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In February, some colleagues and I built an interactive installation for the Designbox gallery entitled "Some of the Parts". User-submitted content (audio, images, video, text) was stored and organized in a custom content management system I built for the project, then visitors to the installation selected bits of content to display using a reacTIVision based table interface built by Jon from shovemedia. A custom publish and subscribe system created by Lee from Project Mastermind routed the content choices to a number of Flash-based visualizations that were projected throughout the gallery. Lee also built an FFT analyzer and data server that published real-time audio analysis data that allowed the visualizations to react to the music being played in the space. This was an incredibly complex system, but it worked beautifully once all of the kinks were worked out. Video is forthcoming, in the meantime, I've decoupled the visualization I wrote for the installation from the system to run stand-alone, analyzing mp3s that are loaded directly, and choosing content from the system at random, rather than relying on user input.

Here are two examples:
Grid
Wave

If you mouse over the right side of the display, you can open a control panel that allows you to customize the visualization in a number of ways, creating completely different effects. The two examples above simply represent two sets of default settings. you can click anywhere in the visualization to toggle full-screen mode.

So I put off upgrading to Adobe CS3 (from CS1) until I let more courageous folk road test it on Leopard. After testing the waters personally for a month with the free Photoshop demo, I picked up the Design Premium upgrade right before my demo expired. My understanding was that I could keep the demo installed, and simply enter my serial number after installing the rest of the CS3 apps. This was not the case. After installing CS3 (minus PS, which the installer correctly detected as already installed), I fired up Flash, entered my serial, and activated CS3. Fired up Illustrator - no nag, properly activated after doing the business with Flash. Nice! Fired up Photoshop - and my troubles began. The serial nag screen was still there. Hmmm, OK, maybe since it was a demo, I need to activate it on it's own... No go. Serial rejected. WTF? So, I uninstall the Photoshop CS3 demo with AppZapper (don't do this - use the uninstaller that comes with the demo). Then I went to install Photoshop from the CS3 DVD. But I can't because the installer thinks it's still installed - but I can't repair the installation or uninstall. Again, WTF? After poking around on the Adobe knowledge base and reading some blog/forum posts, I found the Adobe CS3 Cleanup Script. This script cleans up all of the little files that Adobe sprinkles throughout your system that can cause the installer to be confused. I de-activated CS3, then ran level 1 and level 2, which nuked all CS3 related files on my system. At this point, I was able to re-run the CS3 installer and choose to install Photoshop. Success!

Or so I thought. After waiting for about an hour for the full installation to run again, the installer completed. With an error on the Photoshop installation. "Component install failed" - great. Thanks for the verbose explanation. Googling this led me to a bunch of people talking about how having Flash 9 player installed or maybe having an old flash player installed can cause this error. Great. I also read that the CS3 cleanup script I used had two undocumented levels -  level 3 removes CS2 files (no help to me, but good to know), and level 4 will seek and destroy any Adobe and some Macromedia related files. Hell yeah - that's gotta solve my problem. Or not. Same result. Component install failed.

At this point, I've wasted several hours and I'm out of options. So I go into the install DVD and find the actual Photoshop installation image, AdobePhotoshop10en_us.dmg, and try to mount it. And get an I/O error. Really. On a brand spankin' new DVD with no blemishes. OK - let's try copying the file to the hard drive. No dice - in fact, I can't even close the copy progress dialog - had to kill -9 finder to get rid of it. A quick search leads to an article on the Adobe KB that lists all of the steps I've already gone through, and if that fails, to call customer support and request replacement install media. Great. An hour and five transfers around Bangalore later I have a new set of DVDs on their way to me. In 4-6 business days. I asked if they could let me download everything I needed - you know, since they do ESD for everything nowadays. Sorry Charlie.

Well,  I don't have a week to spare, and since I use Photoshop every day, I had to either reinstall CS1, or try to find a way to get a working copy of the AdobePhotoshop10en_us.dmg file. Since my CS1 media was at the office, and I was at home, I decided to try a little experiment. I downloaded the Photoshop CS3 30 day demo, and found that file in an obvious place. Well, since the demo is supposed to be the same as the full version, maybe I can substitute the image from the demo for the broken image on the DVD. Copied the CS3 DVD to my HD (minus the busted file), and dropped in the image from the demo. Ran the installer - and FINALLY got a complete and perfect installation.

However, since I had uninstalled my CS1 apps with the CS3 cleanup script, the activation routine asked me for my CS1 serial. Which was at the office. OK, well, I've waited two days, I can put it off until the AM. Cut to this morning. I fire up Flash, get my CS1 box off the shelf, punch in my serial number and... big red X. Some error message about the serial belonging to an ineligible product for the upgrade. Which is BS, since the installer previously recognized and accepted my CS1 version when it was actually installed on my system. So I uninstalled CS3 with the CS3 cleanup script, installed CS1 again, and successfully installed CS3 with my patched together package. This time, CS3 recognized my CS1 install and activated as it should. At this point, I was able to remove my CS1 apps. Finally - for real - a working CS3  Design Premium suite.

I learned three things from this exercise:

1. Adobe really needs to work on their CS3 installation routine.

2. Using the CS3 cleanup script, you can probably use the entire CS3 suite for free indefinitely as long as you're willing to nuke and reinstall all of the tools from their demo versions every 30 days and put up with the nag screens. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but you know, I'm just sayin'.

3. [Newly former] Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen has some explaining to do:


Dear Bruce,
I am willing to pay a premium for quality tools that allow me to be more productive. Installing your tools cost me two day's worth of productivity, which is worth about as much as the cost of the CS3 Design Premium package (the full version, not the upgrade I purchased). Before you clean out your desk, please ask Shantanu Narayen to send me a full copy of CS4 Design Premium, or it's equivalent for Mac upon it's release as compensation.

Thanks,
Rob

Hopefully this story will save someone some frustration. At the very least, I feel a little better now.

So I've always liked the idea of being able to post photos taken with the camera on my mobile phone to my site. I've hacked together some ways to do this in the past using email. Recently, Apple launched a new gallery service on .mac that pretty much works the same way, but very cleanly. They also integrated upload access to the galleries into the iPhone, making it extremely easy to send photos to your .mac galleries from the phone. Email is the transport mechanism, but the process of uploading is very simple.

Another nice feature of the new galleries is "Photocasting" this basically means that each gallery exports an XML feed describing the photos in the gallery. The feed includes URLs to thumbnails, medium sized versions, and full size versions of each photo. This makes it very easy to integrate your .mac galleries into your own site.

I set up a gallery dedicated to iPhone images to be posted in the sidebar on my site (look right under recently seen). You can click a thumbnail, and a full version of the photo will pop up in a lightbox. You can shuttle back and forth within the lightbox, and the caption is displayed with each photo. I wrote up a quick tutorial for the 1% of iPhone owners that also have .mac accounts and PHP driven websites that use Smarty.

Yahoo is featuring an article by AP writer Greg Bluestein about how US universities are changing their approach to computer science education in an effort to counter the declining number of comp-sci majors. The article describes efforts by educators to create more engaging curriculum to attract more undergrads to CS programs. This view is myopic at best. The decline in interest in CS degrees is directly caused by the shrinking job market due to the outsourcing of skilled technical jobs. Right now, 20 year veteran developers are competing with recent CS grads for positions. This article seems to tacitly blame disinterested students for the decline of "U.S. technology supremacy" - gimme a fucking break. The dot-com bust started the ball rolling and the large-scale outsourcing of tech jobs has brought us to where we are today. Todays undergrads may as well pursue a degree in buggy whip design as CS.

The article concludes with this little nugget: OK, so the decline may be related to the job market, but...

The always forward thinking UK Office of Science and Innovation is predicting that Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights that humans enjoy. If this happened, the report says, the robots would have certain responsibilities such as voting, the obligation to pay taxes, and perhaps serving compulsory military service.

As if we didn't already have enough trouble with election fraud. An army of semi-autonomous robots could be instructed to vote a given way by a bored script kiddie. No matter how good election security is, you couldn't secure the free will of a population of interlinked AIs.