Outside of Eyebeam, I do commercial work for a few clients to pay the bills. Right now, I am creating a shopping cart for a jewelry store, a video preview system for a video studio, and a small content management system for a painter. But the biggest outside project I have is called Hit! or Sh!t.
As the literature goes:
Hit! or Sh!t is the bastard brain-child of hardcore scientists/academics/socialites David Jimison and Jeff Crouse. The duo first met soon after their devotion to hardcore science led them deep into the Dirty South to Georgia Tech. The two became friends after discovering mutual interests in obscure experimental electronic music, Mexican food, and drinking. They are well known in the Atlanta academic scene for wild parties that typically involve all three.
Hit! or Shit! was inspired in part by a desire to finance a Hunter Thompson-esque journey across the great plains and purple mountains majesty of the US of A in a giant rolling rock-star-cum-computer-scientist laboratory. But beyond this decadent daydream, David, who is mentally enabled with A.D.D., envisioned a media player that could satisfy his insatiable, erratic tastes, while Jeff saw it as a chance to humbly contribute more data to the great computer brain called the Internet that will one day rule and entertain us all (or perhaps already is).
Hit! or Sh!t was the winner of the mtvU Digital Incubator contest back in 2006. Dave and I spent the summer putting together what was supposed to be a prototype, but then MTV decided they wanted to take it further, and ever since then, we have been playing catch-up, make it a decent piece of software so that we can get a decent chunk of change.
As a student/employee of Georgia Tech, you basically sell your soul to the university. The professors will be the first ones to tell you – if you have a really, really good idea, keep it to yourself at all costs. If Tech thinks that you came up with something that could potentially make money, and they can prove that you so much as stepped foot on campus while 3 of your neurons were contemplating that idea, there will be lawyers crawling up your pant legs before you can say “intellectual property litigation”. I bring it up because at this point, MTV wants to buy Hit! or SH!t from Tech, and the contract that has been bouncing back and forth between these infamous Tech lawyers and the equally infamous ones at Viacom made another stop in my Inbox yesterday, and I was supposed to read it and understand it, which I didn’t, and I don’t.
Luckily I have Dave, who spelled it out for me a bit. Basically, it says 2 things: 1) Once the sale goes through, we are no longer associated with Georgia Tech. We work as contractors for MTV, and we owe nothing more to Tech. 2) Once the sale goes through, we have 1 month to do a shitload more work that we said that we potentially *could* do for about twice as much money and time, or else we are in breach of contract. This is why 1) we are not accepting the contract in its current form, and 2) I am trying to hire some cronies to help me out with the hardcore programming. I am always hesitant to hire someone because it usually ends up taking just as long to bring someone up to speed with what I have already done as it would to do it myself. This could be a reflection on my programming skills, but I think that it is generally a pretty commonly-accepted truth that you can’t just hire a new
One major change that we are trying to implement in time for the sale is the move from SOAP to AMFPHP. And since I had never heard of AMFPHP before Dave suggested I look into it, I will explain that it is a remoting library that allows Flash to talk with PHP via a binary protocol that is supposedly much faster and more effecient than SOAP. The main motivation behind the move was Bruno, the mysterious bug that has been mercilessly haunting Hit! or Sh!t since its conception. Bruno manifests himself as an error that is thrown as soon as the user launches the Hit! or Sh!t player. Our best guess is that the Flash SOAP component is having trouble loading the WSDL for the H/S SOAP service, but we don’t know why, or how to increase the timeout limit of the component.
It’s also open source, earns it some brownie points in my book. Of course, I am wrestling with some problems.
New Podcast
In other news, I am determined to start a Podcast. I have been toying with some ideas for a while, but I can’t seem to nail one down. They seem to fall into three categories.
I also just discovered a tool called PodServe by the Big In Japan folks. It is basically a podcast hosting service, but they also have a feature called “PodCall”, where you put in your number, and then you receive a call, and it automatically adds the audio from the call to your podcast. But PodServe is still in alpha, and it seems that all of the Big In Japan tools are pretty slow, so I am not sure how useful it is going to be.
Working on 6 projects at once can be very stressful. I need an assistant. I also need to do something semi-relaxing this weekend or else I fear I will burst into flames.
Outside of Eyebeam
Outside of Eyebeam, I do commercial work for a few clients to pay the bills. Right now, I am creating a shopping cart for a jewelry store, a video preview system for a video studio, and a small content management system for a painter. But the biggest outside project I have is called Hit! or Sh!t.
As the literature goes:
Hit! or Shit! was inspired in part by a desire to finance a Hunter Thompson-esque journey across the great plains and purple mountains majesty of the US of A in a giant rolling rock-star-cum-computer-scientist laboratory. But beyond this decadent daydream, David, who is mentally enabled with A.D.D., envisioned a media player that could satisfy his insatiable, erratic tastes, while Jeff saw it as a chance to humbly contribute more data to the great computer brain called the Internet that will one day rule and entertain us all (or perhaps already is).
Hit! or Sh!t was the winner of the mtvU Digital Incubator contest back in 2006. Dave and I spent the summer putting together what was supposed to be a prototype, but then MTV decided they wanted to take it further, and ever since then, we have been playing catch-up, make it a decent piece of software so that we can get a decent chunk of change.
As a student/employee of Georgia Tech, you basically sell your soul to the university. The professors will be the first ones to tell you – if you have a really, really good idea, keep it to yourself at all costs. If Tech thinks that you came up with something that could potentially make money, and they can prove that you so much as stepped foot on campus while 3 of your neurons were contemplating that idea, there will be lawyers crawling up your pant legs before you can say “intellectual property litigation”. I bring it up because at this point, MTV wants to buy Hit! or SH!t from Tech, and the contract that has been bouncing back and forth between these infamous Tech lawyers and the equally infamous ones at Viacom made another stop in my Inbox yesterday, and I was supposed to read it and understand it, which I didn’t, and I don’t.
Luckily I have Dave, who spelled it out for me a bit. Basically, it says 2 things: 1) Once the sale goes through, we are no longer associated with Georgia Tech. We work as contractors for MTV, and we owe nothing more to Tech. 2) Once the sale goes through, we have 1 month to do a shitload more work that we said that we potentially *could* do for about twice as much money and time, or else we are in breach of contract. This is why 1) we are not accepting the contract in its current form, and 2) I am trying to hire some cronies to help me out with the hardcore programming. I am always hesitant to hire someone because it usually ends up taking just as long to bring someone up to speed with what I have already done as it would to do it myself. This could be a reflection on my programming skills, but I think that it is generally a pretty commonly-accepted truth that you can’t just hire a new
AMFPHP
One major change that we are trying to implement in time for the sale is the move from SOAP to AMFPHP. And since I had never heard of AMFPHP before Dave suggested I look into it, I will explain that it is a remoting library that allows Flash to talk with PHP via a binary protocol that is supposedly much faster and more effecient than SOAP. The main motivation behind the move was Bruno, the mysterious bug that has been mercilessly haunting Hit! or Sh!t since its conception. Bruno manifests himself as an error that is thrown as soon as the user launches the Hit! or Sh!t player. Our best guess is that the Flash SOAP component is having trouble loading the WSDL for the H/S SOAP service, but we don’t know why, or how to increase the timeout limit of the component.
It’s also open source, earns it some brownie points in my book. Of course, I am wrestling with some problems.
New Podcast
In other news, I am determined to start a Podcast. I have been toying with some ideas for a while, but I can’t seem to nail one down. They seem to fall into three categories.
Working on 6 projects at once can be very stressful. I need an assistant. I also need to do something semi-relaxing this weekend or else I fear I will burst into flames.