I.D.E.A.

My brother-in-law is a marine biologist and he often will do ocean surveys as a contractor. Recently, he did a survey to measure the amount of eel grass in a certain area. The way that he does this is via scuba and a GPS unit. He essentially gathers data, in a methodical way (I’ll spare you the details), and then uses the data to generate a black & white pixel map. Black areas indicate that eel grass is present. He then usually brings this map into a really expensive software to calculate the total area of eel grass.

I recently happened to be tooling around in Processing and decided to make a very quick and dirty tool to do this calculation. You run this program, pick the image, set the pixel measurement for your area unit, and the software will tell you how many area units you image contains. The interface is not pretty…just functional.

PrimeSense has partnered with ASUS an entered the market with their own 3D sensor, the Xtion Pro Live (There’s actually the Xtion Pro model which doesn’t have a RGB camera…so if you’re just interested in getting 3D data but not actual image data, this is the version for you).

I can’t get one of these yet…just got the Kinect to play with. But here are the comparisons.

I have a drive with 3 partitions (The Big One, Rachel Time Machine, James Time Machine). I had quite an ordeal trying to moving each TM backup to a new/bigger drive. Initially I tried doing a straight copy from the File Manager…i.e. just dragging the Backups.backupdb directory to the new drive. It worked for Rachel Time Machine (took probably 3 or 4 hours). (I also found out that doing a straight file copy essentially is not efficient because doesn’t preserve the links (logical pointers to files) but essentially duplicates the file that the links are pointing to (see patrix’s comments in the link above). After copying the files over, I pointed Rachel’s laptop to use the her new Time Machine drive and I can see all of the older backups. Great!

Migrating James Time Machine to a new drive was not so smooth. Doing a straight file copy took forever (something like 5 to 6 hours)…I basically let it run over night. In the morning I woke up to find that it didn’t work. Here’s the ordeal described for a Stack Exchange post. As you can see from the post, trying to copy using OSX’s Disk Utility didn’t really work the way I wanted to. It basically cloned my drive so that my NEW drive was just as small as my original (I think it basically created a small partition…but the weird thing is that if you look at the disk in Disk Utility, there is only one partition and it should be 1TB, the size of the new drive…hmmm). Carbon Clone Copy didn’t work either. Finally SuperDuper! did the trick!!!

I have to thank this Neil’s Apple Blog post for mitigating some of the frustration along the way…it was comforting to see someone else with the same issue and that a solution was possible!

Got a Kinect from Best Buy today for $99. Holiday prices I guess…good deal eh?

Starting to play with Kinect again. Did it at work earlier this year when I was still on the East Coast. Back then we were testing out its capabilities to determine whether it would be a good platform to use for a science museum activity. We got the OpenNI, NITE(from Primesense…the company that actually developed the hardware in the Kinect sensor) samples working just to see how well skeleton tracking works.

Fast forward to the present…

So, I’ve just downloaded Cinder and their Kinect Cinderblock(their term for a library) and ran the samples. Pretty neat. It allows you to essentially get the sensor information from the Kinect and also allows you to control some of the hardware on it such as the motor so you can adjust the tilt of the Kinect. Here’s their example of a visual point cloud composed from Kinect’s depth information.

PrimeSense and ‘recently’ Microsoft released SDKs to help you work with the Kinect. (These SDKs, also come with libraries that help you interpret and make sense of the Kinect sensor information. I.e., they take the raw color and depth info from the cameras and (if a person is standing in front of it) will give you information about the body…such as the location of their head, hands and joints. Without it, the info from the cameras are essentially just color information and depth information.

Here’s an article comparing the features of Microsoft’s SDK and PrimeSense’s SDK. The one thing that I see is a major benefit for Microsoft is that there’s no calibration pose needed. From an interaction designer’s perspective, this is huge because user’s don’t expect a calibration step. It would be best if the technology just works!

I recently read about the Pomorodo Technique on a post at the Stack Exchange forum on personal productivity.

At its very basis, it’s a way to help you have focused intervals of work with minimal distractions. It also helps with goal setting, task management, time management and time estimation.

The jist of it is this (iterate on the items in your todo list) :

1. Set a timer for 25 minutes (this timer and time unit is called the ‘Pomodoro’)…work on the task without interruptions
2. Mark an X next to your todo (this helps you keep track of how many Pomodoro’s you’re using for this todo task)
3. If you’ve finished the task, cross it out from your todo list.
4. Take a 5 minute break. During the break, do not do anything related to the task. You can check your email, etc.
5. If this is your 4th Pomodoro, take a longer break…30 minutes.

I’m taking the Stanford AI Class, which started about 6 weeks ago. It’s been eye opening and it’s also a welcomed challenge. This is essentially an online version of the AI class that they teach at Stanford. This is the first time that they are trying an online version that is open to all. They have over 85,000 students enrolled. I’m a bit behind on the lectures because of the arrival of baby Maya. So, I should stop blogging and get back to the class!

Just started playing around with Cinder. It’s along the lines of Processing and openFrameworks. These platforms, if you will, really helps with the creation of graphic and event-based applications. I’ve worked with Processing (taught a class), dabbled in openFrameworks (created a music exploration/visualization environment) and am now trying Cinder.

For Spring 2003, I created a class called Dynamic Bodies at ITP. The class helped students to create algorithmically controlled/animated objects using vector math and physics. It was a class I created out of a labor of love and inspired by folks coming out of the, then John Maeda led, Aesthetic Computing Group. Some of the things that I’ve taught in that class have now been made easier with the introduction of libraries for vector math, physics engine and algorithmic behaviors (such as for boids). Many of these libraries are available for the three platforms above; one of the more notable is the feature rich toxilibs by Karsten “toxi” Schmidt for the Processing platform.

I missed those days of making things so I’m taking this opportunity to get back on it! One other reason for this step towards ‘making’ is that both openFrameworks and Cinder can be used to build iOS apps. I have an iOS project ‘in the works’ with a friend.

MY friend Jenna and I have been brainstorming about a kids’ iOS app and I’m finally excited about making what we’ve schemed up happen. It’s going to be an iOS app that needs a physics engine.

It turns out that cocos2D for iphone is a sprite based game engine. It now includes integration with the Box2D physics engine. Both cocos2d and Box2d are free to use and distribute with your app.

This should be really helpful for our idea…stay tuned.

We’re finally moving ahead with an e-commerce project. It’ll be very exciting with lots of new things to deal with…like Merchant Accounts and Payment Gateways. There are so many out there. We’re using BigCommerce, a cloud ecommerce offering, which integrates with many payment gateways so I won’t have to code anything…but it’s not making it any easier to select one.

This is a good “how it works” diagram of payment gateways and merchant accounts.

Our client is a brick and mortar store that current swipes physical cards at credit card terminals and they also take phone orders. So I’m trying to figure out what merchant account(s) they need and what payment gateways(s) they need…and decide which providers would allow for the most flexible configuration. Another thing that I needed to consider is that they’re currently shopping around for a new merchant account but our ecommerce store won’t be launching for at least a few months. So, the providers should allow us to grow the business and add the ecommerce store later.

Merchant Accounts

Depending on the merchant account provider, you’ll have to sign up for at least one, if not many, merchant account based on how you will be receiving payment. The company that our client is looking at, Elavon, requires a merchant account for retail (physical card swipes), MOTO (mail order/telephone order), and ecommerce. Needless to say, each account costs money…for setup, per transaction, has monthly fees, etc.

Payment Gateway

In order for you to process and connect to your merchant account(s), you will need at least one payment gateway, if not more, to connect to each of your merchant accounts. So you may need a retail payment gateway to process and connect to your retail merchant account, or you may need an ecommerce payment gateway to process and connect to your ecommerce merchant account.

One of the gateways on the BigCommerce list of partners they integrate with is PayLeap. They actually have a plan called “Brick and Click” which essentially allows you to process transactions originating from retail, MOTO, and ecocmmerce, under ONE merchant account and ONE payment gateway. Also their fee structure seems really reasonable. So, as of now, I’m recommending this to our client.

Have had to revisit my work experience since moving to L.A. Needed a place to present my portfolio so I put something together (the majority of the design is from a pre-made theme but it includes minor tweaks by me).

Portfolio site: http://labs.2-bit-toys.com