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.

Getting closer – bildr

So bildrCode is getting closer to being done. I have a list of things that I need to fix/ make happen before it is ready to go, and it is getting shorter by the day.

Since last write, you can add files and folders properly. There is a confirmation box for deleting a file, and file history is back working (I had killed it implementing the session way of working).

I think I am actually at a place now that I could actually start on the bildr video (showcasing the idea) but I gave my self till the end of July to finish it, so im going to see if I can before I start the video.

I have been thinking a lot about how I will explain the code part, and I think I have some good ideas for some visuals that will really explain everything that is going on and why it is better for what we are doing than using the plain wiki site, or even something as awesome and powerful as github.

On a quick side note, I have started working again in ActionScript again. This time for work. I love how whenever I do things in flash/ActionScript they are never for the web. (please do us all a favor, and don’t use flash to build entire sites).

Im often wondering how you go about doing things properly though. If I need to know the highest value in an array without resorting it is there a better way than making a copy of it, sorting the copy and returning it? What about finding if a value is in an array? Must I loop through it?

I guess I just have a human fear of loops (in that I think of computers as being too human). I always neglect to think of how powerful computers are, and hate looping through 500 values because I always assume that it is just too much work for them.