Category: Software

Origami Site Update

I just completed a major revision to my Origami web site at www.zingorigami.com (also www.zingman.com/origami). Attentive readers of this blog will recall that I started on this endeavor way back in September. I had to get around to a bunch of other projects first, but I’m happy to have completed phase one of the operation.

I invented about ten new origami models this year, so the update was long overdue. Major features include reorganizing the collection of models into a series of pages according to a set of major categories. The index page now links into these pages and presents a comprehensive index of thumbnails. I also created a page of Adirondack Origami, to highlight the feature I did for Adirondack Life magazine earlier this year. Additionally I created a page for info about Origami commissions if you’re interested in having you own origami handmade by me the artist, and a page about my forthcoming book, mostly a placeholder for now.

The next step will be a new round of photographs. For many of the recent models I simply put up snapshots, but sometime over the winter I plan on folding exhibit level versions of all my models and doing a proper photo shoot of them. This will also be useful for the book.

Then phase three will be to make the pages served dynamically. I need to research some kind of lightweight CMS and template engine, or maybe make my own. That will be a pretty good project.

And in related news, my friend John has a new web site to showcase his origami: www.johnmontroll.com

Weekend in D.C.

Over the weekend we went to Washington to visit my friend John, who is an accomplished origami artist. It was a really fun trip.

But first the part about danger and adventure. About a month ago, after all our summer travels were over, I took my car into the shop for an oil change, tire rotation and new front brakes. Since that time, I’ve only driven to the train station and back, and have not taken the car about 30 mph (48 km/h). The kids had a half day of school on Friday, so we lit out for DC about 2 in the afternoon. The trip was great, the traffic smooth and light, and the weather turned from cool and cloudy to mild and sunny. But I after I got on the highway I started to notice a vibration in the front end, and as the trip went on it got worse. By the time we got off the Beltway it was pretty bad, and soon the front brakes were smoking! Luckily we made it to John’s house and there was a garage just a couple blocks away.

It turned out one of the tires was seriously worn along the outside edge, to the point where it was ready to blow out! I think the garage last month must have screwed up with the tire rotation, cuz this was not normal wear. On top of that the rear brakes were shot. So I got new back breaks and ended up getting four new tires, cuz one other tire was pretty badly worn and all of them were more than five years old in any event. Ah well, it was an expensive hassle, but I would have had to get this work done at some point, and all in all we were pretty lucky.

And it didn’t even slow us down very much. There are a lot of good restaurants in John’s neighborhood and Friday night we got Mongolian food. Saturday I got up early to deal with the car, and then we all took the train into downtown D.C. We went down the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial. I haven’t been there since high school, so it was interesting to see how the place had changed. For on thing they put up a slightly incongruous World War Two memorial right near the Washington Monument.

It’s also interesting how some thing haven’t changed. It’s a long walk (4 miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and back), and you’d think they’d have trams or bicycles or something for the tourists in this day and age of fat America. It would also come in handy for people with kids or a bad ankle, or people who don’t want to walk the whole length of the Mall twice. Also the food selection is pretty meager, just a single concession stand with bad pizza and hot dogs and soda. You’d think there’d be row of places to get lunch.

The highlight of the day was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. This is a fantastic place and I’ve been to it every time I’ve been to Washington. It’s full of spaceships, including such legendary craft as the Apollo 11 Command Module, and of a more recent vintage Spaceship One, and storied airplanes including the original 1903 Wright Flyer plus hundreds of later models from every era of experimental, military and commercial aviation. There used to be a Space Shuttle but that’s now gone. I understand they moved it to a new museum hall out near the airport.

The kids really loved it (as Jeannie I both did at that age), and I don’t think they ever really thought to spaceships as something real before, only an idea out of movies. I grew up in the 70’s and I remember the waning days of the Apollo program, Skylab, Viking and Voyager, and the development and debut of the Space Shuttle. All that stuff was really cutting edge back then; now it seems almost nostalgic. I mean, my 41-year old classic muscle car is built of the same technology that took humanity to the moon! I read in the paper today that the US will not have manned space light capability for the next five years and will have to pay Russia to send up our astronauts like dotcom zillionares do. Sigh, yet another failure of our government.

In any event the museum was a blast and it was a great day. When we got back to John’s neighborhood the garage was still open and I picked up the car. We get Peruvian food for dinner and played Settlers of Catan after. (It seems John always wins.)

John has a grand piano. It’s been a few years since I’ve played a grand. I used to play one a lot when I lived in California and hung out at my friend David’s house. My own piano is an upright, and it’s good for what it is, but a grand has a faster, better action and much more definition in the sound, especially in the bass registers and the very high end. So it was very enjoyable to play on that.

And of course we spent a lot of time talking origami. I folded some models out of his forthcoming book, a magnum opus of polyhedra and geometric origami. He has a chapter on polygons, including a regular pentagon and a golden rectangle. His pentagon is (folded from a square) is a very accurate approximation, but the golden rectangle is mathematically exact, which is very interesting because it’s only a few steps; the golden rectangle is latent in the square. I have been searching for year for a method to fold a regular pentagon (or a 36 degree angle), and his is the best I’ve seen. But it doesn’t beat the method I’ve come to prefer, which is basically to eyeball it, because I’ve gotten good at it with practice. In any event, since the golden ratio is expressed everywhere in pentagonal symmetry, I feel intuitively that there must be a way to develop a mathematically perfect pentagon from a golden rectangle. I plan on investigating this.

We spent some time considering the Archimedean Solids and their duals. I developed and folded a Truncated Octahedron from a square sheet of paper. This a really interesting shape, composed of eight hexagons and six squares and has the property of being able to tile space. To my surprise and delight, my design mainly worked, right up until I got closing the model and locking the last face in place with it’s neighbors. This ending stuff can be tricky but is essential to a nice model. My current design wants to spring apart, but it looks like I can get make it with stiffer paper and a slight adjustment of the layout of the faces on the paper.

Back in the office today I got a demo to Flash 10 from an Adobe evangelist. It has a lot of cool new API for doing 3D. My friend Veronique turned to me and said this would be cool for my origami software. She’s totally right, but this had the effect of making me sad because I’d love to have the time to work on that project again. I started it back in the dotcom bust when I was out of work and got a lot of design work done and start on a demo, but it would take months of full time work to get to the next level with it. Ah well, with the economy going the way it is maybe I’ll get my chance. Heh!

Happy Autumn, Part II

More works in progress:

I’ve started work on a new song, “Who Can Fool Me?” Sort of an angry and defiant song, inspired as a response to how people in authority use lies and manipulation to maintain their power: the government, corporations, the media, etc. It’s basically a jazz blues in C minor, played in a stride style. But it’s dressed up by a 7/8 time and lots of chromatic harmonic movement for a sort of tense, edgy feeling. It’s coming together relatively quickly, which is nice. Got the arrangement worked out, got rhythm section down, and a MIDI sketch of a horns and strings, and did first pass at the vocals last night. I will do one more pass at that as I am still finalizing the lyrics.

Work on my origami book continues. I’m close to being done with diagramming my moose. This is a long one, over 60 steps so far. It’ll probably end up just a few short of 70. This one will present some new challenges when I do the page layout, since the size and shape of the individual step drawing very greatly, I’ll need to expand my palette of layout templates. I’m folding a moose as I do the diagrams. I had folded my previous mooses out of Wyndstone Marble paper, but that is no longer available in the United States. So I’ve been searching for some new and different kinds of origami paper recently. For this one I ended up using a piece of paper called Tant that I ordered from Nicolas Terry in France. It’s working out very nicely. Very strong and reasonably thin, very workable, and it comes in largish (35cm) sheets. I would love to be able to get the stuff even larger (like 50cm). Anyway, you check out Nicolas’s origami shop and order the stuff here.

Another project I’ve decided to start on this fall is to redesign the origami section of my web site. I’ve been wanting to do this since the summer. I had a big burst of creativity last May and June, and came up with eight new models in that period, and since then of course I’ve decided to so a book. The big problem with this is my web site is really old. Parts of it date back to 1995, which is truly ancient in internet time. I’ve added on it over the years, but the core is flat html. So the origami galleries don’t scale well, and every time I add a new model it’s a fair amount of hand coding. I want to completely redo it, with a more modern looking, CMS-backed, Javacript-driven front end. Maybe something like this. BTW, Giang Dihn is my favorite origami artist out there right now. His stuff is so lyrical and flowing, so beautiful.

But that’s a rather large endeavor, beginning with researching available code libraries and seeing how they fit in with my design concept. So it will have to wait. Meanwhile I’m overhauling the current set of pages on last time. I swear this is it. The most labor-intensive part of this is I have to photograph all my models and bring them into photoshop to size the images. This is something I’ll need to do anyway for my book. But the more I do it, the higher my standards get, and I’m starting to realize I need a better camera or better lighting setup, or maybe just need to become a better photographer. Ah well another bridge I’ll cross when I get there. For this rev I’ll just use the pictures I have.

Lastly, I spent some time last weekend with the girls on the movie Rollercoaster of Cheese, their little timeline animation project. Created the soundtrack by editing together and layering 3 takes of our the voiceover. Showed them how to use Audacity, a simple but reasonably powerful audio editor for the PC. Brought the soundtrack into Flash. The next and last step is the actually animation, using the library of drawing they built up.

This led to us exploring some old multimedia pieces I have on my web site. So here’s some shockwave stuff from a few years ago. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/mmedia/index.html

Girls First Flash Animation

Here’s an little animation from Lizzy and Michelle. I’ve started teaching the girls Flash, with the idea of using it as a way to introduce them to programming. I was about Lizzy’s age when I first started programming computers. Of course back in those days if you wanted to do anything at all with a computer you had to write a program first. These were TRS-80’s and the language was BASIC, and we’d type in the source code for simple games like Lunar Lander out of a manual and then watch it run. Now computers, languages and platforms are about a zillion times more complicated, and it’s hard to know where to start. I figured Flash is good cuz they can start with the drawing and animation tools, and then get into simple frame scripts, and go from there they can take it as afar as they want, up to a full on Object Oriented language and web application development platform. Not that they will necessarily want to grow up to be software developers, but right now they mainly use computers for watching DVD’s, playing games, and surfing the net, so it’d be good for them to have some basic understanding of how things work, as well as developing some logical problem-solving skills.

So we’re up to playing with the drawing and animation tools. Here’s a first effort, called “Squishy Cheese”. The project is actually from a little while ago, but there is renewed interest, and they’re working on a follow-up. The new one will have thematic content and an attempt at narrative. This one is more, stream of consciousness and impressionistic.

Terrible Idea | Great Idea

While we’re on the topic of amusing office annoyances, here’s another.

I work for a really big company. Big enough that people’s idea of what they think is the right thing do in the corporate context can vary greatly depending on their particular role. This can get rather surreal. My floor alone is well over 100 people, all working on just one small set of applications.

The other day I’m working and I get a last minute and urgent request from a project manager to implement some absolutely boneheaded feature ASAP. This is actually not that uncommon, but more often than not it’s the result of poor communication, so usually the solution is to find the person who made the request and go talk to them, figure out what they really want and implement something sensible instead of their flaky hack.

(The project manager is a neither-fish-nor-fowl role in our organization. They not developers or technical managers, nor or they produces or have anything to do with defining features or product direction. They are basically organizers and mediators and their job is to schedule and track things and make sure people who need to know what’s going on know what’s going on. And to insulate developers from random noise from creative.)

This request came from a producer over in creative, so I go over to ask him about it directly. This particular guy is often more of a “big picture” than a “details” person, but he’s a nice guy and smart and if he can see that his idea doesn’t make sense to a developer he’s usually willing to listen and find a solution that works for everyone.

But not this day. I explain first issue, which is with usability. “You’re right, it makes no sense,” he tells me. ” I know it’s a terrible idea, but we have to do it anyway.” He actually said this. Pressure from the legal department apparently.

I’m sure it seems like a simple request to him but it actually would require some substantial reworking of a nontrivial set of code, and it touches other parts of the code base, so I’d have to get other developers involved. This would make the whole thing run over schedule, and have cascading consequences. So I think it over and tell him, “Actually I think it’s a great idea, but the problem is we can’t do it.”

Professionalism?

So the other day I’m at work, writing code, in the zone, working out some complex and esoteric problem. Concentrating, you dig?

The phone rings. “Hello, is this John [horribly mispronounces my last name, which is not even that hard, and doesn’t even come close the standard mispronunciation most people use]. My name is Michael [somethingorother] and I [blahblahblahblahblah]”, talking a mile a minute, without a comma and without getting to the point. No good morning how are you, am I interrupting? or anything.

Eventually he has to pause to take a breath so I ask him “Are you a recruiter?” We’ve been having a growing problem with headhunters cold calling random people in my office looking for an in. They go onto LinkedIn and see your job title and the company you work for and then call the main switchboard and navigate the phone directory to get out numbers at our desks. I don’t know why they do it; it’s a complete waste of time. It aslo seems to me extremely rude. We all tell them about our HR department, whose job it is to listen to people like them. Usually the headhunters are pretty pushy, and some developers will wait patiently to get a word in edgewise, and plead “I’m really sorry but I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to call HR.” Sometimes the hapless developer will repeat this 3 or 5 times.

So the guy says “Yes I am I work for [some recruiting agency] and I [blahblahblahblahblah]”. So before this gets too out of hand, I tell him to talk to our HR department and hang up the phone.

Steve, who sits across from me and is not a developer but a “Resource Manager” and has to put up with more of these calls than anyone, looks up and says “Good answer.”

A minute or so later the phone rings again. I should mention I’m expecting a legit phone call right about then, so I pick it up again. “Hello this is Michael [somethingorother] and I just want to say that it is very unprofessional of you to hang up the phone on me …” Well I’m just floored! This is your sales pitch Mike? You cold call a complete stranger just to spam me, and when you’re told the right way to pitch candidates to our organization you don’t listen? Then you call me back just to insult me? And you expect me to help you because why? I thought for a second or so about trying to explain to him that it really is appropriate to hang up under these circumstances, and that had the info he called me for anyway. But I figured he probably wouldn’t listen to that either. I never found up what his second point was, cuz I hung up again.

I guess I should cut the dude some slack. He was probably just having a bad day. He’s probably just figured out he’s going to get fired for being such a lousy salesman.

Life and Origami

I’ve been really busy the last few weeks. More on that below, but first a few preliminaries.

First, both of the girls had their models accepted in OUSA’s origami for children exhibit! Look for them this June.

Next, it turns out that Nick.com won a Webby. Thanks for all your votes. I have no idea how canihazacheezeburger.com did.

Spring is really, really here.  The weather has been really, really beautiful.  Out in the garden we planted tomatoes a few weeks ago. Critters ate them.

I haven’t had a chance to work on music in a couple of weeks, although I want to get my last song of the current set done soon. Hopefully this weekend I will get back to it. One or two more sessions and I’ll be able to post a rough mix; it’s down to vocals and horns. A couple things came up that delayed the music work.

One is I got some malware on my PC. It looks like it’s under control now, but I’m afraid that next time I reboot it will come back. I had to go out and get anti-malware sofware and all, and it didn’t even fully clean it. I might have to go back and restore my OS from and archive I made last fall. Oh such fun. Glad at least my new computer’s a Mac.

The other is I’ve been really jamming on origami, making a ton of models. I’ve been working the last month or so on an origami commission, and I finished all the models last Friday. It was a cool set of subjects; each on presented different and interesting challenges. I’m please and satisfied that I was able to come up with good designs for all of them pretty much on demand in a short time, and while I was at it, came up with some new ideas I can apply in other models. These were more in the intermediate than complex level, so it was also good to take a step back towards more readily doable subjects. I’m particularly fond of the bear and the moose.

The Bear is in the modern style, which is to say it doesn’t really use a base. With a model like this it’s all about the pose and the posture. I came with the basic form and approach pretty quickly, but it took a couple of days just to work out the ears! And it changed around the design quite a bit.

When I was done I noticed an underlying structural similarity to my Elephant. So I went back to look at my Elephant, and it seemed needlessly complex to me, especially the back legs. I remember a few years ago when I came up with the design really struggling to work it out but never being fully satisfied with the fold sequence. So now I’m redesigning my Elephant. The new version is closer to 30 steps than 50, and the same size paper yields a substantially larger beast. The overall appearance is very similar, and the head is almost exactly the same. Of course one thing leads to another, so now I’m working on the head.

For the moose, I had a bit of an idea about how to approach the antlers. I saved this model for last, cuz it was the hardest and I figured I’d work up to it, but by the time I got there time was running out. So rather then do a free body design I fell back on the tried-and-true bird base. (A modified stretched bird base, actually.) I pretty much nailed the model on the first try with not alot of experimentation and some lucky guesses on the proportions. Using the base turned out the be a good thing because it left me with a thick body with lots of layers; it was strong and the legs could support the weight, and the model doesn’t tend to flop forward despite the big antlers.

I took the day off Thursday and pretty much folded continually from first thing in the morning into the evening and the wee hours of the night, all the final models in one long session. I was amazed at how exhausted I was by the end of the day. It was intensely creative, and my brain felt like it does at the end of a 16 hour marathon of writing code. My hands hurt right at the base of the joint of my thumb too.

Sunday was a folding session at the Museum of Natural History. I took Lizzy and my friend John was in town to teach and hang out. He’s working on a new book that includes a lot of theory, and I looked thru some of the material. Lots of math; very intense stuff. It’s going to be up there with Robert’s ODS. Lizzy learned how to wet-fold. It’s also kind of cool to see how she can function and enjoy herself in an all adults kind of setting. All in all a really good day.

Jeannie stayed home and re-planted the garden, and built a little fence out chickenwire to keep the critters out. Tomatoes again as well as various peppers. So far so good on the critter front.

Werk: Nominated for a Webby!

Nick.com has been nominated for a Webby award. Can you believe it? Little ol’ us, alongside such heavy hitters as canihazacheeseburger.com. The mind boggles. So now would be a good time to go check out Nick.com, and in particalar some of the pieces I’ve worked on, including TurboNick, Nicktropolis. and the previously mentioned Nickpages. And while you’re at it please vote: http://pv.webbyawards.com/account/pv_login

Hello Spring

Well, spring is here. In fact it’s April already. The nights are still cold but the days are getting mild. It’s been a few weeks since life has returned to normal WTR the work week, but I feel like I’m still catching up. Haven’t even had time to go shopping. Been trying to catch up on some random purchases. Been getting back into biking and rollerblading regularly again. We *did* manage to finish tiling and painting our bathroom (more on that in a previous post). Also last weekend we started getting the yard going for spring. Raked off the leaves and debris, and uncovered the fig tree, and started planning what we want to do this spring.

Been making progress on the new Mac. Every new thing is an adventure. After we discovered that Boot Camp won’t work if there are three partitions on the drive, we basically started over. We got a new external hard drive (which we were planning on anyway for backup) and put a 10.5 partition on it, and then put a 10.4 and a Win XP partition on the main boot drive. I went back and installed proTools on 10.4 and it worked, and so did the drivers for my MIDI interface, and so the whole MIDI rig. So far so good. Last week we installed VMWare, which involved calling up Microsoft to talk numbers with a phone robot. Tons of fun. My friend Blick, who is a Mac ProTools guru, came over to help me out last weekend with my music setup. Still after all that SampleTank still doesn’t appear in the list of plugins. So it looks like I’m gonna buy the new SampleTank upgrade for intel macs and see how that goes. At least I always have the option or running PT under windows now.

Been making progress on a new song. The song is gonna be it’s own post when it’s ready but for now I’ll say it’s a kinda prog-ish r&b number and I’m working out the horn arrangement. I realized as I was tracking it that I don’t really have funk chops on the bass, so I went for something I’ll call the funky rock approach that seems pretty good. Now I’m up to penciling the horn section.

And I did get a bit of a spring break, a few comp days. We took the kids up for a day of hanging out in the Catskills with my brother Martin and his fiancé Kathleen at this quaint Victorian era lodge. Sort of like camping but without sleeping out in the cold. The place had a Teddy Roosevelt kind of vibe; thematically consistent with the Museum of Natural History. It was built kinda like a castle into the side of cliff on a small lake. We went hiking and ice skating and swimming, and had a blast. Pictures to be posted sometime in the indeterminate future. The next day M & K came back to our place, and we hung out and played Wii and Settlers of Catan. Our friends Steve and Alice from Texas (yo!) also popped by for a visit.

I’ve also been making progress on diagramming my origami turtle (hope to be ready in another few days), but overall I feel like I need to devote some time to new origami designs, and haven’t yet had the opportunity. I have a bunch of ideas in my head I need to work out in paper.