Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I have been blogging for 10 years, started Dec 1999 (dreadnet.editthispage.com which sadly died a few years back due to my own negligence) so some  2010 social media long term predictions and gratuitous advice which again is worth what you paid for it

Social Media 2010 predictions and gratuitous advice:

1. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr and other walled gardens are over in the long term; an open solution will replace them in 5 years or less.
2. Don't be afraid to use and experiment with the walled gardens but recognize that your stuff can be deleted at any time and unless you have backed it up to an open format like HTML, it won't last forever (most likely scenarios: service goes out of business or your account is deleted for an arbitrary reason). I wouldn't shed a tear if all my tweets were deleted, YMMV. If you have fun with the walled gardens, get your domain and start a blog, videoblog,podcast, etc., you won't regret having an online presence you own and control
3. If you care about your closed garden stuff, back it up to an open format. If you aren't geeky enough to figure this out, ask a geek, there's lots of them, just don't ask me :-)
4. Have a "hook" and nurture and grow it. Not good enough in 2010 to be a jack of all trades social media whatevah :-) You actually need to *know* something. Most people do (they just don't realize it!) so that's not a problem.
5. Don't know why I have to write this in 2010 department: Don't trust reviews or content on Urban Spoon, Yelp (i like the idea of yelp & other aggregators  but in practise most of the reviews are shall we say not helpful), Gowalla, Facebook etc unless you know the person in real life or have read their stuff over a period of time. Most restaurant reviews like most content on the Internet are wildly biased but that's a good thing because objectivity in food reviews is ridiculous.
6. Get your most valued content out of the walled gardens and your email (email rocks but it's not a place for long term knowledge storage and retrieval) and back it up. The best way to back up is to put the content in an open format like HTML on your own domain and backup all the stuff on your domain. Again, ask a geek. And really most people's stuff that is truly valuable is not a lot, myself included :-)  e.g. I bet my best emails, best photos, videos and blog posts for the last 5 years could fit on 1 DVD!

After some digging and research around the web, my ideal mobile mad scientist programming language would:

• have the 2D and 3D graphic manipulation power of Processing, Nodebox and Shoes
• be cross platform mac, windows, linux, maemo on mobile, iPhone, android
• be 'web native' i.e. REST, JSON, XML and all the other web API stuff built in and not bolted on like it is Processing, trying to use the flickr api from Processing is shall we say kludge-o-rama (awesome code from bryan chung but indicative of the unnecessary struggle one is forced to engage with in Processing and other non web native languages)
• not use a Java-like syntax, death to curly braces and wasted semi-colons
• be dynamic, death to the Java/C++ cargo cult of typing for no reason 
• be easily adaptable to new APIs and new sensors through the ability to create a domain specific language and/or easy to use and beautiful foreign function interface
• be open source, sorry but for my mobile art,  i can't use programming environments and languages that are not open source
• support the REAL loop, I don't want to spawn threads for the sake of questionable 'concurrency' like I am forced to with OSGI and the Bug Labs Bug

IF I were an idealist that pretty much rules out everything :-)

Fortunately I am a pragamatist. So I will continue my experiments in:

• Nodebox & Python on the Mac
• Cocoa Touch and Objective C on the iPhone

What about Processing? Sorry can't handle the Java syntax and the pain of doing XML and JSON and REST programming and the kludge-o-matic way to access Java libraries. processing.js? too early and too much impedance mismatch to use all the lovely JS libraries out there. And Shoes is promising especially if it were improved so you could easily use normal Ruby gems but given its current "hibernation" "post-Why" not sure it will continue to be improved.

What should I use on Maemo if/when I get an N900? Ruby plus SWIG or some such foreign function kludge er interface :-) to access the sensor APIs which I assume are only available in C and C++ ?

What should I use on Android if/when I get an Android device?

What should I use on Windows? Not that I really care :-) But it would be lovely to have Windows people join in my fun without having to do anyting. Eines Tages!

Somehow I think the "mainstream" world is moving towards my ideal solution and the mainstream solution for what I want will look more like processing.js and ruby-processing or smalltalk i.e. scratch then it will look like Processing, Nodebox or CocoaTouch

What I am looking for in my ongoing mobile art experiments is REAL!

1. Read the sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc)
2. Evaluate the data from the sensors
3. Art - Make some art (sound, graphic, image, etc) and display and store it on the mobile
4. Loop - Back to step 1

And I want to do it in a dynamic environment that doesn't force me to do yak shaving like spawning separate threads for each of the sensors or other such needless complexity that's not needed by my artistic algorithms. Nor the slings and arrows of outrageous certificates or certifications or developer programs or DRM malarkey :-) !

After reading the N900 technical reviews from the Maemo summit, it appears that the unlocked version of the N900 is the closest current device that could do this:

1. It's Linux so assuming the sensor APIs are available from a standard Linux C (i.e. not using some non standard craziness like Carbide C++ for Symbian) library, Python, Ruby, name your favourite dynamic language here, etc (C++ and Java are just not malleable and easily hackable enough, sorry!) bindings could be (and probably are or are in the process of being) built to those C libraries
2. No need for developer fees or ridiculous certificates
3. It has all the sensors I want for my current experiments
4. It's NOT mass market, but it's mass market enough for hackers (unlike Bug Labs Bug which I love but already probably has less than 1/10 the amount of developers working on it as the N900).

Am I right? Time for me to watch the blogs for signs of the N900 and Maemo 5 and 6 making dynamic languages first class citizens unlike on Symbian where S60 Python was far too many steps behind Carbide C++  (and time for to save up for the N910 since the N900 will probably be crippled in some significant way as all 1st gen Nokia devices are e.g. N95-1 not having enough memory)

The Bug Labs asynchronous GPS API that we can't get working (mentioned in the previous blog post) with Simon's identicon program is: IPositionSubscriber

I'll report this in the Bug Labs forums and then update this post.

Here's my not so world-changing idea (i have other ideas that I'll talk about the day of!) for a fun session at BarCamp Vancouver 2009 (see you there):

Social Ice Cream - Easy, peasy 1,2,3 :

1. pedal/ride/board to Mario's Gelato @ 88 East 1st Avenue, it's a 5 min bicycle ride away from BarCamp! 
2. Eat Ice cream ($4 including tax and up, lactose free yummy alternatives also available!) and create something related and put it on the web tag it #socialicecream
   
3. Share it with somebody at BarCamp you don't know