simonb.com: blog > articles from March, 2010

The other day, for no reason in-particular, I was thinking about Mac FTP programs. I had used Interarchy (formerly Anarchie) for years. But around version 9 Stairways sold it to Nolobe (employee buyout) and after that it started to crash. So I switched to Transmit. Anyway, I was thinking about FTP programs and wondering what had happened to Interarchy, since it hadn't been updated in a while, when I got an email form Nolobe. They're having a fire sale. Literally. Their offices were destroyed by fire two years ago. So that's what happened to Interarchy and version 10…

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Google has turned on street view for Hong Kong. Above is The Peninsula from street view. I guess Shanghai will have to wait a little bit longer. Where "little bit" tends towards infinity.

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Last week I tried to visit my local DVD store only to discover it under construction. It looked like they were building more shelves to house their vast stock. Today I discovered the purpose of the shelves. They're a false wall. I walk into the place and discover it is now a quarter of its former size and only stocks Chinese movies. But then an assistant beckons to me as she pushes on one of the shelves. It opens to reveal the rest of the store with all the regular stock.

This is obviously a pre-Expo measure to stay in…

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Our new regular Monday morning art feature. Above is drawn in Flame, a Processing Java applet by Peter Blaškovič. He has loads of cool visualisation experiments on his site to explore.

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Here’s a game you can play along with at home: cover design for free English language listing magazines in Shanghai.

It’s time for the annual Shanghai International Literary Festival (SILF). Your task is to design a magazine cover with this subject. So, like any good designer your first port of call is Getty Images. You search for Royalty-free (RF) Creative images with the term “bookshelf”. Scroll down the results and near the bottom you’ll find this image.

Here it is on Getty and here it is on Flickr.

“Perfect,” you think. “That’ll do. A bit of Photoshopping and…

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Every so often Shanghai goes through various schemes to improve how it looks. For example, we've had the ban on the hanging out of washing and a general disapproving eye turned on the wearing of pajamas in the street. These schemes usually take hold when they're first introduced for a few weeks then gradually everything goes back to the way it was. Take spitting for example, during SARS there were lots of public service posters about spitting, it declined a lot. The problem is a Shanghai male cannot pass an ashtray or a urinal with out feeling the need to…

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The Shanghai Daily is reporting that Shanghai will build three large emergency shelters. 4000 sqm each! Infrastructure investment or preparing for something? Hmmm. Presumably these will be underground. This together with the expansion of the metro system leads one to wonder what's left underground to hold Shanghai up.

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Jim Pavloff has put up a couple of videos up on YouTube that re-create two Prodigy numbers in Ableton Live. He starts from a clean slate and gradually builds up the songs from samples and loops. It's fascinating viewing.

Smack My Bitch Up

Voodoo People

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Two generative art examples.

The above image was generated by IOGraphica and my mouse movements. The lines follow mouse movements, the circles represent where the mouse rests - the bigger the circles the longer the rest.

The above was generated by Harmony - an experiment with Javascript procedural textures/brushes and the HTML5 canvas tag by Ricardo Cabello.

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Ever seen this on a menu?

"15% service charge not included"

Who exactly does this serve? This message is all about the service provider and nothing to do with customer service.

The service provider is essentially saying:

"Not only are you paying for our goods but there's an extra fee for the privilege of paying us money."

Or

"We like ripping off our customers."

Or

"The people who made the menu couldn't multiple by 1.15."

These lines about service charges leave a bad taste in my mouth. This is unfortunate as they're usually found on menus; always in very small…

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