Well, MovieReshape does the same thing on real-life footage. You can morph flesh-and-bone actors in-motion. Watch the video below and pay close attention to how it fits a mesh on the model.

Here is the paper from Max Planck Institute. And if you want to play with 3D morphing I suggest you try Make Human (open source).

Source: gizmodo.com

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When I decided to give this software a fair chance to succeed on its very own domain the only question in my head was; will it pass the test of users? It doesn’t really matter what you have intended the users do with your application. What matters, first, is what they think they’d like to do with it and then whether or not they actually use it.

So I tried and I failed. Two main reasons of this failure are; technical deficiencies and the special way of interaction coffee reading is. Technical deficiencies is the easy one. I couldn’t devote enough time for telvee, especially lately. As a result it doesn’t even have basic stuff like e-mail changing or account deletion. This is 100% my fault. The second reason however is more complicated and there was not much I could do about it. Except one thing I will tell you at the end of this post.

Telvee didn’t pass the user’s test mainly because coffee reading is somewhat private. It’s more of a 1-to-1 communication, while all social applications¹ are designed for 1-to-many communication. This was disastrous not only because of the lack of viral growth but also because of the reluctance of users to interact with other users.

An example image of coffee remains telvee generates

I would like to thank everybody who participated and I hope you had some fun playing with it. Telvee domain will soon redirect to this post and I will probably not renew it next time.

I won’t be starting a new experiment soon. I will spend most of my time on my work. Hopefully I will be spending a little more time on free software projects. By the way I would like to note that Telvee has spawned a couple of Django apps: django-inviting & django-simple-friends.

Oh, and the thing I could do better about user experience was to be more agile. I should have either fixed the problem quickly or failed fast. I have no regrets though. This was a unique experience and I have learned a lot.

1: Yes, even the e-mail system and dating sites are designed for 1-to-many communication primarily in mind.

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2

Free Software & Open Source Days of İstanbul Bilgi University and Linux & Free Software Festival of Linux Users Association are united under the name Free Software & Linux Days this year. If you have attended before, you will probably make no other plans for April 2-3.

If you have never been to this event, registration is free and can be done at the front desk. If you are remotely interested in free software or hackerdom you will want to be there. …and, of course, you are welcome.

I will be giving a Django presentation on Friday. Please come and say hello if you happen to be attending.

UPDATE: You can find the slides from presentation here. Slideshare’s importer failed to import the file I’ve uploaded properly. So please download and view the slides with Acrobat Reader.

Related posts:

1. I Am Discontinuing Telvee
2. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
3. Working with files in Django – Part 1

I follow (and read with great interest) Steve Souders’s blog High Performance Web Sites. I must admit I was sceptical about it at first; spriting images, individual different loading behaviours of browsers… I thought they were premature optimizations. But I realized I was wrong as I continued to read. Steve Souders is an expert on high performance web sites and what he preaches are realistic techniques, backed by test results most of the time. If you are not following, I suggest you add it to your RSS reader.

Optimization Techniques

We can explore the techniques in two main categories:

1. Techniques to reduce the data to be transferred.
   • Minifying: Minification is removing comments and unneeded whitespace in CSS and JavaScript files. Compilers like YUI Compressor and Closure modifies JavaScript code to compress even further, without any changes to the functionality.
   • Gzipping: Web browsers accept gzip encoded content for a long time. I have just compressed a 13 KB text file down to 4 KB. A two thirds compression ratio is not bad at all.
2. Techniques to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
   • Combining: CSS and JavaScript files can be combined together into a single file and therefore a single HTTP request. Gzip may be more efficient on these files. In a similar way background images can be merged into a sprite and then reconstructed again using their coordinates on that sprite.
   • Data URI’s: Images (or other file types) can be embedded into CSS (or JavaScript or HTML) using data: URI‘s. Extra HTTP requests for those resources can be avoided this way.

You might think it’s fine to perform all these optimizations, but what happens when I want to make some changes to my combined, minified JavaScript file? Instead of applying these techniques blindly, it’s best to follow a sensible plan for implementing these optimizations:

• First of all everything that can be automated should be automated. Regarding the example above script files should stay uncombined and uncompressed in the development environment and optimizations should be applied when the application is published. Taking it a step further we can have the application detect changes in those files and update optimized versions automatically. (django_compressor works this way)
• I was worried that spriting would complicate managing the design. But I have seen, on the contrary; if images each sprite contain are choosen carefully it makes the process easier. Start combining images that belong to the same design element. Avoid complex arrangements, stick with horizontal or vertical stacking as much as possible. Don’t forget to leave transparent spaces between items and sprite border. Try to combine images that are loaded on the same page, avoid loading a sprite for only half of it’s elements. Don’t force yourself to combine all images, if you follow the guidelines I have mentione they won’t.
• When performing optimizations don’t forget to use easily available tools. You can use YSlow for general analysis, SpriteMe for image combining tips, CompressorRater to compare different compilers’ performance on your scripts. I would like to note that Steve Souders is the developer of first two.

Telvee Results

I didn’t think about performance at all when I started developing telvee. Too many CSS files and too many images were being loaded. Here is what it looked like before optimizations:

Then I have installed and configured django_compressor. I used YUI Compressor for both JavaScript and CSS. I have created sprites and modified CSS files manually¹. Then I deployed these changes and measured again:

In the load column of Homepage, the number in parens is the actual load. But the design of homepage is changed with this upgrade and a new 90 KB image is being loaded now. So I have accepted 70 KB in my calculations. The result of optimizations are as follows:

Django_compressor and Data URI’s

Django_compressor, developed by Christian Metts, helps you to apply optmizations I have mentioned above easily to your Django projects. You can see my fork here where I have merged some other branches and added a little bit of code myself.

Using compressor.filters.datauri.CssDataUriFilter in data-uri branch of this repository, you can embed linked files within your CSS files. It will only embed files less than or equal to 1024 Bytes (1 KB) by default. You can change this limit by setting COMPRESS_DATA_URI_MIN_SIZE in your settings.py.

There are a couple of things to pay attention when you convert your references to data: URIs. Firstly file contents are base64 encoded which means approximately one third increase in size. It’s up to you to balance between increased bandwidth and reduced request counts². Another thing to watch for is multiple references to the same file will end up embedding the same data many times. The solution to this problem is to reduce all references to one³ but this might break your CSS arrangement strategy.

Please test django_compressor’s data: URI support and tell me what you think. If you haven’t applied optimizations I mentioned above, you should. Thanks to django_compressor they are quite easy to implement on Django projects.

1: I would like to add automatic sprite building/linking support to django_compressor sometime.

2: With Today’s modern connections 1~2 KB increase is a good price for 1 less HTTP request..

3: http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090401/why-css-needs-no-variables/

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2

The final model has some minor artifacts (especially in concave sections) but very nice looking otherwise. I wonder how well it handles complex geometries and deep cavities.

They say, in the project page, there will be a Linux-based demo released in a few months. You can leave your e-mail there if you want to get notified.

Related posts:

1. Morphing Characters In Real-life Footage

I have sent XING two messages to cancel my account, I don’t want to be a member.

I would like to take advantage of XING’s unique potential to bring people together, until they cancel my account, to help homeless children and elders.

WTF! This was supposed to be a business related group. If anybody and their aunt will spam all 15k members; thank you, but no, thank you. So I did what any responsible user would do and used the report spam thingy.

Here is what I had hoped to happen; my report is stored somewhere. Other people flags this as well. When a critical number is reached a moderator reviews if the message is really spam and takes the appropriate action.

Here is what happened; an hour later or so I got an e-mail. It said “if you don’t want to receive messages from this person do yak yak yak”. King-size WTF.

1. First of all I had already done that. He should have checked if I did before writing an e-mail.
2. More importantly, he should have checked my profile for a second. It says programmer. So, if I’m a programmer I am supposed to know a thing or two about these computer thingies, right? Clicking, double-clicking, expertise on check boxes and stuff. Telling me how to block a user is the same thing as saying “hey muhuk, you’re an idiot”. Even if we suppose there are such morons¹, you still don’t have to tell it to their face. If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say nothing.

As a result, I got pissed of and sent this tweet:

XING Türkiye Support is clueless. Make sure you know who you’re e-mailing + take a moment to check if your advice has already been applied.

This is not the end of the story though. I received an e-mail from XING Community Manager yesterday. It was a very polite message containing the acknowledgement of both issues². Nothing out of the ordinary at first sight. But wait, the message mentioned my tweet. In the very beginning. Actually the first word was “Twitter”. And it was concluded with something along the lines of “keep sharing your comments”.

Well, of course my comments and ideas are worthless. Especially since I’m not a very active XING user. But don’t miss the important point here: XING basically, via it’s community representative, says “you tweeted a negative tweet about us, but we are cool with that”. Why is it so important?

1. They seem to be really cool about that. That means they understand social web. Conventional thinking is “I’d prefer you told this to me directly”, “we could have solved it between you and me”, “why do you shout, you make me look bad”. I have seen supposedly social media aware brands do this. It doesn’t look good. Trying to silence people is a horrible idea.
2. You can win people easily. Beautiful thing about Internet (and online services in particular) is that no party has too much power over the other. You can’t intimidate someone because she doesn’t like your services and writes about it. On the other hand she can’t do much damage³. So instead of freaking out, try to be nice and convert naysayers to evangelists.

Most of the time complaining customers want to know there is someone who can see things from the right perspective. Someone reasonable, agreeable, fair. Most of the time that’s all that is needed to turn “<your brand> sucks” to “sh*t happens, no big deal”. My perception changed from “clueless” to “hmm, I guess that was a misstep of an individual” to “wow, appereantly XING Türkiye knows social web very well”. And all it took was a simple e-mail⁴. It’s not that difficult.

Kudos to XING for being a good web2.0 citizen.⁵

1: I mean programmers who couldn’t figure out how to use a web GUI. People from other professions might not know these and that’s not necessarily their problem.

2: What more could a user/customer hope other than acknowledgement? The message also contained an apology. But, I personally don’t think brands should apologize to their customers. Especially regarding to freemium services.

3: This is true even for big players like TechCrunch.

4: I bet it’s instantiated from a draft, everybody gets more or less the same message. This makes it even cooler though.

5: And special thanks for making me feel like a jerk. Just kidding, feelings are for losers.

Related posts:

1. A Few Words About Singapore, Lah
2. Sign of a Stupid Programmer
3. Was it the imperialism that made the west rich?

Telvee is a social toy built around the idea of coffee grounds reading. No, it is not a fortunetelling application. Telvee is intentionally dumb in that sense. It generates an image of the remains inside a coffee cup. Looking at this image, users write fortunes for other users’ cups. This is the basic idea.

What if you don’t know anything about coffee reading? Well, we have a 12 step program that… No, no. If you don’t have proper coffee reading skills just make something up. Telvee is after all nothing more than a social toy. I am very passionate about coffee reading. I can’t tell a fortune. But I can drink the coffee, turn the cup and listen to my fortunes. This has worked pretty well for me in real life. We’ll see how it works out on the Internet when telvee is launched.

As you might have guessed telvee is a Django project. I am happy to work on a well organized, clean and well tested (91% coverage) codebase.

What Works?

Basically all the main functions are in place:

• Cup image generated ✔
• You can write fortunes ✔
• You can moderate fortunes (but blocking is broken) ✔
  • Deleting, recovering, liking, unliking…
• You can write comments ✔
• You can delete comments (but blocking is broken) ✔
• Friending works ✔
• You can block users (but it doesn’t have any effect for now, hence broken) ✔
• Invitations work (but, currently hidden from testers) ✔
• Account management works (but, incomplete) ✔

What Needs To Be Done?

Aside from critical functions I haven’t thought of:

• A blog
• Groups
• Improvements on many pages including homepage
• Django goodies that has little to do with frontend experience.

When Will It Be Finished?

Probably never. But I would like to initiate a proper beta this year. And then launch as soon as possible, maybe before summer. It is currently tested by a tiny group of people. I will start sending invites as soon as I decide it’s reasonably embarrasing.

If you would like to try telvee; please leave your e-mail at http://www.telvee.com.

Related posts:

1. I Am Discontinuing Telvee
2. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
3. Working with files in Django – Part 1

I have stumbled upon STATE via sjjh today. Check out the demo.

I wonder what will be possible next? Hopefully not immortality. There are too many cool things to discover before.

No related posts.

This might sound nice at first. If you are pirating music, movies or whatever, and feel guilty, this way you can say I'm paying my tax, therefore my conscience is clear. Pirating is suddenly legit, content is finally free as in free speech. Moreover there is a good sum of money in the Piracy Tax pool now. Yay! We saved the music industry (or content producers in general)! No, you didn’t. You just eased your conscience.

Let’s get real. Suppose you passed the bill of Piracy Tax at the parliament and a good number of people are paying this tax. That’s just one part of the equation. How will this money be distributed? What will determine the relative share between artists? Do we need distributors anymore? Do we even need producers anymore? And most importantly when you cap the total amount of earnings, will this have any negative effects on creativity? And finally which problem exactly is this Piracy Tax solving?

In the comments of Serdar Kuzuloğlu’s post, several people stated that it should be trivial to gather reliable statistics on downloads. This is not true at all. Even if there was a single distributor (I hope we agree this is undesirable) there will be statistical errors. No system is 100% reliable. But HTTP, i.e. web sites are especially not suitable for transactional operations. Aside from this fact, there will likely be a dozen of services. Are you just planning on adding the figures to calculate the final share? How about the differences in these services’ reach? Don’t you think simply adding the figures makes the system easy to game?

Something everybody seems to forget is there will be always piracy a.k.a P2P¹. It would take you to the wrong conclusion to assume everybody is the same. Not everybody is using Windows, not everybody has Flash, there are even people who doesn’t have a graphical browser. Do you even know what a text browser is?² It is not wise to ignore these people because they are the minority. These people are Internet residents, like it or not you are just tourists. They have practically invented the Internet. So please don’t make the mistake of ignoring the possible effects of technologies like tor and the culture of FLOSS.

In any case, statistical errors are unavoidable. I would suggest 3% is an acceptable error margin. Then what happens to the independent artist or the small production company that should have 0.25% and ends up having 0.025% share? Is this fair now? The pirate tax pool would likely benefit the big players and crush the independents. Big players have already been employing portfolio management strategies, independents just can’t do that. It is naive to think Piracy Tax could sweep so called low-quality productions away and elevate finer artists. It will be exactly the opposite.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. (George Bernard Shaw)

Piracy Tax will severe the already severed bonds between the artists (the producers of art) and us (the consumers) even more. When we buy a DVD or CD it is not just bread on the tables. It is also sending the message “I like what you do. Here, I even choose to give my hard earned money willingly to support your art”. Emphasis on willingly and supporting art. It’s not a passive action like listening to the radio. You (consumer) take a conscious step. Your contributions are small materially, but it should mean something to the artist even at the individual level. We need art. It is not just listening to music or whatever. But we need art to compete in the neverending race of civilization. No art, no culture. No culture, no civilization. Lack of civilization is inevitable slavery. So, we need to learn to support our artists willingly and directly. Piracy Tax is an obstacle for this social goal.

What about opting-out? If I opted out will I still be able to use legal download services? If I am not allowed to opt out but I continue pirating³ your download statistics will be further skewed. If this is being done to free the content then why do we have to give up our freedom⁴. If this is being done to increase the profits of content industry… Well, then it makes sense.

If the free market is a bad idea, why don’t we shift the whole economy to a controlled market? With pirate tax in effect, content industry’s income is not only centralized but falls under government control. The government controls the art. I don’t like that idea. Art should be free. In short I don’t think Piracy Tax is the way to go.

What Is My Proposal Then?

I have been thinking hard about Pirate Party and the problem of piracy. The question is not what should we do about piracy? Unless you want to treat the symptoms. The question is how will content industry adapt to the information age? We adapted to information age quite well, didn’t we? Why can’t they do the same? I don’t want to believe they are so stupid that they don’t really know how. As far as I can understand they don’t want to change. Because change has a price. And they don’t want to pay. They want us to pay the price for them stagnating like that. Let’s stop beating around the bush and see it as it is.

Smart artists are already making the move. They let you download their movies and songs for free, and find other channels of monetization. Lots of concerts for example. Not necessarily huge stadium concerts. If you take all those middlemen out of the equation you don’t have to be all that popular. All in all, it is much better than continuously whine about piracy.

My proposal is not to engage ourselves with Piracy Tax⁵. There has to be a better solution. At least a solution that doesn’t necessarily make big players more powerful than they are. Let’s support far-sighted artists who take the steps to adapt new conditions for now. And continue to discuss alternatives.

1: I know piracy doesn’t equal to P2P. It is possible to share content legally via P2P networks. Also P2P is not the only channel you can distribute pirate content. I just think they are interchangeable in the context of this post.

2: It does matter. Let’s not go to the extreme. It would be a waste of time and energy for me to even subscribe to a web based service. Torrents are much easier and flexible for me. And I have a graphical browser with Flash capability.

3: See 2 above.

4: Money can buy freedom, any objections?

5: I would like to remind those who would suggest Piracy Tax as a temporary solution; laws might end up being in effect for too long.

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2

Psychic support is what people are looking for when they expect others to just know their development environment and their code. If one doesn’t supply enough information on the problem, no matter how good a hacker the person on the other end of the conversation, it becomes a silly guessing game. So the following list is actually about avoiding psychic support and similar situations.

What Not To Ask

• Don’t ask to ask! Just ask your question. Don’t ever say “I have a question about X, can anybody help me?“. Even worse is “Hello! Is anyone there?“.
• Don’t ask for competency. It’s unkind to try testing people whether they are worthy of your question or not. This’ll only decrease your chances to get an answer.
• Don’t ask what’s already documented. This is the most frequent and the most disturbing problem in IRC support channels. Django is exceptionally well documented. Nobody wants to parrot docs just because you’re too lazy to read them.

Psychic Support? You’ll Have To Wait… Long.

• Ideally you should supply related code with your question. But it’s understandable for beginners to not know what to paste. Even so it becomes annoying when the person asking the question has a you-dont-need-to-know-that attitude. If you know so much, why are you asking here?
• Don’t paste in the channel. It’s unreadable, I can’t copy & paste it for testing and worst of all you’re flooding the channel. If it’s more than 1 (in writing one) line, use a pasting service.
• When pasting tracebacks always use the plaintext version. Don’t insist it’s plaintext when you have selected it with mouse from an HTML page and copied. Instead use Switch to copy-and-paste view link right next to Traceback header. Django is civilized.

Hit-N-Run

• This is an unsolved mystery. Enter the chat room, send your question, leave as soon as you see it on screen… If you don’t get an answer immediately, don’t get discouraged. If there’s no activity, your message will be noticed when others check their clients¹. If there’s activity and your message gets scrolled, you can repeat your question in reasonable intervals². If you don’t have time to wait for and work through answers, you should postpone your question. Better not waste somebody else’s time for nothing.
• IRC support is for practical problems. So if you are asking a question; please be kind enough to try out the proposed solutions and tell us about the results. Asking the same question again and again, even tough somebody has suggested a solution, won’t help you much. Instead try building on the topic, interact with whoever has joined the conversation and give feedback for their answers.

A Winning Effort Begins With Preparation

• Django runs on Python. Python is a dynamic language. Just fire up the Django shell³ and try out different possibilities. Make this a habit and you’ll see it is much more effective to run a couple of commands than asking someone else to guess their result for you.
• Again, read the relevant docs before you ask. Don’t expect the title of a documentation page to be your exact question. Just read whatever you can find on subject. If people see that you’ve done your homework they will be willing to give you more attention.
• Google your question. If your question is generic enough there is probably a blog post about it somewhere. StackOverflow has quite an impressive repertoire of Django related questions as well. In fact I suggest you to use SO for your non-trivial questions.

1: Some of us have work to do you know.

2: Reasonable depends on the number of messages and the number of joins/leaves. In my opinion you should wait 5 minutes at least.

3: Use manage.py shell command to enter the Django shell.

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2