Monday, April 28, 2008

lisp



deer






So cute!



hp15c







nice.


hp15c




I love my old hp15c calculator. I just got new batteries for it, and it still rocks. RPN - Reverse Polish Notation.



Sunday, April 27, 2008

math



book




From the aforementioned Lisp meeting blog post:

He points out that Ruby on Rails would never have taken off without the excellent book.

So true. Need book write now.



lisp



zed misses the point




Zed Shaw completely misses the point about, Literate Programming. He says that you should have your english and your code in two separate files, and then combine them with a compiler. This is exactly wrong, you want your description of the algorithm right next to the algorithm itself, so that the two don't diverge when you change your code.

When I program, I think about the story that I want to tell, and then I write a small outline or paragraph about what I how I want the code to tell the story, then I write the code, and then I write more documentation about the code.

It would be really nice though if I could just hide the story like collapsing an outline in Emacs, so that I could focus on just the code when I want, or just the documentation, but having the two in different files is just wrong.



blogger adding page elements




I was trying to add a flickr badge and etsy links for my friend Katrina on her Silver Selkie Studio blog, which is hosted on blogger.

I was trying to do it the old-school hardcore way of editting the HTML template directly, but kept getting error messages like:


"The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup."


and


"The reference to entity "zg_person_id" must end with the ';' delimiter."


It turns out that you don't want to edit the HTML directly anymore, instead you want to go to the Layout tab, then select "Page Elements", and then click on "Add a Page Element".

Select "HTML/JavaScript Add third-party functionality or other code to your blog."

And just paste in the code you get. It looks like they do a bunch of sanity checks on your data to make sure it's valid XML, unlike if you paste it directly into the "Edit HTML" link.



literate programming




I just wanted to say that I'm a big fan of Literate Programming, just like Don Knuth. I think that we should write programs to be both a conversation between the author and the computer as well as a conversation between the author and other humans.





knuth




An interview with Don Knuth. I'm really really enjoying reading my set of The Art of Computer Programming. Now I really want to buy Concrete Math by Knuth, and Numerical Recipes.

What is going on! sness is turning into a math guy!



wikiped



liliput




tiny, cheap laptops. sweet with linux.



centre



Saturday, April 26, 2008

2.0 done




cnet says web 2.0 is over. i'm waiting for web 3.0.



silver selkie






I just helped my friend Katrina build a website for her business Silver Selkie Studio, it's all dynamic and Ruby on Rails, with gorgeous graphics from my mom, Fern Ness.

Rails was perfect for this project, I used attachment_fu for doing the pictures, the more I use attachment_fu, the more I like it. This time I didn't use S3 storage, but instead used a local file store, and that worked great.



math



Friday, April 25, 2008

octave




Plotting a simple function with Octave


%first, we create a function with
function [y]=f(x)
y=sin(x);
end

%then we create an array with numbers; for a higher resolution we use 0.1-steps:
x=0:0.1:2*pi;

%feed the function:
[y]=f(x);

%plot it:
plot(x,y);grid;



bibtex



WHAT THE FUTURE SOUNDED LIKE

WHAT THE FUTURE SOUNDED LIKE

Demonstration of the Moog Minimoog

Fairlight CMI demonstrated by Greg Sneddon

rspec



focus




Steve Yegge talks about focus-follows-mouse on OSX, and all the pain he went through trying to implement it.

For me, this just shows another reason why I will stick with Linux. Freedom to do what I want to do.



qhe




Quantum Hall Effect found in new kind of matter. Very cool.



Thursday, April 24, 2008

70,000 years ago




2000 humans, almost wiped out, but survived. wild.



lang



ms




ms pacman hold strategy - a neat story.



centos mysql gem




To install the mysql gem on Centos, try the following:


gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/ --with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib/mysql/ --with-mysql-include=/usr/include/mysql/


From datamapper group on google groups.


swhx




swhx
screenweaveHX

A toolkit to let you write desktop applications with haXe and Flash, kinda like Adobe AIR, but better.



Tuesday, April 22, 2008

exp



negative numbers



petra4








petra3








petra2








petra










normal




Normal is all about context.



permutations with repetition




A little Perl snippet that generates all the permutations with repetition allowed, using recursion:


#!/usr/bin/perl
$max_length = 3;
@collection = ('A','B','C');

generate('');

sub generate {
my ($val) = $_[0];
my ($add) = $_[1];
$val .= $add;

my $item;

if (length($val) > $max_length - 1) {
print "$val \n";
} else {
foreach $item (@collection) {
generate($val,$item);
}
}
}


Generates:

AAA
AAB
AAC
ABA
ABB
ABC
ACA
ACB
ACC
BAA
BAB
BAC
BBA
BBB
BBC
BCA
BCB
BCC
CAA
CAB
CAC
CBA
CBB
CBC
CCA
CCB
CCC



permutations



petra




slecht lands from petra.



brain enhancement



science 2.0




science 2.0 - an article about the new kinds of scientific collaboration made possible by web 2.0 technologies.



rails




Creating more with less with Rails - An important part about Rails is that there is definitely a "sweet spot", if you stray outside that sweet spot, you might be better off hand coding your site.



humane interface




The Humane Interface - all about the rules of design by Jef Raskin. He's a bit too opinionated for my tastes, but has some interesting things to say.



merbly



Building an app using rspec and merb. I've been using test/spec exclusively, but for the new app I'm building for Orchive I think I might try rspec again. I'm also going to do it all RESTfully.


comic




ordinary comics - A new webcomic that looks pretty quirky and neat.



Monday, April 21, 2008

accessibility




aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired.



mod_neko




mod_neko is a way to run Neko applications (written in haXe) on an Apache webserver.



rip



Re: Robert Henke answers question about the Ableton Live Voc

Sunday, April 20, 2008

in/out




in/out - A new internal app at 37signals. moderately interesting.



jssh




jssh - a TCP/IP JavaScript Shell Server for Mozilla

Funky!



flickrfs




flickrfs - Use flickr as a filesystem on Linux. Neato, I wonder if there's a similar thing for picasa?



Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 1)

twenty-five



intel



ikea



Saturday, April 19, 2008

Thursday, April 17, 2008

20



mir




mir2008 - The ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval.

Vancouver, October 30-31, 2008.

Nice!



icad




ICAD - International Community for Auditory Display



deprec



deprec - Recipes for Capistrano.


Tuesday, April 15, 2008

don't blame the elevator




Still, he now sees that it wasn't so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won't blame the elevator.



git




Git - The Workflow.



bad c




Don't use pointers to recast structs in C. Bad bad bad.



pottery









Mussels and More - Some really neat pottery from up the coast. A dear friend told me about this, wouldn't they make amazing serving dishes?


git



quote




"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken



Monday, April 14, 2008

free beats




Free high-quality beats from beatmatch.info. Sweet.



mod_rails




mod_rails for Apache. This could potentially be really sweet for deploying small Rails sites. I'll have to check it out after it matures a bit.



ec2 persistant storage




Persistent storage for EC2. Nice. One of the last pieces of the EC2 puzzle.



NIME




NIME 2008 - 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NEW INTERFACES FOR MUSICAL EXPRESSION



Sunday, April 13, 2008

Saturday, April 12, 2008

crossmark




Crossmark is a language for specifying markup, used by the OLPC project.



interesting DSLs




A couple of interesting DSLs

I love the one by Alan Kay in this article where the programming for the TCP/IP interface is exactly the diagram from the spec:


+-------------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| 00 01 02 03 | 04 05 06 07 | 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 | 16 17 18 | 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 |
+-------------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| version | headerSize | typeOfService | length |
+-------------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| identification | flags | offset |
+---------------------------+-------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| timeToLive | protocol | checksum |
+---------------------------+-------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+
| sourceAddress |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| destinationAddress |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+




time zones



dual core arduino






Dual-core Arduino - Great for adding more I/O lines to a project.


Friday, April 11, 2008

ccrma




Just got CCRMA working on the laptop with the realtime kernel and madwifi under Fedora 8. Used the info that I had posted earlier on my blog to figure it out. :)

Also got Marsyas working and playing sounds. I decided to just totally remove the pulseaudio system, it's cool, but I'm not sure if it's ready for primetime, I had major problems with it.

I'm going to use jack instead, and see about hooking up Marsyas with jackd.



mir workshop




A really interesting looking MIR Workshop in 2008. Man, I cannot believe what a cool field I'm getting into.



fir



git




the thing about git. I'm switching to git, just as soon as I'm done these current projects and have some more space in my brain.



sample rate




To convert a mp3 file to a wav file with a different sample rate, for example on my laptop with an Intel chip that plays only at 48KHz:


mplayer -af volume=0,resample=48000:0:1 -ao pcm:waveheader:file="kb.wav" kb.mp3


Another source for info is here at tamu.





ten



max mathews




Max Mathews - Grandfather of techno.



srpms



mogrify




To convert all the images in a directory from png to jpg:


mogrify -format jpg *.png


Part of ImageMagick.


Thursday, April 10, 2008

computing history



yui




Starting with a sound structure ? predictable HTML layouts using the YUI. I use the YUI Grids CSS for all my layout needs now. There are still some issues, like that a yui-gd can't contain a yui-gb, but it's still much better than trying to code things by hand.



ruby




Ruby's not ready - An article about why Python is more ready for prime time than Ruby.




phobos








Wednesday, April 09, 2008

robyn



Dan Morris




Dan Morris - one of the guys behind the previously mentioned MySong program. Doing neat stuff.



Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches

chi2008




chi2008 - focuses on the balance between art and science, design and research, practical motivation and the process that leads the way to innovative excellence. It is about balance in our rapidly evolving field, the balance between individuals and groups, collocated and remote, stationary and mobile, in both our local and global communities.

CHI 2008 will be held in Florence, Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and home to great artists and scientists.




mysong




MySong - Automatic Accompaniment for Vocal Melodies

I just saw this on geekbrief.tv, it's a neat new system from Microsoft Research where you sing a song, and the program provides piano accompaniment to it. Neat!



Tuesday, April 08, 2008

oz




Oz programming language.

Oz contains most of the concepts of the major programming paradigms, including logic, functional (both lazy and eager), imperative, object-oriented, constraint, distributed, and concurrent programming. Oz has both a simple formal semantics (see chapter 13 of the book mentioned below) and an efficient implementation



dataflow



landprint








appengine




Google gets into the application hosting game with appengine, a way for you to run your applications on Google's infrastructure. Cool doesn't begin to describe how cool this is.



space navigator



Monday, April 07, 2008

linq




LINQ - Language Integrated Query (LINQ, pronounced "link") is a Microsoft .NET Framework component that adds native data querying capabilities to .NET languages using a syntax reminiscent of SQL.

Wacky and neat!




flexbuilder



loops



lair




Wow! Adobe releases Air runtime for Linux. Sweet.



11




11 lessons of innovation from Blizzard.



better_partials




better_partials is a plugin for Rails that gives you much nicer partial syntax.



Sunday, April 06, 2008

plant wall








complexity



echonest API




Echonest is a webservice API to enrich your software's understanding of musical recordings.



francis collins




Francis Collins belives in God. This is the guy behind the public human genome sequencing effort. Neat.



ted nelson



bextract




bextract just got new documentation.



debugger



acts_as_node




The acts_as_node plugin for Rails is a interesting way to show relationships between data.



life is a binary search



Thursday, April 03, 2008

multicore



twenty



Dj Destruction - Korg Zero8 Review

svn




I was getting the following warnings when trying to commit to a svn repository:


svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct


I found the solution here:


export LC_ALL=C




synth




synthmusician.com is a website to help synthesizer artists to connect with each other and their fans.



Wednesday, April 02, 2008