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The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in New York City "I surf as much as I eat." curiouslee in...   Hiptop Nation Mirror Project Google Images The City Paper UMBC TechPort email me past monthly... 2000:10.11.12 2001:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08. 09.10.11.12 2002:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10.11.12
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Sunday, June 30, 2002
Warchalking on campus  Helping to propagate Matt's incendiary new warchalking meme, I marked The Bunting Building of The Maryland Institute College of Art. The building houses the library, and the computer labs where I teach web design. It's so nice to be able to get e-mail and sync Avantgo in and around the building with my Audiovox Maestro and Socket WiFi card. I think I'm going to talk to some people about a network-aware sculpture or installation. Visiting the magic mirror of life On our way to the Bunting Building, we couldn't miss Jack & Beverly's giant camera obscura, which was set up on the grassy median in front of the Main Building. Jack is the chair of the photo department, and Beverly works as a corporate web developer. They were demoing it to a writer-photographer from Baltimore Magazine. We paused before the warchalking to say hi and to check out the inside as we missed the last live demo on campus.  Here's Amy with Beverly & Jack Wilgus, the proprietors of the giant camera obscura.  This is a super-wide angle fisheye view from inside the camera obscura. The entrance to the main building is projected on the round white table (distorted by my lens). The wide open aperture is visible at the top of the frame. The mirror is in a motorized turret that can sight any direction around the camera tent.  And here's a closer look at the projected image. It's the construction crane over the site of the upcoming Brown Center digital arts building. Then we were off to Towson to see Spielberg's Minority Report. Saturday, June 29, 2002
Sharing stories I got a "hello there" via e-mail from local artist Bill Dugan a couple weeks ago, and we hooked up Thursday night for a tour of my office and dinner. Bill is an illustrator working at a game development company and keeps a blog too. It was great to synchronize on our similar interests and past journeys. Bill is particularly passionate about storytelling and graphic novels, and I look forward to more mind-melds in the future. In a different kind of sharing, I'm teaching Dreamweaver Web Page II all day today for Continuing Studies today at MICA. Friday, June 28, 2002
The monster truck arrived My wife got her new Gateway Computer today. I've named it "The Monster Truck" as it is loaded with extras. The "dashboard" is a gorgeous 17" flat panel LCD. She is actually going to modify a skateboard with big wheels to serve as a movable base so she can roll the CPU around to vaccum under it. I think flame stickers, and an STP decal are not far behind. This is quite a step up in scale and power from the tiny Sharp Actius sub-notebook she's been using. Thursday, June 27, 2002
Summer sun  A typical hazy summer sun over Baltimore's Harbor. Humidity rules. I've started testing the replacement for my worn out Nikon Coolpix 950, a Coolpix 995. Warehouse.com is closing out refurbished models for around $475 as the new Coolpix 4500 is on the way. So far, the camera works great, but the chunky design is going to take some time to get used to. Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Amazing micro machines Here are some amazing structures that help deliver some of the raw materials that enlighten and entertain us. About the size of an ant's big toe, the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems or MEMS shown here are etched out of exotic compounds by a complex photo-chemical process.  Here's ink-jet printer nozzle from The Society for Imaging Science and Technology's technical overview on Progress and Trends in Ink-jet Printing Technology. The Scanning Electron Micrographs render the ink nozzles and droplets at an almost monumental scale. And Adam recently sent a link to Texas Instrument's site on the Digital Light Processing Technology used in the projection systems of a growing number of movie theaters.  Shown here is a Digital Micro-mirror Device (DMD) at the same scale as the ink-jet nozzle. The excellent Flash demo explains how these things work in the projection process. And here's a gallery of Scanning Electron Microscope images. On my list of things to do very soon is a visit to the nearest theater showing Attack of the Clones in digital. Sunday, June 23, 2002
Fugitive blog restored I finally got most of my files back up after the server crash, and the ISP's rather unceremonious e-mail saying our accounts are active again but all the root files are gone forever. I miss the days when our provider was run by a local guy who we knew personally. Then they got acquired in Affinity.com's rollup run, and I'm sure our ragtag bank of SGI IRIX boxes are on minimal support. The fact that they didn't have a backup confirms this. Now the planning starts to move to a real provider. I'll be working today to fix some of the archive pages. Friday, June 21, 2002
3D paper periodic table  Feeding my interest in dimensionalizing data printed on paper—and there's not much being done out there—I happened on The DeskTopper, a periodic table of elements projected on to a paper sculpture. The site describes the unique features, shows steps for assembly, and offers an online order form for various classroom kits. And check out these wacky alternative designs. For even more detail, check out patent no. 3581409. The USPT database has only images of the page available. The images require a TIFF plug-in on the PC and QuickTime on the Mac. Thursday, June 20, 2002
The annotated flatland I've been leafing through the new annotated edition of Edwin Abbott's classic social satire Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The updated text by Ian Stewart adds yet another dimension of interesting marginalia to the original manuscript. Here's a review. Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Content management overkill ContentWire summarizes a recent Jupiter Media Metrix report which finds that businesses are drastically over-spending on digital content management systems. While the business landscape is riddled with bloated, ineffective deployments, the need for workable solutions is greater than ever. Jupiter research director David Schatsky said, "Web sites with specific content management needs often focus on the platform that will 'do it all,' rather than match specific problems to specific, often lower-cost, tactical solutions." Jupiter also predicts the number of homegrown content management systems will double by 2004. Tuesday, June 18, 2002
On newspaper typography FONT Magazine explores the changing role of typography in the news media. Via antenna. International UI terms Microsoft offers a handy cross reference of user interface terms in 24 languages. Look at German first to see some longer strings. What they need is RTFM in the same languages. Which reminds me, a couple weeks ago, Wired had a great article on how software manuals are used in various countries. Funny: János Kosztolányi, who translates documentation into Hungarian for IBM, Microsoft and other technical companies, said his main focus is making sure that companies provide do-it-yourself repair information. 15 properties of "wholeness" From Brad Appleton's notes from a 1997 lecture on the work of the visionary Christopher Alexander: Through repeated experiments, Alexander has correlated this objective sense of beauty to the presence of fifteen fundamental properties which recur throughout human cognition and are apparently rooted deep within the psyche. The number of these properties (15) is not at all "magical" in any way. It is completely arbitrary, and merely the byproduct of correlating the results from Alexander's experiments." Visit Appleton's page of notes for the rest of this great recap of Christopher Alexander's work. Alexander's book series culminating 30 years of research in design pattern theories, The Nature of Order, is finally coming this year. Monday, June 17, 2002
Jellyfish lake in digital When you arrive at Eric Chen's portfolio of photos, you'll have to take a moment to meditate on his arrestingly beautiful digital images from Jellyfish Lake in Palau. Contrast the jellyfish with the water bubbles at Kona. And lastly, turtles! Escher's singularities Surfing around for non-math stuff on topology, I found this nice little page at Platonic Realms on M.C. Escher. I'm reintroduced to Print Gallery, a work in which Escher explores on paper the logic and topology of space by folding an illustration into a hole or singularity in the center of the drawing. I need a way to add singularities into my web site maps to solve navigation problems. Cheaper by the terabyte American Scientist has an overview of the past, present, and future of hard disk storage. The article predicts a 120 terabyte storage device in 10 years which will make it possible for you to store every piece of information you might encounter in a lifetime. The only limiting factor at that point is the cost of the content itself.  It still blows my mind every time I use my IBM Microdrive. To think that they've crammed a drive motor, disc platter, pick-up head, actuator, and electronics into a space smaller and thinner than a pad of Post-IT Notes strongly suggests some kind of black magic is going on. The IBM site says they will be able to achieve 6 gigabytes of storage in this form factor in 2 years! Sunday, June 16, 2002
Softimage is the force behind Yoda It looks like Lucasfilm embargoed the press and vendors from running "making of" articles on Attack of the Clones until June 10th. Now Softimage's web magazine is running a feature story on the making of the digital Yoda in Attack of the Clones. The article is light on substance, but there's a great frame grab of Yoda getting ready to show Count Dooku what for. For more meaty coverage, VFXpro has a long feature with more hi-rez movie frames, and a look at Yoda's console. And the current issue of Wired has an interesting quote from Steven Spielberg on digital filmmaking: Now the thing I'm most saddened by is the constant talk about the photochemical process becoming a thing of Thomas Edison's past. There's a magic about chemistry and film. Sure, a digital shot is steady. It doesn't have to ride through the gate of a projector. And, sure, it's as clean as the OR in a major hospital. That's exactly what's wrong with it. Film has a molecular structure called grain; even a still of just a flower in a vase has life because of the grain, because of the molecules in the film. Especially if you sit in the first five rows of any movie theater, you know what I'm talking about. The screen is alive. The screen is always alive with chaos and excitement, and that will certainly be gone when we convert to a digital camera and a digital projector. I was one of the first people to use digital technology to enhance my films, but I'm going to be the last person to use digital technology to shoot my movies. Saturday, June 15, 2002
Starting small So I'll reboot this blog with a post on the theme of small: The London Design Collective has generated a lot of traffic and blog chatter on their project to create the world's smallest web site. In an 18 pixel square they cram in Flash games, haiku, a Google search gateway and much more. InMyExperience, a new blog, posts a link to a nice set of tiny 10 pixel square icons. A couple months back, BBCi reported on "The Smallest Book in the World," and you can order it for $110 from Die Gestalten Verlag. And I don't know how I missed the direct link to the Nixie tube watch in my previous post, but here's the page of info. The watch can be yours for only $499. Alive, really...  R.P. Bird wonders if I'm dead. Clearly not—I thanked him for asking. I'm finally coming up for air after a crush of IA work, teaching, and my personal project on Dimensional Deliverables. This weekend, I'm going to backfill the empty span with some photos and random links. Today I'm going to the last of three days at Hypertext 2002. It's been a great mind-clearing conference full of wonderful people. Next week, I'm going to finish off the Powerpoint of my July 16th talk for the Direct Marketing Association of Washington's Annual Conference: How Does a Web Site Become Worthy of Your Love? I'll post some thoughts on the talk here as I finalize them.
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