On October 9th, (randomly John Lennon’s birthday), we got invited to do video for…Kid Koala. Kevin Luddy organized and DJed several events at Revolution Hall in Troy in the past. So when Kid Koala was booked, he was asked to open for him. Kevin knew of our recent experiments with live video performance, and asked us to join. This time, the live painter was none other than Fernando Orellana, who taught Knox Harrington what’s what.

The rehearsals were very inspiring. Fernando’s compositional ass kicking really elevated the output to the next level.

We practiced with Kevin doing a live DJ session with Serato Scratch software and hardware.

Fernando built two projector casings at his workshop that mounted right on the ceiling. Somebody had the great idea of using rolls of butcher paper to create a screen-roof over the dance floor of Rev-Hall to encase the dancers in full visual awesomeness. We installed the screen the day of the show and set up our gear.

After jamming with Kevin, Kid Koala took the stage. He had a video zoom on him and his hands on the screen behind him, while our butcher paper rolls dripped with medulla-melting visuals over the audience.

I was super impressed with his performance. A few people came up and told me that I was the first person to introduce them to this guy’s music: I felt special. It was nice to hear him play his older, jazzy stuff and the new rock and pop sampled stuff. Enjoy the videos. Check out more on such video-instrumentalism on the previous post.

We did video for Kid Koala from bob smithson on Vimeo.

When an instrument is being designed and built, the process is marked by long iterations. The instrument creator makes something, then a musician tries it out, then its worked on a bit more and over the years an instrument evolves. In our case, this process has tiny iterations and the instrument is essentially built on the fly….

The live painting by Fernando, as well as the live collage and animation is an input into the instrument, kinda like the visions and emotions a violinist might experience when playing. The software by Dave and his curation of relationships between inputs and outputs, as well as content, drives the evolution of the instrument. My drumming provides a gestural rhythmic connection to music that people can relate to. Kevin’s musical passages are picked live to play off of the imagery and each other. Then there is our collective communication happening on top, built from practicing together. We are in sum an evolving video instrument.

The last time I did live video was with Vidvox at the EMPAC opening weekend party, where we backed Madlib and J Rocc.

Dave and Jack, the founders of Vidvox, wanted to use the drum kit from the game Rock Band as a controller. They knew I play drums in Restys so they invited me to join them. At first I simply unleashed my muscle memory on it. Then, we started to find specific mappings that went along with certain synths Dave was creating. We practiced for a week to a playlist of Madlib and Juseboxxx and developed certain topography of the performance. We had a color bar sequencer triggered by me with song-specific color pallets. Another program allowed me to jump forward and backward through a video clip when I hit the drum pads. The video was an in-camera edit shot through the EMPAC construction site that used the “Reveal and Conceal” technique developed by LMNOPF.

The EMPAC party was totally awesome, and we got to hang with Madlib. W00t!

My friend Armando, who’s recent exploits were no doubt presaged by Kafka, just posted a timely and confrontational editorial. In it, he discusses the aftermath of the mugging that unfortunately involved both of us (and two other friends). Two younger guys with guns took our valuables (two phones and two wallets). In order to deal with this, I stopped leaving the house. Armando on the other hand, engaged in community organizing. So why the Kafka reference? Recently, a Troy government official stated that crime hasn’t gone up. However, we’ve had a violent mugging or armed robbery pretty much every other night over the last month and a half. On my birthday a few days ago, somebody even got shot trying to resist. Luckily, I had the wherewithal to celebrate in safer NYC!

Despite the Troy government’s reluctance to discuss the issue, the officers at the Troy Police Department have been vigilant on these matters and are working to stop the muggers. Hopefully, through the efforts of police and citizens, we can actually do something about the greater problem as well. Locking teenagers away is one thing, but its not enough – lets explore and fix why they are resorting to this behavior in the first place. In the immediate future, catching the various perpetrators is priority number one, and any attempt to wave off this issue is not going to help. I encourage all Trojans to be aware of their environment when walking around downtown and the RPI campus, especially at night.

Where did the Adobe Strobe project go? It was not even a few months ago that I first found the homepage for this project. The homepage claimed that Adobe came together with a bunch of other companies to create a consortium that aims to take Flash Video Player development out of the equation of competition. The partner company roster was impressive, and the pronouncements were boastful. ‘Lets standardize player development!’ they urged, ‘lets make player development easy so that people can focus on other elements of the value chain’. But what was this really?

In essence it was all a big PR move. The ‘Strobe Project’ as a whole really didn’t amount to much besides a lot of hot air. However, the Open Video Player page did indeed seem substantial. Here is an open source code base of a video player created by none other than the CDN Akamai. The page also features links to sites that have used this video player as a base for their players. I got excited about it and decided to give it a try.

I downloaded the code and tried in in Flash CS4. The features seemed vast: an informative debugging screen and a way to specify a SMIL file source that contains individual links to the same media encoded into different bit-rates to facilitate adaptive streaming. The player touts an extending drawer that shows other media files. The player can read RSS feeds and show appropriately embedded video. However, on actually running the latest player I hit some depressing bugs. The scrubbing is crappy: its inconsistent and glitchy. The autostart setting is definitely busted: setting autostart to off produced very strange and incorrect results. The debug console didn’t seem available – it was grayed out in the contextual menu.

I decided to download a previous version and see how that performed. Though the autostart bug was not there (seems to be a recent bug only with the latest version) the scrubbing was still whack. Its a shame that a player as feature-full and flexible doesn’t have the basic necessities ironed out. I decided to check out the example sites mentioned on the page. I was surprised and disappointed to find that the players on these sites were similarly buggy, if not more so. Some of the sites didn’t load at all.

Now it looks like the Strobe Project is gone from the internet, replaced with Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework. This looks like a more serious and sober project site with less PR and more meat. Downloading the source though showed that it still relives on the open video player. Perhaps the video player included here is less buggy? The open video player source forge page doesn’t show any updates since May of 2009, so I doubt it.

In conclusion, Adobe and Akamai should test their code before releasing it to the greater public. However, I still think its cool of them to release it. I hope to find the time to fix their bugs and contribute my fixes back into the community.

I want to call methods on a swf on a page, and pass into the methods a closure (aka an anonymous function). The closure is js, and needs to be called by the swf back out on the js page. The swf is doing it through:
ExternalInterface.call('method_name_on_js_side', stuff)

Now, I can’t happily pass the closure into the swf. This is because ExternalInterface is limited – it takes a function name as its first argument, no ifs or buts about it. So I gotta register the closure on the js side in a hash, then pass in its hash key into the swf – instead of the closure itself.

I’m using JS you can programatically register methods to use later. You can define functions up front, and call them later in time.
What I wanted to do was to call a function on an object that is a wrapper to another object. This wrapper would call the same method on the object it is wrapping as was called on it. In other words, when I call wrapper.func(), the wrapper calls wrapped.func().

var methods = {
   'users': {'stuff'},
   'accounts': {'stuff2'}
}

for(var method in methods) {
   wrapper[method] = wrap(method);
}


So above I have a hash that stores all the methods I want to end up with on the wrapper object. Then I defined the wrap method, which basically copies the value of method when its passed in, into a local method variable (at least I think so, otherwise how would it be stored?).

Then, when I create the wrapper, I iterate through all the methods and call the wrap method. Now, if I call wrapper.users() it will return an anonymous function

function() { eval('wrapped.'+method+"()"); }


This function will be immediately executed, and will call wrapped.users();

This actually works where as what I was trying before was a no-go. Before, I didn’t have the extra function wrap – I just did the eval right in the for loop. The problem was, eval was evaluating method and always getting ‘accounts’ – the last value method had. In the example at the top, method was not the latest value but whatever it was at the time the wrap method was called. Hence my thinking that its copied in that step and exists as a saved value in the anonymous function.

A few weeks ago I spent some time in NYC: it was Internet Week and there was a lot of networking to do in the city. While there, I took the opportunity to visit the Orange developer centre (yes, thats how they spell center) downtown. I’ve been planning to hit it up for a while, but the 7 day advance booking requirement made it hard. Finally everything aligned and I spent a few hours there testing video playback on several mobile phones.

Orange Telecom is a huge cell phone and internet service provider in Europe. They’ve set up Orange development centers in several big cities around the world. One feature of these centers is a mobile testing station that allows developers and usability experts to test their software on a myriad of hand held devices. Since we offer mobile video support, I became interested in checking out the Orange partner program. After a straightforward and quick application process, we were accepted and booked time at the dev center in NYC.

I found the collection of mobile devices to be extensive: it includes at least 12 phones that are sold in the UK, France, Germany, and other countries (including Nokia, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericson, and other brands). Absent from their stores of gadgets were Apple mobile products.

One downside is that they do not like the developers to upgrade the phones’ operating systems (unless its a pushed upgrade from Orange). This allows them to have the phones in the state they were originally sold. Other than that it is a very useful facility and worth checking out if you are interested in cross-mobile-platform development/testing.

Today, many companies are turning to third party solutions to create products for clients. Whether you are a member of a creative agency making an internet TV show or a freelance mobile application provider, you’ve most likely incorporated third party solutions into your products. Incorporating video into the budget for projects is realistic, as online video is more affordable than ever. The good thing about that approach is: you can pass the cost down to your end customer. In either case, low cost solutions are what you are looking for. When you’ve finally finished a project and its a success, you open doors to future opportunities. A successful project can benefit from upgrades and other improvements. And clients are often receptive to ‘up-selling’ proposals if the project is a success. Or you could come at them with a whole new project idea – no need to always wait for them to get back in touch with you. You might have a great idea you want to do for them, and they just might bite.

I work at a company that runs SesameVault – a web video platform. Some of SesameVault’s most creative customers are such people. These customers of ours can continue to innovate the product they’ve sold to their own customer by taking advantage of SesameVault beyond the original scope of their projects.
If you:

• used Flash video on a website, why not upgrade to a higher quality MP4 encoding?
• offer educational content, why not offer the audio-only encoding for playback on iPods or car stereos?
• offering browser based video, why not drop in downloadable mobile & iPod encodings?
• integrated basic media uploading into your CMS, why not add thumbnail picking/uploading ability?

If you’ve had a succesfull project with a client, there is opportunity to improve upon it or to do another one. SesameVault is a great tool in your client services tool box. Have you had success creating solutions from third-party providers? Please share. If you’ve had a succesfull project with a client, there is opportunity to improve upon it or to do another one.

I’ve been listening to A Dark Night of the Soul, the latest Danger Mouse album, for the past week and a half. The ‘danger’ has been heightened with the addition of collaborators: Sparklehorse and many singers. The album has been mired in legal controversy (probably stemming from the appearance of many singers under contractual obligations) and will probably never be officially released. While being inaccessible through commercial channels, it is quite accessible in terms of the music.

For me, Danger Mouse albums are each their own acquired taste. Just like it takes many spins to produce cotton candy, it’s taken me many spins to get an appreciation for the album. The different guest singers on the songs push out across a wide variety of styles. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse bend over backwards to produce sonic structures to support each singer. Unfortunately, the overall cohesion of the album suffers from this. It sounds like an awesome fresh mix tape rather than a traditional album. There are exceptions to this, one of them the surprising title track featuring David Lynch on vocals. Laying a foundation for the monotone, and dreamy lyrics sung by Lynch, the artists seem free to elevate the track to the full potential of such an unlikely and intriguing collaboration.

Even though the album (download it here) will probably never come out in the traditional sense, the accompanying book of photographs by Lynch was indeed released. I just ordered a copy and will comment on it when its received.

I’m excited by the varied output coming from the Lynch camp these days. The release of the Interview Project a few days ago, and this album a few months ago has created a confluence of events that we are very excited to be involved in.

I hate a lot of Microsoft products and policies. I hate IE7 always running with add-ons disabled. The manage add-ons option in Tools graphical button drop down is grayed out.

My colleague Cameron figured out that if you navigate to My Computer/Program Files/Internet Explorer and launch it from there, it works with add-ons!

So make a new shortcut and put it on the desktop and use it. The Start menu shortcut is evil and always launches the browser in that mode (once this happens to you). You could also replace that start menu icon with a new one, but who wants to deal with that in Windows?

I hate windows. I like mac os x and Ubuntu, and also Gentoo some times – but I need my hand held when playing in that sandbox.

I had a hell of a time this year. I once again recycled my silver dress into yet another outfit. I wanted to approach ’space cowboy’ and purchased $10.00 worth of guns from the dollar store. Caitlin hooked a brother up and spray painted them silver. She also did my straw ‘Renegade’ hat and the ensemble looked something like this:

Restys played two shows – one at the Bread and Jam in Cohoes, and the other one at 51 3rd Street. Dirty Jeans Jenkins opened for us at the Bread & Jam, and at 51 3rd we opened for Hatchet for the Holidays. Unfortunately the only recording of our set was done in Cohoes by Caitlin. She recorded a snipped of 16 Tons:

Cameron did a heck of a job as ‘Rich Man’ – the women couldn’t keep their hands off’im:

Here is the full album: Halloween ‘08