I have no complaints about working from home so far, although it’s inevitable that I will go insane from lack of human contact. Until then, I’ve been busy writing code and playing with the dog.

This morning the Tools of Change blog published my post on collaborative online fiction, highlighting some interactive fiction projects.

I’ve been enjoying getting back into the Processing language by using the threepress books to create movies. For the subsequent projects I want to play with NextText, which looks like a fantastic library for working with text in Processing. And then there’s the astonishing Processing.js port of the entire language to JavaScript.

Let me say how bizarre it is to see my site in someone else’s screenshot.

The fun part’s almost over, though, as it’s getting to be time to hit people up for real jobs.  As long as I can still take the dog to the park every day, I can deal.

I’ve started a development blog for my open source publishing software project, threepress.org. I’ll use it to post news and software releases.  I’ve got a backlog of posts to make describing the various features in more detail.

I was this close to setting up the blog on a hosted service like blogspot rather than installing WordPress directly on my own subdomain. Then I recalled that the main point of threepress is to illustrate my technical skills, and not my laziness.

I’ve been added to the roster of authors at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change publishing and technology blog. I’m going to be posting about issues relevant to developers in the publishing industry, and also speculating on some directions that publishers can take when dealing with online content. TOC’s primary audience is trade publishers, but I’ll occasionally address topics from the academic publishing world where I spend most of my time.

My first post is on the sexy topic of ebook file formats.

You might notice from my biography on the TOC blog that I appear to have quit my job to be an independent consultant. My first day with no paycheck is International Workers’ Day.

A few weeks ago I was thinking that I wanted a bug tracking system for my own personal use. I’ve used a lot of bug trackers both commercial and open source, but my favorite, hands-down, is the home-grown one we use at iFactory. I didn’t write it so I’m relatively unbiased, but what’s great about it is that it is absolutely simple and feature-starved. Clients can use it. Anyone can use it. You do not have to fill out fifteen drop-down menus just to say “home page broken.”

Its only flaw is that I can’t use it for my own projects and I was dreading trying to find a free one that was just as austere. I could write one, obviously, but even with a rapid-development stack like Django it’s still a lot to implement — not so much the bug tracker itself but the underlying user accounts and access control. Plus I have to host it somewhere.

Enter Google’s sort-of-proprietary hosting and development platform AppEngine.

There’s a lot to say about it, but for me as a developer the key point is how close this (and similar services) get towards making software applications completely disposable. AppEngine uses Python, which I know, and supports Django, which I know, and Django/Python enable lightning-fast web development. AppEngine gives me access control and identity via Google Accounts for free. I get hosting for free. I get one-click deployment (possibly the only thing I would miss from a Java/Eclipse/Maven/Cargo stack). I have to install one thing — Google AppEngine — and after that, nothing.

So instead of wasting 4-6 hours downloading different bug trackers and their dependencies, getting them running, trying them out, and (at best) putting up with the ways in which they aren’t quite right for me, I’m spending, max, 10-12 hours writing exactly what I want, for free.

If in a few weeks I decide my software sucks, or I find a better bug tracker, I can just throw mine away. Nothing lost but a little time, and that’s time I spent learning a little more about Django and AppEngine. The next time I want some kind of tool, I’ll build it in even less time, and maybe throw that away too. It’s just bits.

I’ve been following a lot of publishing blogs lately so I’m obliged to post about We Tell Stories, by Penguin Books and alternate reality game company Six to Start.

The project is subtitled “Digital Fiction”, which immediately brings back memories of dreary academic “hypertext fiction”. Those projects often amounted to “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style short stories with multiple endings, where clicking on words to move through a branching plotline was deemed sufficiently interactive to be interesting.

Film critic Roger Ebert famously doesn’t see the appeal of videogames, but he’s astutely observed that a story with multiple endings really has no ending at all: as soon as he (the audience) realizes there are multiple endings, he’ll want to experience them all, and then loses the pleasure of knowing what “really” happened. Interactive fiction has grappled with this too, and as a player I generally side with Ebert. Once I’ve “won” a game by achieving an obviously acceptable ending, I lose interest in finding any other good or bad endings. I’m ready to move on the next story, not traverse the whole plot tree. (Admittedly I’m also the kind of player who wants every modern videogame to be twice as easy and half as long as it is.)

Some blogs are calling the first We Tell Stories episode “interactive fiction”, but The 21 Steps is not really interactive at all. It’s a linear story told through new medium: short text overlaid on the Google Maps interface. It’s an interesting idea that, like many kinds of experiments, could be compelling once the novelty wears off and an author really dives into the medium. Unfortunately the actual “story” behind Steps is pretty thin, with an ending that reads like a clever high school writing project, and the plot didn’t feel like it truly made use of the map paradigm. Conceptually, co-opting a straight information-based API for use in storytelling and gameplay is definitely intriguing — I’d love to see what someone could do with Google Street View. No doubt stories told in short blurb-bursts are here to stay, given all the attention that mobile phone fiction has been receiving.

I imagine the Google Maps component does work well when combined with the story’s alternate reality game, but the ARG requires one to be in the UK. I’ll be interested to read reviews from people who’ve played it through.

The next episode of We Tell Stories comes out tomorrow, March 25th.

Although I enjoyed most of the talks I saw at ETech, I started having the best luck when I stopped trying to go to ones that seemed useful.

The Commodore’s bartender Scotto Moore performed his “digital fairy tale” called Intangible Method. It’s short, watch it.

Also as part of the Ignite series, Matt Web’s Science Fictional Tour of the Solar System, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything:

Two good talks that I don’t have video for:

Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story

Jeff Jonas

Presentation [PPT]

Open Source Hardware

Phillip Torrone (Maker Media), Limor Fried (Adafruit Industries)

Presentation [PDF]

One of the two half-day tutorials I attended was on building visualizations for the web. It was billed as something of a hand-on tutorial on Processing but ended up just being a talk, which was kind of disappointing. Here’s what I took home:

• The “show everything” principle: dump in all the data right away and allow users to winnow down, not up
• “If you can count it, you can color it”: map values to colors, there are algorithms to do this nicely (e.g. ColorBrewer)
• For non-numeric data, take an MD5 hash of a unique identifier and assign that to a color, to make colors unique (IBM History Flow)
• “Scented widgets”: sliders that show previews of the data (c.f. Bleep, which has scrubbing sliders to visually represent the song)
• Size metrics for visualization: technology vs. number of data points

1. JavaScript/HTML: 1,000
2. Flash: 10,000
3. Java: 100,000+

…but download size becomes an issue after 10,000 data points.

• Ideally visualizations can be bookmarkable and shareable on sites like Digg
• Visualization libraries for Java and Flex: Prefuse

Someone asked the most important question (to me, anyway), which is: Processing is great and all, but what can we do about the fact that Java applets suck? The speaker admitted it’s a problem and that his firm mostly ended up using Flash for client-facing applications. This is a real drag. Processing is great and I already know Java. I don’t want to learn Flash, and I wouldn’t trust an open source applet implementation after dealing with gcj.

I have an idea for my next experiment with Processing and it would end up producing a static image. That might be all that can feasibly done with it for now outside of kiosk or downloaded applications. Bummer.

This book, by one of the main developers of Processing, did come recommended and I’m going to pick it up.

(The first post is mostly pictures because I’m too tired to type.)

I had a fantastic time at this year’s Emerging Technology Conference. A lot had to do with the personal and social angle, especially being a part of the Commodore’s entourage, but the talks were overall really excellent.

The Commodore

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

San Diego

One of the few photos I took, waking up at East-Coast-o’clock in the Commodore Suite:

Here I am partying Disney-style

Photo by John Adams

I look like I’m wearing a parka in this picture because the Marriott air-conditioning was extremely enthusiastic.

The Disney party was awesome in that it approached an almost surreal level of corporate self-parody. They ejected the O’Reilly photographer for “stepping on a Disney executive’s toes” (literally) and also booted an in-character member of Austrian art collective Monochrom for walking around in a faux Soviet uniform with a video crew. Good times.

Here I am partying Facebook-style. Facebook didn’t eject anybody.

Proposals for talks are now being accepted for Web 2.0 Expo NYC. The proposal deadline is March 31, and the conference is September 17 – 19, 2008.

I’ll be reviewing proposals on the design/UI and technology front, so you totally have a in. Plus I bet we can get into all the good parties.

Details and the submittal form are here.

I’ve been playing with the Java-based visualization language Processing a bit. Since a client had casually mentioned the idea of some kind of iTunes-like image viewer, I made that my first project.

It’s not perfect by far (it would be nice if it rotated both directions) but I got about as far with it as I could with my limited patience. Still, my first 3D program! My 10-year-old BASIC programming self would be so proud.

This uses seven random photos from my Flickr account:

Apropos of this I’m looking forward to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference again this year (thanks Brady!), where I’ll be attending this tutorial on web-based visualizations, focusing on Processing. Honestly, though, I’ll probably have more fun at Food Hacking.