Amazing structural chair the Alvi SilkChair beautiful looking mesh of silk and I love the colour.

“Environmental friendly seating furniture with silk thread tightened around a bearing oak frame. The transparent expression is in focus, which creates new forms and brings forth a perception of weightlessness, while the light produces new shadow plays from the thread works of the alvisilkchair.”

I know silk is strong, but I feel like this might wobble about like a hammock or the strings would PING and break when I sit on it… that is, if my cats don’t get to it first. ^_- I don’t think it matters though; when something is as pretty as that who cares if you can sit on it? Form > function.

Prepare to have your mind blown!

Unbelievable though it is, every single frame in this video is CG… no live-footage or photographs in sight!! Absolutely astounding skills here, created by Alex Roman. It took two and a half months to make from start to finish form initial concept through to the final editing.

Hat tip to you sir!

Was sifting through my ‘likes’ on Vimeo recently and no idea why I didn’t blog this sooner but realised this might be really useful for a few friends on the MA looking into the subject of digital/tangible reading. If any of you are reading, I hope this helps!!

It is a prototype for a UI how one might read and interact with digital magazines in the future.

Weirdly, this came out before the iPad was announced, the horizontal to vertical switch of the spreads is almost like those clevercloggs at Bonnier R&D had their mitts on an iPad prototype. So bloody clever.

Completely different from anything out on the market at the time, like the Kindle, which with its non-glare screen may be great for reading reams of text in comparison to the iPad, but not exactly ideal for pretty editorial layout.

I love this!

So I woke up on Friday and I had eight emails from Google saying my site had been flagged for having malcode… visited my site and ah yes, there was the horrible Google red page of death.

Now what? Ignoring the prompt and continuing to my site I could see the style sheet had been disabled. My beautiful site! It was so ugly.

My Mr’s site had also been taken down… and all the other sites that used WordPress on our server had also been infected and taken down, including sites that merely linked to us. Upon noticing this we both emailed MediaTemple who said that they “couldn’t do anything to help us”.

Fine! To be honest I had no idea where to start, but using the SOSWebscan I could see that 5 of my js files had the dodgy code, and upon logging into my site I could see that another admin account had been added. The name? Johnny A.

Deleting the code from the js files, and then also the user account and all the posts that had been created, worked to fix the problem. But upon Googling the exploit, I found this SupportBase article…

Very useful, exactly what happened to me and the other WordPress sites on our MediaTemple server but not to mention a bit irritating. It clearly states that “We believe it to be both a WordPress 2.9 vulnerability as well as a vulnerability in MediaTemple’s Grid Server Accounts.”

Irritating because MediaTemple had made sure the first thing they said to us in their support request was “we have done a deep analysis of the (gs) Grid-Service and found that our infrastructure is secure and is not a source of website vulnerability” Quick to jump to their own defence, of course, but we forwarded the SupportBase article to them and later recieved this response:

“We understand how frustrating getting your site exploited can be. At this time what we have done is scanned all the domains on this service removing all exploits from your files. I have also removed the redirect exploit that was injected into the database wp_posts table. All original files have been backed up. If you are still having issues with Google Malware alert. You can submit your sites to be re-crawled by Google. If the sites are found clean they should remove the warning.”

Oh. So they had initially said they could do nothing to help us, and then when they had said that it was nothing to do with their infrastructure… they then decide to help??

I have to admit, this was awkward. But atleast it was finally fixed and a valuable lesson has been learned. Always update to the newest version of WordPress, having an insane 15 digit password numbers and letters doesn’t always matter… oh and don’t host your sites with MediaTemple.

Over and out.

Ah yes. Facebook “the movie” I am enthusiastic about seeing this, I mean there has definitely been alot of controversy about Zuckerberg and how Facebook got made. Did he/didn’t he steal it from his mates? There has certainly been enough courtcases over it, but then that is expected when you make a bit of money??

Obviously given that the creators of this movie would have to have Zuckerberg’s permission in order to make it, I am going to go ahead and presume that this story will be written in his favour. Not likely to find the truth about the creation of Facebook in this movie… even if he did steal the idea.

The new trailer for The Social Network sets the stage for the betrayals built into the Facebook origins story. Acrimonious exchanges scripted by Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) reveal the twisted relationships between Mark Zuckerberg and other key players during the site’s early days.

It eventually turns out that Eisenberg is accused of stealing the ideas from other Harvard students, dissociates from his close friends, and is also sued by federal court. This isn’t your ordinary biopic, as it is packed with thrills, tears, partying and sex, including court cases.

Having a read of the synopsis, I can already spot a pretty obvious lie in the description… Mark Zuckerberg has most definitely not had sex.

Amazing amazing amazing! This was brought to my attention earlier this week by @chris_jordan. Very cool. A sensory project that has been created with multiple projectors making a display which can only be described as sci-fi!

Here is an example of one that uses just one projector and still manages to be pretty awesome, all of these were made by SuperBien.

Before anyone even thinks it… yes, I know this video came out months ago. But as you (may already) know I am not a fan of the YouTube player – it is ugly and slow – so I really try to avoid embedding it, so I waited until there was a Vimeo version to embed. And so here we are!

Absolutely brilliant video and a bit of a catchy song to boot by OK Go. Incase you haven’t been reading my blog for too long, a while ago I blogged the inspiration for this video which was made in 1987 Der Lauf Der Dinge. Alot more tech, not as fast… but definitely suspenseful. I have attached it to the end of this post incase you missed it.

There is an alternative version of This Too Shall Pass personally I prefer the warehouse version alot more. Which is of course why I blogged it.

Check. It. Out.

Adobe CS5 was released on 12th April and the online download was just available yesterday – this girl got herself a copy of it immediately afterwards. ^_- I was ignoring the hype of it until I saw the video of the content aware fill. If you haven’t seen it, you really need to! I would say I spend 40% of my time using the spot heal/clone stamp… this will save me sooo much time. Genius.

It is also SUPER fast. As pointed out to me, this is probably because for the first time ever Adobe wrote a seperate version for Mac rather than adapting one from the Windows version. Firstly… given that Macs are the standard for design studios I fail to see why this wasn’t done sooner, Macs are the main platform therefore they should surely be the priority release? This should have been done yeeeaars ago in my opinion.

I should hold my breath before until I have given it a thorough test run before I yap on about how magical it is. CS4 was a similar case… for example tabbed browsing seemed like a good idea at the time, but was actually irritating as hell. Though having said that, I only disabled opening files in tabs a couple of weeks ago.

Above is the promo video made by the magical Bonfire click through to Vimeo to marvel at it in HD

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Hubble Telescope and to celebrate Nasa released a set of really amazing pictures.
One of the pictures is shown above, it shows a small portion of one of the largest star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. The picture shows a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and the dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

You might remember how I said I *love* APOD we only ever see a teeny tiny portion of the sky without investing in a telescope, these pictures really capture how amazing space is, there must be very few things on the planet as naturally beautiful as these pictures.

While I was looking at these pictures I suddenly became aware that I’m sort of ashamed to even think about reverting to the Apple Snow leopard or even the Leopard background, on my computers or iPhone. Using those crappy synthetic backgrounds compared to these photographs just seemed so mindless.
I know that the Apple backgrounds are supposed to be of the Northern Lights and not actually of deep space, but why use anything so fake when you could instead have a picture of something so visually amazing?

I propose you swap to one of the pictures at the bottom of this post (some a similar colour to the offending backgrounds, but I think you will agree – a hundred million times more awesome) of the Orion Nebula.

Do it! And if not, answer me one question… why wouldn’t you? I will be the first to admit, I am completely biased, I love looking at stars and I will definitely be investing in a telescope this Summer, if for no other reason to improve my London star gazing possibilities ^_-

I don’t know specifically why I have been so effected by these space pictures but I guess, deep down, there is just something so fundamentally sad about them. We will all live our lives and never get to go into space or maybe even see images like this first hand, it is through science and exploration with mediums such as Hubble that we are able to experience them. It is like a constant reminder that we are so small, us and our tiny planet, it makes what we are up to seem so strangely insignificant.

I would have these pictures enlarged and plastered onto a whole wall if I could, but I will settle for using them as a desktop background because I want to do what I can to appreciate the bigger picture…

Click the thumbnails below to see slightly larger or alternatively click here to download the huge images in a zip file (9.3MB)

Love love love this machine. The movements are so smooth, I know this is because it has been programmed but the transitions from each letter to the next is so well engineered, it’s brilliant!

Rob Seward the creator had this to say about it…

Four Letter Words consists of four units, each capable of displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet with an arrangement of fluorescent lights.

The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.

The algorithm’s tendency towards scatological or “dark” subject matter is influenced by a variety of language and perception studies, especially Elliot McGinnies’ 1949 study “Emotionality and Perceptual Defense.”

While the piece was conceived with idea of displaying algorithmically generated lists, it was designed with flexibility and expandability in mind. The individual units can be connected ad-infinitum, and are theoretically capable of displaying any length of text. While Four Letter Words deals with a specific range of content, the technology can be easily expanded for future textual experiments.

You can read more about it here and see Rob’s creative process on his blog