Last night we released a new version of Plainview. The biggest changes in this version are the addition of a custom user agent string, to help some web apps which use questionable detection methods, some new keyboard shortcuts in response to user feedback, and a few new features for kiosk mode.

Kiosk mode is a way to easily lock users into Plainview, making it a good choice for kiosks where you want to show web (or flash) content, but don’t want the user to have full access to the system. When you enter kiosk mode, you’re asked for an administrator password and then you’re locked in. No menus, no cmd-tab, no bookmarks or location panels, nothing except where the currently loaded site will take you. To this we’ve added a few new bells and whistles. In the preferences, you can now set some options to hide the mouse, and have the app automatically load in kiosk mode.

Friends and collaborators Hecuba are playing at the triple canopy launch party tomorrow night at SiteLA, and I’ll be doing some processing-powered live visuals during the show. If you’re in LA and looking for something to do it should be a great night.

Photo: Pitchfork So everything went pretty well the other night. A few places wrote about the show and the band’s “unique” choice of fashion accessories. It was a difficult task of showing images from Lauren’s forthcoming book, many of which feature Devendra, while not showing too many pictures of him projected behind him which is just [...]

On June 18th, Megapuss is having their debut performance at the Hammer Museum. To accompany the performance, and in celebration of her forthcoming book, Jon Beasley and I created a series of animated vignettes based on the photography of LA artist Lauren Dukoff. More information on the Hammer Website.

Soon after the release of Plainview, we starting hearing about issues viewing pages that employ browser sniffing to look for compatible browsers, sites like abc.com where Safari is allowed, but Plainview is blocked. There was even suspicion that we were using an custom user-agent string which was causing trouble. Well, we weren’t, but we are now. Turns out that the sites mentioned, and many others it seems, are looking for “Safari” in the user-agent string, and WebKit does not identify itself as Safari out-of-the-box so these sites would believe Plainview to be incompatible. This is bad mojo. Apple recommends looking for “AppleWebKit” not “Safari” to ensure compatibility with WebKit powered browsers, and even offers some code to help out.

However, I hardly expect abc.com and their ilk to switch detect scripts overnight. So the next build of Plainview will include a tweaked user-agent string to identify itself as “Plainview (like Safari)” which seems to fix the issues with abc.com and hopefully others as well.

I’ll be participating in the SoftWhere Software Studies Workshop next week at UCSD. This is one of the first events in the US focused on the meaning and goals of the emerging discipline of Software Studies. Most of the workshop is closed, but there is a public PechaKucha style presentation on Wednesday, May 21st, from [...]

Beekeeper was an installation created in collaboration with Lita Albuquerque and Jon Beasley for a show titled “AOR” at the Frederick Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University. Lita envisioned the entire show operating as a single work concerned with the connection between the Earth and the cosmos and the transmutability of being. She often draws on [...]

You have to see for yourself.