Ajax gives you smooth zooming on the web in pure JavaScript. Seadragon Mobile for iPhone is able to seamlessly serve up hundreds of huge images over the air. Infinite Canvas allows you to create and view comics unconstrained by page boundaries. I also helped put together this year's Photosynth release, and of course we've got exciting things in store for 2009! You can keep up to date on my Seadragon adventures with the blog Dragonosticism.

I've been keeping myself busy outside of work as well, creating and releasing a JavaScript version of the Figure Ground puzzle game from Heaven & Earth, and Gimme Shiny, a dynamic slideshow of popular images on the web (also done in JavaScript). I'm still posting random bits to Thoughtsam, though no longer everyday.

Christina's year has mostly been about food. She's taken up regular bread making (nearly one loaf per week), yogurt making and the occasional cheese making, with ambitions of her own homemade cheddar in 2009. The garden gave us several quarts of peas and nearly 30 lbs of potatoes, and it taught us that corn and shelling beans are best gotten from the farmers' market. She also put up 70 lbs of tomatoes, 20 lbs of peaches, 18 lbs of raspberries, 11 pints of applesauce, and a dozen half-pints each of dried tomatoes and bell peppers.

Christina continues with her usual web design antics. New projects this year include intentional and recycled jewelry from PeaceLoveEarth, Peruvian inspired sweaters from Inca Textiles, poems and images from Veita Jo Hampton, and a promotional site for elder care mediator Marcia Haber, as well as all the usuals from previous years.

She's also doing more sewing this year, exploring sewing clothes (shirts, dresses, hats, shoes (!)) as well as non-disposable sandwich and lunch bags, a self-designed laptop sleeve, and the usual assortment of quilts. Sadly, the pictures of these items have yet to be taken in most cases; maybe she'll get to that sometime this year.

In the Major Life Events department, we saw the passing of Christina's father this fall. His decline over the last 17 years due to fronto-temporal dementia has been brutally slow and painful for Christina's family, so the closure of this chapter is a time of both grief and relief. Christina occasionally blogs about her grieving process (as well as many other topics) on her website.

Caitlyn is 3.5 and is enthusiastic about her first year in preschool. She's learning to write (she's pretty reliable about writing "mama" and "papa") and can tell you the letters in her name, even if she wants prompting when it comes to writing them. She's also attending a circus class where she's learning to walk on a tightwire, balance on a globe, climb a rope, and do "seat drops" on the trampoline. Caitlyn loves her books and her various projects (folding, cutting, gluing, glitter, painting, writing, coloring), as well as animals, storytelling, yoga, helping around the house, Legos, the "little computer", and going on "adventureders".

You can see photos of her (that we don't seem to update very often) on her site. I've also started collecting her quotes on my Twitter stream (as has Christina); hopefully we'll add that to her site one of these days.

We have, of course, continued to explore the wonderful world of music. This year's best are collected in our Tunes 08 playlist.

So that's us, how about you? What have you been up to?

Best wishes for the new year!

What about failure?

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-01-21T21:29:52-08:00

Failures and mistakes are part of life. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You either try to avoid failure, or you learn how to recover from it. The difference is that avoidance paralyzes you into an action, whereas failure recovery keeps you moving, ever more nimble with each new experience.

Infinite Canvas

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-01-17T19:49:52-08:00

Inspired by the "Infinite Canvas" chapter in Scott McCloud's book Reinventing Comics, and building on some of my earlier work that led to Seadragon Ajax, I used our recent Out of the Box Week to create a new comic layout and viewing web app, Infinite Canvas. Scott himself was kind enough to contribute one of his pieces, Brad's Somber Mood, and Jouni Koponen has provided The Day the Saucers Came, a collaboration with Neil Gaiman. This is just the beginning though... What can you create, on a canvas with no limits?

Remember the customer?

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2009-01-10T11:00:00-08:00

I've been hearing a lot of talk lately about what's good for business or bad for business. As far as I'm concerned, the only question you need to ask yourself is, "What's best for the customer?" If the answer to that question doesn't align with your business plan, you're in the wrong business. If you're not serving your customer's needs, someone else will -- it's only a matter of time.

Government Coming Alive

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-21T23:15:10-08:00

I'm terribly excited about all the stuff going on at change.gov. He's so engaged, it feels like he's our president already -- even more so than our previous presidents, who felt distant even when they were in office. Much has been said about the democratic nature of the Web; it's great to see it being applied to our government.

Here in Seattle, in the midst of a week of snowstorms, I've discovered some of that great government Web energy at the local level: the Washington State Department of Transportation has a blog, a Twitter feed, and a Flickr stream. The blog is remarkably friendly, the twitter feed is highly engaged (filled with responses to other people's questions and comments), and all of the Flickr photos are Creative Commons. Pretty amazing, and wonderful to see... it's got a lot of people talking, excited about government for the first time in, well, a mighty long time.

Photosynth Silverlight viewer

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-18T21:32:00-08:00

For those of you who have been waiting for Photosynth on the Mac, well, it's still not here. That is, you still can't create synths on the Mac. You can, however, finally view them, with the new Photosynth Silverlight viewer! It's still experimental, so it's not integrated into the site, but with a little copy and paste you can view any synth, including all the great ones collected on Synthopticon.

It doesn't support point clouds yet, and of course you need to have Silveright installed, which means you need to be on an Intel Mac, but besides all that it's pretty darn cool! Go check it out and then leave a comment on the Photosynth support site telling them how excited you are for the next version...

Automobile Apocalypse

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-18T20:42:01-08:00

In the last century, cars have made incredible progress at taking over our livable spaces. The public commons, once the cradle of human community, have been largely usurped by the automobile. It happened slowly, so it's easy to forget that there might be another option. The tide is turning, though, with more cities creating pedestrian-only zones, rejoining places like Venice who never left the pedestrian world.

Then there are places like Detroit, epicenter of America's car culture. Symbolic of humanity's domination by automobile is the Michigan Theater, once a golden-age movie palace, now a parking structure, its grand sculpture playing to a crowd of metal boxes with wheels.

Makes me want to do a series of art pieces of human places taken over by cars. Not anthropomorphized cars, mind you, but full-size impersonal hunks of metal, parked in a restaurant, a public restroom, a playground, your living room. Either that or take still frames from Pixar's Cars and insert reminders that people once lived there, before they were inexplicably eradicated; perhaps some human skeletons, or a baby doll with tire tracks over its mutilated torso.

I Met The Walrus

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-15T22:26:27-08:00

Wonderful modern animation to illustrate an old amateur interview with John Lennon:

Delightful!

larger version

(via)

Seadragon on your iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-14T21:00:37-08:00

We've just released a Seadragon viewer for the iPhone! It's got links to lots of great content, and you can add your own. Of course it has all of the smooth zooming goodness you've come to expect from Seadragon, but now in a handy portable form you can take to the pub with you!

This is another project, like Seadragon Ajax, from the team I lead inside the Seadragon group. This one came from Ben Vanik, and it's really his baby all the way through. We hired him earlier this year, and before long he had absorbed the Seadragon technologies so thoroughly that he was able to write a fresh version (three times, in fact, before he was satisfied) fully optimized for the iPhone. After the first prototype he showed for Out of the Box Week, we knew we needed to ship this thing. Since then he's tweaked the algorithms and honed the interface until the whole thing shined.

Of course it wasn't literally only Ben; the entire Seadragon group helped one way or another, most notably Lutz Gerhard, Chuck Cummins and James Darpinian. I'd also like to call out the photographic artist Chris Jordan, who was kind enough to let us include five of his newest pieces in the sample content.

On a side note, this is in fact the first iPhone application to come from Microsoft. So far the response from the iPhone community has been overwhelmingly positive, but there are those who think it's some sort of contradiction in terms. Rest assured my team's mission is only to innovate, however we can. I leave the guardianship of political correctness to you, if that's how you feel.

In the meantime, we'll be zooming pixels through the airwaves to our hearts' content. I hope you join us!

Activism

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-12-01T11:24:00-08:00

I'm an activist. I don't mean that I attend rallies or ask people to sign petitions, I mean that I work constantly to bring about positive change and to educate others with improved ways of seeing things. I'm a cultural change agent.

I come from a long line of activists. My great-grandfather, for instance, was a missionary to China. My father is one of the founders of the sustainability movement. I'm a homeschooler, vegetarian, Mac user, etc. During the 80s I participated in citizen diplomacy with our then enemies the Soviet Union. Nowadays I live in a new urbanist neighborhood, ride the bus (when most of my country still drives), and work for Live Labs, one of the freaky activist wings of Microsoft. Activism is such a part of my life I often don't even recognize it. Still, I've been thinking about it lately and what it means.

People frequently react badly to activists -- like we are trying to destroy their world -- yet we play an important role in society's immune system. We see a big change coming down the line that most people aren't tuned into yet, and we become voices for the change. In that way we're like a vaccine, like a little dose of something that might otherwise kill you at full strength. It's only natural that people would react badly to this shock to the system, but they should be glad we're giving them this chance to build up their immunity, to adjust to the change, before the big one comes rolling through.

Thoughts I Am

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-11-28T17:00:00-08:00

My blog Thoughtsam is meant to inspire, so I'm delighted to find that it's inspired Dave Thurlow to try the same sort of thing with his blog Thoughts I Am. I'm sure I speak for both of us when I say we'd love to hear from you if any of our snippets have inspired your writing, artwork, dance, gardening, whatever.

Still looking for inspiration? Check out my Thoughtsam blogroll.

FreeRice

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-11-26T00:15:47-08:00

FreeRice has been up over a year now, and it's still going strong. It's a fine example of a single-purpose site perfectly balanced to achieve its goal. The design is clean, the concept is evocative. The user has fun, learns something and feels good about what they've done; the sponsors get their advertisement impressions; the organization gets money to carry out their mission, plus they spread the word. Nicely done.

Seadragon Ajax

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-11-23T15:58:11-08:00

We've just released Seadragon Ajax, a pure JavaScript version of our high-resolution smooth zooming technology.

I'm especially excited about this one, as it's really been my baby from the start. It also combines a number of my passions: Seadragon, JavaScript, Web APIs, open standards, cross-platform, etc. I'm a big believer in JavaScript's potential, much of which I believe has yet to be tapped.

We have a thing at Live Labs we call "Out of the Box Week", where every so often the whole department forgets about schedules and meetings and we all get to do whatever we want, creating whatever we think might be good for the group. A while ago, on one of these occasions, I decided to see what, if any, of our zooming technology I could re-create in JavaScript. The results after a week of hacking, while not nearly as smooth as our native C++ implementation, were nonetheless stunning to those who saw JavaScript as nothing more than a toy.

Once the week was over I went back to my normal duties. The prototype that would become Seadragon Ajax sat on the shelf until four months ago when we hired Aseem Kishore, an exceptionally bright fellow straight out of college, to turn the code into a real product. In four months he wrapped his head around my prototype and completely transformed it into something robust, efficient and clean. The project also benefited greatly from Ken Perkins's indomitable spirit, Boyd Ferris's attention to detail, Chuck Cummins's eye for elegance, and of course the support of the entire team.

Now that it's out in the world, I'm excited to see what people come up with to do with it! I'll be posting new developments along with various other Seadragon-related tidbits on the blog Dragonosticism.

Gimme Shiny!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-10-23T22:53:47-07:00

My latest project is up and running: Gimme Shiny, a slideshow of the happenin' images on the web right now. Give it a whirl, see what you think. Drop me a note here in the comments or over on Get Satisfaction.

Thriving

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-10-14T22:43:02-07:00

Christina and Lianna have started a new blog, We See America Thriving, dedicated to collecting people's visions of a positive future. I've just sent them one of mine. What's yours?

Synthopticon & The Art of Photosynth

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-10-05T15:37:16-07:00

For me, the excitement of releasing Photosynth has always been about discovering what people might do with this new art form. It's been out for a month or so, and already people are coming up with some amazing stuff. Kevin Hanes has been digging through the site to discover the gems that he posts to Synthopticon. Check it out, and if you know any good ones he's missed, drop him a link!

Meanwhile, Matthew Runde has started a Flickr group, The Art of Photosynth, for images and videos inspired by Photosynth exploration. As he says, "Photosynth's unintentional capabilities are nearly endless, and just waiting to be discovered and exploited." Check it out and join the group if you've got something interesting to share!

Capitalism 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Gilman) — 2008-09-29T23:18:49-07:00

I've just finished reading Capitalism 3.0, from Peter Barnes, cofounder of Working Assets. The basic notion is that the negative effects of capitalism as we know it (environmental degradation, exaggerated inequality, etc.) can be fixed within the system by creating a set of property trusts to manage the natural, community and cultural commons. Sounds good to me... now we just have to do it!