Technology: July 2006 Archive Page

--Wintergreen ''When I Wake Up'' (KeithSchofield.com)

Is this for real?

I'm not so sure the song goes with the images, but it's still awesome.

Infocom, king of the text adventure and the first behemoth of American computer game development, began not with a bang, but with an internet meme. --Lara Crigger --The Short, Happy Life of Infocom (The Escapist)

There are some details about Infocom culture that are nicely placed.

I like what Jeremy Douglass wrote about the genre of the interactive fiction magazine article.

To be fair, there is a fairly constrained set of talking points about IF that most features feel they need to include:

1. Remember IF? I loved them. IF...
2. ...started the computer game industry
3. ...were killed by graphics cards
4. ...are still being made!
5. ...are still fun!
6. ...are being sold by 1-2 individuals/companies
7. ...are being created by a vibrant indie community
8. ...are available on any computer imaginable
9. ...might have some future in the cell/ipod/pda convergence
10. ...can be downloaded like this

I haven.t yet written an IF Article Generator, but the code is, I feel, strongly implied by copious example outputs to be found in periodicals. I personally enjoy the 2-4-7-8 articles, and the 4-7-8-10s. I am indifferent to the 1-3-4-5s, and thoughtful about the 4-5-6-9s.

Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build -- and sell -- their own video game.

"That's what they love," said David White, the school's chief academic officer. "That's the hook." --Scott Elliott --Reading, writing and video games (Dayton Daily News)

Sounds pretty good to me.

--Blender Basics, 2nd Ed (pdf) (Central Dauphin High School)

Where was this book during the last 3 weeks when I was struggling with random half-finished tutorials?

Thank you, James Chronister!

RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized. --Experience Disney Without the Long Wait! (ridemax.com)

What a great niche market! A classic entrepreneurial example of finding a void, turning it into a need, and filling it.

Thanks for another great suggestion, Rosemary.

The report, written by Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart and Associate Director Susannah Fox, says that bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online -- like songs, text, or images -- and remixed it into their own artistic creation. By comparison, just 18% of all internet users have done this. A whopping 77% of bloggers have shared something online that they created themselves, like their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos. By comparison, 26% of internet users have done this.

"Blogs are as individual as the people who keep them, but this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression," said Lenhart. "Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge, or just keep in touch with friends and family." --Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world (PEW Internet & American Life Project)

Just quickly blogging this press release about the report.

--Blender for the Faint Hearted -- 06: Material Basics, Part 2 (SciFi Meshes)

I've been working with the open source 3D design tool "Blender." It's powerful. Very powerful. It's got an overwhelming number of buttons, and the existing documentation is incomplete.

I have asked Seton Hill to purchase a handful of copies of a professional 3D design tool, but even the student copies of that cost hundreds of dollars, so I'm not asking my New Media Projects students to shell out that much money.

I've just spent hours trying to figure out how to create multiple materials that are attached to a single object. Right now I'm working on a chair, and I want the base to be one color and the cushion to be a different color. Actually, "color" isn't the right term -- I want the base to be hard plastic and the cushions to be shiny leather. This means that, instead of just determining the color, I'm also determining the glossiness of the surface. If I wanted to create transparent or reflective objects, I can do that, too.

By clicking buttons at random, I managed to create several different materials for a project I've been working on last week, but at the time I really didn't know what I was doing, and I couldn't reproduce what I did when I tried just now.

At any rate, this tutorial expalains what I was trying to do.

I'm a strong supporter of open source software. The Blender Foundation is fully aware that people find its software bewildering and its documentation incomplete. The "Summer of Documentation" is a project designed to tackle that -- experienced Blender users are writing tutorials to fill the gaps. I'm looking forward to reading those tutorials as they come out, but unfortunately for me I've got the time now, and won't have much time to learn Blender once the semester starts.

I do plan to contribute to the existing wiki documentation, so that others will benefit from my struggle.

I do wish there were an "easy mode" interface that turned off features that newbies won't need... and then maybe the documentation could tell you which features to activate as you progress through the tutorials and need access to more powerful features. But it's also probably fair to say that most users of Blender probably have significant computing experience. They won't be thinking of writing comprehensive tutorials for non-programmers.

Ah, well. Back to work.

Qui ne se souvient pas du SPACE INVADERS, lun des premiers jeux vidéo -- Aux commandes d'un vaisseau, il s'agissait de défendre la Terre contre des escadrilles d'envahisseurs venus de l'espace... Et bien, la plus grande partie de SPACE INVADERS de la planète a eu lieu le 24 juin 2006 au festival Belluard.

--Space Invaders (notsonoisy.com)

A beautiful film project, that challenges our notions of spectatorship by reversing the gaze of the video screen, turning each pixel into a human being who gazes back at us, all of them powerless in their participation in the enactment of a space battle simulation that always ends in destruction.

Or I don't know... maybe it's just cool.

The Facebook is truly a killer app for incoming freshmen - as they prepare to start a new life in a new place, surrounded by a new social network, the Facebook presents a highly interactive way to explore this new space. For those of us who sent snail-mail letters to our freshman year roommates, Facebook is everything we could have dreamed of and then some - not only can students know everything about their new roommates, but they can learn everything about their suite, their floor, and their dorm. This is information students need to know, and it helps them get situated in their new social networks. --Fred Stutzman --Adopting the Facebook: A Comparative Analysis (Unit Structures)

They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.

"The drum totally disappeared. There were just little pieces of paper fiber all over," Long recalls. The meat, ejected to the side of a nearby hill, was missing for fully 15 minutes.

Once the treated meat had been retrieved, Long cooked it, along with its untreated counterpart, on a grill he had lugged to the site. --Ka-Boom! A shockingly unconventional meat tenderizer (Science News)

Tenderizing meat... with explosions! What an awesome job! Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

--Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D)

This is just what I was looking for.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my "New Media Projects" students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of a trail-blazer and take advantage of the existing EduFrag community (using Unreal Tournament 2004, which features a more advanced IDE that integrates the design tasks, thus cutting down on the number of times students will have to use little stand-alone applets to convert graphics files and such).

I still want to use the Half-Life 2 system for my own work, but I'm beginning to think that the less-complex UT2004 system will still teach the concepts I want to teach.

Today's peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, "wuffie," or simply whim.

This can all sound a little like, well, '60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It's easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism. --Chris Anderson --People Power  (Wired)

--Muppet Wiki  (Muppet.Wikia.com)

Too much information on the muppets. Way, way too much.

As citizens of a highly technological culture, our students see (and often use) technologies as a daily experience. Because of their proliferation, these technologies become are often taken for granted and unexplored. This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to these technologies explicitly. In this activity, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology, map these interactions graphically, and then compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology. By writing these technology autobiographies, students explore what their stories reveal about why we use the technologies we do when we do. --Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies  (Read Write Think)

I've got an early in-class assignment in my "Writing for the Internet" class in which I ask students to estimate the date when various technological innovations were invented (such as the CD-ROM, the mouse, the ball-point pen, etc.).

I might modify that assignment to include some elements of this one.

Via Doctor Daisy .

In an online advertising market increasingly dependent on the Net's ability to precision- target ads, MySpace offers no sure way to hit the bull's-eye. Google decides which ads to show based on search terms and page content. By contrast, a typical MySpace pageview doesn't offer much of a clue about anything. What conclusions can you draw when kid A bounces onto kid B's profile and leaves the message "Wazzup"? That's why a top-priced Google ad -- say, one that appears with search results for the word "refinance" -- is valued in dollars per click, while a MySpace ad clocks in around a hundredth of a cent per view. In theory, all those millions of lovingly, often exhaustively detailed personal profiles ought to make it possible to deduce a user's interests. But no one knows how to do it, certainly not on an industrial scale. --Spencer Reiss --His Space (Wired)

Rupert Murdoch, who purchased MySpace for $580 million dollars, is an old media mogul whose head is not in the sand. Should peer-to-peer idealists worry about the commercialization of "their" internet?

Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload.

This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code presented in class lectures, students work very hard in this course. The amount of work and new material requires a considerable time commitment from the instructor for office hours and other outside-class contact time. It also requires the selection of a good teaching assistant to provide additional time for questions to be answered. We are examining using a Wiki or similar shared editing space to assist students in asking, answering, and finding previous answers of questions; the efficacy of such a system is pure speculation at this point.

The integration of writing, oral presentation, program design, and coding makes this course a fantastic introduction to software engineering. This helps to overcome students? tendency to compartmentalize, thinking writing is for English class, coding is for computer science, and never the twain shall meet. --Brian C. Ladd --The Curse of Monkey Island: Holding the Attention of Students Weaned on Computer Games (Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges)

Fascinating article on a computer science course that uses a text-adventure project as a way of meeting liberal arts curriculum demands.

--The Information Machine (YouTube)

A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly.

The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator's patient voice and the final image -- of a rose fading into a heart -- show an concerted effort to make computer technology into a continuation of the human effort to make functional and beautiful order out of the world, rather than something to fear.

Note the gender-specific roles assigned to the cartoon characters -- a room full of white-coated female operators of some sort is followed by a very white, very male boardroom. We can't fault the film too much for being a product of its time, of course.

The content is visionary for 1957, the year of Sputnik, when science fiction heroes were battling giant mosters and robots that looked like walking water coolers. It's also interesting to see how computer scientists introduced the idea of mathematical simulation to the general public.

Nowadays, when I sit down to read a book it is so hard to like it. I have forced myself to stare at a page for as long as it takes before I could grasp what I was reading. My attention span for slow paced readings and a teacher standing at the front of the room lecturing is lessening by the minute and I am determined to get it back.

I love technology and what it has done in my lifetime but I have suffered the consequences of constant stimulation. (Whenever I do Homework, the TV is on, my cell phones going off; I'm looking up movie times and the radio's blasting.)

Back then, my mom says she was happy and proud to put herself through college..."not everyone was as privileged as I was," she said...and receive such a reputable degree...I hope I feel that same way when I end this chapter of my life and in the meantime I will respect my professors as if they were doing me favor and spread the word. --Juli --College Etiquette (from a college student's perspective) (Juli's Views)

Even if Juli hadn't ended with a Valentine to the teaching profession, I'd have been very interested in the content of this essay. I've been thinking a lot about attention spans lately.

Both my children are lively and energetic, which means it's hard for them to sit still. All through the month of June, I've been going to the office just one or two days a week, and the rest of the time I've been doing the family thing.

Peter is well into that magical age of childhood when he finds almost endless amusement in a diverse range of activities such as burping, farting, and making up songs (about burping and farting). While I used to worry about his short attention span, now I find he gets fixated on something. ("Can I have a root beer now? I really want a root beer. Daddy, I really want a root beer. Can I ask mommy for a root beer? Did you forget about my root beer? Okay, while I wait, I'll pretend I'm drinking a root beer.")

He has picked up my interest in "god games" (like Sim City, Civilization, and lately, Black and White), and will sit for hours with a book on animals, chess, or robotics (he's eight, by the way). He's also becoming quite an expert on his scooter. He is very quick to lecture his sister when she's not being cooperative, and that can be a problem (since we have to keep reminding him that the best way he can help Carolyn learn to behave properly is to behave properly himself, so that she has a good example to follow).

For the last few days, I've been spending time playing board games and card games with my four-year-old, in part in order to increase her attention span.

She can't quite sit through a full game of The Magnificent Race, but that's okay, because Peter and I just alternate taking her turn for her when she has to wander off to do other things. But a hand of go fish or concentration is much more her speed. (I'm also teaching my daughter to read, which is a pleasure. I've been spending about a half hour a day with her, usually in two chunks. It's a challenge to get her to sit still, it's great to see her progress, and my wife looks on me with love whenever she sees me working so diligently with Carolyn.)

We were all sitting on front of the TV, ready to watch the space shuttle launch. Leigh had space books spread out in the living room, and we had freeze-dried ice cream ready for an afternoon snack. After Peter read her a book about space travel, Carolyn announced, "I don't want to be grow up to be a painter any more. I want to be -- an astronaut painter!" Or maybe she meant "astronaut-painter."

At any rate, we have been working hard to give them experiences that are richly linked, so that instead of flitting from subject to subject, they develop the ability to make connections that are both broad and deep.

Last week, I was participating in a faculty training session, and I was really interested in the material being covered, so I opened up a blank word processor page, and started typing notes. The facilitator, hearing the typing keys, politely asked for "us all" (meaning me) to pay attention. I switched to my PDA, where I tapped away more frantically in order to keep up. I'll keep this in mind the next time I presume that a student who is clicking keys or pushing a button is not paying attention.

Nevertheless, my favorite classroom at Seton Hill (Admin 405) has about 25 computers around the outside of the room, and tables in the middle. That means there's a physical break between lecture/discussion and online work.