kathy's blog

well maybe u do in delhi from june onwards, but today was my first elephant-in-the-street-sighting, so thought I'd share some pics.

the driver stopped the car so I could take the photos. I think he got a fright as I started getting too excited saying "there's an elephant, an elephant!" - tourists hey...

I need a faster camera though - missed the good shot of his head. was too busy watching him walk past.

people were giving me funny looks from the side of the road - same old same old to them I guess..

Play Quicktime version

There's a couple of conferences coming up which I wouldn't mind checking out.. don't think I'll have a chance in person as I'm still in Delhi for work, but I think they'll have video / audio recordings of them so I can check out later.

Vloggercon 2006 is being held in San Francisco this year. Here's the blurb from their site:
"VLOGGERCON 2006 is the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco.

In the past year, videoblogging has grown into a myriad of forms with a worldwide voice. And your voice is needed at Vloggercon– after all, the media is being made by you so it’s your voice that we want to hear! Vloggercon is a two-day collection of roundtable discussions about the emergence and the future of this new medium; not a series of lec-tures. This conference is created for meeting and learning from each other, so be ready to share your thoughts!

Vloggercon 2006 will be held June 10 & 11 at the Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street, San Francisco CA 94114. "
http://www.vloggercon.com/ - tickets are available online.

Where 2.0
This one's about locative and GIS / Google Earth, Second Life / Electric Sheep & similar web apps. Would be good to see what's happening on this front at the moment. Here's the blurb from their site :

" Everything happens somewhere. With open source and free web mapping tools like Ka-Map and Google Maps, we finally have a way to display location information. At last year's Where 2.0, we put the spotlight on the grassroots developers building mash-ups on platforms from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google. This year we'll look at the latest developments in those platforms as well as the latest startups, civic projects, and labs experiments built on them.

In addition you'll find source mapping tools, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. "
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2006/

here's another video of part of the drive to work - this time you can see some of the apartments, shops and people of New Delhi (southern region).

itunes seems to play the direct links, otherwise try videolan if the video doesn't play in the browser automatically. try double clicking the video window in th browser to start playing

--UPDATE : I've changed the video player link below to use the vPIP (video Playing in Place) utility from Cinegage Utilities and quicktime seems to like it better!
try the util for yourself @ http://utilities.cinegage.com/videos-playing-in-place/

Play Quicktime version

double click on the movie to play and stop if it doesn't autoplay

direct link - mpeg4 video format (~8Mb):
http://www.archive.org/download/Delhi__Drive_to_work_28042006/Delhi_driv...

direct link - .mv4 video ipod / psp format (~15.2Mb)
http://www.archive.org/download/Delhi__Drive_to_work_28042006_.mv4/Delhi...

Here's a quick video I shot whilst driving to work yesterday - it's of a few scenes in New Delhi, India. I don't really like talking on camera but thought it was time I practiced and started uploading some more videos.

It's an .mv4 file - hopefully it will open in QuickTime!

Play Quicktime version

or click on the link below for direct download / to open file manually

http://www.archive.org/download/Delhi__Drive_to_work_25042006/delhi_driv...

this is a test only to check I can load processing applets on this site.

this is one of the basic tutorials (with adjusted parameters) - nothing too exciting!

width="400" height="400" mayscript="true">

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com

Source code: sketch_060416a

Built with Processing

Vade's blog also mentions a Processing workshop he went to - Daniel Shiffman's workshop pages has tutorials and examples for Processing. his website is http://shiffman.net/ - check the examples here also.

Shiffman teaches java programming :

beginners course info

advanced sessions

the class delicious links are @ http://del.icio.us/tag/natureofcode/

& class wiki is @ http://www.shiffman.net/coursewiki/

NYU colab site has some good info & links on multimedia, processing, max/msp, gps and more
http://colab.hunter.cuny.edu/colabcms/news.php

Vade's blog has max patches and tutorials for creating glitch videos and other cool stuff.

here's a photo of my new purchase - finally went to a mac! now I just have to get used to using the apple key instead of the ctrl key in windows / on my old laptop.

have been reading about Boot camp - it's all over the mail lists and blogosphere at the moment - MACs running Windows XP. even macs with infamous BlueScreenOfDeath (BSOD). interesting times ahead.

Today I'm meant to be packing up my things as it's my last weekend in Auckland. One more week of work here then I'm on holidays for about 5 weeks - 10 days in Sydney (more packing!) then flying back to NZ to drive around the South Island.

I bought a few DVDs last year and haven't had a chance to watch them yet. This one's amazing - they're all having such fun. It's been around for a while and the film has played at many of the film festivals and there's been live gigs in Los Angeles.

Buy a copy!!

KEEPINTIME - A LIVE RECORDING

here's the trailer from the Mochilla website
http://www.mochilla.com/keepintime/

http://www.mochilla.com/keepintime/trailers.htm

click on the image to goto the video player page

This is a reply to a post on Stealth board listing the software I'm using most often these days.

http://www.stealthmag.com/board/viewthread.php?tid=6461

yeah gimp is good. the interface isn't as nice as photoshop but it's free / open source and has many of the same features for image editing & conversion. if u were a graphic designer u'd probably go with photoshop cs or similar but for simple resizing/cropping and converting gimp does the same job.
http://www.gimp.org

here's a list of my fav s/w atm (at least what I'm using most these days). I've been playing with a bit of videoblogging so a lot of this is video related. (not in any order)

isadora : http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html
it's really cool for realtime video processing. so u could spend hours using it. even if u don't have a camera yourself, just download some quicktime movies from one of the videoblogging sites and do a cutup remix or something. the demo version (which I'm still using) only lets u save 5sec, so to make anything longer, u can just save 5sec at a time then past e them altogether in quicktime or another editing tool. some of the effects are similar to jitter (the video add on to max/msp) but they're all prebuilt so u don't have to write the code. just connect the patch cords.
http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html

max/msp http://www.cycling74.com
- it's great for writing realtime music. generally used in art / sound art installations or universities and experimental performances. jitter is the video processing as mentioned above. easy to spend hours using it. though the learning curve is a bit steep until u get the hang of it. I did a course which was helpful. has a 30 day demo. I bought the student price which is $59 for 9months licence so handy if you're doing a project.
http://www.cycling74.com

quicktime pro - www.apple.com/quicktime
if u pay the $30 to upgrade to quicktime pro u can then do video editing in quicktime. it does interactive video as well. and you can add text tracks, html links, link the whole video movie.
www.apple.com/quicktime

freemind mind mapping software
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- this is great for writing all those ideas down and collecting your thoughts & brainstorming
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

drupal - www.drupal.org
- I use this every day. it's a CMS (content management system) and has features such as blog, rss, chat, forums, user access, stories, project management, images, videoblogging & podcasting support, + a heap more. basically it creates your website then you can start posting information up and sorting/catergorising it
www.drupal.org

if u don't have a website, setup a blogger.com account (free) and start posting info and your creations and let us know the links.

avid free DV - http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp
- it's a cutdown version of avid's non-linear editing software. perfect for home use. has the same interface as the versions used in professional video editing houses so good to learn if u hope to work in that field one day.
http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp

skype - www.skype.com
- for chatting to your friends for free. good for collaborative projects also.
www.skype.com

eZediaQTI - http://www.ezedia.com/products/eZediaQTI/
- for creating quicktime videos / videoblog movies. easy to do text and tracks and interactivity if you don't want to do it manually in quicktime. demo version limited to 5 objects but that's usually ok for small projects
http://www.ezedia.com/products/eZediaQTI/

itunes - www.apple.com/itunes
- for listening to music and podcasts. ipodder/lemon also good
www.apple.com/itunes

audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- for audio recording and basic processing. u could do a track for the stealth remix thread in this!
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

hiphopstarz - www.hiphopstarz.com
- free, basic sequencer for creating beats. it's a very simple interface. looks a bit dodgy but works ok for beginner level stuff. doesn't have all the features of cuebase etc, but it's free. if anyone has another good free /opensource replacement, let us know!
www.hiphopstarz.com

fireant - http://fireant.tv/download
- great videoblog aggregator / viewer. you can also use itunes or just view in the web pages, but this is a separate app which does it also. they usually recommend some good videos to watch / subscribe to.
http://fireant.tv/download

if I had a mac I'd be using quartz composer for video also. but I don't so I can't :(

ourmedia - ourmedia.org + Internet Archive - www.archive.org
- I use this to upload video and audio to IA. it's also a blogging site similar to blogger but looks different. if u need hosting space, this could be an option for original works ie don't upload your mp3 collection or u'll be banned. but if u make a track or a video they'd love u to upload it (free)
www.ourmedia.org

some of the producers here could possibly recommend better audio software. but have a play with video - it's fun. combines everything!

microsoft visual c# - www.microsoft.com
- if you want to try programming, c# is probably good to start with. it's a bit like c and java, but you can use the IDE and create windows/web apps pretty easily.
www.microsoft.com

flickr - www.flickr.com
- upload all your photos. it's social software, so you can add friends and tags, and see when your friends upload new pics, and they see when u do. also good for hosting your images. u can get a free account or upgrade to a paid account if u have lots of pics
www.flickr.com

test only - testing an rss feed for another site. move along... nothing to see here...

I've been thinking about different publishing & distribution methods and as it often happens the conversation appears on a site or mail list around the same time. early in feb, the node-l (node-London) promo emails starting making the rounds of the net lists. it sounds like a great collective of grassroots, funded & professional new media organisations based in London. (read through the list of projects on their site!) initially I was thinking this would be great to have internationally or at least in Australia / New Zealand as well - node-b (brisbane), node-s (sydney), node-m (melbourne), node-a (auckland) or node-au (australia) & node-nz (new zealand). another section of their promo which caught my eye was the POD - print on demand. I followed the links and discovered the mute site is based on CiviCRM which is an offshoot of Drupal (basically it's Drupal with a nice installer and some extra custom themes). Drupal's my favourite CMS as anyone who knows me would know - this site is done in drupal. (finally upgraded to latest version, but haven't had time to add more features yet). anyway, the POD concept is quite cool. people could make their own custom pdfs. researchers could pdf their reference articles for research. endless possibilities. I might try out the 'save to pdf' feature. on the Stealth message board I frequent, Mark was talking about new concepts & suggestions for Stealth mag, so I posted the below message. there's heaps of other options but not sure if he's wanting to go the online publishing method. I think it would work well in conjunction with the print mag and he seems quite busy these days & it sounds like he has to do most of the work which would be quite a lot of work.

I've been reading some of the notes on the Notes about Notes blog (written by a guy who works for Eastgate who make Tinderbox and the site is made using Tinderbox, so perhaps a touch biased? but interesting anyway). The note about commonplace books touched base with me.

I've been watching the identity 2.0 presentations from 2005 oscon and web 2.0 conferences. I'd been meaning to watch more of the presentations from these conferences but hadn't got round to it yet. I came across this again via another site, presentation zen blog, which was talking about different styles of presentations - Dick Hardt from sxip.com (pronounced skip) was recommended as having good presentation style. He in turn borrowed this style from Lawrence Lessig, the well known copyright lawyer and advocate. They both use many slides with short phrases or single words, with a scattering of images and are displayed with a fast pace. It does make the presentation more interesting! - well compared to the traditional powerpoint style anyway. This topic has been on my mind recently - not presentations per se, but events and conferences - as the iDC mail list has been having interesting discussions about the different styles of presentations at digital arts / music / new media conferences. Mostly the conversations have been regarding providing remote connections and contributions for people to attend the conferences remotely either during the conference or after it. Discussions on presentation style came up - different ideas, particularly wrt academics presenting papers and just reading them to the audience when they may have been available prior to the conference, then running out of time for questions. Anyway, I find it interesting as I'm not able to attend all the conferences I'd like to, though I try to attend as many as feasible, but it's really handy to be able to watch a video or listen to audio of the presentations after the conference. I find most of the larger IT based American conferences have video lectures / presentations available - perhaps this is because they have deals with ISPs and video production / distribution people. I think videoblogging could help with this as there's many more people recording video these days, but I suppose it won't be videoblogging as such, but using videobloggers to apply their skills to provide documentation and video on the web. Really useful for online education also!

read more for links used in this post

Ever been on a drive where the countryside is so beautiful it's hard to pick the most beautiful part of it. I took some video - the collage doesn't do the day justice but perhaps gives some idea. There was so much to look at I had to choose some of the finer details to concentrate on.

This video was created in eZedia QTI for Windows. I'm trying out the software - you can add interactive components but for this example I didn't. I just left it simple. There's a limit to 5 objects on the trial version as well so I couldn't fit any more objects in without going over save/export limit! The only thing I don't like about it is that I need to host the videos locally (at least all together on another site of mine) instead of using a remote site such as archive.org. Which means if I use this technique again, I'll need to use smaller video files and loop them. Hopefully this doesn't make my site go over bandwidth - it's only a very small webspace. Oh well. See how it goes.