Los Angeles Technologist, Entrepreneur, Educator and Community Leader

Was driving back to LA with Cindy, when we saw a beach literally covered in elephant seals. It was really spectacular. And suddenly, a massive bull seal emerged from the water and tried to bully us away:

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-r

Howdy loyal readers:

I’ve gone ahead and posted on Almer/Blank Labs the slides and sample source files from my talk @ FITC SF, ‘Getting Started with OSMF‘, which I’ll be giving tomorrow afternoon @ 2:30 in Conference Room 1.

I thought it’d be fun to get this stuff posted in advance of the talk so attendees can follow along if they want.

I will not be recording the session — it is, however, very similar to the session I recorded at FITC Toronto, in April, and which remains posted here, on Almer/Blank Labs.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Good afternoon, all, on this gorgeous, lazy Sunday.

I’m just wrapping up a few things before I begin packing and head up to San Francisco for FITC SF next week, 8/17-19. As I’ve posted a few times now, one of my talks is an updated version of ‘Hearing Pictures‘ (Day 1, 8/17, 11:15A Fisher).

For a variety of technical reasons, stemming from the changes in the talk and the demonstration pieces I’ll be showing, I won’t be capturing this new version of the talk. So, I wanted to take a moment to re-post the link to the version of the talk I gave in April, at FITC Toronto, posted on Almer/Blank Labs.

While I believe this new version of the talk blows away the one I gave in April (I like to view talks as living creations that need to evolve — otherwise I can lose the spark in my delivery), I’m still happy with this older version, so if you can’t make it to hear my next Tuesday, you should definitely check out this older version.

Also, that link has a bibliography of references cited in the talk — the books, music and other media included in the presentation.

Share and enjoy!

-r

I’ll be heading up to FITC SF next week, to give two talks. One on working with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), called ‘Getting Started with OSMF and one on the Synthia project, called ‘Hearing Pictures with Synthia‘.

I’m excited to give both. But I’ve just this moment finished tuning the version of Synthia that I will be demonstrating. In Amsterdam and Toronto earlier this year, I discussed, from a creative perspective, many of the steps I went through to create the publicly usable version of Synthia, which you can play with at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

But in recent weeks, I started work on a new version of Synthia — or rather, a new way of playing Synthia. The web version of Synthia is played just by selecting a photo. In this new version of Synthia (which will not be made available online, because of hardware requirements), Synthia *composes* a track (and provides instrumentation) from a source image, but *you* control playback — with the webcam and a custom glove that I made.

The glove, pictured here with this post, has seven sensors not-so-secretly-hidden in it: three distance sensors, three buttons, and a bend sensor. Each is wired into this new version of Synthia to control playback (along with additional hooks for webcam motion detection), to create a really fun, active and engaging musical experience.

To see the Synthia Glove in action, don’t miss my talk, ‘Hearing Pictures with Synthia‘, 11:15A, on Tuesday, August 17th, day one of the conference.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Good morning, dear readers:

Our little OSMF continues to mature at a rapid pace. The most recent announcement is the release of Flash Media Playback and Strobe Media Playback.

One item that’s made it a bit more difficult for some users to work with OSMF is that it comes with no GUI components (such as the FLVPlayback component in Flash). That means you have to code up your own video player interfaces if you want to work with OSMF.

Well, not anymore. Flash Media Playback (FMP) and Strobe Media Playback (SMP) are two ways that you can work with pre-packaged Flash GUIs build on OSMF.

From the docs:

Flash Media Playback is an out-of-the-box, feature-rich, free media player suitable for designers, content owners, IT professionals, and developers. It is designed to be your simplest deployment solution. You use a setup assistant to configure the player with a few mouse clicks. Because Adobe hosts the player for you, there’s nothing for you to install or keep updated. And users experience fast downloads, because the player is stored in their Flash cache.

Strobe Media Playback provides more flexibility than Flash Media Playback, while still helping you get up and running quickly. Like Flash Media Playback, the Strobe Media Playback player is both free and easy to customize. Unlike Flash Media Playback, the Strobe Media Playback player is open source, available both as a compiled SWF file and as uncompiled source code. And, because it is a download, it can be deployed behind firewalls, where the Flash Media Playback player cannot.

So, FMP is pre-compiled, hosted by Adobe, and easy to configure and embed in your websites.

SMP is an open-source OSMF-based player, that you can use as-is, or open, edit, customize and re-deploy on your own websites.

I will be teaching how to skin SMP in detail in my Bring-Your-Own-Laptop session at MAX, ‘Designing Custom Video Players with OSMF’ (you can browse the catalog of talks and presentations and then you can register here).

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-r

I’ve finally started work on my OSMF lab for MAX, ‘Designing Custom Video Players with OSMF’ (you can browse the catalog of talks and presentations and then you can register here).

And, as part of that, I updated the sample OSMF code for Flash, that I had written in April for OSMF 0.95, to work with OSMF 1.0.

You can read about the minor changes, and download the current source, here, at Almer/Blank Labs.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Good evening, faithful readers:

I just received word this morning that Adobe has made me a MAX Master Speaker. This is the inaugural year for the MAX Masters program, and it means that I have had an average rating of at least 4.8/5 from at least 50 MAX attendees.

I consider this designation a real privilege. I take my speaking engagements very seriously, and it is nice to feel that effort rewarded in such a tangible way — especially in the context of a conference like MAX, which has so many high-level speakers.

I’m currently set to run a lab on building OSMF video players, but I believe that I will also be giving my Practical AS3 lecture, as well (the version of that same talk from last year’s MAX is viewable here, on Adobe TV).

The MAX Session Scheduler has gone live. Check it out. And see you in October!

And, before signing off, I want to note this MAX Master designation is one that I particularly enjoy, because I also happen to be Max’s master — he’s the brindle labrador/rat terrier/pit bull (aka ‘Lab Rat’) pictured here, next to me and Leila:

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-r

Howdy all:

I know blogging’s been light for the past several months. Work at Almer/Blank has had me pretty consumed.

But, as I gear up and prepare for a busy autumn of talks and courses, you can expect some heavier posting.

First up, I’ll be presenting at FITC San Francisco — the first SF installment of the really amazing FITC conferences.

On day one, August 17th, I’ll be giving my talk, ‘Hearing Pictures with Synthia’ — you can see an earlier version of that talk, from FITC Toronto in April, here, and play with Synthia at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

Then, on day three, August 19th, I’ll be giving a talk on ‘Getting Started with Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF)’ in the ‘Adobe Under the Hood’ room — a version from FITC Toronto in April you can view here.

It will be an amazing conference, with a ton of great talks. Early bird pricing ends July 2nd, so get your tickets now!

Share and enjoy!

-r

Almer/Blank has announced the winner of the Synthia contest, to come up with the best suggestion for monetizing Synthia. Details on Almer/Blank labs.

The OSMF team sent this to me to help get the word out, and I wanted to pass it along to you all.

On Wednesday, June 9th, Adobe will be hosting a FREE 90-minute session, run by Lisa Larson-Kelley, on the formal launch of the 1.0 version of the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). Lisa will also cover the beta release of “Strobe Media Playback,” a pre-compiled SWF media player (including source code) based on OSMF.

[blockquote]In this session, Lisa Larson-Kelley will introduce you to the fundamentals of Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), Adobe’s standard video player libraries for building playback experiences and monetizing video on the web. She’ll give you a high-level overview of why you’d want to use OSMF and what it can do, and then dive into its underlying structure and some simple sample code to get you started. This session is for beginner to intermediate programmers and web developers who want to gain a better understanding of OSMF, and how it can simplify media player development.[/blockquote]

The invitation is here and you may register here.

Share and enjoy!

-r

For those who are interested, and who missed it, I’ve recorded my talk ‘Hearing Pictures with Synthia‘ from FITC Toronto, summarizing the creative process I followed when creating Synthia at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

After getting back, I edited it a bit, encoded it, put it up on Influxis and have posted it for your viewing pleasure. Just click slide 1 to watch.

Share and enjoy!

-r

UPDATE 2009-04-29: I’ve removed the files linked from this post, as they are now available through Almer/Blank Labs, including the video capture of the talk, as well as the slides and source files, here at this link.

I have a few free moments here at FITC Toronto, and I wanted to post the slides and files (20 MB) from the talk I just completed, ‘Standardize Your Flash With Adobe Open Source Media Framework‘.

Download the Files (20MB)

[...]

I’m heading up to Toronto next Saturday, to teach Practical ActionScript 3 at the FITC pre-conference workshops, run by the RMI.

I was reviewing my files for the course, and realized that I’d captured the course a few months ago (the same weekend that I captured Unlocking ActionScript 3 Fluency Events & the Broadcaster) — but never edited it down or produced it.

In reviewing the captures, I realized that all of the online version of Practical ActionScript 3 is still completely relevant, accurate and useful, and there wasn’t much of a need to produce a whole new updated version.

At the same time, particularly with the introduction of new features of Flash Player 10 (which was not out when I recorded the online version of Practical AS3), there were definitely some additional content I wanted to add.

So, when I discovered these captures this weekend, I decided to edit down some of the lessons I taught and produced a new course, Practical ActionScript 3 Update, with a particular emphasis on Flash Player 10, including lessons on Loader.unloadAndStop, The FileReference, GPU Acceleration, Sound Manipulation and Generation, and Pixel Bender. And it has intro pricing of $4.99.

Practical AS3 Update

I was also pretty happy to remember that I’d recorded the portion on using Pixel Bender inside of Flash. In 10 minutes I explain what Pixel Bender is, and the three ways of using it inside of Flash with AS3. It’s one lesson of the new course, and because I think it’s so useful for a large number of people, we’ve made it available as it’s own course, with intro pricing of $1.99.

Using PixelBender in Flash

Of course, all the new lessons include great source files that you are free (heck, encouraged) to use for your own Flash work.

Share and enjoy!

-r

I was interviewed by Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle last week about the escalating battle between Apple and Adobe. And it looks like the article is up. One of my quotes (paraphrased) made it in.

Consumers may be affected in the long run if developers avoid the iPhone, depriving users of added choice, said R Blank, founder and chief technology officer of Almer Blank, a Web and software design firm in Los Angeles.

Overall, I really consider Apple’s moving surprising and bold. But as I also told the reporter, I believe Apple’s gambling that it may well lose this when it becomes a legal matter, but they want the additional time to help lure developers into the Apple fold.

All I can say is, with this decision, Apple just lost a ton of potential developers, from the Adobe world. If they want to bring them over to Apple, XCode is just not going to cut it for 80%+ of the Flash world. We need to see better tools.

-r

I’m continuing work on my FITC Toronto talk, ‘Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF‘, and the files to accompany it.
[...]
One of the issues with the still nascent, but growing at an impressive rate OSMF documentation, is that almost all the sample code is for users of Flex Builder / Flash Builder — and all of the sample code for Flash assumes use of external class files.

But using OSMF does not require coding in external class files. So, to illustrate that point, I’ve gone ahead and modified the simplest possible OSMF video player from Adobe’s documentation to code that works on the timeline. Which I’m posting here.
[...]

I’m writing some new sample files for OSMF in preparation for my presentation, ‘Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF,’ which I’ll be giving on April 27th at FITC Toronto.
…
So, since I wrote it as one of the sample files for my talk, I figured I would post the code to run dynamic streaming with OSMF v0.93.

[...]

Now that I’m back in LA, I’ve been drowning in work once again, and unable to post too much to the blog. So I thought it would be fun to end this week with an off-topic post that’s been in my head a little while.

Back in college, I wrote a senior thesis (in history) on the creation of what became known as the Beat Generation. Not many people know that Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs all met in the early 1940s while Kerouac and Ginsberg were students at Columbia University, and Burroughs lived in the Village.

At the start of my senior year, I went out to dinner with my academic advisor, Jim Shenton (now deceased). Jim arrived at Columbia in 1946, fresh from his experience in WWII (as a pacifist, Jim served as a medic, participating in, among other actions, the liberation of Buchenwald), supported by the GI Bill. And, he didn’t leave until he died. So, by 1997, Jim was a living legend, having personally experienced half a century of Columbia history.

I told Jim that I was having trouble honing in on a topic, and I was considering dropping the thesis (which was an option in the history major). That’s when he started telling me about this fellow named Lucien Carr.

Jim had never met Lucien — they missed each other on campus by just a few years. But Jim clearly recalled the mystique his colleagues and fellow students held towards Lucien, when Jim first arrived on campus. And he recalled to me the basics of the narrative:

Lucien Carr had transfered to Columbia as an undergraduate in the early 1940s. By all accounts, he was immensely gifted — particularly as a poet and thinker — and was also given to behavior that was quite out of the norm for the period.

Lucien had known William Burroughs from the time when both lived in St. Louis, and Lucien met both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as fellow students at Columbia. And thus, Lucien introduced these three individuals to each other, establishing the ‘Libertine Circle’, which later served as the foundation for the Beat Generation.

The story of their interaction together is pretty fun on its own terms. These were some pretty crazy folks, and they were focused on testing the boundaries of cultural norms — using drugs, poetry and sex as fuel in their quest. And, while the word ‘Beat’ was still quite some time away, the movement didn’t just happen — these folks were very self-consciously styling a movement (named by Carr as the ‘New Vision’) from way back in the early 1940s.

Despite Lucien’s vital role as the match-maker for the Libertine Circle, and its intellectual leader for this early period, Lucien dropped out very suddenly. And it’s the story of his dropping out that I believe is really the creation moment of the Beat Generation.

The Libertine Circle also sort of included a fellow named David Kammerer. Kammerer was (I jest you not) Carr’s former scout master, and, it seems, harbored a rather unhealthy fascination for Carr over a period of many years. Kammerer, consumed with Carr, had moved to New York to follow Carr when Carr transferred to Columbia.

And, one night in 1944, Carr murdered Kammerer in Riverside Park, and dumped his body in the Hudson River.

One day later, Carr turned himself in, and received a two year conviction; he pled guilty, portraying the attack as self-defense against an aggressive homosexual who threatened to kill him — the New York papers called in an ‘Honor Slaying’ in their front page headlines (though some say the fact that the fact that the New York District Attorney was also a Columbia Trustee may have played some role since the University had a real desire to shut this story down as quickly as possible).

In between the time of the murder, and when Carr turned himself in, he first visited Burroughs, who provided some advice, before spending several hours with Kerouac (the details of which are recounted in some detail in Kerouac’s novel ‘Vanity of Dulouz’). Kerouac was shortly thereafter arrested as an accessory after the fact, though he was fairly quickly released; he dropped out of school and traveled to Michigan, before returning to New York to try to start his career as a writer. And Allen Ginsberg held his very first press conference (Ginsberg, too, tried to write a novel about the events, but the Columbia administration forbade its conclusion).

Carr never returned to Columbia. He never returned to the Libertine Circle. And he never was a beat. When I wrote my thesis, he was still an editor at UPI, and he is now deceased. (His son is Caleb Carr, whose fantastic, best-selling novel, ‘The Alienist’ is — somewhat disconcertingly — about a serial killer in New York City).

In my thesis, I recount this history in significantly more detail, integrating history and literature to make the argument that Lucien Carr was a vital (if essentially entirely overlooked) force in the establishment of the Beat Generation. He brought the key intellectual figure heads of the Beat movement into dialogue with each other, he provided inspiration and direction in that very early period, and the tragedy of the Kammerer’s demise provided, it seems, the sort of traumatic shock that kick-started the actual path to the beat.

Looking back at this paper, 12 years later, I remember the process of writing it across a full year as probably my fondest and most fulfilling academic experience. I got to dive into the primary sources at the New York Public Library (having one of their private reading rooms to yourself, to scour through Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s diaries and private correspondence was a pretty remarkable time) and Columbia’s primary sources collection. I interviewed some really interesting people. And, as I wrote the thesis, I was living in the same dorm that Kerouac had inhabited during the 1943-44 academic year (it seemed significant to me at the time).

And I got to tell a pretty much untold story (really the gold standard for a history thesis) — that I happen to think is also really interesting.

So, despite that the writing is 12 years old, from when I was 21, and that I haven’t touched or edited it since (it’s the same exact version you can find archived at the Columbia University Library), I thought it would be fun to post it up here for anyone who might be interested in this topic.

So here it is.

Share and enjoy!

-r

I am back in the sunshine of Topanga, having returned from FITC Amsterdam, and it was, as usual, a really great time.

While in Amsterdam, I debuted Synthia, the first publicly usable musical instrument to emerge from Project Ludi at Almer/Blank Labs.

Synthia on the web, is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music — infinite classical canons — using a small set of rules that establish key, restricted notes within the key, tempo, instrumentation and the score.

I actually developed Synthia as a demonstration app to accompany my talk, ‘Hearing Pictures’ (which went really well at FITC Amsterdam, and which you can see at FITC Toronto in April), but the results were so fun to play with, that we decided to make it a publicly usable web-application, where anyone can upload any picture, have Synthia turn it into music, and then share it with your friends and embed it in any web page.

We will be posting a lot more about Synthia in the coming weeks, and updating her rules and features over the coming months. But, for now, I’d encourage all of you to play around with the Synthia Composer (just upload an image and listen), or just browse the gallery to hear what other pictures sound like.

And, if while playing with Synthia, you have some ideas on how we might commercialize her, share your thoughts and ideas for a chance to win an iPad.

Share and enjoy!

-r

For those who’ve been reading this blog for a few months, you might recall my mentioning a few times about my side work on translating pictures into music — and specifically, the Synesthesizer, a musical instrument that works by translating pictures into music, utilizing metaphors inspired by synesthesia.

Well, I’ve done a bit better than that — way better than we could get the Synesthesizer to work. In fact, we at Almer/Blank Labs, have just completed the finishing touches on a new software-based musical instrument that we are debuting at FITC Amsterdam.

Her name is Synthia. And I wish I could tell you more about her right now. But that will have to wait another 133 hours. Because Synthia will debut on February 22nd, at 5PM CET (Amsterdam Time) / 9AM PST (California Time).

She will debut as soon as I complete my talk, Hearing Pictures, I will be able to tell you more about her. In addition to the release of Synthia, the talk itself will be *really* good. I’ve given a lot of talks, and this is going to be, by far, the best and most exciting.

If you’re planning to be at FITC Amsterdam, then you will most definitely not want to miss this talk @ 4PM in Shaffyyzaal on Day 1, Monday, February 22nd.

Share and enjoy!

-r

As part of their promotion surrounding their new site and new courses, the Rich Media Institute is giving away FREE enrollment in ‘Comprehensive ActionScript 3‘, which is a compilation of five of the online training courses I have published for the RMI.

Enrollment lasts for 90 days, and this course is free to enroll only through February 15th, and only through this link.

‘Comprehensive ActionScript 3′ includes over 9 hours of training, from the following courses:

– Practical ActionScript 3
– Understanding and Working with Events in ActionScript 3
– Understanding and Working with Event Broadcasters in ActionScript 3
– ActionScript 3 for Flash Video
– The Webcam, CuePoints and Captions in Flash Video with ActionScript 3

So, go ahead and do yourself a favor, and enroll.

Share and enjoy!

-r