Astral Physics

Sensing Your Environment

jordan.snyder — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:10:00 +0000

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of need for sensors in my environment. I would like to have cameras in certain places to notify me of thieves or tampering or wildlife; I would like to have GPS in my car, and on my motorcycle; I would like my phone to know where I go and potentially the things that I say in daily conversation when it’s in earshot, but I want it to do something clever with that information, and I don’t want any one else to have it. I would like to have temperature and humidity sensors in various places to warn of potential mold or mildew situations. And I would like to have a beautiful interface that tied everything together on all of my devices.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as I have only just mentioned consumer applications. I know that industrial applications are available for some of these things, but they are not easy to use and not very accessible (in my opinion). These thoughts have led me to more thoughts around the future of devices, sensors, networks, and people and their interactions with each other and with the environment. I have a simple product idea that I’m trying to develop. Anyone who is seriously ready to start today on some embedded work should contact me jordan**at**jordansnyder.com

Facade Projection

jordan.snyder — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:36:03 +0000

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

555 KUBIK
“How it would be, if a house was dreaming”

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

Production: www.urbanscreen.com

Art Direction: Daniel Rossa – www.rossarossa.de
Technical Director: Thorsten Bauer
3D Operator: David Starmann www.shineundsein.de
Sound Design : Jonas Wiese

Realized with www.mxwendler.net mediaserver

A extended version of this documentation can be found here: vimeo.com/5677104

Fontaine

jordan.snyder — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:49:18 +0000

I have now publicised my musical alter-ego, Fontaine. The sound is not quite where I want it yet, but I am posting my progress as I create with new tools: Logic Studio 8 and Live 7.

Check out the “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (Snoop Dogg) Remix!

Fontaine on Virb

Crossdomain Security and GIF Images in Silverlight 2

jordan.snyder — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:59:03 +0000

As mentioned in my brief talk at Microsoft MIX 09 a few weeks ago, we are working on a Silverlight application for a major photo-sharing website. This is the first post of a couple that will explain a few issues we ran into while developing a Silverlight 2 application.

First, Silverlight does not support rendering of GIF images with the component. You can use a component from ComponentOne to display GIF’s, but it uses WebClient or HTTPRequest to grab the raw image data to process, and therefore becomes restricted by cross-domain security policies. You can find a very clear explanation of Silverlight’s URL security restrictions here, but to summarize, the and components are more lax when loading from one domain to another (they do not require that crossdomain policy files live on the server) so you are allowed to load content from domains other than the one that the Silverlight app was served from. However, when using WebClient or HTTPRequest directly (or direct sockets, for that matter), you must have crossdomain policy files on the deploying server.

So, how is this worked around? You can do a few things:

1. Set up a web server proxy solution – Server-side code does not have crossdomain restrictions, so you can deploy server-side code (on the server that is serving the Silverlight application) that will broker requests from the Silverlight client application, go out and get data from wherever you need it, and then tunnel it back through to Silverlight. This has been done for years with Flash and AJAX server requests, but in my opinion, it’s still as messy as ever. Thinking about it just makes me feel a bit dirty.

2. Deploy crossdomain policy files to ALL servers hosting image content – This means that the “major photo-sharing website” that I mentioned above will have to do some work. Fortunately for us, they are in the process of doing this anyway, but if they weren’t, this wouldn’t quite be an option. Quite a few public API’s do have crossdomain policy files in place for this very reason, but many don’t (including Twitter’s API).

3. Host the Silverlight application on a subdomain off of the same domain as the images? – In other words, can we host the application on http://search.yourphotosite.com and access images on http://images1.yourphotosite.com and http://images32.yourphotosite.com? The short answer is no, not without crossdomain policy files…which, according to #2 above, would solve our problem anyway. So, that doesn’t get us anywhere either!

4. When the API returns with a list of images, filter out all images ending in “.gif” – Okay, this is easy to filter out, but not so easy when dealing with the total number of results. We pagination results and show the total, so if the API says there are 4000 images and 2000 of those are GIF’s, we’re going to have a completely incorrect count at all times. Since this is public and popular image-sharing, there are A LOT of GIF’s. This option definitely does not solve the problem.

As far as I know, these are the only options available in this particular instance. We are hoping that the photo-sharing site will expedite the installation of the crossdomain policy files on their image content servers, but without that, we’d be out of luck.

The Beginning of Something Beautiful

jordan.snyder — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:40:22 +0000

Work in progress…this was actually an accident while trying to create something that will hopefully be much more badass. Stay tchuned!

Tendrils (make your own!)

Inspired by:
Like Spinning Plates (Live) – Radiohead

Processing Hearts AIR While Merapi Lends a Hand

jordan.snyder — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:35:09 +0000

As promised at my brief demo at 360|Flex San Jose last week, I’m now releasing the Merapi library for Processing.

Processing is a Java-variant built mostly for artists or for anyone who wants to create quick prototypes.

Merapi is an opensource Java library that gives access to Java from AIR – Adobe’s own OS-agnostic runtime (for the desktop, not a browser plugin) built around the Flash Player.

But most of you already knew that.

It’s really nothing too complicated (just wrapping the JAR file correctly), but it will make it a bit easier for you to get started with Merapi in Processing.

What to do:
1) ~~Download Merapi Processing Lib Beta~~ – Merapi is not being publicly released yet.
2) Wherever your actual Processing binary resides, you will find a folder called “libraries”. Unzip merapi.zip into this directory. (Your directory structure should be {ProcessingDir}/libraries/merapi/library/… which will contain all the necessary JAR files for Merapi.)
3) Open your Processing IDE (restart if it’s already open), go to the Menu->Sketch->Import Library->merapi. This will import the necessary packages, but there’s one last step before you’re in the clear. The way that Processing imports all of the packages becomes a bit troublesome. If you simply try to create an instance of the Merapi “Bridge” class, you will get a compile error. To resolve this… (See Step 4)
4) Change the import line import merapi.*” to “import merapi.Bridge;”

Also, Adam Flater whipped up this quick video demonstrating the Lego Mindstorm robot cruising around thanks to Bluetooth<->Java/Merapi<->AIR.

Life

jordan.snyder — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:38:58 +0000

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
-Bumper Sticker

“The best things in life aren’t things.”
-Bumper Sticker

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.”
-Ekhart Tolle

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive…And then go, and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
-Harold Whitman

Sketchy

jordan.snyder — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:28:48 +0000

Processing is a sketching language. It is very nice for prototyping!

I have been enamored with astronomy and astrophysics lately, and I’m really wanting to model a supernova or galaxy formation, but my skills are just not quite there. I need to better understand the math behind the physics, and the physics behind OpenGL.

Anyway, I made some of these little spherical doodles today.

Fibonacci

jordan.snyder — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:21:22 +0000

Fibonaaci was a real swell guy. He figured out some things about life and nature. And numbers. He was neat. Boy, I like smart people.

I did this the other day because I needed a distraction. It’s kinda the Fibonacci sequence. It looks like hair. The calculation choked and took a long time to draw all of the points. This computer was working hard for the money.

Figure 1: Not Hair

Inspired by: Fantaisie Impromptu – Frederic Chopin

Art Part Deux: The Update

jordan.snyder — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:04:35 +0000

The art show on Friday went well. We didn’t face any technical difficulties, the art was good, the music was good. I played keys with The Novelist, and our performance went well. Jake Hand recorded it and it actually sounds great for a little stereo mic. I’ll post the full recording when it’s uploaded.

Also, I modified the original visualization a little bit. It was really just a starting point, and once I got all the technical kinks worked out (related to analyzing the audio spectrum data without playing the audio in real-time) I was able to modify the visuals a bit. As you might have noticed, the original was based partially on Brendan Dawes’ Sonic Dots – with some important modifications – but based on it nonetheless. I changed the code up to add some different flare, and I was in the process of changing it more when I ran out of room on my hard drive. Processing tried to save my sketch and since there was no room, it actually deleted all of my code. I can re-write (probably best to refactor now anyway), but this was two days before the show and I took it as a sign that I should just get on with it and turn in what I had. I ended up displaying both versions because I couldn’t decide which I liked more. Here’s version two of the visualization based on Jesse Cohen‘s “My First Music Toy.”