This week I stumbled across some old lemonodor entries that I apparently forgot to post. I'll be running them this week, but don't be confused: I wrote these months ago.

May 2008

Paige talking about Imagewiki. Photo by Rich Gibson.

Happy beginning of summer, lemonodor readers!

Lately I've been working with Anselm Hook and Paige Saez and others on a project called Imagewiki. Imagewiki is sort of a Wikipedia that's indexed by images—You can take a picture of something with your phone, send it to Imagewiki and you'll be directed to a page that connects you with other people who have taken a picture of that same thing or place.

Imagewiki uses the same object recognition algorithm as Evolution Robotics' visual pattern recognition technology (ViPR), which was used in their ER1 robot and LaneHawk grocery scanner, and in Sony's Aibo robot dogs. I've mostly been working on the object recognition part of Imagewiki, using Rob Hess's free implementation of the SIFT feature extraction and matching algorithm as a basis for Imagewiki's recognition. It's a challenge since Imagewiki depends so critically on highly accurate recognition.

Bill Freeman, SIFT features.

This weekend Anselm and Paige and I were at Google's Mountain View campus for WhereCamp, where we showed off the current state of Imagewiki. We even ran a scavenger hunt—several brave people let us jailbreak their iPhones and install the Imagewiki app, after which they got some clues:

1. This shirt has a cold war feel
2. This shirt has a classic feel from yesteryear
3. This shirt comes from francophone Quebec
4. This image has personal meaning
5. This image may someday lead our country
6. (This is a bonus shirt--gooo Barcelona Futbol!!)

Players had to search the conference for likely candidates, snap pictures of them and upload them to Imagewiki to see if they guessed right.

Paige's tattoo of personal meaning.

There were some bugs we had to work out as the game progressed, but eventually Andrea Moed was able to find all five required items and so became the winner of a dinner with Jason Wilson of Platial.

Development on Imagewiki is being done under the umbrella of Makerlab, a new media prototyping lab and art incubator. The source code is available; I'm hopeful that the image matching component will be useful for other people, at least.

I love that I get to work with friends on fun projects and continue the cafe-surfing freelancing LA lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. No office drone here!

In other news, I've made Lehman Brothers the official managers of the lemonodor nest egg. You can't beat the feeling of security that comes from having your money in a bank that survived the American Civil War.

But it's best if you just go to lemonodor.tumblr.com.

Montezuma, my port of Lucene to Common Lisp, has a new home at Google's code hosting.

Yes, this means it now has a publicly accessible source code repository. If you want commit access, email me.

Also if my Mac mini reboots and I forget to restart trac, you'll still be able to access the project pages. Woo!

While this weblog bas been taking a small break, the Lemonodor Auxiliary tumble blog has been pretty busy lately.

Moorabbin Airport, Australia.

A memorial service for est has been scheduled for Sunday, June 15, at Cellspace in San Francisco.

RSVP with Ruchira.

“Unmarked 737 at ‘Gold Coast’ Terminal/Las Vegas, NV/Distance ~1 mile/10:44 pm”

“A geographer by training, a conspiracy theorist by instinct and an investigative reporter by avocation”, and “radical geographer, muckraking author and outlaw artist”, Trevor Paglen will be talking at Machine Project in LA tonight.

He's been one of my biggest inspirations ever since his article in the Village Voice, “Planespotting: Nerds with binoculars bust the CIA's torture taxis”.

Here's a description of a talk he gave in February: Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale.

JoAnne and I had dinner at uWink last night. uWink is Nolan Bushnell's new high-tech restaurant concept, where every diner has their own touch screen for ordering food and playing games.

The concept may not be so bad, if your goals include minimizing (almost removing) interaction with waitstaff and adding opportunities to interact with other diners, but wow right now this is a terrible realization of that concept. From the perspective of a customer it was ridiculously terrible. As a software guy, I found it totally entertaining and educational—failure on this scale is compelling.

“The application ClientController quit unexpectedly.” Yes, we did send a report to Apple.

When we first walked in, JoAnne asked the host about some tables that looked like they were set up as multi-player LCD projector-based gaming stations. The host said “Oh, those don't work. I don't really know why not.” That could be the restaurant's motto.

Once we were seated, I swiped my driver's license and our waiter/runner helped us login. I entered my name and then JoAnne accidentally skipped past the part where she was supposed to enter her name. There was no going back, so she was “Guest 2” from then on.

404 FOCACCIA NOT FOUND

We ordered food and drinks, and the interface was pretty straightforward, but tedious and slow compared to the old fashioned way of ordering.

After submitting our order we got a screen for paying our bill. So we paid it, before we even got our drinks. Then our screen locked up. We flagged someone down and were told that once you pay your bill your session ends, so we should have waited until the end of the meal. This also meant that we lost the game credits from our previous order. The runner reset the thing and we logged in again. This time JoAnne entered her name but I got confused and skipped past my part and so I became Guest 2. I think we both need to sign up for classes at the Learning Center.

Trying to redeem a non-existent coupon.

About every two minutes a big message would pop up asking if we wanted to join a group game. This was extra distracting when we were busy trying to figure out how to remove something from our order or submit a request for more bbq sauce for my sandwich.

We played a bunch of games, which were mostly kind of pointless or difficult to figure out. There was a Boggle clone that was fun because we played against two other tables (we smoked 'em).

For fun, visit local.uwink.com and check their router settings. Update: It might be down now... intentionally? Who knows. Another update: Oh, this was my mistake. local.uwink.com seems to be an internal address; I probably just saw the router of the cafe I was in.

There were constant crashes, hangs, resets, error messages and console spew. For a while one of the projectors displaying group game info just showed a big 404 error. Two or three times we had to ask a waiter to go in back and reset our station.

If you need a waiter for something, like more salt or bbq sauce, you need to touch the help icon, then select “I need assistance $0.00” or “I need more sugars $0.00” or “I just want someone to explain to me why it costs $0.95 to get my drink up as opposed to on the rocks $0.00” and add it to your order, then submit the order. For real. Only a programmer could come up with an interface like that and then not be ashamed to unleash it on the public.

You're a finger.

The guy with two kids who sat down at the table behind us gave up and left after 15 minutes. If we didn't find the whole thing so funny we might have done the same.

At a conference last year I heard Bushnell talk about how he wanted robot waiters that could serve your food at uWink. At the time I thought that would be fun and awesome, but I'm having second thoughts today. It's true that the restaurant has only been open for a year, but it's in need of something more profound than a few software tweaks.

Summary: Ambitious idea, less than impressive UI design, terrible execution. Food was eh. Once they get robots, stay away—for your own safety.

Update: More comments on reddit.

Photo by Jacob Appelbaum.

Over the last 13 years Eric did his best to teach me about the manly mysteries of sideburns and other mojo, the female predilection for butt dances, vomit-inducing parabolic trajectories and recent work in unification grammars. He was a supporter of and mentor to lemonodor, and me.

He knew we would miss him and he was right.

I guarantee I'll be removing my pants in tribute to his memory.

Update: Len Sassaman has a post about Eric.

From Ledermüller's Amusement Microscopique tant pour l'Esprit, que pour les Yeux; Contenant Cinquante Estampes [..] Dessinées d'après Nature et Enluminées, avec leurs Explications, 1766.

The Daily Cross Hatch has an interview with Scott McCloud and Douglas Rushkoff, plus video and audio from their panel at the NYC Comic Con [via Boing Boing].

How do [you] see pop-culture’s recent flirtation with comics as affecting the medium?

McCloud: I think it’s benign right now, it will turn ugly.

So it’s not necessarily a bad thing at the moment?

McCloud: Yeah, well, it’s bringing some people to the medium and at the moment, in this particular time in our cultural history, it’s produced some okay movies. I mean, I’ll go see Iron Man.

Rushkoff's blog post.

Also, Sky & Winter moderate a “My Dad Makes Comics!” panel:

Sky: How is it different to have a dad who makes comic books as opposed to any other jobs your friends' parents have?

Winter: It definitely pays the bill, that's for sure.

Sky: "The bill?"

Winter: The bills. Anyway, it's really fun to have my dad making comics because I get to go to places and most of my idols make comics or TV shows. So since my dad makes comics about making comics, usually they know who my dad is. So I can [say], "Hello, I'm Winter McCloud, Scott McCloud's daughter." And they'll be like, "Oh my God, it's an honor to meet you!"

Sky: Really? I've never gotten that reaction. (audience laughs)