www.donaldmarino.com

Simpsonize yourself.

http://www.simpsonizeme.com/

Because Peter and Charlie were right, not just specifically about REST, (as in representational state transfer) but about the fact that it takes people a while to really understand REST and why it’s not just beneficial, but downright important. I think I finally had some of the ephiphany of REST, but oddly it was because I was thinking about an entirely different problem than web traffic protocols. I was thinking about the different ways people move large amounts of geospatial image, elevation, and vector data around their systems. These days, interoperability is the new way, partly due to advances in technology that allows digital collaboration, partly for the more mundane reason that there are a hell of a lot of formats, web services, and spatial databases out there that people want to use. So, in effect, geospatial data and associated information is coming from all over the place all the time, in all kinds of oddball formats, map projections and states of metadata completeness. Yet we fearlessly use it all together all the time now and it pretty much works well. How do folks do this? Basically, we use a very awkward collection of file format codecs, open standards specifications, web services, and RDMBS systems. This stuff is extremely heavyweight. Again, as it was with web application programming, our first instinct was to create a big fat abstraction layer of stuff to shield us from this big scary world. We created heavy ungainly things that allow us to communicate spatial data and we were happy. But we did it at too high a level again, just like we did with web apps. It turns out that HTTP does provide you with most of what you need for web app communication and much of the app server is stuff we decided we needed to have wher we really didn’t. Well, maybe there’s a way to use a similar type of protocol to make communicating spatial data throughout data systems and get to a place where the communication of data isn’t surrounded with huge, heavy applications to manage all the translations and states and other stuff that we decided we had to have when we really didn’t. Just like web apps. So, I’m not saying use GET,PUT,POST ans DELETE. Maybe something similar in spirit, though. I’m not even suggesting anything specific. This is just the kernel of an idea. But I think there may be something to it. I’ll have to think about it. I know that the OGC specifications have gone a long way towards providing a key data abstraction in the networked world, but I feel like it’s still too high level. I don’t want to have to churn through chatty XML conversations, I want those sweet, sweet bits with a minimum of fuss and I want to edit ‘em, send ‘em back or have ‘em disappear or whatever I want. Web app, workstation app, handheld app, whatever…

I’m going to have to ask Peter and Charlie about this one.

Jaime and I went to the Boulder International Film Festival Saturday to see Air Guitar Nation, a documentary about the growing international sport of Air Guitar.

Air Guitar Nation follows the story of formation of the US Air Guitar Championships and the rise of American Air Guitar Champion C-Diddy to become World Champion in Finland at the World Air Guitar Championships. The other main character is Diddy’s american rival Bjorn Turoque (pictured above). The documentary, story, and sport are all real.

The movie was pretty much hilarious. They also mixed in a message about world peace. Apparently the founding motives of the Finnish in establishing the World Air Guitar Championships is that “If you’re holding an air guitar, you can’t hold a gun”, so if everyone air-guitared, there would be world peace.

Competitve air guitar is modeled on ice skating. Competition consists of two rounds, the individual round, where the players choose their own song, and the compulsory round, where all players play the same song, only revealed to them at contest time. Judging is by three judges using a 4.0 - 6.0 point scale, just like skating. Each song is 60 seconds. The main judging criteria is “airness”. Airness is described as “the extent to which the performance transcends the medium and becomes a higher form of artistic expression. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it when you see it”.

Funny stuff and a good message to take things less seriously. I don’t know where you can see this film, but I’m sure it will be available on DVD at some point. Click on the video link on Diddy’s hompage to see the video of his winning performance.

Rock on.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last 8 years looking at imagery of the earth. My new job is no different, in fact, I see an absurd amount of earth imagery in my latest gig. Which is cool. I am still fascinated every time at what you can see in these images.

I never imagined seeing them in the carpet.

Check out this carpet, which has real earth imagery “printed” on it digitally, that is the strands of the carpet were colored to match the pixel data in the earth imagery. Gives one the effect of being 1000 feet tall walking across the earth. That’s just cool.

Ok this is cool. A robot with an arm draws what it sees by moving a colored LED around in front of a long-exposure camera.
Fotron2000.