Lately I gave ShutterStem a little TLC to fix some issues (broken maps due to CloudMade shutdown, URLs hardcoded to my dev environment, etc.) and posted a rough demo: http://demo.shutterstem.com/

This project still needs some "constraints" to focus development efforts. Ideally it would be a home/portable appliance but OTOH it'd be nice to find a "minimally viable" subset of goals to tick off along the way.

In the end of my not-brief-enough survey

Well I guess it's not the end because I still haven't found that schecurity book back.

it appears that overly conspicuous CLICK HERE–style attempts at dead tree navigation are not actually so much a function of the presence/absence of metastructural expressions

[is he making this incredibly informal pompous crap up as he goes along?]

but rather

CUT DOWN ON THAT FLAT BELLY SIMPLY BY BEING 1 WEIRD EATER THAT A BILLIONAIRE SECRET

a function of the author's knowlege of the subject and talent/restraint in presenting it.

Norman's Psychology of Everyday Things and Schneier's Secrets and Lies were perhaps the most oblique I found in my small sample. (At least, if I remember correctly. I seem to have misplaced the schn-latter book somewhere between my chair and the bookshelf two half steps away.)

They do not really talk about themselves. On closer inspection though, they do provide engaging quasi-pageturneresque introductions.

And don't get me started on sidebars.

Chapter 3 —

There may be some correlation between the hardness/softness of the underlying material and the immodesty of its internal navigation.

— Florman's Existential Pleasures of Engineering: "In the wake of the enivronmental crisis, a reappraisal of the engineer's role in sociey would seem to be in order."

— Beazley's Python Essential Reference: "[…three sentences of facts…] This chapter describes the inner workings of the Python object model and provides an overview of the built-in data types. Chapter 4, […two sentences of forward 'links'…]"

It didn't look like it at first, but Brooks's The Mythical Man Month often does outline, actually, though usually after an engaging few introductory paragraphs.

Imhof's Cartographic Relief Presentation does dedicate a few sentences towards the beginning of each chapter to the roadmap.

Anderson, et al.'s CouchDB: The Definitive Guide starts each with a brief outline-ish paragraph (nicely cordoned off above the first subhead) then proceeds wholeheartedly with the rest of the chapter.

I thought "oh barf I hate those". Seriously, some of the worst books I've read seem to spend half their time warning me about their own outlines and the other half finally proceeding with a few tidbits that I probably already learned about in more depth on someone's blog.

I'm writing a book for a publisher and it promises to be a character-building exercise.

They want chapter introductions that pat the user on the hand and tell them, today class first we're going to X and then we're going to Y and then after that Z but first I'm going to tell you that we're going to do X Y and then Z because before XYZ you need to know that X, Y, Z.

Are you really ready for X? Okay good, because we're going to discuss X before Y. I told you that is all leading up to Z right?

Hamming's Digital Filters: "The purpose of this chapter…", "This chapter uses…", "The preceding chapter has shown…"

It's actually rather less awkward than the chummy "we have learned" ("it has been learned by us"? "it has been learned upon a time and not unrelated to said learning were the previous chapter and its reader"?)

I don't think I like soy lattes. That doesn't sound like something I would order. Hemp* mocha is pretty alright though.

Mad props are a force to be reckoned with. If you are a frozen chicken. But we are not, so we shall take eachother by the hand and forthwards to the card number N+1 where you will have noticed that this card must be number N and having completed the containment testing we are ready to proceed to water ingestion or something with the other prototypes.

* milk; hemp mocha not brownies GETCHER MIND OUTA THE GUTTER.

Now or perhaps in a few minutes you know why they say "build one to throw away".

However, as I began pulling books off the shelf, gathering an arsenal of evidence that good books just say what they have to say.

I found the publisher was right.

And so was I.

don't tell that 1 weird old advertisment.

Fuuuuuuuu…dge

.

.

.

would be a great comfort food about now.

.

In the card before this we learned that

XOXO eVERYONE wAS rIGHT!!!! XOXO

In the next card we will all get mad propz and and/or or soy lattes <3

There is certainly a spectrum — a corpus analysis looking just for "chapter" or even "we" appearances would certainly be interesting.

NASA reports the time as 3:20:26 UTC on Februrary 15, found via the event article on Wikipedia.

So my meteor was not only seemingly at the wrong place, but also almost definitely at the wrong time: nearly two hours later.

Status: BUSTED

So I roughly overlaid that weather satellite image in Google Earth.

White line extends train path, green line is simply between West Richland and Chelyabinsk:

Chelyabinsk Meteor.kmz

I can't tell my ephemerides from my apocentres and so maybe there's some orbital trickery that makes this possible. But right now we have a strike and a half against this being the same meteor:

1. The shortest path between my neck of the woods and Chelyabinsk is nearly orthogonal to the path of the meteor train.
2. (My meteor may, or may not, have been two hours after the Russian one.)

Via @badastronomer via @vrubaI came across a great map of the asteroid contrail (train) caught on weather satellite:

http://attivissimo.blogspot.ch/2013/02/russian-meteor-path-plotted-in-google.html

It shows that yes, the asteroid was heading SW, but to my (extremely naïve) eye it seems a bit too low an inclination to have come over the pole from my western hemisphere — certainly not straight over, but (if the 0520 GMT time is actually correct) maybe there's still a chance?

Here's an encouraging post — it claims the 0520 GMT time and has a video of the meteor crossing the sky.

The vehicle seems to be driving into the sunrise, east, and the meteor crosses diagonally from left to right, toward the camera. If that's right, it'd mean the asteroid was heading sort of from the NE going towards the SW over the oblast!

So maybe what I saw was at about the right time. What about the location?

The big falling star I saw was (approximately) north of me, falling (approximately) to the north.

pull up the map

Hmm, yeah so of course Russia's on the other side of the world…

North.

Well, I suppose it could have gone over the pole!

What time did the asteroid strike? I googled "time in Chelyabinsk" — 14 hours ahead of my time. Most of the reports (all paraphrased from each other) talk of the asteroid at 9:20 am local time.

So 9.25 - 14 = -4.75, add 24 to both sides and that's 19.25 — 7:20pm my time. Well bummer. Maybe I did the math wrong? What were both the times in GMT?

That got more interesting. News reports were giving, parenthetically, two different GMT times for 9:20am local:

• chelyabinsk 0520 GMT — about 59,900 results
• chelyabinsk 0320 GMT — about 95,700 results

9pm PST is 0500 GMT, so if the 0520 is right we could have something.

Moscow time is 2 hours behind Chelyabinsk's time zone. So if the news happened at 0520 GMT the time at, say, a news agency in Moscow would have been 9:20am!

In the morning, catching up with Twitter, I saw all sorts of tweets about a meteor that struck near Chelyabinsk, Russia damaging windows and even some structures.

Of course, this made my falling star a bit more interesting. Improbable of course but, perhaps, related?

I began to investigate.

Last night Toby and I went to Home Depot to pick up some more greenhouse/aquaponics parts. It took a while to find what we needed and as we started checking out they were already announcing ten minutes to closing, i.e. 9pm PST. Loaded the car, strapped him in, started driving home.

Driving up Bombing Range Road, I saw a falling star ahead on the right side of my windshield. It was bright enough and slow enough to notice while driving, and seemed to have a greenish color.

Neat sight, and was sorry Toby missed it from his seat in the back.

New posting interface is nice, and looks like image hosting is now provided too! (Regarding a couple of the earlier cards.)

Haven't used this much lately.

Some random reasons perhaps why:

• I was hoping this would be good for sharing brainstorming-in-the-shower kind of stuff. Unfortunately a) writing conflicts with brainstorming, b) water conflicts with electronics.

• it feels too isolated. I wish others could add thoughts to my streams.

• actually, I wish others could annotate/edit my cards inline.

• in realtime!

• without any strong social aspect, it's a bit distasteful to me to host essentially static pages on someone else's property

I'm imaging something more like a mashup of Etherpad, Federated Wiki, Github (and/or its Gists) with a visual design and posting interface ecosystem tailored towards some motto like "Thinking Out Loud, Together"

Instead, right now I feel like I would just be setting up a separate commentless microblog for each of my hobbies — which is actually antithetical to my goal of writing quicker, shorter, more frequent posts about everything I'm working on, on my own site.

Stir pasta and sauce separately

"Mix the pasta and sauce, but wait! I mean mix the pasta and mix the sauce. Mix each one but don't mix them together, just mix each in its own little compartment for now. You mix them both now, but together later!"

Stir separately.

Every now and then I come across a phrase that stands out due to its economy and/or clarity.

Also of interest, here's my recent blog post with some estimates and notes regarding the Cost to keep ShutterStem image masters backed up in Amazon Glacier.

One more hopefully helpful snippet from my "Sent" folder:

The "image" schema right now is very simple, mostly just a timestamp! Although I've been working on a geotagger and a caption helper app too. I've annotated a sample image from my DB a bit here, sorry no geotag on that but I can find a sample of that if you'd like: https://gist.github.com/3744441 There's also a really basic "basket" (±album) schema that's an array of photo references, and a "source" schema that's also pretty basic. [At some point I want to add an actual "photo" schema, distinct from images in that a "photo" is a "keeper", e.g. the pick of a stack of images as opposed to say a hundred blurry images taken from underneath a balloon or a quick snapshot of a receipt for records. The idea is that human-intensive work like captioning, rating, organizing, etc. should be done on real "photos" rather than all raw "images".]

I'm also guessing that maybe it's a bit unclear how to import photos^Wimages? Sorry if that is the case! I'm something of a perfectionist and wasn't sold on the old way, but also have been busy getting a global aerial tiles service going in the last months, so I haven't managed to make a better replacement in the current default branch on github. D'oh!

If you use the instructions (and design document — it shouldn't interfere with the "take_three" one right now) at https://github.com/natevw/ShutterStem/tree/master you will get sort of a hairbrained scheme to have a (hopefully) secure photo importer controlled via a CouchDB external script. So basically, there's a little Python "import server" that you can talk to via some HTML files you save raw into, say, your camera card. There was some convenient/fun stuff about that but kind of an unexpected user experience and didn't scale to multiple master databases well and such. Some quick instructions, though, are at https://gist.github.com/849343 and when that's done you should be able to use the web interfaces http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/dashboard.html and http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/index.html to import and export sets of photos respectively.

There's a couple hacks I sometimes do to use the import code from the Python shell instead of via the web interface, since the web stuff expects the source folder to be available locally. Once you get it going, though, all the new apps also work with the same image schema. I've got http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem-t3/launcher.html bookmarked in my browser to go to some of the apps.

Feel free to ping me if you have any more questions, I feel bad this is in such a sorry state and it does tend to be a bit of a hassle to set up. It's sort of still in a protoyping state at the moment, but once I get http://argyl.es launched next month I hope to have more time for it again.

I should add, I've been greatly encouraged by conversations with a few people who emailed after I mentioned the ShutterStem project on the CouchDB mailinglist. The following cards will be some general notes from replies I sent to them.

Work on ShutterStem has slowed.

Well, kind of... In the meantime I've actually been trying to get one of its dependencies going, most preferably as a sustainable business!

But I'm still using the current progress as my primary personal photo management system, and certainly haven't stopped caring about it or its mission. I'm starting this so I can collect design notes and such.

A different reply on a similar topic, a bit more thorough:

The take_three branch does not have any import/export functionality built in yet. The older master branch has a sort of too-clever approach that uses local HTML files and a Python request hooked into CouchDB to do import and export. There are some instructions at https://gist.github.com/849343 on one way to get that set up, then you can use http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/dashboard.html to import and http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/index.html to export. I can write up a bit more documentation on this if it's not clear once you get it installed.

The stuff at http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem-t3/launcher.html — newer couchapps installable from the take_three branch — has some other more interesting apps (Seasons is the farthest along) within it but still need to build a better "native" import/export solution for it as well as some web "folder upload" stuff I've started experimenting with in Chrome recently (no code in ShutterStem yet though).

Snipped from an email reply I sent:

As you have found, currently in the master branch of ShutterStem there is a CouchDB [old-style] external written in Python that lets a user import/export on the machine running that CouchDB server. This was a pain to set up, and not great for many workflows (e.g. importing from laptop straight to home server when it is available). That's why the more active "take_three" branch is simply missing import/export for now — so other import/export tools would be great!

Yeah, definitely my internal dialog follows a Sturgeon's law distribution regarding positive nice things to say. I'm waaaay too picky about software.

This is actually one of the main reasons why I've been wanting to share more about the design processes of my own hobby projects. I crumple up too many interesting thoughts and toss them onto the floor without making anything public; then when I finally have something to share I'm too busy wrestling with the next iteration to do much recap.

Yeah, definitely not liking the two-step "Create" + "Find little mouseover icon" thinking process.

Just found the "Inbox" — really liking that idea, though I'm always a little afraid of adding another "just collect stuff here and organize it…later" box to my life.

Overall though, really, really liking the idea of a lower-pressure place to work through ideas in the open. I'm excited to see how having something of a medium for internal dialogue ends up working in practice!

Time zone "picker" interfaces vs ThoughtStreams | Account ;-)

Is there a way to host an image, or do I need to upload somewhere myself?

Also the current publish icon doesn't really feel like "publish" to me; maybe I'm just too used to github's "smiley face vs. lock" for publishing idiom though.