Jon Sykes

Sigur Ros @ MoMA

JP — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:26:46 +0000

I’m a bit of a fan of Sigur Rós, I think their music fills a spectrum that I often need filling at 2am whilst working hard, or 9am whilst driving nowhere. I’ve also always respected what they say in interviews, they seem to have a genuine drive to do their thing and do it for the right reasons - which I like.

This is a great video of their performance at MoMa, from Scene 360, from Current TV.

Lightning

JP — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:32:51 +0000

I love lightning. I love thunderstorms. I always said if I won the lottery, I’d pay a bunch of guys lots of money to allow me to tag along doing storm chasing.

Which is why I love finding stuff like this…

Unique Array Filter in Dojo

JP — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:35:15 +0000

I was just doing some work that needed some array parsing in JavaScript. I was surprised that I couldn’t find anything that seemed relevant in the Dojo source that would allow me to do this. It’s one of those rare occasions where I assumed Dojo would have it and it didn’t, rather than the usual spend hours coding something to find out I could have just done dojo.doAwesomeStuff() 2 hours earlier.

So I set about trying to find a solution. The problem? I have an array that contains items, I want them to be unique. I want to filter out all the ones that are the same. I want an array_unique like they have in PHP.

I found an interesting chunk of code over here on a blog post that’s about a different problem being solved with Dojo.

Amongst all the other stuff was this snippet:

cleanFilterValues:function(values) {
var unique = {};
//get rid of duplicates
return dojo.filter(values, function(value) {
if (!unique[value]) {
unique[value] = true;
return true;
}
return false;
}).sort();
},

I rather liked the look of it. It was super simple. Didn’t need you to loop through the array twice (once to get tha array value and then once over the whole thing again to see if the value you had matched one already in the array). Instead You just sort them all into order and go through them one at a time and don’t return any that are the same as the one before it.

Now of course this won’t work everywhere.

It won’t work where you can’t sort the array for example.

But for what I needed it was perfect. I figured I’d share it.

rgb2hsl

JP — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:54:48 +0000

I just needed somewhere to put this that I won’t loose it, it’s from the php.net site, I need a function like this for hexday, for a couple of features I’m working on.

/**
* Convert RGB colors array into HSL array
*
* @param array $ RGB colors set
* @return array HSL set
*/
function rgb2hsl($rgb){
$clrR = ($rgb[0] / 255);
$clrG = ($rgb[1] / 255);
$clrB = ($rgb[2] / 255);
$clrMin = min($clrR, $clrG, $clrB);
$clrMax = max($clrR, $clrG, $clrB);
$deltaMax = $clrMax - $clrMin;
$L = ($clrMax + $clrMin) / 2;
if (0 == $deltaMax){
$H = 0;
$S = 0;
}
else{
if (0.5 > $L){
$S = $deltaMax / ($clrMax + $clrMin);
}
else{
$S = $deltaMax / (2 - $clrMax - $clrMin);
}
$deltaR = ((($clrMax - $clrR) / 6) + ($deltaMax / 2)) / $deltaMax;
$deltaG = ((($clrMax - $clrG) / 6) + ($deltaMax / 2)) / $deltaMax;
$deltaB = ((($clrMax - $clrB) / 6) + ($deltaMax / 2)) / $deltaMax;
if ($clrR == $clrMax){
$H = $deltaB - $deltaG;
}
else if ($clrG == $clrMax){
$H = (1 / 3) + $deltaR - $deltaB;
}
else if ($clrB == $clrMax){
$H = (2 / 3) + $deltaG - $deltaR;
}
if (0 > $H) $H += 1;
if (1 < $H) $H -= 1;
}
return array($H, $S, $L);
}
?>

Conversation vs. Speech

JP — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:19:42 +0000

Khoi Vinh via FFF, this is an amazing slide show that I highly recommend anyone in the digital world should read (especially those in the “web design” world).

It contains some very insightful gems…

“Digital media is different from print as a speech is different from a conversation”

| View | Upload your own

All Points West - Some of my videos

JP — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:27:41 +0000

All the big screen stuff was done CCTV style with off angles of all the band, actually made for a very personal feel.

The vertical Tubes were capable for being lit at varying intensities there full length. Giving an amazing range of possibilities.

One of my favorites…

Green Rain…

Rising Purple…

I have a ton of other videos and photo’s from Friday on flickr.

All Points West

JP — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:00:41 +0000

Today I am at All Points West in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey. I am very happy about that.

It’s been a tough couple of months, lots of hard work, a ton of stress on the family side and we had to cancel our long anticipated trip to Tuscany at the very last minute. The only upside is that rather than being 3,500 miles away relaxing in rural Italy, I can instead go to All Points West as I had originally hoped.

Sorry tomorrow myself Jim and Mrs Jim will be heading in by ferry, bright and early, to get spots near the front of the VIP enclosure, hopefully my wife will be joining us later (although I suspect she’ll never make it there).

I’m sure I’ll post pictures and video over the next few days. I’m pretty much going for two reasons, to see Underworld live (something I’ve never done) and to see Radiohead live (something I’ve never done).

Hopefully my mental pictures of the Manhattan backdrop to the stage are accurate.

To anyone that’s going over the 3 days, i hope you have a great time, I’m looking forward to having a large local music event in NJ that hopefully gets bigger and bigger as the years progress.

It happens to the best of us

JP — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:56:02 +0000

Tom over at no turn on red, has a great post showing a product that still contains what looks like the default product title and description. Clearly someone missed something whilst merchandising new products.

It made me curious what else like this was out there.

You can still see search returns for these items and more on google (you can’t cover up online mistakes anymore).

That search also pulled up a other interesting finds, including.

Who knew J Crew sold $4,500 Gold Rolex’s, this apparently isn’t a mistake, they actually do sell these.

Little Room

JP — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:01:27 +0000

Well you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started in your little room

Possibly one of my favorite songs of the last 10 years. It’s totally applicable to almost everything in life when viewed as an analogy. Yet it’s also very true and relevant taken on face value. At work a year or so ago we’ve moved out of our little room, and I do find myself every now and then thinking about how we got started sitting in our little room, just to get that feeling back that was good.

Olympics Imagery

JP — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:49:45 +0000

After seeing a post over at swissmiss I decided to go digging for more Olympics imagery.

The 2008 Olympics site has a whole section on graphic standards for the event.

Including the pictograms:

The Official Emblem:

The Mascot:

and the official colors:

Chinese Red

The Glaze Yellow

Chinese Scholar-tree Green

The Blue-and-White Porcelain Blue

The Great Wall Grey

The Jade White