ZR has been added to build.last.fm. We're proud to be a part of the growing last.fm developer community.

If you're new to Zen Radar, take a moment to read about what this thing is and find out how to use it. If you have questions, check the FAQ, or feel free to contact us. If you're ready to get a closer look, create an account and dive right in.

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.

Add me to the list of victims.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that my trackpad button was unresponsive in the middle, but OK on the sides. I figured some cruft had gotten under it and would work it's way out eventually. Today, I noticed a little bit of a wobble, like there was something on my desk under the machine. So I took a look...

Apple Support was very responsive, and they're sending me a new battery free of charge (provided I send back this one). Great service, but I'm homebound until the big yellow van comes to visit.

[update: 5/3]
My replacement arrived this afternoon, less than 24 hours after my call. Awesome customer service, but I'd rather have had a good battery to begin with. If I had been on the road, I would've been screwed.

Check out tanyacash21's Music Roamer. You can explore last.fm related artists through a groovy Flash interface. Discover new music, find out how many degrees of separation there are between your favorite artists. I could click around in there for hours.

Jeff & I have been working on a service built around the last.fm & audioscrobbler album correlation science I've been talking about. It's now ready for semi-public use.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Zen Radar.

The project is still in active development, but is fairly stable. We'll be adding new feeds and features over time.

Percussa is now shipping their AudioCubes. New images and video can he found here. The price is somewhat lower than what I expected! I may have to pick up a set.

After setting up a recent tracks widget for my homepage with Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, I came to the disappointing realization many people have lamented. There is no album information in the recent tracks feed, and no easy way to get it through other means. I don't really understand why the album info is not provided in the feed - the album listening stats are available, so it's being stored in the scrobbler database somewhere. I'm sure there's a good reason for this omission, since there have been a number of requests for this feature on the last.fm forums.

Since album detail feeds are available (with track listings!), it's possible to correlate the artist and track names in the recent tracks feed to the albums. It's not an easy task, and it's not 100% accurate, but with a little effort, you can put together a system that can match album info to your recent tracks list, complete with cover art, URLs to the album pages on last.fm, the whole enchilada.

Here's the lowdown

Have you ever wanted to display your last.fm recent tracks (or any other info last.fm info for that matter) on your own site? If you're using the Zend Framework, it's amazingly easy. The Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler class in the incubator provides an easy way of using the Audioscrobbler web services.

I put together a brief tutorial on how to make it happen.

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen - a fully automated, magazine fed, remote controlled beer launcher.

If only it was easy to get decent beer in 12oz cans.

Akismet provides an unobtrusive mechanism for filtering spam posts from user submitted content. It works. Well. You never have to pester your users with the psychedelic Turing test that is Captcha again.

I installed the Zend_Service_Akismet implementation here and MicroAkismet on a few other blogs over the last week. Even sites with serious comment spam problems have seen the spam drop off to zero. I haven't seen any false positives yet.

Get it. Use it. Love it.

ZDnet's George Ou is reporting what is now my all time favorite windows exploit. I expect much hilarity to ensue.

UPDATE:
This listserv post from 11 years ago points out the obvious. You'd think that with the NSA helping out with Vista's security this would have been taken care of by now. Too bad Microsoft isn't devoting as much energy to security as they are to DRM.

The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA was involved in Vista's security development. Microsoft claims that the agency was involved in testing and the creation of an admin-oriented security guide. I'm not buying it.

Percussa is developing a tangible music UI based on custom hardware. The technical details on their site are sketchy, but they have some good demo videos up.

Word on the street: Availability starting at Winter NAMM

After years of neglect, I've rebuilt roblogic.net from the ground up. Stronger. Faster. Better. I'm sure my 12 monthly visitors will appreciate it.

Happy new year!

Beat juggling (literally) with reacTIVision:



I could amuse myself with this for days.

Here's an article about the setup

This week I started experimenting with reacTIVision, part of the reacTable* project. ReacTIVision is the object tracking engine, the synthesis and visual feedback portions of reacTable are not open source. The new version of reacTIVision, 1.3, contains a MIDI server with a very flexible configuration scheme. This allows easy mapping of controllers in applications like Ableton Live that don't support OSC, the protocol that reacTIVision has traditionally served.

Here's a quick demo video of reacTIVision controlling Live 6. It's not much of a performance, but you can see the potentential.

I've made some changes to the MIDI server to allow smooth CC interpolation, variable CC quantization, and some statefulness to stop redundant CC messages. This has made the MIDI functionality a bit more music-friendly and reduced the MIDI traffic significantly. Martin's reacTIVision code is very elegant - I'm a novice C++ programmer, but was able to dive right in and start working.

I'm hoping to develop an configurable visual feedback engine along the lines of reacTable that is geared toward controlling applications like Live, Traktor, Reaktor, etc.

Jeff and I spent some time this week web-enabling his fish lamp. You can see whether or not the lamp is running, and turn it on or off. We've got some other devices around the office running on the same system. Jeff & I are thinking about putting together a tutorial on the how to roll your own. There are a ton of practical uses for this kind of automation. I'm working on adding scheduling, building an admin interface, restricting access, and integrating webcam feeds. The system uses the X10 CM17a Firecracker controlled by flipit. Jeff's flash interfaces talk to PHP scripts that control flipit, and get and set device status from a small MySQL database.

Microsoft has proclaimed that Vista will be the most secure operating system ever. Revolutionary features like virtual filesystem roots for users and applications, allowing applications to run with restricted priveleges, and the ability to access tools that require administrator rights by supplyng that admin password on a per use basis rather then having to log out and log in as the Administrator user are noted as answers to todays complex security needs.

Somewhere, Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie are having a big laugh over this.

There's an anti-spyware bill in congress right now, and it's getting huge support on both sides of the aisle. Make sure your representatives and seantors are behind it.

Firefox version 0.9 is out. Get it. Use it. Love it.