The very first projection onto the SMALLab floor at Parsons.

Couple of awesome updates. The most important is that Shawn and Kelly from ASU helped Kyle and me set up the SMALLab installation at Parsons. Very, very cool.

Distortion: Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

Kyle and I got processing communicating with the system in about a half hour and made a couple of nice sketches with two balls tracking. Should be a good kick off for making lessons starting two weeks from now. Here's a YouTube video of that:

Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

Processing. What it is and how to get it:

• Processing.org
• Processing Language Reference
• Processing Examples

Precedents:

• Joshua Davis
• French Automata
• Wooden Mirror
• Zach Lieberman "Drawn" (http://www.thesystemis.com)
• Evan Roth
  • "Grafitti Analysis" (http://a.parsons.edu/~roth/thesis/TEMP_graf_analysis/index.html)
  • GRL (http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76)
• Cory Arcangel "Cloud" (http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2003/)
• John F. Simon Jr. "Every Icon"(http://numeral.com/appletsoftware/eicon.html)
• Map of the Market (http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/)
• Jared Tarbell "SUBSTRATE"
  (http://complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/)
• Flight404
  (http://flight404.com/blog/)
• Casey Reas "GroupC"
  (http://groupc.net/)
• {Software} Sructures
  (http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/)

Practice. What you need to know to start being a programmer:

• Wikipedia: Flowchart
• Wikipedia: Pseudocode
• Wikipedia: Hello World!

I presented an overview of the Sydewynder application to Sven Travis's Creativity and Computation lecture class today. I've attached the PowerPoint and PDF below (and an OpenDocument presentation can be posted, if anybody wants that).

Also, I've released Sydewynder 0.1.1, which has the option to take screenshots of the apps as they run (useful for putting together the presentation) and a new "Round Robin" sample app that shows how to send a single SMS messages to multiple recipients and multiple messages to several recipient lists.

The latest version of Sydewynder, our mobile application server for the S60, has been released! With Sydewynder, any S60 phone, like the Nokia N80, can become an automated SMS gateway. You can grab version 0.1 off of the SourceForge site.

This new version features:

• scripts can now connect to WiFi, making Internet-enabled responses possible!
• emulator for off-phone development. Now students don't need to have a phone to develop mobile apps for it
• two tabbed pane view for logging and status indicators
• start up screen -- very pretty!
• a much better UI
• a new example application using WiFi - "We Feel Fine". It taps into the wefeelfine.org API

And these bugs were fixed:

• recipients in the address book could not receive text message responses
• unicode text problems

Much thanks for Sven, Colleen, Chuck, Eric, Albert, and Chloe for their support, ideas, and code.

We discuss some of the history and structure of the Internet, using historyoftheinternet.org as our guide.

• History of the Internet
• Telegraph
• Vannevar Bush

In this course students re-invent Lang’s student newspaper as a web-based community for Lang College. Focusing on questions of how to translate a print-based medium into an interactive community, students consider what additional technological experience needs be added; how an electronic newspaper is read and used; what links to include to other portions of the university, the city, and the world. Working with a Web designer, students build and test a prototype. The course involves learning about how online communities work, and an examination of what the different kinds of online community are. It involves survey Some prior technical knowledge is preferred. This course also satisfies a requirement for Writing. ing Lang students about their online habits and needs.

Co-taught by Karl Mendonca and Mike Edwards.

After a what amounts to full year of preparation, bootcamp is underway, and I'm helming a code class. Time to put up or shut up.

So far, things are going pretty well. After a shaky start with the blogs, it looks like most of the students are rocking on them, and we're starting to see some outstanding work posted. They're tired (weren't we all, way back in 2006,) but they seem to be getting on.

Here are my students' blogs:

Akiko Rokube

Carlos Lopez

Elie Stevenson

Fengyu Hao

Jessica Johnson

Pasquale Chieffalo

Jia Zhang

Joana Kelly

Joanna Zdeb

Lynn Maharas

Michael Thibodeau

Rohini Metharam

Stephanie Mendolia

Wai Sze