Category: Development

Local Report

local report: home
For those of you wondering what I have been up to for the past month or so, here is your answer: Called, Whitman Local Report, this is a performance piece utilizing mobile phones to create a montage of video “reports” and phone “reports” all in real time (live).
I created some custom software that runs on the phones (Nokia 6710’s) to shoot and automatically upload video from the participant’s phones (30 of them) and more software to playback the videos as they come in (with some controls for play, pause, stop, next and previous).
Hans, my technical collaborator, took care of setting up an Asterisk server and queue to receive the phone in reports and play those out as they came in.
We have one performance to go, please tune into the live stream, come to the live event or check it out afterwards. The previous 4 are available now if you would like a taste.

Here is some press that I just came across: Art and Innovation Collide

Launch those JARs

SourceForge.net: launch4j 2.0.RC3 released
From the site:
Launch4j is a cross-platform tool for wrapping Java applications distributed as jars in lightweight Windows native executables. The executable can be configured to search for a certain JRE version or use a bundled one, and it’s possible to set runtime options, like the initial/max heap size. The wrapper also provides better user experience through an application icon, a native pre-JRE splash screen, a custom process name, and a Java download page in case the appropriate JRE cannot be found.

IBM/ASF Cloudscape/Derby (in terms of MySQL)

IBM’s Cloudscape Versus MySQL
I loathe articles that pit one piece of software vs. another but this one has a good explanation of Cloudscape/Derby (IBM’s recently open sourced java embeded database). Sounds pretty nice.. Perhaps my next project will veer from my standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) environment and go the AJAX/Servlet/Derby route..

Processing and PComp come together

Wiring
From the site:
Wiring is a programming environment and electronics i/o
board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and
learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates
the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of
hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design
and tangible media aspects

Very nice.. A compiler (Java/Processing) and board for physical computing type work.