March 22, 2010

Looking into Automotive On Board Diagnostics

Having just discovered that my car actually had a little black, data-recording box, an On-board diagnostics, computer, that logs a ton of info about engine performance, I decided I'd take a little time to do a little research and see how could I tap on that data. Not that I want to go race my car anywhere - considering my friends call me 'grandma' whenever I get on the road - that'd probably be the last thing I'd ever think about doing.

I'm actually interested in

1. Being more aware on how everything is going under the hood
2. Maximizing fuel economy.

March 17, 2010

QRType

Recent news point that Facebook will be adding QRCodes to user profiles, which means that QRCodes may *finally* go mainstream in the US, almost 8 years later than Japan.

Since that is really such a big deal for the future of the interwebs, I thought I'd pull out from my trunk of 'I'm not sure why I did this, but maybe someone out there finds it useful'.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you QRType . Yes! You can now generate QRcodes, as you type. Isn't that amazing?

Props go to Kazuhiko Arase, for the great QRcode Library that my dumb implementation uses.

January 20, 2010

pwdmkr.com

Pwdmkr is a simple and safe password generator. If you are conscious about the huge danger of using the same username and password throughout different services on the web, never knowing how or where your passwords are stored, pwdmkr is for you.

In most cases passwords are actually stored in cleartext, meaning if one of those services database gets compromised, or if you happen to give your password to a sketchy website, you are, pretty much... hosed. The hacker, or admin with bad intentions will simply try your username and password in a series of other services, and once someone gains access to your email, it's bye bye to your online identity. (and all the other stuff you stored throughout the web).

pwdmkr is not the ultimate solution to passwords, however, it adds an extra layer of security to keep your online stuff safe. Generated passwords are secure, using a good combination of characters that makes brute force attacks many times harder. It also generates a unique password for each website you require one, meaning if that website gets hacked and your password compromised, you don't risk all your other accounts dominoing down.

This is not a unique or novel idea, many have already built similar stuff. I just took this a step further and focused on making it Simple, and usable, while making sure that, none of the info you use to create a password is cached or stored in memory in absolutely no way.

Hope you find it useful!

Visit the app over at pwdmkr

July 16, 2009

Blueprint

Blueprint is a plugin for Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Flash Builder 4 that allows users to query for Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash code examples found on the Web directly inside of the development environment.

Blueprint is the result of just a fraction of all the research work of Joel Brandt, Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's HCI group. Joel came in to Adobe as an intern last year, the idea for this project was born. Only in the very last bits of his research a couple of months ago we actually started coding it. I worked on the Design, engineering and front end development of the plugin. Of course, this project could not have been done without the immense help of Mira Dontcheva and Ivan Cavero Belaunde.

Read about this project in this technical report on Blueprint (PDF Link) and learn more about Stanford's HCI group work on Opportunistic Programming.

Get Blueprint

January 16, 2009

Information Visualization: a personal retrospective

A personal recount I wrote for Inspire, the website of the Adobe XD group.

"First off, let me start by mentioning that I am not a scholar. I'm a wanna-be architect who turned to graphic design, trying to escape the world of physics and mathematics, who eventually started scripting, then programming, and finally ended up architecting immense visualizations of data from both databases and realtime streams."

continue reading here...

December 04, 2008

QueryBox

QueryBox allows you to easily create a Live Search Input form that lets users search and refine a query while continuously showing all valid results as they type.

November 14, 2008

Adobe Max 2008, San Francisco

Adobe Max is coming to town next week, and it's going to be the biggest Max Ever. I will be presenting on Playful Design together with Remon Tijssen on Monday at 5:00pm. I will also be talking very briefly about the work we are involved in with our group at Adobe XD: Designing Design on Tuesday. Finally I will be demoing the work I did for the Encylopedia of Life project we demoed at TED this year, at the conference within the conference, the FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX on Wednesday. We've been extremely busy preparing for this. Not only I'm presenting 3 times, but I also have been involved in a demo for the Keynote on day one plus another one on day two. I'm really looking forward to meet you all there!

September 25, 2008

Speaking at FITC Seoul

I will be presenting at FITC Seoul on October 14th, 2008 among an amazing speaker lineup that includes, Joshua Davis, Erik Natkze, Kyle Cooper, Paul Burnett, Euna Seol and Ralph Hauwert. More info on this event over here

August 23, 2008

Test from heteml.jp

Hello Hello! Long time no see. Just getting ready to revamp this thing. Lots of things happened since 2007 ;) Mediatebmple is shutting down all coldfusion accounts, so I was forced to move out. Now live from heteml.jp More soon...

May 09, 2007

FITC Road Show - Chicago

June 8th, 2007. I'll be speaking at the FITC Road Show in Chicago.

April 11, 2007

Flashconference 2007

May 4, I'll be presenting my work at flashconference in Stuttgart. Extremely bright minds such as Andre Michelle, Mario Klingemann, Peter Elst and Claus Wahlers, among others will be there too.This is my second time I'm participating in this conference. Can't wait to meet everybody again!

March 25, 2007

Debugging AS3 with firebug's console

Most probably you've already heard about firebug, if you haven't, I really recommend you go give it a spin right now.

Basically, firebug let's you lift the hood in your browser and see pretty much everything that's happening in there. It lets you edit, and monitor all HTML, CSS, Javascript live in any web page - it even lets you edit those objects on the fly!

It also gives you a fantastic console that lets you expose information about what's flowing through your scripts. Adding a global variable named "console" it exposes many methods that allow you to write to the Firebug console.

The really cool thing is that from flash you can call "console" using ExternalInterface, and any object you pass will be dumped as if it was a javascript object.

try it out:

ExternalInterface.call("console.log",{foo:123,bar:"da",boo:{da:12,beh:[123,145,"dfa",{fa:[0,1,2,4,5]}]}});

and you will see the output in the image above.

March 23, 2007

not slacking!

way too much going on, this past year has been sleepless. I've managed to take on a good bunch of monumental projects that have kept me quiet to the outside world. Now that I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm definitively committed to flip that up. expect updates, soon, very very soon...

February 20, 2007

see conference 2007

April 21st, I will be speaking at the second edition of the see conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

February 20, 2007

FITC Toronto 2007

April 22-24. I'm really excited about coming down to Toronto again. Come meet all your favorite artists! Really big names this year. more info over here.