Brian Shaler

Another Ignite Phoenix is coming up, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 6pm-9pm. I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Phoenix #2, where I took 5 minutes to show how data visualization can give us new ways to see things.

If you haven’t been to an Ignite, you should. Even if you’re not in Phoenix, there are Ignites held all over the world. Find one near you and check it out!

Videos from past Ignite Phoenix presentations.

Tempe Center for the Arts (map)
700 W Rio Salado Parkway
Tempe, AZ

Ignite Phoenix is an information exchange for fostering and inspiring Phoenix’s creative community. In one evening, you hear 18 passionate speakers from our creative, technical, and business communities talking about their current projects or favorite ideas for just five minutes. Presentations will educate and inspire you, and maybe make you laugh in the process.

Up to 20 slides and 5 minutes is all you get. Not a second more. The presenters need to get to the point quickly, and make it exciting and engaging.

We welcome topics about anything that other people will find interesting. That’s a wide criteria and that’s just fine. If the most interesting submissions end up being technical, then Ignite will have a technical feel. There is a wide mix of topics. If you’re not interested in the current topic, all you have to do is wait for 5 minutes and a new one starts.

Via Eventification, the Phoenix tech event site

Are you interested at all in mobile technologies? iPhone? Android? BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc?

Then you need to go to this event.

MobiFestival.com
May 16th, 2009
9:00am – 7:00pm

Location:
Gangplank HQ
325 E. Elliot Rd.
Chandler, AZ 85225

Mobi Festival is where platform allegiance is checked at the door. The goal is to bring together mobile enthusiasts, explorers, developers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobility.

Mobi Festival hopes to support the many voices helping to unlock the potential of a truly digital life in a mobile world. The format will be part conference and part un-conference. There will be some scheduled speakers at set times and bar camp style presentations in between. Additionally, there will be time set a side for break out groups to actually do some mobile hacking. This conference is for mobile developers by mobile developers.

Joe Stump of Crash Course Keynoting

INFO: http://mobifestival.com/
REGISTER NOW: http://mobifestival.eventbrite.com (FREE!!!)

Intel will be providing mobile devices for hack session.
Go Daddy will be raffling iPhone and G1 throughout the day!
Lunch and Free T-Shirt provided for those that register online!

Growing up poor, I found solace in my material possessions. Still to this day, I struggle with the pack rat mentality of parting with stuff I own. This is something I have been working on recently.

Over the holidays, I spent some time in SF and NYC, working and couch surfing. When I was in NYC, I worked from friends’ places and from coffee shops. For four weeks, I toted my life around on my back from couch to couch. It may surprise some that I found it to be a rather enjoyable experience.

What I found was that I could be perfectly happy living life out of “one carry-on and one personal item” (a shoulder tote bag for clothes and a laptop bag for gadgets and work stuff). A carry-on bag is enough to fit a week’s worth of clothing, if you’re okay with wearing jeans 2-3 times before washing them. If you can find a place to do laundry every weekend, you’re set.

Why do I need all that stuff at home? It’s nice having a comfortable bed, a computer desk, privacy. It’s comforting to know my mortgage payments are baby steps toward owning my own place outright and having drastically lower living expenses in the future.

But if I got rid of it all, that mortgage payment could go into an interest-earning account and would be quite a sum after 20 years.

If I sold now, I probably wouldn’t walk away with any cash, since I don’t have much equity. On principle, I’m not going to sell my condo to break even or take a loss. For 3 years, I’ve been paying more than I would have if I was renting on the basis that the money isn’t being “thrown away.”

When I was walking the streets of New York City, I was thinking about becoming homeless. Then I realized my situation at home and came to the conclusion that I cannot afford to be homeless.

I’ll keep this super short, because you can read/watch more about it here.

My employer, BitGravity released a free Flash video player, developed by Dean Casalena, for people to quickly and easily post FLV & H.264 videos they are hosting themselves (or, obviously, on the BitGravity CDN).

It’s tucked away a little bit in the Player Configuration Wizard, but I think it might be interesting to experiment with the pre-roll and post-roll advertising functionality. That’s something you don’t get when you embed Vimeo or Viddler videos, and it opens up new opportunities for video content producers to monetize their content.

I have been wanting to jump into several programming languages, recently. Unfortunately, I’m very limited on time. As a full-time Flash developer, it is bad enough that I am lagging behind on adopting AS3, Flex, AIR, and Papervision. I would love to pick up Ruby, Python, and Silverlight, too.

However, the data visualizationist in me has been captivated this year by a language called Processing. Flash is a great tool for visualizing sets of data, and has served me fairly well in the past. While Flash is mostly tied to the web (and with AIR, it takes a step out of the browser), Processing is designed to be put in many more places. More on that in a second.

Let’s start with a summary of the platform. Here is an excerpt from Processing.org:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain. Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Processing is built on Java, which means you can create applications for the web, desktop, and mobile devices. Even more fascinating, there is a project related to Processing, called Wiring, that allows your Processing application to communicate with homemade hardware (circuit boards, solder, and microprocessors, oh my!). This means that no matter what input or output medium you want to use, Processing should be able to do it.

Before I get motivated enough to try out any new technology, I need to see it in action. The more impressive the examples, the more motivated I will be to try it out.

I found out about Jonathan Harris thanks to his TED Talk in 2006. The project that I found particularly fascinating was “We Feel Fine“. It features many colorful objects floating in space that represent feelings the application discovered while scraping blogs.

As a Flash developer, I could not miss Audi’s “Rhythm of Lines” micro-site built using Papervision3D that features moving lines in 3D space, shaping the outline of an Audi A5. I was surprised to learn weeks later that the accompanying TV spot for the “Rhythm of Lines” campaign was created using Processing. Upon doing more research on the subject, I came across this detailed AIGA article about Processing.

Another feature that Processing boasts over Flash (something I have been wishing to see added to Flash years) is OpenGL-powered hardware acceleration. Papervision3D is filling the gap a little bit, but it still requires a lot of work from the CPU, instead of throwing it onto the GPU where it should be. OpenGL support means that you can add more complexity, some shading, and other fancy effects without taking much of a performance hit.

Even though I am very short on time, if I get inspired to do a particular data visualization, I might invest some of my sleep hours into a micro-project.