I am going to keep track of my progress in DoDonPachi here. I just started playing shmups so I am not that good yet. So far my best score is 5,299,970 and I have gotten up to Stage 1-3.

2/28/2008 - 5,299,970 - STAGE 1-3

Tokyo cityscape at night. Looks like something out of Snowcrash.

I would like to propose that a group of people get together to create a new personal computer platform that is similar to the Apple Macintosh in that it is a "closed" hardware platform built upon an open-source operating system. The goal of this new system would be to take cues from the success of the Macintosh, and refine the human-computer interface to a more intuitive design.

The wonderful thing about the Mac is that everything just works, right out of the box. The graphical user interface is well designed and polished, and is made to interface easily and properly with the hardware upon which it is designed for. Apple's OSX is built upon an operating system called OpenDarwin, which itself is built upon the XNU Mach kernel, and parts of 4.3 BSD. I am curious as to why Apple chose to go the BSD route rather than building their own operating system from the ground up, or basing it upon the Linux kernel. I suspect that it might have something to do with differences in the license agreements for both Linux and BSD. Linux is definitely where all the action is these days with regards to the desktop computing platform. There is a wide Linux developer community creating a plethora of applications and graphical user interfaces, and it is binary compatible with BSD.

Apple is making the right steps forward on the hardware front by building their system on the OpenFirmware spec. The technical and open-source nature of OpenFirmware allows for a much greater range of compatibility with different pieces of hardware. Hardware integration on the Macintosh platform is almost a non-issue. Everything you add or connect just seems to work right out of the box, and is easy to configure. Hardware that is plugged into a Mac via USB or Firewire is easily integrated into many current OSX applications. The commercial design of Apple's hardware is also tasteful and exceptionally well executed.

The main aspect that I find fault in with the current Apple platform is the graphical interface of the operating system. OSX is a delight to look at and certainly is pretty, but any features seem non-intuitive and almost invite error. This includes the dock, with its confusing capability of only displaying icons with no descriptions unless they are rolled over. Additionally, the Finder is a but chaotic in that it is trying to be like a web browser and a filesystem utility all at once. I didn't like when this was incorporated into Windows 98, and I like the OSX incarnation even less.

I feel that hardware and software still has a way to go towards creating a seamless user experience. Ideally, the end consumer should have about as hard a time operating their home computer as they would a DVD player. Of course there are computer users out there that want to know as much technical information about what is happening under the hood as possible, what that is not the platform that I am envisioning in this post. The end user should be spared the wide range of cryptic acronyms in use on today's PC. Using the interface should be more based on visual, aural, and tactile intuition than on reading a manual or a help page. The Macintosh platform is moving in the right direction towards achieving a goal like this, but I believe it is time for other creative minds to step in and assist in solving the human-computer interaction problem.

Remember that old-school screensaver for Mac called Flying Toasters which was an After Dark module by Berkeley Systems? I was just feeling a bit nostalgic tonight so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I remember when all the computers @ my elementary school (the Mac LC's) had Flying Toasters installed...those were the days.

Video artist J. Michael Deane writes in his statement for lucid.ludic that “situation is a collaboration after all,” and in this installation both he and the artist Sabina Ott take on the “situation” of the show as a site, a conversation, and an opportunity to create new work. “the secret impulses of a becoming-expressive musician bird” is the core of their exchange, a series of takes of caged song birds at a pet store. For Deane, the birds are found objects that he documents and reshoots (two of the monitors show images of the original birds captured off his own television). Ott’s conversation with Deane’s work is to use the language of painting - “color, texture, gesture, rhythm” - to set the stage for Deane’s five-channel video work. Finding objects in the gallery, and colors and rhythms in the video, she has painted the walls a Canary yellow, and created a landscape of colorful pedestals through which the image and sound of the birds resonate.

A friend of mine from high-school is now working at a US biometric imaging company in the Bay Area called SecuriMetrics Inc. They make iris recognition devices which are currently being deployed in Iraq, as well as the US Department of Corrections. Pretty nifty stuff. I can imagine a time someday in the future when we have these kinds of devices installed in airports, department stores, the DMV, and other places that need reliable and ready access to specific identification. A whole wealth of information could be linked you a person's iris scan profile, such as credit history, dining preferences, or even what kind of clothing you like to buy. Neat, trippy, and scary all at the same time.

I am currently starting a couple of projects, the first being preliminary designs for a new kind of computer operating system. It is basically an offshoot of sorts of what the r3volude project was. I want to create an open-source 3D operating system based on OpenGL and other open-source technologies. The core idea of the OS is that it will require a broadband network connection and current 3D hardware, and that everything you do in the OS will be easily linked to any other thing you do on the computer or over the internet.

My other project is that I am designing my personal house of the future. I am going to design a home that is eco-friendly and loaded with the latest in computer and media technology, as well as integrated home-control systems. Come back later for updates on both of these undertakings.

look girl 'distance'

look girl 'distance'
Originally uploaded by **sirop.