TOKI WOKI. 

I’m big, now.

My “anniver­sary” intro

It’s been five years (this mon­day) since Google added the abil­ity to sim­ply chat inside Gmail and to store your chat his­tory, just like your reg­u­lar e-mail dis­cus­sions. This poster is a cel­e­bra­tion of that, plus a big high-five to my “chat pal” (who hope­fully received my pack­age on time), plus a tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­i­cal look at what we wrote dur­ing these years.

Let’s make history

Back to the chat his­tory thing… I remem­ber being pretty happy when Google announced it, mainly because I knew I’d use it for later ref­er­ence, archiv­ing links and thoughts had become much easier.

Here’s a copy of the announce­ment they made:

Chat with your friends from right inside Gmail. There’s no need to load a sep­a­rate pro­gram or look up new addresses. It’s just one click to chat with the peo­ple you already email, as well as any­one on the Google Talk net­work. And now you can even save and search for chats in your Gmail account.

So it’s been five years. And I’ve chat­ted quite a lot; mainly with one guy, my buddy Renaud. We chat­ted around 2,800 dif­fer­ent dis­cus­sions so I thought there might be some inter­est­ing data to dig in these archives… So I dug.

But dig­ging thou­sands of dis­cus­sions is not an easy task, so I had to take a look on the tech side of things.

Join the tech side of the force

Before dig­ging, I had to retrieve all the dis­cus­sions we had, in an easy-to-analyse for­mat. I used Gmail’s offline fea­ture: apply­ing a new label to our con­ver­sa­tions and locally sync­ing this label. For some unknown rea­son it would crash on Google Chrome so I had to use Mozilla Fire­fox. When sync­ing was done I got a pretty big file in my “Google Gears for Fire­fox” direc­tory.

Cool thing is, Google Gears stores data as SQLite data­bases, so I fired up Lita in order to under­stand what the struc­ture was like… Things looked a bit messy but I even­tu­ally found every­thing that would inter­est me; and it was in the “MessagesFT_content” table. Here’s the query I ran:

SELECT c1Body FROM MessagesFT_content WHERE c0Subject LIKE '%Chat%'

Almost cool. The query still returned a bunch of HTML code, our names, and other use­less crap. So I fired up Flash Builder, imported the SQLite file and wrote a few AS3 lines, in order to grab the results and fil­ter them with reg­u­lar expres­sions. Bang: plain text! Oh, this use­less AIR app is Open­Source, by the way.

Now that the data was clean and ready to be ana­lyzed I had to find a cheap or free way to do it. I chose Prim­i­tive Word Counter, not because it’s per­fect but rather because it’s very sim­ple and could han­dle the large amount of data I was going to feed it (some other apps sim­ply crashed)…

Run­ning it gave me the most used words and phrases, I only picked the most inter­est­ing (at least to me) and launched InDesign.

A cel­e­bra­tion poster

I decided to go for an A1 poster, mostly focused on those words and phrases but with a tech twist to it. I kept it all secret, got it printed, and sent it to my pal… Happy fifth Google-talk-history-enabled anniver­sary to him; and to all of you out there that use it on a daily basis!

When I moved in I bought an IKEA Ramvik table and while trav­el­ling this sum­mer I had an idea (don’t ask why): dec­o­rate its top with Lego bricks used as pix­els. Here are the steps I went through. If you don’t care about those steps and want to see a nice time-lapse video, scroll to the end of the article!

Lego bricks

First things first. What are the Lego brick sizes and col­ors avail­able? Oddly enough this ques­tion is not that eas­ily answered. Prob­a­bly because Lego’s site is crappy, or because nobody really cares… I even­tu­ally found Brick­ipedia which hap­pens to be a much richer resource than the offi­cial ones. Every­thing I was look­ing for was there: the Lego “unit” is 8 mil­lime­ters and the color palette is pretty sim­ple.

Table specs

Know­ing my table size I had var­i­ous options, depend­ing on the “pixel size” I’d choose. Of course the num­ber of bricks (and the price) would also vary. So I cre­ated a dynamic spread­sheet on Google Docs that’d do the cal­cu­la­tions for me… Here it is, with all the options pos­si­ble (French, sorry).

iframe: <a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AmyvU-n2aOBpdG5oNUN6UW0xcUJ4a2E3eXFrTTJIVnc&amp;hl=en&amp;output=html&amp;widget=true">https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AmyvU-n2aOBpdG5oNUN6UW0xcUJ4a2E3eXFrTTJIVnc<span class="amp">&amp;</span>hl=en<span class="amp">&amp;</span>output=html<span class="amp">&amp;</span>widget=true</a>

I chose the 4x4 option, quite cheap and still offer­ing a cool num­ber of pixels.

Design

36x16 pix­els of free­dom, that’s it. I tried lots of dif­fer­ent designs, from lo-fi pho­tos to pixel-art draw­ings. I decided to go for a Heavy Oblique Futura.

Actual size:

Look­ing good.

The Lego palette

I set my type to white, on a black back­ground. The anti-aliasing process cre­ates gray-scale pix­els to smooth the curves, which is great, but Lego bricks aren’t avail­able in all col­ors! To have a real­is­tic pre­view of what it would look like I had to cre­ate a Pho­to­shop Color Table match­ing Lego’s gray-scales (if you’re inter­ested, just ping me [UPDATE: here they are]). Here’s a com­par­i­son between Photoshop’s default gray-scales (left) and Lego’s palette (right):

You may notice that Lego’s black is a lit­tle bit light and the grays are yellowish.

Time to order bricks!

Already? Nope, not that fast. Before order­ing I had to know exactly what to order, that means count­ing the pix­els. Well, I’m not this kind of guy. I’m a devel­oper; I hate repet­i­tive chores, you know.

So I fired up Flash Builder and came up with Palet­te­Counter a sim­ple, Open­Source, app to count pix­els of each color. I also added some kind of “assem­bly instruc­tions gen­er­a­tor” to help us build it. Handy.

Time to order!

Really? Yup. I placed an order on lego.com’s Pick A Brick and received it a cou­ple of weeks later. Yay!

Let’s do this

I’m not going to describe the process (that hap­pened this sat­ur­day), just have a look at this time-lapse vid. 1020 pics shot in about an hour, yummy. Thanks to Céline and Julie for help­ing out!

I talked about the logo here and there and now, here are the EPs! Grab them dig­i­tally or phys­i­cally.

You know you want that.

Yep, we cooked some!

Two amaz­ing artists I dis­cov­ered recently.

Sol LeWitt

Ellsworth Kelly

L’album est sorti le 31 mai mais il n’est pas trop tard pour en parler…

La boîte à musiques — Bar­cella.

Fais un cadeau à tes oreilles, l’ami !

This is how the Adobe AIR Chal­lenge (that took place in Paris this week-end) looked like: lots of young and fresh folks ready to spend 24 hours build­ing an AIR app.

Pretty happy the 3 apps I sup­ported all made it to the podium and can’t wait to play with Dig­i­tas’ Flickr app! Nice job, fellows.

See pics at Flickr, vids at Vimeo and wait for the apps: they should be out really soon.

The Adobe AIR Chal­lenge will begin tomor­row at 3pm in Paris, I hap­pen to be a part of the jury so I will have to review and judge all of the 15 apps made by the 15 2-member teams.

If you’re inter­ested fol­low the #air24h hash­tag on Twit­ter and watch the event (there will be a live broad­cast online)! A Flickr group also has been set up.

Make sure to also down­load and test the apps where they’re done!