I had no clue

I had no clue it had been so long.

Ok… so I have to say. I hate moving. Maybe worse is unpacking. Im here in my new place typing this in my own room. I call it the studio/ office/ lab. It’s pretty full of junk right now, but I think it is going to be perfect when im done setting it up. I may actually have real space to not only work on my design/web work, but a completely different table to work on electronics.

So the real reason for no update has been the move/ unpacking. The last 3 weeks have been dedicated to only that. Not to say that work hasn’t sucked the life out of me, but I managed to take some of it back, and it looks like most nights will be mine to work on my own stuff for once.

At work, I guess I can say, I should be able to at least, I am working on the development of the software for our product. It is being developed in adobe AIR so we can write once and deploy on what ever platform you want. It is basically flash for the desktop. So I have an application with a real icon who actually updates, opens ands saves files, and does everything an real application should do. It’s pretty nice.

Because of it, I have been learning a ton of new action script stuff, and if I ever get time to write some multi-touch apps again it should be much easier.

Once the product is out there I can tell you more, but we will be offering a product in the field of Affective Computing, AKA the ability for computers to interrupt human emotion. It’s a really cool field of research started by Rosalind Picard (who happens to be my boss) to expand the field of artificial intelligence.

People look at Spock from Star Trek as this perfect example of a perfectly logical human, and how smart they are. We often think of emotion as getting in the way of decision making, or at least messing it up.

Well, it turns out that people with too little emotion actually have a hard time making decisions. Imagine going to a restaurant, your favorite one. Maybe you look over the menu and see a few things you like, but end up going with a old favorite. Your emotion kicked in and helped with that choice. If you had been perfectly logical you would have considered 1000 things about the food (from taste, ingredients, health etc) before making a decision. Ultimately, you would spend more time and possibly end up with something you would like less in the end.

So if humans need a certain level of emotion to make better decisions, what about computers. If people want to make computers act and think more like people, then they too need to have some emotion. That is what this area of study is all about.

Bildr Code API & icons

I made some more Icons for whoever wants them (no credit needed). I was doing something that needed some small file icons so I whipped these out. (size shown is at 200%)

PDF here

So I got something else working I had been banking on. The sudo-API for bildrCode is working now. I even wrote a plugin for the bildr wiki that easily allows users to add the code to an article (the entire point). So as of now, all that happens is you request a file with the ID of the project you want, and it spits back javascript who then places the code on the page in a nice clean box with tools and a drop down to select the language. The code is even highlighted and inserts it’s own css along with it.

I got this idea from github who does this nearly the same way. It’s a little funny because I could actually use this to display code on any site. I will have to figure out how to stop that from happening.

So if all goes according to plan I will have bildrCode in beta version by the end of the month. After that I will be constructing a video to go along with the site that will help show my vision for the site and hopefully get people excited enough about the project that they will want to help out.

The next step after bildrCode will be to build a javascript schematic editor (yeah right). But if it could happen, it would be truly awesome. Imagine building schematics in a collaborative manner!