This last week I spent some time checking up on some projects that I have been following over the last number of years. While looking at some projects that I was aware of, I came across one that I had not seen – Scratch. I have to admit that after playing with Scratch for a few days, and showing it to my son, nephew, and niece, I am thoroughly impressed.

Scratch is a project being worked on at MIT, with some affiliation with UCLA, and sponsored by a wide range of backers … and it is an impressive development tool … for kids! Their own website describes it as:

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Coupled with the Scratch language and environment, there is also a “social” site where Scratch users can upload programs and sample code, and download these same programs to then learn from them, modify them, and re-upload them.  I sat down and wrote my SpiroSprite program in maybe 10-15 minutes … and uploaded it to my Scratch account.
The environment and language is influenced by the Logo and Smalltalk languages, and presents a very simple, yet powerful way to learn login, event-driven programming, and create fun software.  From what I understand it is written in Squeak … which seems to be continuing to slowly gain momentum.

For anyone that wants to explore the concepts of programming, with or without their kids, I’d suggest downloading a copy of Scratch and beginning to experiment.  It’s really an impressive project!

A friend of mine sent me a link to WeatherBill today. This is pretty wild. You can actually take out “contracts” to hedge against the weather. Almost like “weather-insurance” …

The site is pretty good … there is a tutorial/learning page, and then the actual quotes page. Hmmm … I can buy a contract for $854 for next Saturday if it rains more than 1″ of rain they’ll pay out $10,000!! They have a lot of examples of using this for golf courses or any range of businesses or events. Picnic insurance!

It seems that maybe someone will think about how to game this for some real income …

Wow … September came and went. There was just too much going on. I got back from my Caribbean Cruise – Puerto Rico, Aruba, Curacao, St. Maarten, and St. Thomas – and it was already the 10th of September! The cruise was nice, however there was too much to do when I got back. I immediately got back into coding mode – I’m working on three different start-up ideas right now – and several contract development projects.

We completed our first cut at the Adobe Developer Desktop – an AIR application – that we built for Adobe. The intention is to create an extensible application in AIR that Adobe developers can use to track outstanding bugs and issues, report bugs to Adobe, and access other information quickly. It’s been fun, and we’re continuing to extend this application.

I also took off on the road for three conferences that were very interesting. The first two were in New York – the Millennials Conference, and then the Tweens Conference. The Millennials are people born from 1982 to 2000, and the Tweens are a subset of this group that were born from 1995 to 2000. Both conferences were impressive, and if you want to hear about some of the topics discussed we talked about it on one of our latest ITConversations podcasts – Technology Travels. The core thing that I realized is that our youngest generations growing up in America are becoming fully integrated into the Internet. To them … the Internet just *IS*. It has always been here for them … they are using it daily … it is an extension of who they are … their community already includes “close friends” that they have never met in person. It is extending their world.

I then went on to Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago. I had gone last year, and so this was my second year seeing what Adobe is up to … and to me it is very impressive. Adobe announced and demonstrated a string of new products and projects … on top of the new Flex and AIR development foundation that has been growing. There were too many things to think about … but Adobe seems to have a lot of momentum, and is pushing hard to become a cross-platform solution for developers, corporations, and end-users. Some of the cool things that the showed and talked about:

• RIAForge.org – Open Source Projects built on Adobe Technologies
• OSFlash.org – more Open Source Flash
• Red5 – the Open Source Flash Server
• Spaz.AIR – a cross-platform twitter client written for AIR
• Agile Agenda – an AIR Agile project management tool
• Digimix – an amazing audio mixing application written for AIR (demo)
• Buzzword – a truly impressive web-based Word Processor … Adobe bought these guys!
• MTV Adobe AIR Challenge – developer contest
• … and more.  I’ll post more in a future post …

One other thing that was really fun about New York and Chicago … mass transit.  In New York I stayed with a friend who doesn’t even own a car anymore.  It was actually fun to ride the trains and the metro … back and forth without ever having to sit in traffic.  Chicago was the same … I took the train from the airport to my hotel downtown.  Adobe ran buses from the hotels to the convention center.  It was nice to not rent a car …

We got into Puerto Rico last night … on our way to our southern Caribbean cruise.  My girlfriend Andrea and I, along with a group of friends, are finally on our way.  I had blogged about the cruise quite a while back, and got a good response … there are 11 other friends that joined us, about half of them flying in with us yesterday.

The flight from Salt Lake City to Atlanta was nice … but they didn’t use the aircraft with the  onboard Trivial Pursuit … bummer.  The flight from Atlanta to San Juan was nice … we were upgraded to first class, and it was uneventful until the aborted landing in San Juan.  It ended up that the plane in front of us was too slow to get off the runway.  Oh well … no biggy.

We took a cab into Old San Juan, and it is very cool … the entire area is built on the foundations of the old fort here.   We checked into our *very* nice hotel … the El Convento … which is a remodeled convent.  We had a great outdoor dinner at the tapas restaurant that is in the hotel – El Picoteo.  The food was wonderful and we had chicken, lobster, squid, beef, and some of their paella.  Too good.  Afterwards we took a walk through town as the nightlife began to pick up.  It was fun to see the various bars and clubs in the narrow streets, and the young people hanging out … and even some late night skateboarders that were very talented.

Today we are heading to go and see Arecibo … I’ll see if I can post some pictures later tonight.  Of course we are also closely tracking the various tropical storms … Felix, the latest tropical storm … but it is going to nicely move out of our way before the cruise leaves tomorrow night.  🙂

More later …

Over the last month I’ve been thinking about more implications of the rapid evolution of Internet adoption. The last decade of evolution has completely altered our lifestyles and behaviors, and is massively shifting the reality that younger generations live in. The “on-line” aspects of life have gone far beyond the “couch potato” aspects introduced by television. With television, you might have begun to sit in front of your tv at night, and actually begin to schedule your life around television programming, but with the Internet many of us are beginning to create an on-line identity by  craating … pushing large amounts of content into the net!

This migration is further accelerated by the adoption of all sorts of digital technologies – cameras, video, audio, web sites, blogging, social networks, virtual worlds – and the Internet facilitates us pouring more and more of who we are into bits! In the “old days” (a decade or so ago) people would create using atoms … learning the various skills to manipulate materials in the physical world, or using simple devices that would create physical world results. Cameras actually produced negatives which were printed to pictures on paper. Letters were written on paper, using pens and pencils … or typewriters. Invitations to events came in the mail, and were printed – sometimes in relief – on paper or cardboard. Movies were taken and developed, and stored on reels. Our lives and memories were tactile, and existed in physical space.  People would then accumulate all of this in their closets, drawers, and basements. When people died, these boxes would be dealt with by the families, descendants, or friends. Many times these boxes of atomic materials (memorabilia?) would be passed down for generations.

Last month, my friend James pointed out this post on LifeHacker titled Handle your online life after death. This really stimulated my thoughts about the series of events that would follow the death of the average Internet user. There are a lot of interesting scenarios, however it seems that very few people are thinking about the implications of living in a pure digital world … where you are no longer accumulating physical world memorabilia, and the “bits” disappear when the bills are no longer paid, and the accounts are deleted.  There are probably a number of valuable tactics that could be used to ensure that your identity outlives your biological self.  There are lots of issues if you don’t.  You might be found in some future time, by “digital archaeologists”, or “Internet archaeologists”.  Depending on what you do, there is a good chance that your descendants might never get that basement full of memories, or the boxes of memorabilia.  Some of my thoughts:

• If you are posting all of your information to a site that is using your own domain name, then who is going to pay the bills when you die?  If they aren’t paid, then the domain expires and is up for grabs.  All of your Google-juice goes away … all of the links in search engines are broken.  Who has the account details to manage your domain if they wanted to?
• Since non-geeks tend to use the “hosted” solutions, they might be in better shape!  Having a Blogspot /Blogger blog might just promise that you will live within Google for Google-eternity.  Likewise with Live.com, or many of the other Web 2.0 sites that are out there.  Of course, as the LikeHacker article mentions … who has your account details to be able to post obituaries, etc. on your sites?
• Oh by the way … where are you hosting your domain and sites?  On your own machines?  At some hosting provider?  Well … who is going to pay the bills?  Who will continue to manage the machines?
• When thinking of my own private domains, I’ve realized that I ought to look for ways to include other family members in activities on those domains.  If my son begins to use this domain, then it’ll be handed down to him when I die.  Wild to think about passing along the family name … evolving into passing along the family domain name!
• Even if you have been saving all of your photos, documents, e-mails, etc. on your home PC or laptop, and even if doing backups … does anyone else in your family know the organization of your hard disk?  What folders have you saved things in?  Do you think they will dig through your hard disk when you die and locate all of the fun memories on your PC?
• You might want to trust the WayBackMachine at Archive.org to preserve you, however you have to remember that few if any of your Google links, etc. will link to that site.

It seems to me that there is eventually going to be quite a large market that emerges in this space.  “Digital Insurance” might emerge to protect your domain names, and to provide long term services beyond just basci “backup”.  It will not just be the businesses that provide some sort of “digital insurance”, but also a large amount of education of the masses to understand the implications of living in a digital world.  There might be a lot of people who just don’t care.  I do believe that the younger generations – the “millennials” – that are already learning the importance of their on-line identities and profiles, will be the ones who begin to recognize the needs of preserving your digital assets.
The article Is the Internet the new heaven? on Salon.com also has some interesting thoughts about your “life after death” in relation to the Internet. They point out the book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace … which touches on some very interesting points related to all of this. There are a lot of people that believe in a “spirit” that we leave behind when we die.  Or that lives beyond us.  While searching Google for others thoughts on spirit, machines, and the Internet I came across the The Spirit in the Machine … an interesting article with a unique perspective.

Where do we go when we die?  Without a little preparation, a lot of what we have created in our lives might just vanish … far faster that many of the old atomic ways of preserving our contributions to society.  At the same time that technology is increasing our reach, it is making us more vulnerable to disappearing and being forgotten.

Well … that really was pretty cool. Now you see it, now you don’t. At ~6:40am the Key Bank Building went down. With the news helicopters circling overhead, the crowd atop the American Towers building woke up as a line of charges began to fire up the left side of the building. There was almost a strange pause, and then the charges continued to fire … now seeming to go in inside the building. By that time, the left side of the building had already began to drop and as charges continued the entire building slowly collapsed sideways, with the left side leading the way.

Immediately, a large dust cloud began to rise, and as the crowd let out a cheer the entire area became enveloped in a huge ball of dust. It was amazing to see the dust cloud rise and completely obscure the Marriott Hotel, and then move over the Salt Palace and continue to blow west, and north west. It took a good 10+ minutes for the dust to clear, and what was left was a pile of rubble. Within 30 minutes, the rooftop was pretty much cleared and everyone was on their way.

It was interesting to see the large amounts of dust that were left spread across the buildings and streets in the area.  In front of the Salt Palace on the street you could see a line that almost looked like snow … near white/tan dust and then the black asphalt another block down.  I’m sure the clean-up will take a while.

There was a pretty good group of us up there, Dave Biesinger of DNA Films joined us and filmed the implosion in high-speed/slow motion, Phil Burns and his wife joined us, and several other friends. So we have a variety of pictures and video to sort through and post. I’ll do one last follow-up post when I get my videos up on YouTube.

And so the re-construction of downtown Salt Lake City continues …

Every now and then I find one of these very cool articles that details a breakthrough in technology that really impresses me. Imagine if you had a way to project 3D models or images out in space that appeared to just hang there? They might rotate, or people could walk around them to examine them from all directions?

If you think about the images of Star Wars, R2D2 is projecting the 3D image of Princess Leia into space for the rest of the characters to look and listen. But how do you get the image to “hang in space”?

Well, a group of researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a projector that is showing signs of being capable of all of this … and maybe more!
Check out this post titled AIST develops 3D image projector … it shows some of the early images, and talks about how the device works.

The newly developed device, however, creates “real” 3D images by using laser light, which is focused through a lens at points in space above the device, to create plasma emissions from the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at the point of focus. Because plasma emission continues for a short period of time, the device is able to create 3D images by moving the point of focus.

At the demonstration, bursts of laser light were emitted 100 times per second to form shapes in the air up to 50 cm above the device. Heat from the laser caused the air to expand, producing a crackling sound that resembled a series of tiny explosions.

Now this is just amazing to me. They are able to focus a laser at some point in space, and excite the molecules enough to create plasma emissions. Imagine when they are able to improve upon this technology, and create nice compact projectors. The issues that I can see right now are colors, and the sound. Will they be able to create different color of the dots? And what can they do about the sounds? Maybe timing the lasers in a way that causes the sounds to cancel each other out? As for colors … who knows.

With something like this, the Star Wars chess game becomes possible … I’m curious how many years until we see something like this hit the market for the average consumer? I have to admit that I wouldn’t have even thought about something like this being created. It makes sense how it works … but some amazing minds are at work. We are living in interesting times … and the Singularity is coming.

As an update to my previous post, the Key Bank Building at 50 South Main in Salt Lake City will be coming down tomorrow morning.  The announced time of implosion will be 6:30am, and the city is closing off a 9 square block area around the building when it occurs.

I’m committed to being there to see it, and have arranged for some rooftop access to witness the implosion.  This first picture is the view that I’ll have.  You can see the Key Bank Building is the large white building in the center of the photo.  As a side note, I’m floored that folks are booked in rooms in the Marriott Hotel … that thing is so close to the implosion … that would be a wild view!

We have a small group that we’ll be able to get in, and of course we’re having a small breakfast party.  I’m not able to have anyone else join us … we’ve got a full group.  I’m contacting the last few people to verify they are coming … if you want to be on a waiting list, feel free to post a comment.  I already know that there are going to be some decent crowds downtown.

I’m going to take my camera, and video camera with me.  I’ll make sure to crank out a quick YouTube video to post after the event.  I’m curious exactly what it will look like.  With my 3x zoom on my camera, the building will look something like this photo.  I’ve got a few friends joining us with other HD video cameras, and even one high-speed digital camera to record it for slow motion!

One warning to people coming down … although they anticipate the dust cloud to be low to the ground and localized to the implosion, you have to imagine that there will be considerable nasty stuff in the dust cloud!  Today when I looked at the building I noticed that ALL of the windows are still in there, and I heard that there is still remaining insulation.  I’m thinking that breathing pulverized glass and insulation is not going to be good for anyone!

I’m thinking that one way or another it’ll be a fun experience … something new to watch!  I’ll be snapping pictures and maybe blog using my broadband card!

This might be old news to other people, but last week my girlfriend showed me the Mr. Lee CatCam. This is just too cool. The creator of this cool hack, Juergen Perthold, has a well written intro on why he built this, and how it works. The basics idea is that he took a super small digital camera, added a bigger battery, and a small circuit that causes the camera to take a picture every minute. He then mounted this in a small housing that is fairly durable and water-tight, and then hung it on his cat’s neck!

When his cat leaves the house, this camera is keeping a photo log of where the cat goes, what it sees, and where it’s hanging out. When the cat comes home, Juergen simply removes the SD Memory card from the camera, and retrieves all of the photos. Juergen has some great photo tours that he has posted on the website that show examples of where his cat went, and what it saw. It’s too cool.

What is fascinating about this is the evolution of technology. Juergen was able to buy these parts off the shelf, hack them together for a small price, and have a really innovative technology. It’s amazing that he is getting great battery life out of this set-up, and the camera is surviving the trips out into the wild. It got me thinking about the miniaturization of technology, and the ability to get this functionality down in size at an affordable price. It also goes to show what could be done with animals in spying for the military … just add a GPS. 🙂

On top of all of this, Juergen has turned this into a commercial venture … you can buy a CatCam here! Gosh … this almost has me want to go out and buy a cat!

Tonight I completed my first installation/set-up of Subversion source control on Fedora Core 6. I’ve been a long time CVS user, and although I have used Subversion (SVN) I have never actually set-up a repository. Tonight, using the resources of the net, I was able to get one going.

The first document that I found that was a great start was this piece titled: Setting Up A Subversion Repository Using Apache. I had already installed SVN on my server using Yum, and so the second page of this really covered all of the steps to get things going. I actually created a Virtual Server in Apache to be my SVN server … and so I added the various httpd.conf settings within that virtual server. I created my own file within the Apache /etc/httpd/conf.d directory, following the instructions in the article above.

Of course when I then restarted Apache it immediately died with the error “unknown DAV provider: svn”. When I searched Google for the answer, I found this post which explained that I needed the “mod_dav_svn” to be loaded. I did a quick search of my hard drive and found that it wasn’t even installed on my server. Back to yum … a quick “yum install mod_dav_svn” got that in place … and also added a “subversion.conf” into /etc/httpd/conf.d … and so I moved my conf file contents into the subversion.conf file to keep things neat.When I restarted Apache, it was happy as could be … and I was off and running. I did a quick connect test from Eclipse, and it worked. Now I have been told that DAV access to SVN is slower than using the svnserve proprietary protocol, and so I did some quick looking around on how to get that up and running.

This article on Running a Subversion Server was a good reference that linked me to an awesome book called Version Control with Subversion, which was freely available, and downloadable as a PDF. This book had some great information on getting the various files set-up and configured for access. Once I had svnserve all configured, I did a quick test run and it worked perfectly.

The last part of the installation was to have svnserve automatically start when I booted my server. I found a contribution on the SVNForum.org website where a user posted a SVN init.d script for Fedora that works great. Make sure to read the comments below his post to fix a few things that he got wrong … but with those tweaks it works great.

I’m looking forward to getting all of my projects moved over to SVN now, to take advantage of the various benefits of SVN on my own servers. As usual … it went pretty smoothly …