I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing . It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. Im going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasnt writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Rubys syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home@,$,and:prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isnt inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. Ill probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and thats what is really important).

This morning, I learned that Time Spent Alone was nominated for a Webby Award . It is a collection of explorations of personal themes using, not surprisingly, the internet.

Check out the project, and consider giving it your vote for the Peoples Voice Award in the NetArt category.

For a time now, Ive been posting things on flickr, vimeo, this blog, twitter, archiving projects in various ways, and using tools like delicious and (recently) ffffound to keep track of things that come to me through the tubes. My stuff, like many other peoples, exists in a lot of places on the internet, and it became far too many to continue to tack onto an increasingly tall sidebar. So I stripped everything out (pretty much), and replaced it with a new website. [...]

We at the San Francisco Barbarian Group office had an incredible holiday party on Friday. After a full afternoon of shooting assorted handguns, we reassembled at the office. A great spread of holiday snacks and beverages was laid out before us, ready to help us recover our strength spent on the range.

For the party at the office, I had set up a photobooth of sorts. Motion in front of the camera caused it to begin capturing frames which were then turned into animated gifs. You really should check out the photos from the party .

While on the plane to Boston, I got a little frustrated that I cant program my iPhone directly. No simple, scriptable terminal or anything. Since Im not of the skill or inclination to quickly write a python interpreter or processing development environment as an app for the phone, I went a different route. I decided to use the icons on the home screen as a low-resolution display matrix.

When adding a page to your homescreen, the iPhone creates an icon for the page by rendering the whole thing down to a square format. I took advantage of this to create half-filled dots on the screen.

Naturally, I had to write something with the pixels I was making. It being party time and all, I decided to encourage celebratory behavior with my downsampled display. Keeping with the spirit of lo-res, here is a video of the display in action, converted into an animated gif.

In the end, I rather like the simple visual weight of the 50/50 webpages: 01v 01h 10v and 10h . They are flexible minimalist works; they scale to fit any size real-estate. Use them to create your own iPhone cum lite-brite or just enjoy your monitors ability to crank out pretty, high-contrast black and white pixels.