George Showman’s Blog

Hello world.  I’m here to re-post, with some updates, some information on getting started playing Go.  To get started with playing Go online, you’ll need an account on a server and a Go client (software that serves as the playing environment/board).   You may want to play against a computer for a few games first — I played about fifty like that before logging on to IGS — and it’s also smart to read up on etiquette (e.g. when to resign) and timing rules before launching into a game with a human being.  Okay, here are links and notes:

• Sensei’s Library (http://senseis.xmp.net/):  General Go info (including this page for beginners) and some great, open-ended discussion on specific aspects of the game, such as joseki and life and death.  There’s a very useful section on timing – to play online you really need to understand the byo-yomi time system.  And, of course, a glossary of game terms.
• Good online go community (the International Go Servers, IGS).  I think these are mainly Japanese servers, but I have played against many nationalities, and language is rarely an issue — only when there is a problem, such as a player refusing to accept defeat.  I am “gshowman” when I’m online, and I’m 13k or so, at the moment — look for me!   As I’m sure is common everywhere, the IGS servers let you “observe” games; it’s really nice because there are some VERY good players on there (including, occasionally, a professional playing multiple games at once).  Of course if you are a beginner, you should start by observing fairly low-level games.  I suggest watching some games at the 15 kyu level — if you watch much higher, you simply won’t see the deciding moves, so you’ll risk drawing false conclusions.
  • NOTE: There are plenty of other online Go communities, including Yahoo’s servers (which have a reputation for rambunctiousness, apparently — i.e. smack-talk, carpet-bagging, etc.), and KGS — this may be bigger than IGS, I think, or at least equally as big and refined.  Sensei’s Library has a good listing with commentary.  IGS still seems like a great one to commit to.
  • Note: if you are setting up a match on IGS (e.g. you are “seeking” a game, or you are challenging somebody directly to a match), good settings are: your turn: “nigiri”; Handicap: (accept what the computer assigned!); Boardsize: “19×19″ is the typical — only play smaller games (13×13 or 9×9 are the only usual ones) at the very beginning; “Pandanet Style” timing, with 1 min initial time, a ten minute Byoyomi, and 25 stones.
• glGo is the  internet go client I use (for IGS).  It basically works right out of the box, with a button to log on to IGS — but you need to set up an account on IGS.  All this is free, of course.
• Good go AI to play against.  This is the “Many Faces of Go”, the program I used to learn basic Joseki (tactics), etc. You can download a 9×9 version for free (and the full version is $40 or something at most). It really helps one’s fluency to play fifty games against the computer, when one is first learning.  In my case I used it to boost my confidence enough to start playing humans on IGS.
• A place to buy Go gear in NYC: the Village Chess Shop .  Admittedly, the selection is very limited, but I’ve seen no other store in NYC that sells Go stuff.  I bought a decent Korean tournament board here, and some nice large stones in decent bowls.
• A place to play Go in NYC (I still haven’t found the time or guts to go):   New York Go Center.  There’s also the Brooklyn Go Club, whose door I’m hoping to darken some day.
• Lastly, I subscribe to a weekly e-zine that sends me two recent IGS games, one high-level (e.g. 3-dan players), one lower level (e.g. 5 kyu players), commented by high-level professionals.  I enjoy these a lot, though I’m not sure how much they’re helping my game.  They definitely give me a fairly fresh perspective on things.  It’s $5 a month.

Well, I have to say I am pretty angry at Flickr.  I can’t believe that after two years it is still very difficult to sort one’s photostream the way one wants.

This thread on the flickr forum outlines the originally identified and still super-relevant problem.  It’s actually a really interesting window into certain aspects of blog culture.  But the justifications claiming that ‘the nature of a blog is to have your last-breaking images first’ really don’t cut it, from my point of view.  Not that I don’t appreciate the importance of freshness in flickr content (well, okay, actually I don’t, since pictures taken “now” vs. “then” seem equally interesting to me), but here is my real-world problem that breaks this rationale:

I recently uploaded some photos from a trip to Sandy Hook, NJ.  As is quite common, two of the photos were taken of the same thing, right after one another, and I am hoping people will enjoy comparing them.  But amazingly the Uploadr, or Flickr’s server-side software, has somehow decided to separate these two, and there is almost no way in hell that I can bring them together,  short of corrupting the actual photo timestamps — THERE’s a helpful solution! — or putting them in a set (which I am not inclined to do for just a handful of pictures from a one-day trip).  I understand that sets are for formatting groups of photos, but in this case the photostream order is simply WRONG, it has nothing to do with freshness, it just has the order in time wrong, period.

So perhaps this needs to be re-thought not as a feature request but as a bug.

While the presence of a ‘breaking’ photostream may be useful — or at least deeply reassuring — to some people, at least, PLEASE GOD, within any one uploaded batch let me order the photos for some semblance of coherence!

Uploadr is deeply flawed because it won’t let me do that.  I think flickr is a good value for the use I make of it (which, recently, hasn’t been that much).  Still, I would pay $50 if they would let me re-order my photos the way I like, using their awesome tools that do everything else but this one thing they have purposefully and dogmatically omitted.

Seething… oh, my flickr page is here.

We had another salon at Think Coffee yesterday, so I am writing to summarize. This was the best-attended salon yet (by far). Present were Che-Wei, Adam, Frank, Sean, Caleb, Mike, Ken, Christine, and myself. Karen (ITP friend of Che-wei’s) came at the very end, when I think the salon had basically dissipated. Think worked pretty well as a venue; as the group grew we were able to grab one of the central couches and pull up enough chairs.

So, the minutes:

A recently-graduated scripter from Pratt: neoarchaicnet.blogspot.com and also neoarchaic.net (this last is a great example of an online portfolio, it seems to me).

We discuss Frank’s need to prototype his bike rack design for NYCityRacks (he was one of ten finalists). Somebody suggests a fiberglass manufacturer called Seal. And Sean suggests looking into guys who do motorcycle customization (if I remember correctly).

We discuss what it would take to develop a Rhino plugin that does material mapping properly, since this is our #1 gripe with using Rhino as a primary rendering solution (with whatever render plugin you like — at Pratt it seems like it will be V-Ray this year). There is no clear answer to this yet — I have to look into it — but there’s a free Rhino SDK available for download so I will get on it.

We have an extensive discussion on polygon modeling vs. NURBS modeling. Rhino Grasshopper comes up a few times — as a way to address some of our concerns about Rhino’s slow, “one-way” (”fire and forget”, perhaps?) modeling capabilities. Well, Rhino has fabulous powers of precision, in geometry and gesture (creative actions, so to speak), but the lack of good history and editing, compared to the spontaneity of Max’s or Modo’s polygon powers, makes it a pretty cruel thing to foist on students as their main app for 3D thinking. Or at least, I think so.  In response to Adam’s and my griping about Rhino, and my particular wondering as to whether there are not just certain ways of working in Rhino that are cleaner and more adaptable than others, Che-wei mentions that he always models in wireframe — i.e. drawing only curves — before generating any surfaces.  I am going to try to apply this rigorously in the coming semester.  Che-wei also mentioned an Audi TT tutorial that he thinks is especially effective for learning effective modeling.

As the evening progresses we realize that Maya does, and has done, basically everything we talk about. But Maya is out, for some reason. So sad!!!  Can we blame the perhaps overly obscure design processes of the late 1990’s studios at Columbia for this failure of the architecture community to just use the full powers of this tool, and get the guys who make Maya to add a few useful features that would have just made it click?

Thanks to Mike’s and Caleb’s presence, especially, there is a bunch of web-dev talk. Apparently some cool sites (which I will check out shortly) include FFFound (okay I am already hooked), Everything Everywhere (can’t find this, actually), and Yugop.com. We also discussed an idea I’ve had for some time of creating a visual database and map of (primarily) digital drawing techniques. As references people mentioned RISD’s recent “web video interface” and the early GSAPP website by Corey Clarke which apparently had a kind of tree-like network view.

Next up, some hardcore software and hardware discussion, courtesy of Caleb. He mentions:

Datarush, by Sun Microsystems… a better kind of relational database, apparently, and very easy to use.  Still in development.

GPGPU… a framework for taking advantage of new multi-core graphics processors, if I understand correctly.  Apparently (perhaps this is a separate point), the upcoming Flash version will actually be able to use some graphics card capabilities, thus permitting fairly hardcore 3D work in Flash.

OpenGL3 is coming soon, apparently, and will re-legitimize this oh-so-sweetly open graphics library.

Caleb is excited about COLLADA, an open graphics file format that is apparently becoming more and more feature-rich. E.g. there’s a Flash library, PaperVision, which has a COLLADA parser.  Ummm, check out this Papervision site, actually.  Wow.

We discuss briefly how there’s not a lot of attention being paid in the geek-architect community to scripting at the level of the rendering itself (e.g. shaders, raytracing).  I.e. we make funky geometry, and we also do a lot of pixel-based manipulation of 2D images, but we don’t play that much with the magic that creates specific patterns of pixels from the geometry and lights, etc.

Answers:  Sunflow, including P5 Sunflow for Processing, and Zbrush.  But I’m not satisfied.

On the fuzzier, friendlier end of graphics work, apparently Che-wei saw Gil Akos do a project where max/msp and Processing were running in parallel and talking to each other. But (and I was surprised to hear this!), Che-wei is moving away from Processing to OpenFrameworks, an apparently amazing set of libraries for C++.  Yes, C++!  Holy smokes!  He says the OpenCV library is especially amazing (that’s “computer vision”, not “control vertex”).

Adam is going to Siggraph in a couple of weeks (or whenever it is), and intends to attend a “design and computation” session they’re going to have there.  There will be discussion of folding, apparently.  Sounds fun — please report back Adam!

Lastly, for Che-wei (and anybody who likes to hike around NYC), I present to you Breakneck Ridge.  It’s best to get a topo map from these guys, I have one and it’s very helpful.

Oh, and Caleb thought you guys would dig this recent Radiohead video made with LIDAR, and the making of it.  IN fact to really get the beauty of the lazer-survey technology in the video you should download the 86MB version from Radiohead’s website.

Okay, that’s all.  Attendees, please comment with links if you have other stuff you wanted to share!

The Long Now foundation blows my mind yet again, this time with a long talk by Craig Venter that shows me several things:

1. It *is* possible to do something very productive while sailing around the world. I can’t quite tell to what (undoubtedly large) degree the sailing ship was just a vanity project — by which I mean, he just did it because he loves sailing — and to what degree the mode of transportation actually helped with the science. Obviously it’s easier to get pristine water samples if you aren’t emitting exhaust, etc., but there would be many other easier ways to do the sampling he did. As a publicity stunt it must be fairly effective, however.

2. Craig shares my belief that the global environmental problem has reached such a point that only radical technological change will get us out of it. This radical change will also, inevitably, result in radical social change — a complete re-making of everything, including ourselves. I would normally write off his apparent optimism about the final result of such re-making as stupidity, but he’s clearly so far ahead in his technological achievements that I think I have to take his perspective as being considerably more likely to be the right one than, say, mine.  In a way, this gives me a huge surge of optimism — technology such as he is aiming for would actually be able to solve a lot of our global environmental problems.  Just to see a potential technological solution is already a huge step forward.  It almost makes me feel that it’s okay to buy new things again, to take airplanes, to stop worrying so much.

3. But, how not to be left behind? Craig has one of the best seats in the house for watching global change, since he’s pushing a lot of it forward. I envy him hugely — never have I felt the lurking irrelevance of the profession of architect and educator more than while watching his talk. I used to get this feeling when talking to my friends in software, but the technological gap Venter is opening seems to be much larger. To actually be there at the blistering edge of the technological shockwave must be incredibly thrilling and empowering. Meanwhile, those of us in the design professions (well, and almost everybody else) are left to clean up, constantly adjusting our thinking to the technological changes raining down from on high.

This makes me feel very low. I think I need to find the right large project to devote myself to, and I”m afraid even the broadest reach of architecture does not engage with such projects.  But I’m very impressionable at the moment.