王朋

Steve Jobs on the Company

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 04:16:00 -0800

The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and the designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

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On IE

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:27:00 -0700

One time, when testing the effect that modifying the content of a selection had, I inspected the DOM tree and found a "/B" element. This was not a closing tag, there are no closing tags in the DOM tree, just elements. The nodeName of this element was actually "/B". That was when I gave up any notions of ever understanding the profound mystery that is Internet Explorer.

— Marijn Haverbeke

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Snippet #1: Stylebot & Google Reader & More

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 01:23:00 -0700

Update I've also added one for the ReadItLater webapp. Both now feature css3 finishes and webkit scrollbars, which I think should be everywhere. Customizable embedded browser chrome (buttons, fields, scrollbars) is such a necessity these days.

Update All my styles are here: http://stylebot.me/users/hlfcoding

Update I've updated the Reader snippet to be even more ridiculously minimal. I've also added the snippets for some other sites. Note the gist contains versioning and are bookmarkable if you're on github.

http://stylebot.me/ is an awesome Chrome extension, doing what userChrome.css does in Firefox, though perhaps with more style. Here's something to help Google Reader power users *.

See the full gallery on Posterous

* Use www.google.com/reader/view/ instead of the autodetected www.google.com

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Essay #4: The Pretense of Our Education

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:06:00 -0700

Lately I've been looking back and debating with myself and others the relevance of our grade school education. Those who'd rather not fix something not blatantly broken, read no further. Those who constantly tweak and improve the state of this world, continue on.

I went to a high ranking high school. My middle and elementary schools were similar quality. On average, the teachers knew how to teach, and the schools were the pride and selling point of the neighborhood. That's why it saddens me to consider that my parents mis-invested their time and money educating me in the traditional fashion, throwing me into high rank schools. Before my crit, I'll give in that our education system is good in that it exists, is established, and is respected. That much alone is uncommon.

But we can do better. I find a disconnect between how the real world feels and how the grade school system feels. Or rather, our education system takes some markedly bad things about real world institutions and imposes them on kids. There's extra emphasis on bureaucracy, authority, and organization. Be inside classroom doors by eight-o'clock; obey the teacher; and always come prepared with supplies bought and answers memorized. And with such a system, although ironically seeking to foster prosperity by spreading the same mantra that brought our existing prosperity, our status quo will not improve. Our society continues to stagnate from these mantra, notions that have lost meaning from over-application and zealousness. Tight regimens aren't always good.

There is a lot of waste, because with a blind allegiance to established systems comes a lack of common sense.

In terms of core classes, however core can be defined, the material isn't always relevant or necessary. We learn more than we have to, and it's getting worse. Reading and writing effectively with the native tongue does not take twelve years to teach, unless the context or goal is specifically to become a teacher of such things. Not saying all those critical literary analyses I wrote weren't challenging and enriching as much as they were tedious and boring, but ultimately, the failure of the system is in the real world there's rarely a need to write ten pages analyzing someone else's work outside of academia and certain fields of research. Even then, the context isn't nearly always literary.

And there is the time cost. Has anyone paused to think how preposterous it is to have young people spend forty hours a week sitting in class for two-thirds the year, and with few if any of them coming closer towards their life goal or dream career than say, since their first day of middle school? It gets worse. Students have to make up for time wasted sitting in class listening to lecture or doing relatively unimportant activities not specifically targeted to individual educational interests, and they do that after school, doing work at home to understand material they should have been able to absorb during classtime. For instance, I learn much better on my own and through actively applying the topic, than say, listening to long lectures or working with a group I'd rather not be in. I also learn much better when I've personally decided the subject is within my interest. And I know I'm not alone on these preferences.

Granted many teens are unstable, but is putting them through a suffocating regimen making things better? Is it better to trample their paper-tiger ambitions and tell them instead to just follow the high-ranking crowd? Things need to get better, and I think an alternatively guided path needs to exist in our system, one that gives space to all sorts of growth. The early phase of grade school is immensely useful. It's about playing with other kids and mastering the fundamentals of learning and being in a group. It's about being curious, courageous, independent, and empathetic. It is also a time kids heavily require adult supervision and attention, but the mothering can stop by age eleven, so the mentoring can start.

Mentoring is not common, at least when I was a student. You should not necessarily need a trained teacher to mentor. The student should be able to choose based on feelings of inspiration. They should be able to grow freely, of course within ethical boundaries. A student who is more interested in music may find a senior student who is exceptional. Conversely, the senior student should be given the opportunity to learn what it's like to teach, rather than learn, for there's no better way to learn than by teaching. This positive feedback loop is not only sustainable but also efficient. There's no wasting talent by putting exceptional teachers in front of class after class of students with a paint-by-numbers lesson. I feel that situation is common today and probably a good two-thirds of students are not truly interested, or become interested too late. Of course, survey classes should exist, but they should not be mandatory, and should not replace more advanced and flexible workshops. Students should take survey classes to find their core classes. Instead, we just have them taking too many classes altogether, so it's no surprise to me now why school made learning seem like such a chore. I've yet to have a job as bad.

Learning something you're interested in improving on and mastering is about as exciting as it gets. It brings a new dimension of richness and meaning to life. For me, this something was drawing, and it saddens me to no end that I was unable to get the resources and mentorship directly from school in my early years. My friends were my main source of encouragement, and artists I found in various commercial media were my ghostly mentors. To those who deny that all people can be so driven and focused on learning something, I admit I wasn't focused at all. I procrastinated and continue to procrastinate on my passion.

But it's probably more like drugs: once you try it, you can't escape, no matter how long you're stay away. Except, at least I feel, finding your passion like this is a good thing, so all young people should try and give into their dreams, at least once.

The education system needs change. Because it is with a stagnating school system that we have more people trying to just get by in a professional world that is short on accountability. Fewer people decide on a job based on the confidence that it's a job they were meant to do and can do better than anyone. We've stopped asking ourselves the important questions. We've gotten good at jumping through seemingly the absurd and pointless hoops of bureaucracy, authority, and efficiency to buy our bread and butter and audis. We're conditioned to think only of ourselves; since in our school systems, we are competing against one another in meaningless contests that chain and loop to no end.

After all this time, I still fail to see the importance of tests. There is no physical record of accomplishment, with the exception of a certificate or a ribbon. Certainly it's important to be certified. We need certified doctors, cops, fire officers, dentists, etc. But why do we need to certify students who are only beginning to discover their careers? Would colleges prefer a high SAT score in English over honorable mentions and awards from several articles about this country's political polarity, socioeconomic gap, or media sideshows?

Instead of the STAR, PSAT, SAT, midterms, finals, etc. etc, I'm certain at least a good portion of students would rather learn writing by reporting on real world issues. Learn history by researching and contributing to Wikipedia. Learn programming by doing the school website or helping out in the multimedia lab or even by making video games made available during recess. Learn art by painting murals on the dozens of empty walls around the schoolyard. Learn design from making pamphlets, announcements, notices, and signs. Teachers should facilitate this sort of constructive, purposeful education, let the capable ones play freely, and try to nudge and soothe the ones who aren't as able until they improve and find their path. It's easy and wasteful to just maintain the paperwork, schedule, and classroom rules, including the one that makes kids carry large textbooks back and forth when each day only requires a dozen pages. We subject kids to the plight of Sisyphus. Does that bother no one?

In a burgeoning age where information is accessible and omnipresent, there is a diminishing need for people who can retain and regurgitate. Google can do that far better. We need people who are open enough to see possibilities and trained enough to execute on those dreams, preferably with a sense of humanity and practicality. Doing great things means taking risks, being self-motivated, knowing how to assemble outside help when needed, and conversely how to hunker down and focus until the problem is solved. The work is also iterative, meaning what was done a month ago will be needed even months later. There's a lot of refining, a lot of love. Work is long term and meaningful. Never in human history, to my knowledge, were there more people who preferred to be drones doing short-lived busywork than apprentices aspiring to master a true, meaningful craft.

I sincerely believe, that if the system fully worked as it should, a lot less of everyone's time would be wasted, taxpayer money too.

Addendum: with each generation, we find there's less time to get to all the things in life. A successful career, a happy family, a meaningful life, a stable lifestyle. Even more so that it doesn't make sense to spend at least six years of what is essentially our prime doing things that are not doing their share to enrich our future. If career was decided by the latest of age eighteen, it would give us much more time and space to explore and understand the other thousands of things about adulthood. My parents always reminded me I'd regret wasting my youth playing videogames and watching cartoons when I got older. They were partly right, but not the part about MegaMan and SpiderMan.

July, 2010

Update: Congrats for making it to the end. Here's a video with a message that runs along the same vein.

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Coding Update #3: MicDroid

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:57:00 -0700

Pronounced McDroid (i.e. McLovin'), it's a wildly successful Android app created by a friend. I feel privileged to be entrusted with creating the ui, from concept to code.

The latest release as of this writing features the first release of the new ui. There's much more in store for the app. Development has been very organic and fun thanks to Github. There, you'll see the inner workings of the app: like my first 100 or so lines of xml to write layout, the file structure of the resources directory that map the support for various phone types, and the nine-patch images that save tons of space. I only wish this was the base model for making websites. The xml format certainly feels very powerful, I may even prefer it over html+css. Also, a big thanks to the Android designers at MtV for the base materials psd files that really sped up my photoshop work. Overall I've had a pleasure learning tip of the Android api. In terms of what's baked in for the ui, it still doesn't feel completely baked, but already I prefer it over other, ahem iOS ahem, platforms.

I know I've been gone for at least a few "blogosphere epochs," there's more posts in store. Image below is actually a comp and not 100% the final product.

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Essay #3: Two Years of 2.0

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 02:37:00 -0700

I started seriously following web trends a few months before 2008. Now 2+ years later, I’ve deleted 500 bookmarks from my Delicious, almost a couple hundred+ tagged items from my main Reader account, and another couple hundred labeled as TODO from my browser bookmarks, stored by XMarks. Now, hours later, I still have another couple hundred items in my ReadItLater list, although somewhat sanely manageable and accessible. And I’m fanning the flame by writing a long review, hoping some upstart doing websites out there will find use in it.

Overall, I feel like all web news, lessons, and exhibitions was useful. I learned lots stuff good. But I spent much time and still missed some golden opportunities. On several occasions mostly in Delicious, I had duplicated entries perhaps only months apart. A number of the items I had as TODO were horrible write-ups on WordPress and jQuery “tricks” that were (in terms of screen estate) 20% awful UI, 40% yes-men comments, 30% ads, and 10% content. Only now do I realize how shallow those authors’ knowledge were, as I eventually outgrew the usefulness of my gathered resources. So yes, I should have organized better (more on that), but there is a definitely content quality issue with sites out there. Oh, and I’m also pissed FFFFound has no RSS feed.

Seems like posters of late don’t take the time to write and grow content but instead just put up link bait to worsen the quality of RSS feeds. Delicious Popular, back in 2007, did not look as it does today. Back then, since the web was less spammed up by WordPress strip malls, the content gathered by (what I’m assuming is and has been) an automatically ranked feed of popular pages on Delicious based on times bookmarked. As a result, the content was quite good, and I learned a lot about mashups, and startups, and CSS standards, and even design patterns and separation of concerns. Back then, there were no Noupe, Cats Who Code, etc., and point is, now my attention has shifted to Hacker News and a selected group of consistently good ~~bloggers~~ writers. Still, little by little the WordPress spammers are creeping in. I really don’t know how they do it, and I don’t think HN is very automated…

For the past few months, I've been fighting this spam with better organization. I got the PostRank userscript for Reader that can at least visually show me which posts are truly more popular, based on a fairly good algorithm. I decided to stop using web interfaces for browsing bookmarks. One, because the tags feature in Reader is limited and difficult to browse. Two, Delicious’ website, browser sidebar, and assumptive other services are abysmal with managing a huge collection of bookmarks. Their bookmark editing features are worse: granular editing cannot be done in bulk, as their bulk editing feature lacks key functionality (that require little effort beyond some jQuery, or in their case, YUI).

Browser bookmark management, especially in Firefox, is way more advanced. It can quickly show hierarchy through nesting folders (vs. the Delicious tag+tag approach). It has separators—translated as meta categories—for dealing with over-nesting folders. It is convenient. Use case: click drag the favicon to a folder in the bookmark bar, then separate as needed in the menu; access is a click away, and editing and management are almost better than Finder/Explorer. It includes favicon support and compact lists. Plus, XMarks syncs bookmarks across browsers using SSL encryption (yes, most bookmarks (at least mine) need not be public). Don’t get me wrong, Delicious is a fine service and website. It just isn’t nearly the best bookmark handler.

Admittedly, when I first started on Delicious I added every semi-interesting or useful page to my account, each attached to a dozen or half-dozen tags, and ended up with a huge, flat, and unstructured pile of links. I realize today a lot of the software sites I don’t need to bookmark; I’ll download it and try it out, and there’s no huge time cost there. Interesting, but long, articles are a big time cost and break the feed-pruning flow, so I only decide after skimming whether or not to queue it to ReadItLater, which comes with various integration points: bookmarklets, Firefox plugin, RSS (which ties into Reader and its feed bookmarklet). The only things I save now are seminal articles, tutorials, and documentation to keep; and libraries, documentation, and work I want to dissect in detail, and web tools whose urls are hard to remember. Basically, anything that takes an hour or more to sink in, or that I want to revisit again and again. Meanwhile TabGroupsManager acts like a temporary work area for storing second-class bookmarks and can export them nicely as bookmark folders.

There’s two points I want to make as I end this reflection. One is centralization is underrated. People want to share here and post there and jump from Youtube to Facebook to browser to iPhone. But we’ll use more and more apps, and we’ll realize how important centralization, via standardization and organization, really this. Dropbox proves this as a bridge between multiple PCs and a Webby nominee for this year, so does Digsby, with its multiple social, chat, and email services, and its CNET 100 award . They are services acting as bridges and gap fillers. They save me time and at the same time allow me to do and learn more. And so, my solution for bookmarks chaos is to rely on the browser as the core bookmark manager, and to use various web services to do the syncing. Of course when the need arises, I will share things I actually feel are useful for first my immediate Delicious network and then the rest of the world. It’s important to realize the prospective bookmark's level of importance in context of your network and workflow. And that’s the second point.

Why did I do all this for a pile of “trivial” bookmarks, able to fit in a small and dispensable file? Simply because I learned most of what I know from other people’s bookmarks, and I want the web to improve in organization and quality. In my case (which I’m sure is not unique), it actually got to the point where I got so confused with the quantity of links I couldn’t find the crucial ones I needed. It was as if I had no bookmarks, as I just ended up googling everything and relying on my tab sessions. Because ever since middle of 2008, thousands of WordPress articles starting showing up in my feed. Even after skipping 90, each of the remaining ten still looked so useful in the 5 seconds I had to skim it before filing it away forever, only to uncover it again months later and realize the documentation I poured myself over while working already taught me many times more.

Readers beware, lots of crap out there.

Update Half a year since writing this, and much of the technical details above has changed, but my overall setup still follows the same structure. I no longer can recommend XMarks because they've pretty much closed shop. And although they might receive some funding or improve their business model, in their blog post they nailed something I failed to see: native is better. Google made native sync, and I primarily use Chrome now. That's right, no more jumping back and forth from Firefox to Chrome, at least for a while. Although not having bookmark separators is a bit of a dealbreaker for me, in Chrome I can actively manage memory and have a generally stable environment (with the exception of web inspector in certain instances freaking out over javascript errors and crashing the tabbed process).

Also, with an iPad I now have access to other readers like Flipboard, which as of writing has Google Reader support. As a result, image-based feeds and newspaper feeds are much more convenient and fun (especially to go through why lazying around under a blanket).

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Sketches #6

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:06:00 -0700

See the full gallery on Posterous

I saw this image on brysonian’s tumblr post. I had to try to replicate it, and I definitely have a long way to go. Going to post it regardless. Besides, it was good fun working with peon’s processing textmate bundle. It really makes me not miss the original ide at all. Very well thought out and implemented, alas unlike this sketch.

// edit

It’s been a good week. I started off implementing my own autonomous steering behaviors using this article as demo and specification. I also played around with making the methods in my PApplet subclasses chainable:

Chaining

pen.update()
   .prepareCable()
   .trace()
   .cable();

And I started a Stage singleton abstract the Processing functions into something more reusable and flexible, though one of my doubts is I’m just undoing the benefits of Processing in order to fight its detriments. I’ve still got much to resolve to get to drawing technique from the original picture, but I did manage to implement the ‘cable’ effect I mentioned a few months ago.

Strangely, I’ve used Processing for 4+ years but it was only until recent years I looked more into Java…

I’ve started a Github repo for this project Plans to salvage all the crap Processing code I’ve written will be underway soon as well.

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Essay #2: A Case Against Closed Source

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 03:52:00 -0700

The greatest thing about Google Chrome? I can download any extension, and if I dislike the UI the developer hastily slapped on there, I can change it myself in a few minutes. I can store changes however I want, back them up in case future extension updates overwrite them, maybe even send the guy my changes. The web is built on this dying code of ethics, one I will one day sorely miss. The web is shrinking and consolidating. Like the industrial revolution, there will be much turmoil, chaos, and injustice ahead. Unlike the industrial revolution, there is no guaranteed improvement in living standards. Maybe the leash around our necks and blindfolds around our eyes will tighten. But we will accept, even unwittingly, because there is no point of reference. There will be more monopolies than innovators. More fences than doors.

What building a walled garden does is it drives other people, whether through annoyance or motivation, to building their own walled gardens. The result is the new century's arms race. The stakes are users and their information. The end result is less functionality and freedom for the end user, who has to make difficult decisions and commit to certain technologies and platforms out of paranoia about identity security. But more importantly,

Why should anyone trust software, hardware, or services that refuses them access rights?

The web is also built on standards. Take aways standards and there's only chaos, inefficiency, and room for mishaps much worse than the typographic eyesore. By creating a new whole new 'ecosystem' of distributed applications outside of the internet and its protocols and technologies, there comes a great burden of re-inventing the wheel. Apple just declared war on the Internet. The walled garden versus the open prairie. Even if what Apple is selling works and looks better (at least on the front-end), it is poison. There is nothing worse than playing a game and betting your life on other people's rules. In the simplest of terms, it's a dictatorship versus a democracy. And while giants like Google can potentially dictate, they are more benevolent and aware of the community's needs.

Apple's war on the Internet is not a complete win. Much has yet to be done about Flash, about being able to search through an app collection wider than 3-4 iPhones. I would suggest the company rethink its goals, and also bear in mind: Why do I need an app that only a fraction of developers know how to build (thereby more expensive), only a fraction of people will get to use (thereby less profitable), and with a potential chance of being rejected by a third party; when I can build an app using open, common technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python, etc. Time spent focusing on shiny buttons is time lost on accommodating developers is chances of building real and useful apps wasted. Don't get me started on the idea of interactive ads. Most apps are already ads in and of themselves. Unobtrusive is the best cure for a necessary evil. Google already figured that out. Time to stop reinventing the wheel.

Back in college, if I had to get my old hellolittlefriend.com website approved by Google or Yahoo or Apple prior to launch, it would have never seen the light of day, and I'd be a few months less of a front-end web engineer. I might have never even gotten the needed break. The site was a UX what-not-to-do: CSS was wonky, the jQuery was horribly inefficient, and the Portfolio page had 50+ full-sized images. But no users were harmed in its making, and I learned from my mistakes. Coupling its review process with its hands-off-my-shiny-shell policy, Apple is doing such a disservice to education, I would suggest Mr. Jobs, in light of this hypocrisy, to retract his speech at the 2005 Stanford commencement. It turns out, never settling and thinking different are not always good.

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Coding Update #2: Front-end Builds Framework

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:01:21 -0700

A quick update for those who are interested and don't follow me on Github, I wrote this tool for people like me who write a lot of HTML/CSS at their jobs, and especially have to present those templates as deliverables. A lot of the times you're only responsible for the frontend development, so it's hard to get the benefits of server-side web development. In other words, you have to repeat yourself a bunch of times as you're coding, and it starts to get messy. I just hacked together something using XML and PHP to keep the content separate. There's not much separate documentation, just inline comments, but the tool is definitely usable (especially by those who understand basic PHP). A demo, also in progress, can be seen here.

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Painting #1 – RFC

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:48:00 -0700

It's been a while since the last update. I have been trying to squeeze in more hours on Wren, the new Cintiq WX (my thumbdrive is Pigeon, macbook is Penguin, and pc tower is Nest). This is a painting that's been put off time and time again, mostly because it was ridiculously difficult to redo the lines digitally with the old Graphire III. It was started at a time when I was a lot more interested in painting digitally. I'm starting to regain that interest, despite the overwhelming amount of work required in this piece. It is meant to be at print quality (at around 300-pixel resolution). I'm posting for documentation, self-motivation, and hopefully one or two comments. Colors are in progress, but they are even less done than the lines.

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Sketches #5

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:28:00 -0800

This weekend, for the UCLA Animation Workshop's Annual Falling Lizard Competition, I had the amazing chance to draw on a Cintiq 21UX with Brandon Chau and Eric Carlson for their entry for the central theme, failure, about a mad scientist living in a trailer while harboring a craving for meat. I did a couple backgrounds in Photoshop. This experience has made me realize two things: I need a Cintiq NOW, and I will need to work with these guys again in the near future on something even bigger.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Update:

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Coding Update #1: Git, MVC, & .NET

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:14:00 -0800

I've finally started using my GitHub account. I've had it since almost a year ago, but only recently decided to dive into the Git commands in bash. The learning curve is definitely manageable, if you're not afraid to google. This sudden shift from SVN is mostly invoked by jQuery's move. A good amount of the source code I 'clone' for my own use (I'm not a fan of browsing for download links) is on GitHub, too. As awesome as TortoiseSVN is, GitHub just seems to have so much potential, at least over Google Code.

I've also started venturing into MVC web frameworks again, mostly in PHP, since it's mostly what I know server-side. I'm going to redo the back-end for my site, so I can extend it with more flexibility and creativity. This will definitely be a long-term project, with a lot of long pauses and short spurts of activity. But it just plain sucks that I can't easily build new portions of my site without affecting or changing the old, because Indexhibit or WordPress are simply not designed to be highly extensible, from a development standpoint. They're also not really getting improved upon very quickly, at least in the rate their language platform (PHP) is -- which actually isn't that quickly. And as a side note, looking at the BuddyPress source--which sits on top of WordPressMU, induces powerful headaches. So I've just abandoned what most of the internet runs on; what do I want?

More specifically, a good framework, in my opinion, simplifies basic and routine routing logic, database logic, validation logic, state logic, and view logic, all the while having an established and simple entry points for the developer's own code. But to be honest, I don't necessarily mind extending NDXZ or WP, but it's just that it gets old after a while, and the excitement of a challenge gives away to tedium in the face of very little time. All this is making me want to switch to Django or Rails and sacrifice a bit of time to learn their respective languages. That's a bit extreme, since there's nothing really missing from PHP.

So I'm trying out Recess for size, and then will compare it to Cake. Recess, even after a trial run, still seems very magical and reasonably stable for how new it is. I just hope it pulls through and gets enough developers and polish. And Cake seems very reliable, due to the big community, so I owe it to myself to give it a go. CodeIgniter and Garden seem to be suffering from DukeNukemForever-itis, so like NDXZ and WP, they are also time-sucks/time-bombs to be developing on.

I'm still going to improve and maintain my NDXZ, WP, and Vanilla extensions, and will be putting more into GitHub. But for myself and my own projects, it's time for some change.

Lastly, I've been introduced to the Microsoft ASP.NET stack recently. The conversion from XAMPP hasn't been too horrible, since I've been fed with OO my entire programming life. Plus, integration of the stack seems quite good: IDE, source control, reporting, database, and programming language all fit nicely. Microsoft's products are beginning to get to me, or at least they're definitely not as bad as people make them out to be. They just need better UI people, at least for the web. I'm personally a huge fan of the old-school, beveled warm-gray window chrome.

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Sketches #4

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:35:00 -0800

2005-2009

A new year, so out with the old. The sketchbook is still half blank, but it's about time for an update. I'm anxious the years-old ink is starting to fade and yellow the pages too much. Better digitize and correct it for the screen; it's now or never.

I've had it since age 13 or 14, but actually started using it like a sketchbook only after college, when drawing time was less plenty. These days free time is only more scarce. Most of the later sketches took an hour or less.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Sketches #3

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:07:06 -0800

Managed to refactor the last bit of Processing code to have less surprises. Still playing around with the language's core drawing and math features, so I am for now avoiding all the fun, more advanced libraries and frameworks like 3D and OpenGL, as well (but not as much) the Java underpinnings. Also, just so I don't give out wrong expectations, I'm mostly sticking to just static prints. The light at the end of this long tunnel of coding is to create tools and/or assets akin to this that I can combine with illustration in perhaps a sci-fi narrative.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Sketches #2

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:03:00 -0800

Discovered tonight I am very rusty at Processing. Regardless, this is an attempt to plot parallel lines of points in set intervals to create a "cable" effect, which soon evolved to pivoting the corner point at the center. Will probably make it prettier and more controlled at a later date.

Also, I added an old screen from a sketch from April. Really wish I had more time for this stuff...

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Sketches #1

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:17:00 -0800

Process:

Draw a random, curved shape.
Fill in the shape with machine components and various hull decorations, using the curves as bumps, ridges, and cables to guide the final form.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Haiku #2

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:43:00 -0800

the moon of your heart
will guide light on the darkness
of this fleeting world

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Lyrics #1

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:15:00 -0800

it was just the day before,
a dream with my white eyes open wide
in there with the sky above,
were you and a storytale that read

once upon a time ago,
soaring in the actual skies,
you could do it and
all it was is that

basking in the vapor stream
extending my white hand far and wide
that atmosphere certainly
is already made out to you and me

once upon a time ago,
putting real things into words,
could not be done and
all you saw is that

underneath the usual skies,
meeting you there late tonight,
i could do it and
all i want is that

always up ahead
is the other side

freedom for certain
awaits over there
(awaits over there)
with the consequence

ktv version adapted from english translation on supercarband.com

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Essay: Navigating The New Housing Boom

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:14:00 -0800

Websites are like houses. The creator of Django confirms this idea I've had in my head for a while. While I lack his experience working with the internet, and I have not worked in construction or studied architecture, I see the similarities in the processes. I also believe these similarities will can help us correctly defined the future of websites.

Definitions

Most websites are, or should be, functional, so they're rarely foremost works of visual spectacle. I am excluding the genre of the Flash-based brochure sites, as they are closer to commercialized movies. I am referring to sites that foremost deal with data: its storage, distribution, presentation, aggregation, and management. Since the internet is about interacting with information, it doesn't do much good if the information is static, like in a brochure site. Therefore I'm referring to sites where the data is very dynamic. Of course, it doesn't matter what the site does; sites do a lot of things, from tracking your life to being a game.

If making websites was about visual spectacle, it would be more like making a painting or a movie, all about the visual feel with little concern about supporting functional, non-linear interactivity. Rather, making websites is different and harder in two ways. First, websites, like other software that support user-interaction are non-linear. This changes a lot of the underlying creative thought process. Instead of just imagining the natural, cumulative, visual progression of strokes on the canvas or frames in the clip, you have to think of use cases, the variety of paths that branch and fork depending on what the user is looking for. The user is given too much interactive power for linearity to work.

And that's how, for a while now, I've realized like many, many others, the website of our time is actually software.

Analogies

And making software is like making houses. Both tasks take a very long time. There are numerous stages, and I'm sure, variations of processes for projects of various scale. There are many components and with them, are constraints. And these standards must be met, or the result is unusable. Just like poisonous Chinese drywall doesn't meet standards, make people sick, and devalue the houses they're in; a website where there are ads anchored to malware or flash banners that interfere with the layout and content upon mouse-over will drive away readers and actually lower revenue, thanks to ad-block features on browsers and userscripts. Or something as careless as forgetting user-friendly color contrast.

Software is heavily indebted to its implementation. In most fields of visual media, the task of implementation has been automated, so most of the labor of making a book is making the designs, the page layouts, and choosing typefaces, color, and other visual assets. While libraries and frameworks like jQuery, CodeIgniter, and WordPress have helped a lot, such that the level of automation that allows us to, in construction terms and according to Mr. Moss, assemble heavily pre-fabricated rooms, though at the expense of some ability to customize. Still! someone making a website has to think of why a page shows up blank; and if he wants to have more visual control over the layout, he must learn a relatively advanced subset of markup languages like HTML and CSS before being able to change something conceptually simple like the gutter-width on a column. Imagine if someone making a book had to do that. Or that a reader needed the right set of 'browser reading glasses' to view a book's pages correctly. Albeit, you can choose sewing, gluing, and binding your own copies instead of the press; but printers can do everything, while you retain near-complete control over design and material. WordPress.com and other non-coder web platforms still require coding if you want to get that other 20% of the website perfect. And they represent only a small subset of current web-apps. As Mr. Harris says, "[The tools aren't there yet. We need better tools and the people to build them.]"

So, my deductions are 1) websites are non-linear by nature, and 2) implementing a website is a process that, with our level of tools today, cannot be easily automated. And that's why making a website is a lot of work, like building a house. A big site like Facebook would be akin to a skyscraper, or maybe even a cluster of them. And designing the interaction for a big site like that requires a deeper understanding of the website's architecture and community, a keen foresight of cause and effect, and definitely of the tools available. I have always felt Facebook is what it is because of its scale and (improving or worsening) level of functionality, and not because its main color is blue, or that it mostly forgoes rounded corners.

That said, it's time for people who want websites and the people who make them to get a little more serious about the task.

Imagine a house. Here some walls are built differently than others. Some doors use a square knob, others a round one. And not one room's window is shaped like the others'. Like this house.

You can't see the real suck behind a bad website, but you feel it the more you use the site, and eventually the sloppiness of the architecture and construction are revealed. It could be that the free CMS you got is a half-organized gigantic bundle of patches and debris, making it hard to develop off of. So you started mixing content, presentation, and business logic; and with each ensuing update the site's visual consistency got thinner. Spacing being off, buttons not aligning, modules looking slightly yet painfully out of place, some parts not even loading. Or perhaps the plugin or extension you mindlessly downloaded lacks proper documentation, or does not follow modern web standards or an appropriate, clear design pattern. Or perhaps it doesn't know how to communicate with your other plugins to make sure they don't all do a costly HTTP import of the same JavaScript library, and so it slows down the load time of the page. And if you don't know much code, you don't know what to do when this plugin breaks with that extension, except to beg the under-compensated developer to spend his time dealing with someone else's code. It's as if we developers build websites expecting them to be short-term and disposable, because only with extra effort can a website / framework / application be made somewhat less of a nightmare to maintain. And that effort is really effortless when we understand the impact of our work. We're building real things that others interact with. We're affecting people's lives and livelihood. No joke.

So what (now)?

The problem is this is somewhat accepted, in the sense a real website analogous to that house isn't torn down. And in some places, it has become the culture, the norm; and you'd get fired for voicing out. Otherwise, a lot of the under-budget regions of the web are filled with poor software. Despite a quality website's heavy reliance on customized, product-specific implementation, the general mass have little care or knowledge to code. The result are ghost-towns where these houses do not fit/connect with their intended community, and it's mostly due to poor or inappropriate implementation, usually brought on by poor or inappropriate planning, from both the site-makers and the toolmakers.

To be fair, there are also constraints with resources. Clients think about how much money they're burning and their business' cash flow. Designers lack the time to research the platforms, frameworks, libraries, plugins, and general technological restraints they are designing for. I am almost certain this is not the case with architecture, where you don't just implement the design for a 500-story skyscraper. Meanwhile, developers think about how in the world they can make the 2-month deadline for that 500-story high skyscraper; because they are usually at the end of the production pipeline. And users, including myself, focus mostly on that the app doesn't have a subscription fee, or at least has the free option.

So then, what's the solution? Should we blame global competition and currency imbalances for driving rates down on the workers, the builders, the developers who hold the most power and responsibility for a website? Because $15/hr is a wage that cannot feed a family, at least not in Los Angeles. But web services like oDesk are making that wage deflation a harsh reality, no irony intended.

I think it's only appropriate for me to list a few things I want to fix, and to have you and the community involved in this new construction take it from there.

The guy in charge of content needs a better, layman tool to manage and grow it.
The guy in charge of the code needs a raise. He also needs to let go and stop using bad software, which thereby taints everything he builds. Hopefully with the raise, he'll have the resources to learn new tools, help improve existing open-source tools, as well as role out his own tools to grow the development community.
The end user needs to realize the web is software, start demanding the best quality, most forward-thinking software, and stop putting up with sloppy, outdated software. This includes browsers. The realization of software should lead to some consciousness of the different approaches to web software. Hopefully the less merited approaches will get more public criticism.
The client needs to research (or hire someone to research) what already exists on the web, and learn to forgo features, and if needed, leverage the existing utilities (i.e. social networks, media hubs) in his own website. This way, he doesn't copy Google in terms of features, but has a better chance of imitating Google's quality of implementation. Less things to do means more time to do them better.
Mentioned before, the designer needs to accept and study the two differences between web and print media: nonlinearity and the highly unpredictable cost of implementation. A successful website/user-experience design needs to find solutions for both issues.
Lastly, and this is more of a wish: for too long has it been OK for the general public to have this phobia/aversion to anything related to the internals of computing, primarily code. To me, the only difference between Mandarin and PHP is Mandarin is a human language and PHP is for web servers. Both have good parts and parts that suck due to growing pains. (Apparently, there was no consideration given to how the romanization of Mandarin would be compatible with English pronouciation, despite English being the world language; and this has caused a lot of our names to be butchered). There ought to be no barrier for users even submitting specifications and pseudo-code for developers to follow. The quality of community-driven tools is directly proportional to the amount of participants × their average talent × the efficacy of their participation.

If we are going to move our lives online, then let's at least demand better housing.

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Haiku #1

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:39:00 -0700

all of an absurd

sudden, the hopeless gloom gives

to great light and hope

is it real

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