The Leaning Chair

I found this really nice chair from designer Simone Harbert as part of the student exhibition of her design College in Germany. It's part of a series called Parasites & Hybrids where the chairs, like leeches, utilize an external entity to complete them. I can't read German but thats what I imagine it says.



(from MoCo Loco)

Radiant Dark Design Exhibit

The design related events in Toronto continue even after the INS and Come Up To My Room have finished. The Radiant Dark Exhibit is going on at the Burroughs Building at 639 Queen St. West. incidentally, the giant Queen St. fire that happened last week was the same day that the exhibit was supposed to open. Due to the reduced number of visitors caused but the fire the exhibit will now be open for longer than originally planed, until March 2nd. That means this weekend is your last chance!

Solar image dancing to Goldfrapp

This is a bit old but its really beautiful.


Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

If you're into creating music at all you might want to check out Vimeo where the person who created this visualization describes how it was done. It went completely over my head but maybe it'll make sense to someone more familiar with it.

I Drink Your Milkshake

One of my favorite parts of the move There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson is the part where Daniel Day Lewis' character is describing to Eli how he has already taken all the oil out of the his land. He describes this by relating it to how one might drink someone else's milkshake using a large straw. Good one.

Then this Saturday SNL had a great parody of that scene. Its about a show on the food network called "I Drink Your Milkshake", hosted by Daniel Plainsview and his son H.W. It is the funniest thing ever. It also has references to No Country For Old Men (I haven't seen it so I don't know what they are referencing in particular) as well as Juno. Take a look at the clip below.

Come Up To My Room recap

So the Come Up To My Room event that I had mentioned in a post a few days ago is now over. I went to the Gladstone on Saturday during the day to check it out and I was pleasantly surprised. There were some rooms there that I really liked and others that I was not really that fond of. I took a few pictures (but not many) that I'll put up as well.

I just want to briefly mention a few things that stick out in my mind of all the things that I saw there.

The room done by the designer DB Johnson was by far my favorite of all the rooms there. The artist is "a self-taught cabinetmaker and artisan of furnishings and objects of wood". This definately shows in the room that he designed which is pictured below. You can't see much because there were too many people there to be able to take a good picture.



Basically the room has a giant nest (you can see it in the picture) that was resting on a part of a tree that was brought into the room. The nest is obviously the bed and there was a small ladder against the wall that people could use to climb up in there. According a friend of the designer who was sitting around when I went to visit, the nest can comfortably hold up to two people.

The nest itself is made out of random branches and pieces of found cloth very similar to what a a giant bird the size of a human would make its nest out of. Having this nest-bed elevated off the ground freed up some space in the otherwise tiny room. The space under the nest was using as a sitting area. There was a bench there with a small table facing into the room. The table held a small bowl of soapy water, a shaving brush, some shaving cream and a razor. Against the wall opposite was a much larger desk, also beautifully made. Down into the little space left in the room (where all those people seem to be walking towards, is a tall shelf with decorative items everywhere. The lights in the room are fairly dim and there are feathers hung on the walls and above the desk.

There was just something about the room, the moody atmosphere that it evoked or the earthy smell of it from all the oiled wooden objects in the rooms that really made it special. Where all the other rooms has thoughtful placement and meticulous construction of their items, this room was completely different. It was organic in construction where the nest kind of just build itself. There were no blueprints and measuring tapes, carefully chosen patterns and textures. Like the overflowing ashtray in the corner or the leftover mess from a morning shave this room seemed real. Some bird-loving naturalist created it but not to be mass produced and consumed but by simply as a byproduct of living in a small room of that size for a long enough time.

Again, it was so very different from all the other rooms which may be why it left such an impact. But really I feel like its more because most interior designs are venturing away from that kindof organic-feeling and chaotic design that seems to have a makeshift and DIY feel. They are all about clean lines and smooth curves.

Anyway, enough about that. There was another room that I really liked by Jacques Bilodeau. It was a simple white room with a long log-like seating. The seating looked like log but curving, slightly snaking against the wall of the room. It had depressions along it that were made to mold around the individual that sits on it. In the middle of the room was a pole that was covered strands of what looked like wire. Most of the strands had their black covering on but certain strands, every here and there, were stripped of their covering and a clear wire underneath exposed.
The pole looked strange, like the wires were hair in a head of really thick hair. It had a strange and dark affect, especially with the mirrored floors and the dark, tar covered, transformed log-like seating bench next to it. I liked it.

There were many other things there that I liked as well. I was walking by Magic Pony around a month ago and I had seen a really cool couch in their font window display. It was a really old-looking antique couch with artificial mushrooms stitched onto it. I liked it a lot. In the room that Magic Pony did at the Gladstone they had a similar armchair that I took a picture of.
I really liked another room done up by group of people called This Is Collective. Their room included a bed under an animal trap. The bed itself also had very many small holes which you can look through. Each one depicts a scene. I didn't get to look through all the holes in the bed, but I saw some good ones: another miniature room, a scene right out of Saturday Night fever, a movie projected on one side of the wall .. etc. It was fun.
There are some other images that I took while I was there, not to mention other designs that were displayed out in the open space. When I have some time in the future I'll post them up.

Come up to my room

In my last post I mentioned the Interior Design Show that is happening this weekend at the Exhibition Place. Well to coincide with that the Gladstone Hotel is also having their annual design event called Come up to my room. I'll be honest and say that I've actually never been to one of these events before but I have heard a lot about them (they're covered in both the Eye in the Now every year). They have a good reputation of being very eclectic and innovative so I'm going to try and hit it up this year.

Basically what they do is they get a bunch of designers to come in and design a room in the hotel as well as some public spaces. I've seem some very nice pictures in the past and it looks promising. It is not just about design but rather the mix between design and art. As you can imagine this involves interesting materials and techniques used to create the basic functional furniture as well as some very unique themes for the overall rooms.

For those of you not down with design there is also an Ice Festival happening up in the Bloor-Yorkville area. There is going to be an ice carving competition as well as an underwater scene created using ice sculptures. There will also be lounges set up for drinking (to keep you warm in the cold weather) and for, you guessed it, ice wine.

Interior Design Show 2008

I didn't find out about this until a few days ago but there is an Interior Design Show happening here in Toronto at the Exhibition Place. Tomorrow Thursday February 20th is the Gala Night and then on Friday is the day for all the professions to come and check it out. Saturday and Sunday are for the public (yay!).

I'm going to definately try and go to this. The tickets can be bought at the door and they're around $18 and if you buy online ahead of time they're $16 (assuming there is no service charge or something). If you are interested in going to some of the workshops then it'll be $35 which includes admission and all. If you decide to go on Saturday then you might be interested in the two seminars that are being offered for free. Be sure to go early if you do because space is limited and it will be first-come first-serve.

Check out this page to get a list of all the exhibitors that are going to be attending the show.

RESTful Web Services

I recently started reading the O'Reilly book on RESTful web services, as the title suggest, by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby. The book is good, easy to read and pretty entertaining. I'm really bad with technical books because I get really bored really easily so I was pretty surprised that I've gotten as far as I have (which Isn't very far).

Ok now I'm going to go ahead and make a complaint about resource-oriented architecture. Please be advised that I have not read very far into the book so maybe this question of mine gets answered somewhere along the line. Also feel free to put me in my place if you think I'm terribly wrong.

Firstly, lets go ahead and give the definition of RESTful services as given by R&R. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. A RESTful web service is one where resources that are being sent back and forth in the service are defined and addressed in a very specific way. In particular, when a request is being made from a service it should correspond to a HTTP method that defines the action being performed on an associated resource at the server. The resource being affected should be identified using the URI. Those are basically the two main principals: actions must be associated with HTTP defined methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD) and resources being affected must be identified in the URI. Simple enough.

In fact it is so simple that even I can go ahead and provide a simple example for you. Imagine I have a web service that provides to you information about books that I've read. By information I mean my comments on what I thought of the book.

Now imagine that the client interacts with my service in the following way:

• To get information about a particular book the client makes an HTTP GET request to the URI http://exmaple.com/getBook/. The body of the request contains some xml with the ISBN of the book that they're interested in. The response will be an xml document with the the comments about the requested book
• To update information about a particular existing book, the client makes an HTTP GET request to the URI http://example.com/updateBook/. The body of the request, again, contains some xml with the ISBN of the book that they're updating as well as the comments they want to replace with
• To delete information about a particular book, client makes and HTTP GET request to the URI http://example.com/deleteBook. The body contains the ISBN of the book they want to delete
• To add a new book, the clients makes an HTTP GET request to the URI http://example.com/addBook. The body of the request contains some xml with ISBN of the book being added and some comments that will be associated with it.

So that sums up our current service. This is not a RESTful service. It does not identify the resource (the book) that is affected in the URI, not does it use the HTTP methods to do corresponding actions. Lets make this a RESTful service then. We'll change it to do the following:

• To get information about a particular book the client makes an HTTP GET request to the URI http://exmaple.com/book/[Book ISBN]/. The body of the request doesn't have to contain anything. It can be empty. The response will be an xml document with the comments about the requested book
• To update information about a particular existing book, the client makes an HTTP PUT request to the URI http://example.com/book/[Book ISBN]/. The body of the request will simply contain the comments that we are replacing with
• To delete information about a particular book, client makes and HTTP DELETE request to the URI http://example.com/book/[Book ISBN]. The body of the request doesn't have to contain anything
• To add a new book, the clients makes an HTTP POST request to the URI http://example.com/book/. The body of the request contains the comments that the new book should have as well as the ISBN that should be assigned to it

Okay. So that was pretty simplistic and straightforward. We converted the URIs so that they are the same when referencing a single type of resource. It also changes to that when there is a resource that is to be addressed it is done so in the URI rather than using the request body. Lastly, instead of exposing new URIs for each action to be performed on a resource we take advantage of preexisting HTTP methods that meant to be used for this very same purpose.

Excellent idea. Sounds really great! But wait, what if you don't have a single resource that you're addressing each time? Does REST still work? For example, what if you have a service that allows a user to use a fat client in a bank to create new accounts for people. The database that stores all this information is a national database located miles away and there a web service that the fat client interacts with.

So here lies the problem. I imagine that an account can be a resource. That makes total sense. But what if the workflow is such that it splits the account creation into multiple pieces. First the user is required to enter their personal information, then their employment information, then information about their demographics or something like that. Each time you're using the service to address the same resource, the bank account, but passing different information. Sure you could create the resource at first and every subsequent interaction with the service you are simply updating the existing resource. It would work, but it doesn't really seem like the most elegant way to solve such a problem.

In fact, this problem would exist for all wizard-like forms that a user would use for both a service and/or a web page (after all, a web page is just a service but with a different response type: a html document). Consider a search service which lets you accumulate criteria using subsequent requests on the server and then search returning to the client all the results. That wouldn't work though because then we're not stateless anymore. The server has to know about the client and keep track of their accumulated criteria. How do you solve a problem such as this?

Anyway, I was just thinking off the top of my head. I have a feeling that this next chapter that I read will answer all my questions anyway or rather declare that you can't do something like that with RESTful services, you're better off using something stateful. But these are real-world problems that I've encountered before where a resource creation is done piecemeal and the client cannot retain all the information on its own. This forces the server to become stateful and there doesn't seem to be way around it.

If you know how to address a problem like that, feel free to let me know cause right now I can't think of anything.

In summary, the book is good. It didn't put me to sleep and it actually make me want to think about how I could change things that I've seen designed to be more RESTful.

Cute plushies at the Monster Factory

Check out this website called Monster Factory. I have a soft spot in my heart for all things soft and cuddly and I just LOVED all the cute characters that they have there. They have an online store where you can buy some of the characters though they're a bit pricey. You can also go down and pick them up from the Monster Factory studio during their special hours which is located right on King St West.

The Road By Cormac McCarthy

I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I started this book sometime last week and after being unable to read the book due to work and travel during the workday, I decided to just finish it off over the weekend without and distractions. An what a great idea it was! The book was a great read. Don't worry, no spoilers below.

The story is about a father and a son in a post-apocalyptic landscape of North-America. The boy, born after some unknown disastrous event that has almost destroyed all of civilization knows nothing about earth as it was before. For this young boy there is nothing to find joy and happiness. Everything is black and burnt, covered in ash and the sun is shrouded in a great cloud of darkness. Their lives are filled with fear of death due to starvation, cold, and the threat of groups cannibals roaming the burnt landscape for food. The father's main goal is to make sure that his son is safe, that is his only drive in his otherwise hopeless life.

The most touching part of the story is the love of the father for his child. It is his only will to live and his drive to make sure he is well and safe.

They writing is very minimal but that somehow makes all the imagery so very vivid. It paints a horrid picture of the things the two have to endure and the horrors that they see along the way. There are corpses along the road that they are following that the father cannot prevent the boy from seeing. The face death every day, a lot more exposure to it than any boy of that age should every have to experience.

I also heard that there will be making a movie out of this book very soon where Viggo Mortensen will play the father. I love Viggo Mortensen so I'm really looking forward to it. I don't know who will be directing this movie yet but I am very hopeful. So much could be done with this story!