Hunch

A fun and inspiring advertising/art project I’ve been involved in (wrote the server and client software) is currently running (Mon 26 – Tue 27, 2009) at Stockholm Central station.

You push a button, the huge Satio phone replica snaps a photo and publishes it instantly on the web, also displaying it on a huge screen in the main hall.

The server is based on the Nginx HTTP push module and the client (the huge phone) is comprised of a Mac Mini, a standard USB camera, some wiring done by my brother and a simple Cocoa application I wrote which simply takes a photo from the camera, compresses it and publishes it to the server. Niclas Bergström wrote the front-end (HTML & Javascript).

A The Viral Company production.

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Yesterday Google premiered IMAP connectivity for their mail platform Google Mail. It turned out pretty good but far from perfect.

Pros

• Synchronizing protocol gives me the same state on all my devices. (workstation, cellphone, web interface, laptop, etc)
• Centralized means backup means reliable and time-saving. (and I feel a bit safer. Once in a while computers crash and burn)
• Labels are treated as folders, the IMAP way. Hierarchy is achieved through / (slash) separator.
• Starring or un-starring a message is as simple as setting or unsetting the “important” flag. Very clever.

Cons

• Very slow connection. This is a real pain in the ass. My private IMAP account and server interfaces in speeds of about 1-50 MB/s while the Gmail IMAP-connections has a burst rate of about 150 KB/s
• Seems like Google caches folder/label indexes and only refreshes this cache when a new IMAP connection is made. IMAP clients does not disconnect very often which has a side-effect – labels created or modified in Gmail does not update in the client. The trick is to reconnect (restart Apple Mail) to do a refresh.
• The IMAP interface is under testing and Gmail is still in beta mode, so there is no insurance whatsoever for Google not to pull the plug on IMAP. I may have to go back to POPing into my own IMAP again, which really is bit of a hack.

Further reading

Google Mail Help Center: How do I enable IMAP?
Wired: Google Adds IMAP Support To GMail

I shot the first serious session with my new Elinchorm D-Lite compact flashes last tuesday. After about 4 hours they both started shutting down because of the built-in overheat protection. Obviously that’s what you get when you remove fans from the construction. However, they cooled of pretty fast so I was able to use one and have the other one cool down and still shoot pictures.

I have the 200W version which proved to be more than enough for the (studio and open-area) shots we were doing. I can with good confidence recommend those flashes to anyone who deals with part-time or hobby photography, like myself. The “price vs quality & functionality”-factor is really good. Sturdy construction (even though a bit plastic) and has all the basic features like slave, modeling lamp, etc.

I’ve been working on this new design for Spray the last couple of months, together with Oliver Wagner, Nicklas Söderlind, Tobias Svensson and alot of other really good people.

We have also created a new server platform, based on AbstractBase – a PHP runtime library, as well as apache 2.0 instead of 1.3, which the old servers was running.

Business cards for STREET, a clothes store in Sturegallerian, Stockholm.
Click the image for supahsize