2nd floor entrance display

One of the first tasks assigned to me at my new job, was to build a digital signage system for the main library on campus. They had already secured and spent their funding on several Mac minis, some Apple 30″ Cinema Displays and a 55″ Samsung TV. They had found a software solution that they wanted to use, Billboard CE, an offshoot of Billboard which is NC State’s digital signage system. The one problem though, was that Billboard CE was mostly an unfinished port from their source and wasn’t really ready for us to deploy, so my job now became to either find an alternative, or to build some software glue to tie this all together.

Some caveats. First, this was about a year ago, and the money had been spent much earlier, so the Mac minis were of the previous generation, which for our purposes means that they lack the graphics power of the most recent minis. We didn’t have much more money to spend. We didn’t want to BootCamp all of these to run an off-the-shelf solution, and this needed to be done quickly.

Hardware

Before I dive into the software side, a few notes about our hardware implementation. Doing this all over again would be considerably easier with current hardware, but I digress. Each installation with one exception is comprised of a Mac mini and a 30″ Apple Cinema Display, the exception being the main entrance setup on the second floor which has the large Samsung TV. Two components doesn’t sound that bad, but then you have to take into account that the old Mac mini has a large external power supply, as does the cinema display, and the mini requires the use of a DisplayPort to dual-link DVI adapter to output to the 30″ display. Also add in some wake from sleep and reboot issues with the dial-link DVI adapters, and so to be safe, we’re powering them off of an independent USB power supply. Contrast this to using current equipment, where the current Mac mini employs an internal power supply, as does the 27″ LED Cinema Display, and since the 27″ LED Cinema Display has a mini DisplayPort cable to start with, no messy adapters to fiddle with.

Software

My background in programming is a weird and long story that I’ll get to someday, but the important part is that my recent experience in web development has largely centered around Django, a powerful Python framework. The systems department in the library is a mixed bag of programming experience, with plenty of very competent programmers with experience in say, Perl, PHP or Fortran. They’ve deployed a couple of WordPress installs to deal with certain parts of their main web site, but all-in-all, there isn’t really an institutional standard here. So I jumped around and built some basic signage apps with Django, and toyed with a Rails apps that could accomplish the same thing. The basic requirements being that the app run in a fullscreen web browser, such a Plainview, and have the ability to rotate through what more or less amount to slides.

The design was pretty straightforward but took a lot of mocking up and some testing to get to a point where I felt comfortable with the visuals. I went through what books the library had, and did some reading online, but found surprisingly few definitive resources regard digital signage. The most useful book I found was written primarily for physical and static architectural signage. It was helpful primarily in font consideration, both for type faces, weights, and knowing when you need diversity. For the digital side, my best friend was the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) published by the W3C. I looked to the WCAG primarily for guidance regarding colors, contrast and color brightness. The WCAG also had some good advice regarding font selection, but for my purposes was mostly a mirror of what I found in print, which was to avoid scripted fonts.

As for what I ended up with, we have a clock and date in the upper right, set in Lucida Grande, and other titles and text are set in Helvetica Neue. There’s something about times, dates and email addresses set in Lucida Grande that I like and find very readable. The overall theme is dark for a couple of reasons, the most obvious reason is to allow the slides to stand out. It’s also dark to contend with the lighting conditions in the stacks, which is relatively dark to begin with.I want the displays to be as bright as possible without blinding our patrons. The perfectionist in me isn’t satisfied with the design, so I’m continually making small adjustments and changes here and there. All of these changes will culminate in a new and hopefully more balanced font layout in the near future.

I’ve got an app more or less ready to go. Mission accomplished. Except for this minor matter of maintainability.

Problems of Maintenance

I was hired using federal stimulus funds, so my job is expected to exist for around two years. No one in my department has any experience with Django, and very very minimal experience with Python, to say nothing of Rails or Ruby. Crap.

Some discussions and a few meetings later, it becomes clear that if I’m going to be a Good Programmer™ and deploy something that they can fix and update themselves, it’s going to at least have to be in PHP and ideally, based on WordPress. I’ve toyed with WordPress plenty of times, and I’ve set up several sites and blogs using it as a base, but I wouldn’t have called myself a PHP programmer. It’s not a terribly difficult language to pick up and use though, so it wasn’t a big deal to replicate the core functionality of my Django app. Blend in a little mix of WordPress plugins, some template hacking, and now we have a functional digital signage system. It’s not perfect, and can’t be modified and extended in quite the same way as my Django app could, but it gets the job done, and will be able to stay alive without my continued presence.

Afterthoughts and Looking Ahead

Signage in the stacks

Never underestimate the need for maintainability. This is a hard lesson I’ve been learning over the years. Even if it isn’t asked for up front it’s foolish to design without it in mind. The less someone asks about maintainability, the more screwed they’ll most likely be a couple years down the road, and if you’re out working somewhere else by then, it’ll come back to haunt you. This encompasses everything from the frameworks and languages you use, to how you document your code. You do document all of your code, right?

This was just under a year ago and quite a few things have changed. I’ve made several modifications to the design since it was deployed, and continue to make more changes, especially on the front end. The hours display has always bothered me so along with another initiative to consolidate the way we hand hours information, that display will only display today and tomorrow’s operating hours, leaving some more room for other bits of information. We may be getting another sign installation with actual professional-line digital signage monitors and a newer Mac mini.

Overall, I’m happy with how things turned out on the technical side. It’s a stable solution that gets the job done, and is pretty easily managed. As always, things could be better given more ideal circumstances with regard to time, money and environment. But somtimes, you just have to go with what works.

I liked the format of this one. Kept things pretty simple and put the focus on getting students face-to-face time with local media professionals. The feedback I got was that it was helpful to get the perspectives of practitioners in the field, and to get some advice on getting a job in this climate. My brother was in attendance and spoke to a number of very interesting students. There were a lot of other familiar faces including Bob Benz, Lauren Spuhler, Patrick Beeson, Jack Lail and Chad Parizman. I got to rotate around and chat with a few of them before they left, but most of them know me by now anyway. I’ve been doing this college thing for five years now and am almost done. My only gripe was that the whole event made me feel a little old. Most of the journalism students in the room were completely new to me, save for a few who have been working with TNJN this semester. I suppose my time has come, but I still never thought it would feel quite like this.

Long story short, I’m getting old, it’s time for me to graduate, these kids need to learn the ropes and become better programmers as well as journalists, and Knoxville is brimming with talent.

By the way, Patrick wrote up a great bit on his blog about his conversations with students, and I agree with him on every point, I’d recommend reading it, it’s quick and to the point. I even left a (hopefully) helpful comment.

First, a few counter-points.

I love/hate math. Really, I love logic, which is why I am repeatedly drawn back in computer science and engineering stuff in general. Nothing beats pouring through tech specs on a new device or technology. And I do love the thrill of squashing that bug and troubleshooting something into oblivion. But when it comes down to algorithm design or optimization, I start to glaze over and I get bored. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that after a while, something so deeply mathematic starts to bore me and I look for something more broadly complex. Something larger.

I understand networking. Well. Not only that, but the history of the stuff is fascinating as well. But I can explain TCP/IP, and “how routing protocols help route routed protocols” (Cisco CCNA 3.0). Routers, switches, and big telco metal are tons of fun and do present the kind of troubleshooting and design challenges that I revel in on a technical level. Elegance in network design and the knowledge that our fiber link isn’t going to collapse upon itself like so many dying stars is tremendously rewarding. But here again, I eventually get bored. Things are always exciting yes, but they do start to fall into patterns for me, and things can become so process oriented and slow (for good reason) that creativity is often stifled and the new and dangerous don’t really have a chance to flourish.

Then, there’s Product and Design.

Both are essentially creative endeavours, and both (in the right org) are going to be pushing the envelope to something prettier, more useful, faster, and so on. Moreso than design, I see Product as being a sort of 3,000 feet high view of a single product/design/problem with the fun problem-solving part being the before, during and after “vision” fiddly bits. The way my brain sees it, is that when designing and guiding a product, you’re constantly solving a puzzle. If you’re lucky, you start at the beginning so you get to choose your foundation and initial direction, in either case you’re having to be consistently one step ahead, choosing the next move in anticipation of what will follow, and steering the big ship on a dime (as some would say) to course correct for any missteps that follow. In my experience, the fun parts always come together in crisis, such as in the STS mission simulator when you’re acting as Flight Director and you just realized that the Shuttle has lost usage of two fuel cells and is in the middle of a docking maneuver with the ISS. The best of times are often the worst of times, if for no other reason than you survived.

At the end of this midnight excursion, I finally found the perfect analogy for all of this. Chess.

Chess club taught me two things. 1, move your pieces forward quickly, aggressively, and intelligently (react, not reactive). And 2, never ever underestimate the power of dumb luck.

Good night.

I am presently sitting quite comfortably on a foldable chair at a table with my PowerBook, a textbook, a cell phone, and a bowl of freshly picked cherries at my aunt and uncle’s house in the country-side of France. We’re about a 25 minute drive from Paris in the village of Vernouillet. On Monday I will move into a dormitory at Cité Universitaire on the southern end of Paris.

How did I get here? By plane of course, from the Tri-Cities Regional Airport, to Cincinnati, to Charles-DeGaulle International Airport. Why? That’s a bit more complex, allow me to elucidate.

Spring

In the Spring I started exploring various internship possibilities or something at least to keep myself occupied over the summer. For the past two years I have been employed by a particular fruit company as a campus rep and my term is this job was coming to a close, the date of which hinging on when I would start my next Big Thing. I had been exploring the possibility of an internship there or at some other related or web-services/web-apps company, me being a Python/Django and Communications guy.

By February things were far from clear when I got an intriguing email from Sherry McNair on the College of Communications and Information Sciences listserv with an attached flyer detailing a summer study abroad program led by Dr. Kenneth Levine to Paris, France. I went around the college, researching the program and what it entailed, spoke to Dr. Levine, and I had my plan B.

Naturally, I preferred the prospect of gaining some more real world experience and (hopefully) making some money along the way. After all, I’m due a new MacBook Pro and I need to start saving for post-college. I interviewed at the headquarters of my (then) present employer, and at MochiMedia in San Francisco. Both sets of interviews went fairly well and the Mochi guys were fantastic (special thanks goes to my good friend Staci Baird and her husband for the hookup). I made some new great friends along the way and have certainly set out on a path to the west coast, but ultimately nothing panned out for the fall due to either scheduling issues or my lack of database ninja skills (I’m working on it!).

Plan B

All the while interviewing for these internships I continued to plan with Dr. Levine and the Programs Abroad Office for the possibility of my traveling to and studying in France for the second summer session of 2008. Thankfully, that planning paid off and when the internships fell through, Plan B was activated and so far, a highly productive summer has come through like a charm.

The plan was to proceed with the family beach vacation to Hilton Head Island, return for a week, go to WWDC in San Francisco for a week, return for a week, and then fly out to Paris a week early to spend some time with my French aunt, uncle, and cousins.

WWDC

I should devote a whole post to WWDC, and I probably will at some point, but without going into too many specifics, it was a jaw droopingly amazing experience, for which I have Rands and Andrew to thank for mostly. The first night alone I got to meet John Gruber briefly and then had dinner with Merlin Mann and a handful of Apple engineers and one Google engineer. I went to a party every night and met some of the most bright and interesting people I have yet to meet at Apple or anywhere else. This was my second time at WWDC, the first being last year, and I certainly hope it will not be the last. Every year I learn something new and amazing that continually inspires my work and my life. Again, thank you thank you thank you to everyone there.

France and Communicating Globally

There is so much more to come on this subject, but the general gist of the program is that we are here to study the cultural differences of communications in France, Belgium (briefly) and the United States. Our agenda is quite impressive, visiting and touring dozens and dozens of French businesses and sights, of which I will blog about once we’ve made our way around a bit.

I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic; I lived in the Netherlands for three years in the 90′s. Now, I know that being an expat is not as unique and I sometimes perceive (and my parents are apt to remind me) but in this group at least, and in this curricula, it would seem to be a great advantage. It is also quite revealing to a number of cultural/social problems I have encountered at home. As I have been reading through our textbooks on American cultural differences, I have begun to truly realize my own cultural perspective, which is not entirely American.

My father is a Bolivian (now an American since the 70′s), my mother is North Carolinian, I lived in the Netherlands for 3 years attending a largely international school, and frequently interacted with my family in France and Bolivia. From as best as I can ascertain, the majority of my cultural context is comprised of Latin culture (French, Spanish, Latin American and so forth). To quantify, let’s say I’m 60% Latin culture, 20% Dutch/Germanic, and 20% Anglo (American and British). This mix due in part to family, my time in the Netherlands, and my schooling (which was heavily influenced by Brits).

After reading all about these French cultural differences, I feel almost as though I need a book explaining American culture, there is so much that I have been relatively unaware of and many mistakes that I have made as a result of that. I guess, that a lot of that cultural experience has just averaged out over time and is all mixed up, lacking context. I hope that this trip, and these studies will help me contextualize my experiences and give me some good tools for quantifying what I’m seeing.

Best wishes to everyone back home, I’ll see you all again after August 4th.

So, Verge is finally over.

Well, technically, it ended on April 4th, but I’m just now getting around to spinning out my thoughts on what happened.

For those not in the know, Verge has been a series of convergent media conferences put on by the Tennessee Journalist. We cover issues in web journalism, web-based media, getting jobs in new media, new technologies, and anything else potentially related to journalism and the internet. We’re fully buzzword compliant. Stephen Townsend did a great write-up on the event here along with some great pictures taken by my friend and roommate, Brandon Ball.

We had a pretty awesome group of people and I especially enjoyed the time I was able to spend with our panelists and the students who came down from George Mason. They are just getting their news website started and I can certainly sympathize with their struggles. Steve Klein was their prof and he was exceptionally energetic about the idea of deploying Django in place of Drupal or WordPress for their site.

On that note, it’s also important to mention that Harry Montevideo from UGA’s Red and Black student newspaper was here largely to weigh in on the future of Ochs and is just itching to deploy it. Hopefully the coming months won’t disappoint any of these guys, and they’ve been very patient as we’ve been toiling along with it.

I can’t continue without mentioning our headliner speaker, Rob Curley, vice president for product development for the Washington Post-Newsweek. He’s an exciting speaker and you should jump on the chance to see/hear him speak and present. He and I connected on a Django and Mac level and had a great chat in what time was left after he presented. Also, penguins. He loves penguins.

Now, to the meaty bits. Between some scrimmages between the “old media” types and the “new media” types, and Rob’s presentation, many of the profs, directors, deans, and students, were either scared or impressed into some basic trends and facts about online journalism. About the medium in general.

• Things are not only changing, they have changed, and will continue to change. You don’t have time to sit around and debate about what direction online journalism is going in, you have to act now. Otherwise, give the kids back their money and shut down your school, you’ll save yourself some time.
• Convergence is more than a nice buzzword. It’s very real and it means that your news writers are going to have to learn to be broadcast journalists on top of everything else. It’s not that hard, trust me, you just have to convince them that they need to hurry.
• If you don’t already have an online news publication for you school, get one. You’ll probably want to use Django. Can’t figure it out? Get yourself a nerd who can. They’re everywhere, you just need to find them out and convince them they don’t have to know abstract algebra to code in Django/Python.
• If you don’t have a personal blog. Get one. Figure it out. Start writing. For students especially, if you don’t have a blog, no matter if you’re a communication studies major or a journalism major, you need to learn to self-market yourself. Your blog is destination #1 for you. If it isn’t, make it so.
• It didn’t have to be this way, necessarily. Big news didn’t have to get hurt so badly, and it doesn’t have to die. Stop doing stupid things like trying to charge for content (archives really? Come on. That’s easy ad money right there if you use it right). Micropayment system aren’t viable yet so you better work with advertisers to help them fix their end of the machine.

While we got a lot of good info out there, I feel that some fundamental messages were lost along the way, mainly:

• Advertising programs are becoming more worthless the less time you spend teaching kids about how online advertising works. I’m sick and tired of having to teach someone what SEO is, and all the basics of internet traffic. I’m not going to work with someone who doesn’t have a basic grasp of this and clients or employers the world over are going to skip you right over if you’re clueless on this stuff.
• Video is easy. It is so, super, easy. Spend an hour or two on a weekend, borrow a camera, and play with iMovie. You don’t have to be perfect at this and you don’t need to emulate the broadcast guys. Rob has an amazing video team who can do some really amazing graphics and know how to produce great content. I’m not saying to forget that if you’re really a print guy, but you can get by with shorter pieces so long as you learn how to edit and hold the camera steady. 60 seconds of something will make most any news story worth 5x to a user. (Other rules do apply, but you need to start somewhere).
• Web journalism is NOT limitless. To clarify, you do NOT have unlimited space to tell your story. This is a pretty common misconception. One of our editors even makes a big deal about it in our promo video. While you don’t have the same space restrictions that you have in print, you do have restrictions. Namely, the reader’s attention span. I could go on all day, but the point is, people scan, they have limited time and attention. Write for people who are just scanning over your page and only ever make your story a mile long if it’s just so engaging that most people will want to read it all.

I can’t wait for our next conference. This thing has come a long way and has given TNJN some great exposure. Our next big step is going to be releasing Ochs into the wild and hopefully changing the world, or at least journalism school. I’m going to keep on yelling about things I think people are doing wrong in teaching or employing journalism online, but I have to hand it to our guests, they certainly kept an open mind and really do care about fixing their industry and profession.

As I always say, anything is possible, but here, only time will tell.

PS: For more thoughts on web journalism, check out Patrick Thornton’s blog.

To define a “blog” in the terms of a dictionary, we would start with something like “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces and ongoing narrative”. In other words, a site that is regularly updated, can also suffice. The use of the word has become so broad that it requires some hands-on use and some refinement.

On with the cake.

The analogy only carries so far, so bear with me. At the base, where the cake is biggest, we have regular old blogs. This site being an okay example, but also other WordPress blogs, Blogger blogs, MovableType, Django-based blogs, etc. Blogging software or systems that allow full and complete (for the most part) customization of the interface, and addition of new functionality through the use of plug-ins or other software.

The second layer in the cake is something called LiveJournal. I first got started with the thing back at the end of middle school going into high school. Needless to say there’s a lot of junk there, typical ramblings and rants of a teenager. Had it been a few years later, it could have just as easily been a “MySpace Blog”. Same stuff. But nowadays LiveJournal has evolved into essentially, community blogging. There are thousands of group journals that people contribute to covering a massive array of topics. This has been seen before, it was called Usenet, or newsgroups. It’s also pretty similar (when you get into the commenting threads) to a typical online forum or other bulletin board system. But really the majority of LiveJournals are personal, structured like blogs, and themselves tie into the greater community at large. Moderately sophisticated commenting tools allow other users to start threaded conversations about that post, or something else entirely. So, LiveJournal allow people to blog in a more or less watered down way (it’s hosted, so a lot of the magic sauce is behind closed doors), and it’s community centric.

Now we get into the third, somewhat smaller, layer in our cake. Services such as Tumblr and/or Pownce. Now I know there are others in the area, but let’s keep this simple for the time being. These services are not intended to directly compete with a service like Blogger or WordPress, rather, they are along the vein of something called a MicroBlog. In this case, Tumblr is a specialized MicroBlog, while Pownce is a bit more broad and generic. Tumblr for instance, is focused on acting as a simple and easy to use online scrapbook. So you post all the neat little pictures and video clips you come across online to Tumblr and your friends can come on up and see them or they can subscribe to your Tumblelog (like one subscribes to an RSS feed). Pownce has a similar capability of allowing you to post up images, audio, video and text, but both have a focus on quick and short posts. They are not set up to carry on extended stories or conversations. Although there have been some creative uses in that application of these sorts of services, that’s not the focus.

Which brings us to my favorite part of the cake, the top. The best example I have, is a service I use all the time and love, Twitter. Keep in mind this is a hierarchy of content types/styles, not necessarily the winners or losers or anything like that. But here we get into a really interesting idea. Twitter is rather unlike Pownce or Tumblr in that it not only does not allow you to attach images or videos directly to your “tweets” (posted updates), but you are limited in how many characters you can upload in a single tweet, 140 chars to be exact. Twitter has found a plethora of uses, notably the idea of a “lifestream”, the posting of your day, play-by-play. For instance, you could be tweeting weather updates on your way to work on the train while also tweeting about a news story you noticed in the newspaper while tweeting what you’re eating for breakfast. Not all at once mind you, but you get the idea. Others use it in much the way one might use del.icio.us, tweeting URLs of interesting things they come across online. There are many more uses we could get into, not to mention the communication theories that are at play here, but I’ll save that for another post. Here, we’re just getting the lay of the land.

An important thing to note with all of these, is there are a number of ways to interact with these services. Most notably, Twitter, which has in my opinion, the best desktop companion to the service. It’s called Twitterific and is a wonderful Mac application that sits in your menu bar and totally changes the way you think and interact with Twitter. Someone else already gave a pretty good explanation on his views on the matter, but in short, when you use Twitter through something like Twitterific, your use and approach of the information delivered through it is changed. For me, Twitter is an application that lives on my desktop, and dutifully notifies me of interesting tweet every 5 minutes, and to whom I can quickly and easily tweet away with and easily track and form conversations through Twitter’s direct messaging option. To someone else, and in fact, very many of the first users of Twitter, it is a website and an SMS updating service. Part of the reason for the character limit system-wide is the character limits placed on the US SMS system. One of the primary interfaces for Twitter when it first launched was the SMS (AKA: TXT or texting) screen on a cell phone and the other was the web site itself. Tweets would be sent to your phone from those you followed, and visa versa. This, so far, is the thinest of the MicroBlogging layers.

All these services exist to fill a need that was not met with the tools that existed prior to them. They are all empowered with RSS, and are all offered (for the most part), free of charge. They are quickly changing the models of communication that we are studying right now in class, and I am extremely excited to be alive right now to witness what is happening. I could gush for hours on end, but the point is simply this. Go out and try them out. Find the ones that work best for you. I abandoned LiveJournal a long time ago, but I am active on my blog once again and I am now an avid Twitter’er through Twitterific. Try them out and get back to me with your findings.

Cheers!

So we’re off to another great year here at the University of Tennessee and I’m one more semester close to graduation. I’ve decided to go ahead and go for the minor in Information Sciences. If we had a major I would have switched to that long ago, but since that isn’t available this will have to do.

On that note, IS 102, the introduction to the IS minor is interesting. I won’t lie, it’s far too basic for me. We’re starting on what computers are and not going too terribly far from that. Computer Science 102 and 160 both taught me more than this class can, but the context is certainly different which makes it not a complete waste of time. In either case it’s unavoidable at this point in time since the professor responsible for the minor left but a few months ago. We’ll make this interesting however. As versed as I am in Django, I have not had a chance to fiddle with Drupal. So I’ll be taking some class related time in the coming weeks to develop some Drupalie stuff. Good times.

JEM 222 – Intro to Online Reporting isn’t bad either. We have a great person stepping in for Staci Wolfe and while the class isn’t exactly the most computer literate bunch in the school I have high hopes that they will be in short time. More importantly, I think we can easily recruit some of these sharp souls into TNJN as staff reporters. While I’ve already completed JEM 422 (the last in the online reporting series) I am confident that I will learn something out of this course.

JEM 457 – Media and Society essentially boils down to a social sciences class. Here we’re focusing on how (surprise) media affects society and various theories behind those effects. This one is going to prove extremely interesting. So far so good, solid dialog going on in the class, I’m not afraid to debate anything we’re talking about, I should be able to get a lot out of this.

The other two classes are simply GenEd filler, both fun, but also time consuming. I’m not worried about them, I just wish I could be taking some spare CS or IS classes instead. Second summer session is the plan there. My sights are set on WWDC ‘08. But for now, there is MWSF and all the wonders therein.

This is a second run at making use of this domain, oddly enough, the slightly misguided vision for the first attempt ended up being realized after all.

So to those who ever saw the old edition, I apologize for letting it linger for as long as it did. In the interim, this space was largely utilized as a test bed for some RapidWeaver magic (a fun app worth checking out).

So now, after some time, travel, and reading, I’ve settled on marginally maintaining a presence on the web beyond Facebook and my long abandoned LiveJournal.

What will be on here? Hopefully some insights into online journalism and technical issues related to that (for as long as that lasts), software design, web design, broadcasting, and whatever else strikes me and isn’t ridiculous.

Cheers.