gnomedex

in response to air's comment, here's a video version (select the HD version if your screen is big enough!) of the penmachine barcode which hopefully is more fun and more self-explanatory:

If you can't play the above YouTube video e.g. perhaps because your platform doesn't support flash, try the original quicktime version of the penmachine dodging buses barcode video

What the video displays

Boring tech stuff:

1. In the middle, 4616 of derek's photos (75x75 pixel thumbnails of all photos >= 720 pixels high from flickr) are displayed
2. while at the bottom their 1 pixel wide by 720 pixel high "barcode slice" is displayed.
3. Finally at the top, a red dot shows where the latest 1 pixel slice is being displayed.

 All three lines wrap-around after 900 pixels.

Cool People in the video:

• miller family-o-sphere
• vancouver tech-o-sphere (if you are in Vancouver and you are in tech, you probably are in the video!)
• gnomedex-o-sphere (chris, ponzi, etc)
• northernvoice-o-sphere

Their is also a webapp version but due the network not being infinitely fast and zero latency it falls behind and out of sync

Here's the webapp version: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/pm-bc-video/html5-barcode/drawbarcode.html

It's a pity zero latency and infinite bandwidth networks don't exist :-)

In order to create the video, I ran the webapp on my localhost to eliminate bandwith and latency problems!

Colophon:

photos by derek k miller:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/penmachine
music "dodging buses by derek k miller:
http://www.penmachine.com/podcast/2009/06/dodging-buses.html
4616 barcode images of derek's flickr photos generated by:
https://github.com/rtanglao/barcode
html5 web app code to generate the video :
https://github.com/rtanglao/html5-barcode/blob/master/drawbarcode.html

video made using: Snapz Pro X from ambrosia software

Known Bugs:

(tested on Mac OS X Safari,  Chrome 12 and Firefox Aurora and Firefox Mobile on Nexus S)

1. the white space on the right side of the video
2. The red dot should skip by 75pixels instead of 1pixel or perhaps we need a separate indicator pointing from the slice to the 75x75 thumbnail
3. The red dot should be erased when it wraps around

Lessons Learned

I need to work more with cool music from people like Derek. Music + code indeed music + anything is fantastic

I'd really like to go to BarCamp TDot and the Mesh Conference in Toronto since I could slip in a visit to my brother and his family as well as learn lots and meet some very smart people from the rest of Canada (since most of the people I know in Web 2.0 are on the West Coast of North America) who get things done in the Web 2.0 space.

BarCamp TDot is more my style (and the organizers think :-) I am coming because I sort of suggested it in my CanadaCamp post) so I am trying to see if I can find a way for me to go to BarCAmp TDot (and money permitting the Mesh Conference) that makes sense to my family and Bryght.

While I love "normal" conferences (and Gnomedex is definitely one of the best and hopefully I will be there this year again as well!), I personally get more out of unconferences like Northern Voice Moosecamp and BarCamp Amsterdam (to gratuitously name drop the unconferences I have helped organize).

Net net as they say, Mesh has lots of great people so I am sure it will turn out great regardless of what myself and Boris pontificate online about it :-) !

Lee's pre Gnomedex BBQ was one of the highlights of the conferences I went to in 2005. For me, it brought together lots of cool people in Seattle as well as the technical creatives who happened to be in town and was magic (magic for informal networking (I loved the videos of me and others by Peter Grondal) and magic because it helped me to get to know Lee and his wife Sachi better).

Kind of what TechCrunch's Mike Arrington started doing shortly afterwards: an informal gathering of technical creatives. More like that please when you get back, Lee! The Seattle (and Vancouver) communities could use regular BBQs like this during our ever so brief non rainy season. Anybody got a nice place in Vancouver (preferably with a backyard plus a basement or somewhere decent to hang should it rain!) where we can do this? I'll organize if you provide the venue! I'd offer our place but we don't have a backyard!

From Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: What I Would Have Written in 2006 (A Goodbye For Now).:

QUOTE

Seattle - I would have continued to document the growth of Seattle as one of the global centers of Web innovation and growth.

UNQUOTE