May 2013
1 post
3 tags
Fibonacci & the Y-Combinator in C
Be warned, this post describes something you should never actually use in production code. However, we will get to play with some very cool concepts and techniques: functional programming in C, closures, implementing autorelease pools from scratch, data structures (linked lists and b-trees), bitwise operations, recursivity, memoization, and the Y-Combinator. If this sounds crazy, don’t be...
December 2012
1 post
1 tag
Liza Long writes about her mentally ill child:
I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about...
November 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Web 3.0 at Chartboost →
This is an article I originally wrote for the Chartboost blog.
For the sake of brevity, we’re going to dub the next generation of web app development “Web 3.0.” This entails a collection of new technologies and new ideas, which have become possible only recently with the large advances made by modern browsers.
What does this mean? This means creating web applications, not sites. We believe the...
“Even as I was watching “Cloud Atlas” the first time, I knew I would...”
– Roger Ebert
September 2012
1 post
1 tag
August 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Richard Muller for the Wall Street Journal on the Fukushima incident:
But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The “hot spots” in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that...
2 tags
A critique of the Apple indie developer community
The Apple developer community has bred some of the most skilled engineers I know. Specifically, I’m talking about those who, like me, were writing Objective-C code before the iPhone and before there was any money in it.
Objective-C is a hard language to learn. It’s unsafe, manually memory managed, and full of easy mistakes. But once learnt, it’s one of the most rewarding...
June 2012
3 posts
1 tag
I have the best job in the world.
Every day, I show up to work and create something awesome. It’s like being a kid again except this time, instead of Lego bricks, the building blocks are Objective-C blocks, WebSockets and ØMQ. Clojure, Ruby, and Assembly. I make things that I want to use. I solve problems for the sake of curiosity. I’m like a child in Disneyland, having the time of...
1 tag
As final project for my Advanced Motion Graphics class, I produced the above set of 3 personal idents.
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Stones
This was an exercise in synchronizing motion to audio. As a school project this past semester, we were all assignments parts of Anon Day’s song Stones to produce a piece of video for. This was the intro.
May 2012
1 post
2 tags
Scylla Absinthe
This was a project for my packaging design class, this past semester. Starting from scratch, I designed the entire story and identity. Illustration was done by the incredibly talented Brian Mutschler.
Scylla is said to once have been a nymph so beautiful that Poseidon, the great god of the seas, fell madly in love with her. Scylla, not reciprocating the feeling, fled to the dry land, where...
April 2012
7 posts
2 tags
WWDC
This story will sound familiar to a lot of people this morning, I fear: I woke up to a handful of text messages, emails and IM messages saying Apple had opened sales for WWDC tickets at 5:30 am. I frantically jumped out of bed and to my computer, to try and buy one immediately. Of course, as it were, all tickets were sold out.
The rules this year around state that a personal Apple developer...
2 tags
Sexism
It’s often claimed that we are creating a negative environment for women in tech, through the way we like to have fun and blow off steam. A startup is an intensely stressful environment, and staying sane is crucial. In-jokes, brogramming, and good-natured debauchery is a way to do that. If somebody cannot handle some crudeness, I’d postulate that he or she does not belong at a startup,...
2 tags
A fractal of bad design →
Alex Munroe:
I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.
You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.
You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw...
2 tags
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App Store Retrospective
Three years ago, I wrote a summary of the major problems with Apple’s App Store as an email on the iphonesb mailing list. Three years later, I think it’s a good time to look back and see how Apple has handled the situation, and assess whether we’re better off.
App Store:
Junk Apps: The App Store is filled with junk apps made in, at most, ten minutes. The proliferation of...
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:
At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The...
March 2012
3 posts
3 tags
America is one of the most hospitable countries. The American people are genuinely nice: they give a lot to charity, they like to have fun, they smile. It’s hard to realize how much of a difference this makes until you spend some time living somewhere else. In Russia, for example, people seem sad and distant, while in South Africa the pleasantries feel much forced and status-driven, as if...
1 tag
Watch
In Advanced Motion Graphics, we were assigned the science fiction parable Scales, and instructed to design a title sequence for a hypothetical film based on the short story. The video is my interpretation, designed over three weeks in Cinema 4D and After Effects.
I came to this solution pretty late in the process. I spent most of my time working on this concept, before ultimately abandoning...
1 tag
Watch
A short one week assignment for my motion graphics class: a title graphic for a fictional indie band.
February 2012
4 posts
WatchThis is by far the most bad-ass video of an insect you will ever see.
1 tag
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Watch
This semester at CCA, I’m taking an Advanced Motion Graphics class. This is my first project: a short video which visually illustrates the feeling one gets when going clubbing and drinking, and the night gets crazier and crazier, until it morphs into something that isn’t so fun anymore.
Partying is fun, but it’s important to know one’s limits. I’ve made that...
Lament of the Delicious Librarian →
Jessie Char:
I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to...
January 2012
1 post
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be...”
– Steve Jobs
December 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Enter the Dragon →
Mike Lee:
With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to...
Path's "+" Button →
Rick Fillion:
Details take time. Details are exhausting, and require a ton of trial and error. I spent at least 5 minutes last night just tapping Path’s button again and again looking at the animation to try to figure it out exactly, to figure out why it felt so right. Recreating it would take me much longer than those 5 minutes. This exhausting trial and error is how you can manage to create...
1 tag
Watch
So I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting up pretty much everything else so I could get these done in time. But now that’s over, I’ll finally be able to show off my hard work. This is my final project for my Type 3 class, a class on information graphics.
Dangerous binge drinking in America’s youth is the result of a prohibitionist culture and...
November 2011
2 posts
A Conspiracy of Hogs →
Willy Staley on how McDonald’s essentially transformed being in the restaurant market into being in the commodities’ futures trading market:
At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that...
1 tag
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
WatchFor a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.
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A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew...
“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s...”
– Barack Obama
“If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles...”
– Zack Morris
September 2011
6 posts
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the...”
– Andy Warhol
4 tags
How to fix the US economy in a week*
* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.
Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.
Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)
Tuesday: Declare...
“There are two ways to strike out: looking and swinging. Striking out looking is...”
– Chad Etzel
Jobs are obsolete
Douglas Rushkoff:
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
[…]
What we...
August 2011
8 posts
“One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the...”
– Dave Winer
“And so, as someone who does a lot of writing throughout my day, having a text...”
– Shawn Blanc reviewing Macchiato
1 tag
What Happened to Obama?
Drew Westen for the New York Times:
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his...
Patrick Rhone reviews Macchiato:
Recently, Ive been taking a tour of various text editors and writing environments in an effort to, well, give them all a fair chance. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m so tied to TextEdit that I far too often give most everything else only a drive-by chance before running back to the comfort and security of what I already know. That said, while I love TextEdit, it...
3 tags
Macchiato
This past June, I attended my very first WWDC. The conference, the people and the parties were all amazing, and it was definitely a highlight. Inspired by the spirit of the conference, and all the new technologies presented, I set out to conquer my laziness and build and ship a new app.
I’m a huge fan of Markdown. So much so that I write nearly everything in it. From emails and notes, to...
1 tag
Marco Arment:
I don’t think the results of the 2012 election will significantly affect the next term: the modern Republican party controls the country’s policy and all mainstream political discourse extremely effectively, even when they don’t hold the presidency or a congressional majority.
I have no idea what the Democrats are trying to do, generally. The only coherent message they’ve...
