David Wicks's Barbarian Blog

Failed to Connect: Some notes on WebSharing

david@barbariangroup.com(David Wicks) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:02:30 -0400

The Problem This weekend, I discovered my localhost wasn’t working when I wanted to do a bit of local website development. I got a pretty unfriendly ‘Failed to Connect’ message when trying to hit http://localhost/, http://127.0.0.1/ or the IP my mac was telling me my Sites/ were at in System Preferences. Bummer. I tried pinging my [...]

ruby-processing

david@barbariangroup.com(David Wicks) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:02:34 -0400

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).

William Kentridge at the SFMOMA

david@barbariangroup.com(David Wicks) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 04:02:54 -0400

There are lots of things worth noting in the William Kentridge exhibition: Five Themes. For now, I will simply note the superb blending of mechanical actors with hand-drawn animation in ‘Black Box’ (pictured above, not playing). The piece also incorporated found video footage of a rhinoceros “hunt”—the rhinoceros being a prominent figure throughout the piece, [...]

Webby Awards Nomination

david@barbariangroup.com(David Wicks) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:17:31 -0400

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.

Aggregating myself

david@barbariangroup.com(David Wicks) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:02:56 -0500

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. [...]