50 visualizations of Life's Things

On Friday I gave a talk on the new Audio API in Firefox 4 at FSOSS.  I was showing my youngest daughter some of the demos I presented today, and she said, "Dad, that song is so beautiful, draw some more of it."  I really like this song…

Processing, Mozilla, and Seneca a year later

It's FSOSS eve, which always puts me in a storytelling mood.  Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on Web Audio, and demonstrating a lot of the things that are possible with our new audio API in Firefox 4.  I've been getting demos ready today, and I was reflecting tonight on…

Visualizing Source Repos with gource

The other day some of my colleagues were tweeting about gource, the amazing OpenGL SCM visualization tool. It allows you to visualize git, hg, bazaar (and possible CVS/SVN) logs as animated graphs. Building it on Mac was a bit of a pain, given the amount of crap I had…

What real political engagement looks like

Mark just pointed me at a post Tonya wrote this morning on the occasion of Rob Ford being elected mayor in Toronto.  You should read the whole post.  A couple of things resonated with me. So, Rob Ford is Mayor. I’ve been sitting on Facebook (my social media of…

Exposing the Professional

I've had occasion recently to watch a number of professionals at work.  I know them to be professionals because they made a point of indicating it, and in some cases, clarifying it when the fact might be in dispute.  In each case these people had become engaged in some larger…

The Book of the Web

Recently I had a free evening and decided to build a little experiment to recast Twitter as a book, written by The Web, without any reference to individual people.  I was partly inspired by Jay Hilgert's Anatomy of a Really Old Book, and started working up from there.  Twitter is…

"First, I'd like to make a forest"

If you're a parent of children between the ages of 4 and 8, you are perhaps familiar with the stuffed animals called Webkinz.  These are small toys--dogs, cats, sheep, birds, etc--and every purchase also brings with it an access code for a 1 year membership to the online Webkinz World.…

sfxr.js: sound for open web games

Last week Mozilla Labs announced its Game On competition, a contest "all about games built, delivered and played on the open Web and the browser."  The open web platform has got a lot to offer game developers these days.  I'm hoping that some people will enter processing.js…

Introversion, a definition by negation

"The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy." --William Burroughs writing…