General

IDK if anyone actually reads this blog on a regular basis of any kind or subscribes to my rss…but just wanted to say I’ve been posting everything this summer to another blog (thesis.vargatron.com) but I felt like I was ignoring this one (I was) and got sick of it. So I imported all my posts and I’m now back to using this blog exclusively. I feel like I’ve built this blog up pretty nicely and its better to just keep it going, plus I didn’t feel like making ANOTHER wordpress theme. Ugh.

So what have I done all summer? Thesis research, traveled to China for a month, worked on things for developing nations in Africa, taught an introductory graduate course, and worked with Zachary Lieberman on a number of projects (one of which is redesigning his site so that its not insanely crazy and hard to update…thats coming soon).

Other than that I just started school again so expect (hopefully) a lot of updates on everything.

Having done a fair amount of freelance work, I have a lot of experience with different types of clients. Some are easy to work with, some difficult. Some pay you on time, some argue over money but pay you in a timely manner, some take a bit to pay you but just cause they’re lazy and you get the money eventually. Then there are the deadbeats. You do a site for them, you put it up in good will, and they don’t pay you. You send them an email asking for payment, they side step you and still don’t pay. What do you do to protect yourself against this?

You could say “I’m gonna take the site down within 10 days if I don’t receive payment.” This is all well and good, but what if the client decides that they’re gonna change their FTP password and lock you out? You’re screwed.

Since I am currently dealing with a deadbeat client, I thought of how I could negotiate this. Then I realized….PHP!

PHP can change (and delete!) directories on a server. So by hiding a simple PHP script on the clients site, one which only you would know how to get to, you can put a little insurance in there that will let you delete the entire site by simply going to a URL.

Here’s a link to the code that I am using (thanks to Kunal Patel for the link )

Recursive Directory Delete with PHP

OK…super nerd warning on this post….

I am currently attempting to use PHP as a gateway for retrieving my IMAP mail for my Speak to Me/Breathe project, and I hit a MAJOR snag last night. It seems that the version of PHP 5 that currently comes with MAMP is totally not compiled with support for IMAP SSL (secure email connection). I think this is one of the key differences between MAMP and MAMP Pro which costs $70. This is a major bummer for anyone who wants to grab gMail, since they basically require that you use a SSL connection. After about 4 hours of wrestling with my file structure and recompiling both PHP 5 and the IMAP extension about 20 times, I finally figured out how to create a version of the IMAP extension through Terminal (something I’ve never done…). Since I went through all this pain and suffering, I figured I’d share it with everyone so that they don’t have to.

Basically all you need to do is download the attached “imap.so” file and drop it into the following directory:
Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922

Thats all there is to it. If you’d rather figure this out on your own I recommend reading the following instruction site, but keep in mind that I had to do a couple different things to get this to work, namely manually creating the “/usr/local/include/” directory in my local Apache PHP directory. You then need to follow comment #5 and copy the compiled files from the OS X Apache directory into MAMPs php extension directory (the one I mentioned above).

Thats all…hope someone can find this useful and avoid the pain I had to go through….

Click Here to Download IMAP SSL extension

Here are a couple TED Conference talks that we watched for computation that I thought were extremely interesting.

David Merrill discussing Siftables…an new,insane, completely modular interface

Caleb Chung discussing his life’s work and Pleo

I’m at the Franklin Institute in Philly waiting for the Dark Knight to start on IMAX, go in the gift shop and i see this…SPACE ICE CREAM…freeze dried ice cream for astronauts…why is this only available in museums, is so damn delicious!

This is a crazy 3D animation using ping-pong balls to create music…obviously not possible in real life but makes me wonder how something much simpler could be created….
and here is a real life example that was shown to us by one of the creators (Dan Paluska) last year in Algo, created by several artists from MIT for Absolut Vodka

Definitely awesome to think of creating sound through mechanics…I hope I can apply this to something in the near future using servos/solenoids/etc.

These are so fucking hot. God I wish I wasn’t poor these would be bought in a second.

Today was the first meeting for a new project I am involved with, creating a Flash based website for the Parson’s Annual Fashion Benefit. We are working with a team of people from R/GA (awesome digital agency) as our art directors and project managers. Their office is pretty damn incredible, they have a parking lot(!) in midtown Manhattan and like a front yard. They also have a full, free cafe/coffee bar and a really, really nice everything imaginable around the office. Can’t wait to get started on this project, initial design comps are due on Thursday at 4 :/ so guess I’m not sleeping much this week…

Testing out posting to wordpress from the free app

Particle based interaction with spring systems

Spring Systems with Particles Interaction from Steve Varga on Vimeo.