elliot winard

Inspired by Scott’s list of 10 good things from 2010 and refreshed from a week & a half off from work, here’s my list of 13 good things from 2010 - 3 rock ‘n roll, 2 non-profit, 6 technology, 2 general ones.

1. Recess – My new band!  Mary, Kate and Elliot play rock ‘n roll.  4 shows in 2010. Lots more coming in 2011.
2. The Whores, The Pioneers of Seduction, Clinical Trials, Crazy Pills – One of the great things about playing gigs again is the fact that I get to see so much AWESOME local music!  Based on the music from these local 3-piece outfits, rock ‘n roll is alive and well in Brooklyn!
3. Mojo’s night at The Trash Bar – Free PBR from 8-9, great local bands, awesome bartenders, close to the train.
4. Lexington Readers Club.  The LRC doesn’t have a web site yet.  Patrice Covino put together a monthly program where professionals and artists spend an hour a month reading with third-graders,
5. DonorsChoose.  DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects public school teachers with people who want to help.  They call it citizen philanthropy.  Yeah, this isn’t totally new for 2010 but they were one of Oprah’s favorite things of 2010.
6. The Monkeysphere Project – Why do you trust the web sites and servers you connect to, the people that you communicate with?   The Monkeysphere and the OpenGPG web-of-trust add add a layer of authenticity to online connections.
7. DebConf 2010. This year DebConf was up at Columbia University in NYC. DebConf is an international gathering of free software advocacy, free software in design & government and the Debian operating system.
8. DropBox. This online backup service allows you to “sync your files online and across your computers automatically”.
9. Ruby on Rails.  I’ve never been a fan of “web development” but the test-driven-development approach and conventions/best-practices that are part of a standard Ruby on Rails projects almost force good coding practices.  Sure beats the head-ache of dealing with other people’s sloppy undocumented code.  Yeah, I still like Django/Python and Perl but the Ruby ecosystem is really sweet.
10. Arduino and open-source hardware.  At the TechCrunch hack-a-thon we stayed up all night and built a “welcome mat” that greets you when you get home, asks about places that you’ve been and people that you may have talked to.
11. Git source-control management.  Also not new for 2010 but git is a pleasure to work with.  Thank goodness I can use git as a front-end to the Subversion repo that we use at work.
12. Samuel the amazing cat.  Yeah, he’s a little crazy but he means well.
13. Babies.  What can I say?  I like hanging out with my sister’s and friends’ kids.  They call me Uncle Elliot.

I’m a little late at bringing attention to it, but folks at the company that I work launched Laszlo Mail, a demo version of Laszlo’s kick-ass web-mail client. Check it out. It’s quite an accomplishment and I’m difficult to really impress when it comes to stuff like this.

Sure it’s not as full-featured as your desktop email client yet, so do your part and submit a bug report with features you think are missing.

Stay tuned for more “Digital Life” stuff from Laszlo. Oh, and drop me a line- replace the AT with @ in the email address – if you’re a Designer or Software Engineer looking to work on cool stuff like this. We’re always looking for good folks.

The tricky part of creating a class that displays a scaled reversed character is figuring out what to stretch & what to flip. Ultimately, the best solution was to add a single view wrapping the (resizing) text with a stretchy view that is flipped and positioned to take the flippage into account.

    <class name="revletterblock" font="black">
           width="100%" height="100%"
           options="releasetolayout"
           bgcolor="${blockcolor}"
           >
        <attribute name="letter" type="string"></attribute>
        <attribute name="blockcolor" value="$once{canvas.colorhash['orange']}" type="color" />
        <attribute name="color" value="white" type="color"></attribute>
        <attribute name="borderwidth" value="2"></attribute>

        <view width="${-parent.width}" x="${parent.width}">
              height="100%"
              stretches="both">
            <text name="char" text="${classroot.letter}" resize="true">
                  fgcolor="${classroot.color}" />
        </text>
    </view>
</class>

Using Laszlo’s default resizelayout to lay the block characters out, the full cover reproduction looks like this -

    <!--
         resize laid-out view
         stretches to fill parent unless told otherwise by layout
    -->
    <class name="lview" height="100%" width="100%">
        <attribute name="axis" value="y" type="string"></attribute>
        <resizelayout spacing="2" axis="$once{classroot.axis}">
    </resizelayout>

    <lview name="t" axis="x" width="100%" height="100%">

        <lview width="40%" axis="y">

            <revletterblock letter="Y" options="releasetolayout">

            <lview height="60%">

                <lview axis="x" height="60%">
                    <revletterblock letter="O">
                    <revletterblock letter="P">
                </revletterblock>

                <lview axis="x" height="25%">
                    <revletterblock letter="A">
                    <revletterblock letter="R">
                    <revletterblock letter="G">
                </revletterblock>

                <lview axis="x" options="releasetolayout">
                    <revletterblock letter="E" id="e">
                    <revletterblock letter="I">
                    <revletterblock letter="H">
                    <revletterblock letter="P">
                </revletterblock>

            </revletterblock>

        </revletterblock>

        <revletterblock letter="T" options="releasetolayout">
    </revletterblock>
</revletterblock></lview></revletterblock></revletterblock></lview></revletterblock></lview></lview></revletterblock></lview></lview>

next…. physics? layouts? more type experiments? code-generating projects?

Today after work I looked through Emil Ruder’s Typographie and decided to start explore digital typography using LZX.

The first thing that I attempted was to reproduce the image on the cover of Typographie using whatever fonts I could find on my system. Maybe I’ll get into creating my own digital font like my friend Daniel did but for now I’ll make due with type that I have.

I find that the best way to approach a problem like this is to split it into small bite-sized chunks and solve them one after another. So I started with the following list:

1. pick a decent font to approximate the strong sanserif on the cover of Ruder’s Typographie
2. create a blockletter class in Laszlo
3. lay out the letters
4. think of new typography-related projects to play with in Laszlo

For #1 I picked Arial Black, a simple blocky font that was already installed on my dev machine.

The code started off with a simple canvas and a <font> tag

The colors on the Ruder cover are orange and white but I want to reuse the blockletter class that I create with different colors so I inclued attributes for blockcolor and color (forground color) as well as letter for the text to display in the blockletter.

    
    
           bgcolor="${blockcolor}" >
        
        
                   value="0xFF5500" type="color" >
        

        
              fgcolor="${classroot.color}" >
    
    

Notice some vertical clipping on the right-most edge of the characters inside of the blockletters. We’ll see later if the bug is in my code, in the component in Laszlo or in the ariblk.ttf font.

next… layout, reversing the letters to match the Ruder cover, tracking down the character slipping.

I started reading DUNE: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert – son of the author of the original Dune series – and Kevin J. Anderson on Monday night. I’m not yet sure how I feel about the style of the younger Herbert – the book reads a lot more quickly and doesn’t have the same meticulous tone as the original Dune. I thought that the following quote was pretty funny when I spent Tuesday at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center.

When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.
— SISTER BECCA THE FINITE

My team at Laszlo recently started working on visual designs & UI implementation for the CALO: Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes project through SRI. Memories of working at SRI & my past life in academia flooded back to me as I saw my buddy Dave Blei and all of the brilliant professorial types in action. I’ve got to find a way to incorporate the word “ontology” into my daily life more and remember to roll my eyes when I meet Bayesian statisticians. I also talked to a robot researcher about problems that he was trying to solve – local navigation using keypoints coupled with reactive obstacle-avoidance. Quite similar to the main project that I worked on when I was at SRI, albeit with a larger robot that drove outdoors rather than shoebox-sized robots in office environments.

When I’m done with the latest Dune I’m going to check out John Sundman‘s Acts of the Apostles. John is a self-proclaimed technoparanoaic, a judge for the latest Loebner Prize competition, and writes damn-good documentation for OpenLaszlo.