Mike O'Toole

Developer :: New York office

Mike is a developer in the New York office.

Before joining The Barbarian Group in March 2008, he did things like sequence genomes and help make ‘curling’ the number one search term on NBC’s 2006 Winter Olympics website.

Cinder 0.8.1

We officially open-sourced Cinder, our framework for creative coding in C++, to the world three weeks ago. And, as we’ve decided to go with a release early and often style development cycle, today we’re releasing version 0.8.1.
A few of the new features include…
  • MutliTouch – supported with the same API across Windows 7 and Cocoa Touch.
  • MSAFluid – CinderBlock port of Mehmet Atken’s Fluid Simulation. As a bonus for Cinder users, the solver on the Mac benches at 2x the speed of the original. You can see what Robert Hodgin has been up to with this new capability in this video:
  • Audio Synthesis – callback-based audio synthesis API
  • Numerous enhancements – plenty of other new functionality, bugfixes and improvements
To read more about the new features and download version 0.8.1, check out the libcinder.org blog.

Super Nerd!

Ian computes so hard that he needs 5 laptops to do his job.

Review: Egg Salad

Ever since the young age at which I started eating solid foods at pool-side barbecues I’ve had a visceral hatred for all mayonnaise based salads. I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t be able to stand the taste of chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad, pasta salad, potato salad, and coleslaw. I always wondered why you’d want ruin the delicious aftertaste of a freshly grilled hamburger with like 40 pounds of mayonnaise.
However, this past Monday, as I was standing at Cafe Duke waiting for my usual panini to finish up on their industrial strength George Foreman grill, I took a gander at the sandwich fillings, and the egg salad really caught my eye. ‘That stuff actually looks a little bit delicious,’ I thought to myself.

Barbarians Erin, Lexy, and Nicole all informed me that egg salad was indeed delicious. Ryan McManus was the sole dissenting opinion. Given the overwhelming majority in favor, I decided it was time to give egg salad a chance in my life.
Armed with Erin’s advice on what other sandwich toppings and breads went well with egg salad, I returned to Cafe Duke just before lunch time this afternoon and approached the sandwich counter. Sadly, the egg salad did not look quite as appetizing today, the egg was a lot more mashed up and it looked a lot less like a bunch of slices of delicious hard-boiled egg and a lot more like a yellow goo. However! I didn’t let that minor bump in the road dissuade me. I approached the counter and ordered egg salad on wheat toast with onion.

Upon returning to the office, procuring a root beer, and sitting down in the bi-weekly Creative Meeting, I took my first bite. The verdict: Delicious Indeed! I finished the entire sandwich and my opinion persists. I do have to say that that is some heavy stuff, I definitely had to pull in the reins on my eating pace to accommodate the whole sandwich, but for a regular bread-sized sandwich, it totally filled me up. Also, egg salad is not the ideal sandwich filling, it definitely wants to get out from between those two pieces of bread. I would highly recommend a fork to salvage the escaped the egg chunks once the sandwich has been consumed. In the future, I also plan to try out additional sandwich fixin’s with the egg salad, I suspect avocado and tomato would be quite delicious when paired with it. Overall, egg salad sandwiches have definitely earned a place amongst steak burritos and chicken pad thai in my regular lunching options.

User Experience on the Telephone

I had a surprisingly awesome experience with TimeWarner Cable’s phone system this morning.
A couple of days ago, I made an appointment for today to have a dude come to my new apartment and give it the internet. This morning I called TimeWarner’s main customer service number to confirm that said dude was in fact coming to my apartment today. As soon as their system picked up it just told me that my appointment for today between 12 and 4 was confirmed. It was totally awesome, I didn’t have to wait on hold or type in my absurdly long account number, or do anything, it just knew what I wanted!

Mashup!

I really, really hate the word ‘mashup’ (or the phrase ‘mash up’?). I think it’s a dumb buzzword that has lost most of it’s meaning because people use it to describe so many different things (cough…web 2.0).
That said, this is totally the best use of it I’ve seen, ever:
http://thru-you.com
Update: Oh hey, that link’s not doing so hot right now. But you can check out all the tracks, on this sweet You Tube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/downwithutube
and I’ll emebed one!

Is that even a question?

An abridged conversation between me and my friend, Lisa:
Lisa: eww
i just choked on a cat hair again
...
Lisa: seriously mike. I don’t think I’ve gotten this cat hair out of my throat what should I do?
just keep drinking a lot of water?
surely that couldn’t be bad for me…
me: yeah i dont know
ask the internet ‘how do i get cat hair out of my throat’?
me: google says: ‘i suggest to eat a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of water, 8oz.’
Lisa: ahhh
smarts
brb
me: man, the internet is so great
http://istheinternetawesome.com/
Lisa: is the internet awesome?
is that even a question?
of course the internet is awesome
Lisa: mmm, plus this peanut butter is delicious

History of the Internet!

Check out this rad history of the internet from Melih Bilgil.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Formal Friday, Mad Men edition