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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Flash Forward Boston: Day 2

For the second day of Flash Forward, my day had a much stronger focus on creativity rather than coding in Flash. That was my intention though. The conference is structured so that your time here reflects your own interests.There are 4 sessions going on simultaneously so each person, by picking which sessions they attend, gets what they want. If you’re a Flash designer or developer, I would encourage you to attend some time.

My first session was Finding Creative Techniques by Garrett Nantz. He showed a variety of projects he worked on at Big Spaceship—Hungry Suitcase for Royal Caribbean, HBO Voyeur, 30 Days of Night, and Glaceau primarily. What has always impressed me about these projects, beyond their sheer creativity, is the high level of production that goes into them. I’ve wanted to peak into their process and see how they actually accomplish these amazing things and luckily, that was some of what he talked covered. I’m sure I can’t properly distill down the Big Spaceship “secret” to success, but based on what I’ve seen today, it’s clear that a great deal of pre-production helps bring these projects to life. If you’ve visited the Royal Caribbean site, you may recognize the lower image to the right. The image you may not have seen before is the ‘planning’ stage of the site above it. A lot of us use this same technique for outlining a site. The level of preparation they go through sounds like it’s on overdrive though. Garrett’s example of experimenting with filming a variety of ink stains in water to get the transitions right for the Glaceau site is a level of detail was impressive.

Later in the day, Craig Swann from CRASH! MEDIA gave a presentation he called Imagination & Technology. I’ve seen Craig’s presentations at prior Flash Forward conferences and wanted to be sure to see what he’s been up to recently. Craig has a wonderful way of pairing devices with his computer with Flash to create some mind-expanding demonstrations. He explains his projects as simple manipulation of basic data, but the results are really cool. I shot some video of one of his experiments below. In case the audio isn’t clear, what he’s doing is using time as a variable when displaying live video. Instead of displaying a full frame of video every quarter of a second (or so), he’s only displaying one vertical line of the video then moving the next refreshed piece of video to the right by the width of the line. This is just a single example of many interesting projects he showed.

The last session I attended on day two was The Blind Sketchmaker: Exploring Evolutionary and Generative Art with Flash by Mario Klingemann. The Blind Sketchmaker is a project he showed that he’s still working on. It’s goal is to create randomized designs, then, based off of learning it accumulates through asking Mario what images qualify as art and which do not, determine if that generated design scores high enough to qualify as “art.” You can see on of the pieces of “art” here to the right called Sit and Watch. What makes this so interesting is that the definition of what is art is highly subjective. Can a computer program be taught to recognize it? It’s a highly complex process your brain goes through to determine if one image is “art” or just random data. His system is still in development but it’s a really interesting concept. I hope Mario will be posting some of the presentation on his website, http://quasimondo.com.

Flash Forward Boston: Day 1

This week I’m happy to be at Flash Forward in Boston. I’ve been to coming to this conference since 1999 or 2000. I forget which year it started. It’s always exciting to see the presentations and find out what the best Flash heads are doing now and what’s coming down the pike.

I attended 4 sessions today, the first day of the conference. The day started with the Adobe Keynote address presented by Kevin Lynch. Mr. Lynch has been the face of Adobe at many of the FFs I’ve attended. For this conference, he gave an summary of all the recent Flash developments Adobe has introduced over the past several months. One of the most interesting to me is Adobe Air which provides a way of making desktop applications from Flash content. As an added bonus, Adobe also gave every attendee a copy of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0. Thanks, Adobe!

The next 2 sessions I attended were ActionScript 3 for Designers by Rich Shupe of FMA and OOP for the Noob by Peter Elst of Mind Studios. I’ve been playing around with Action Script 3 some and I got quite a lot out of both of them. Peter was good enough to post his session notes on his blog. Check it out here.

My last session for the day was Video Game Opportunities with Flash by John Say of Say Design. His primary topic was casual games. If you check out his company’s site, saydesign.com, you’ll see many cool casual games in the portfolio section. At his company, they prefer to develop games in Flash. There are several advantages to Flash. The development process is easier than traditional programming. There is also a great advantage in distribution since the Flash Player isn’t limited to a single computer platform since Flash games easily play on the computers most people think about when Flash is mentioned--PC, Mac and Linux. In the past year, Flash has moved to our TV screens with the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3. Causal games also have a good marketplace on XBox Live, although they are not Flash based in that case.

The highlight of the entire conference was also on the first day, The Flashforward Film Festival. You can check out all of the nominees here. Bitey Castle won the People’s Choice Award for his wonderful 30 days: 30 shorts project. Be sure to check it out here. 

Dear iPod Touch, Not So Fast

I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the iPod Touch I ordered, but over the past week, my desire for it has ebbed. My first hesitation was that I heard Apple has removed the ability to add events to your calendar with the iPod Touch. There is no technical reason for this. It’s simply a move to differentiate the Touch from the iPhone. Yesterday, the first reports of users getting their hands on a Touch didn’t come with glowing reviews bases on a screen that was inferior to the iPhone’s screen.

Those events, along with my suspicion that I will need to replace my mobile phone soon, lead me to cancel my order. I will get an iPod Touch or an iPhone soon, but I’m still torn between the two. Which would you get?

iPod Touch, not iPhone, Is What Got My Money. (It’s What I Want.)

I’d been on the fence about an iPhone for weeks. It looks so sweet and I’ll probably end up with one at some point, but the iPod Touch seems to have filled every “techy” itch that the iPhone filled and got rid of the sticking point for me, the AT&T phone part. It looks sweet. (If you’re wondering what song I doctored into the above photo, check it out here.)

Backing Up Is Hard To Do? Not Any More.

There’s a common sentiment among geeks about hard drives. It’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail. That hard drive in your computer has lots of moving parts: at least one spinning platter made of metal or glass and at least one read/write head moving constantly to find the data your computer needs to function. That wear and tear will cause your drive to break. That is, if it doesn’t get stolen first.

Whatever happens, it will certainly happen at the most inopportune moment as well.

Now are you fearful of losing your treasure of family photos, financial information, job resume and, God forbid, even your MP3 collection? I won’t question your priorities but I’ll try to help you get a good routine going of making backups of your stuff. It might sound like a bit of a pain to deal with but you will thank me when it comes time to recover your stuff. Let’s get going.

Do you have a MAC?

This is going to be pretty easy.

First, find out how large the hard drive in your computer is. On your desktop, highlight the icon of the drive, probably called Macintosh HD, and then hit command-I. You can also find this command, Get Info, under the File drop down menu on the upper left corner of your screen. You’ll see a window come up with a bunch of information. Under the section labeled “General” you will see your drive’s capacity. You will need to buy an external hard drive larger than your hard drive you are backing up. If you buy a drive that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it, you will be golden. If you’ve got an Intel Mac, you’ll be find with just a USB 2.0 connection on your external hard drive. I’m using a Western Digital External Drive like you see in the Amazon ad to the right.

Second, now that you’ve got your external hard drive, let’s get you set up with SuperDuper, the software I use to make my own back ups. Visit their site to download a copy. The free version will make a full back up of your data onto your new drive. It will work forever this way for free, but I would suggest spending the $27.95 for the full version. The full version of the software includes very easy scheduled back ups so you will not need to work about manually doing this in the future.

Another feature I appreciate is that it’s got incredibly verbose descriptions of what you’re about to do when you use the software, helpfully labeled “What’s going to happen?”. You will see in the image below what “Smart Update”, an incremental back up feature of the full version of the software, will do. Nice.

What if you have a PC?

I don’t have hands-on experience backing up a PC. I run Windows XP and Vista, but only through my Mac with Parallels, so backing up my Mac in essence backs up my PC too. If you’re a PC user though, there are solutions out there for you too. For XP, Microsoft has included some backup software for you. Since I don’t use it though, I will simply point you to the page on Microsoft’s site called Windows XP Backup Made Easy. Another page on Microsoft’s site tells you how to install it from your installation disks.

If you run Vista, you’ll want to check out a different page on the Microsoft site: Windows Vista - Windows Backup and Restore Center. Unfortunately, one of my big gripes about the multiple versions Vista is sold under comes into play here.

Automatic File Backup helps to keep your files safe and is available in almost all editions of Windows Vista (it is not included in Starter and has only basic functionality in Home Basic edition).

That’s confusing, Microsoft! If you’ve got either Starter or Home Basic version of Vista, you will need to get some additional software to do your back up. Wired recommends SyncBack Free I would recommend checking out Wired’s complete PC back up article.

Offsite backups

Now that you can wipe the sweat off your brow knowing that you’ve got a back up of all your data I will tell you about another really cool service I use for off-site back up called Mozy.

Why would you want yet another backup now that you’ve got an external duplicate of your data? If someone breaks into your home and takes your laptop, do you think they’ll leave that tasty little external drive sitting next to it? It’s truly frightening to think about but, what about a fire in your home? I’m sorry to say that if you lose your computer in that situation, you’ll probably lose your back up drive as well.

Mozy will back up and encrypt your data externally so that you will be able to retrieve the files you simply can’t live without. A small program runs in the background and automatically monitors your hard drive as files change and sends only the files that have changed to be backed up over your internet connection.

You can sign up for a free Mozy account and back up 2 gigabytes of data to their servers. I pay for an unlimited home account which lets me back up any amount of data on a single computer for $4.95 per month.

Do you need both onsite and offsite backups?

Nothing is perfect. Mozy does have a downside. Since data is backed up over your internet connection, only about 9 gigabytes of data can be backed up per day. If your computer has 200 GB to back up, you’re going to need to have it running 24 hours a day for about 23 days to complete your initial back up. And, I should note, I find that very optimistic.

A external hard drive also allows you the luxury of having a bootable hard drive ready for you to get back to work in just minutes when a hard drive failure happens. A remote backup solution does not offer that. That’s why I recommend both approaches to backing up your data.

In a future entry, I will go over some hard drive maintenance and recovery software that I’ve used that will help round out your whole toolkit to keep your data yours.

Got a question about your back up? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.