virtual

Virtual tables - Used in C++.

impedance

Impedance extends the concept of resistance to AC circuits.

dyn

dynamic languages strike back, the latest blog rant by Steve Yegge.

trees

Tree Listening. An experiment where they hook up sensors to trees, and turn the things they sense into music. Beautiful.

unit testing c++

Building projects with Ruby on Rails made me a TDD (Test Driven Development) convert, and now that I'm working with C++, I just need to be doing unit testing with C++. Marsyas, the library that I'm working with has regression testing but doesn't yet have unit testing. I'm evaulating different testing frameworks.

A great resource that evaulates all the C++ testing frameworks is Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle by Noel Llopis. It's a well written article that goes into great depth about the different frameworks. After reading it, I am leaning toward CxxTest.

Dr. Dobbs Journal has an excellent article about CxxTest.

Here is a page listing all the C/C++ testing frameworks.

CxxTest
CppTest
TUT
CppUnit
cutee

2point

From a recent geekbrief.tv episode

2pointhome.com
iheartswitch.com

mccarthy

Rough transcript of John McCarthy answering questions for a class.

web 2.0

Explaining web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

I'm waiting for web 3.1415 myself.

victoria festivals

Festivals in Victoria this summer.

One that I'm looking forward to is VEMF, the Victora Electronic Music Festival. I want to get my stuff together to perform in 2009.

electronics

Places to buy electronic parts in Canada.

It looks like Newark.com and Digikey might be my best bets for buying components.

Now, I just have to figure out what to build first. Something simple, from plans that someone else has made, so I can get my feet wet again. I miss the smell of solder and the feeling of building circuits, can't wait to get started again!

sicp

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a so so cool video lecture series at MIT by Hal Abelson and




Sweet.

openspace + voice

I was at a really interesting performance at Open Space here in Victoria recently.



First of all, Kathy Kennedy led us around the city on a soundwalk. This was a different kind of soundwalk though, because each of us carried a FM radio around tuned to the local campus radio station which was broadcasting some ambient drone music.



Kathy was also broadcasting a signal on a little pirate radio transmitter that she had setup on top of the building. As we walked around the streets, our radios would randomly pick up the two stations, sometimes flicking briefly into other stations. People looked at this crowd of strange people carrying radios and humming with curiosity.

It would be cool to do this as more of a performance piece, perhaps we could spread out through the downtown, meeting up randomly, music interleaving. The radios were interesting because the buildings would distort the signal, but the other stations on the dial did interfere with the experiment. Perhaps we should do it with a less populated frequency on the dial? Perhaps there would be people walking around who would be transmitters, and others who would be receivers?

Could we do this with digital media? Live singers? Try to find where the singers are performing by using your own radio to locate their transmitter, and then as more people find the singers, the louder the amplification would be?

Later that night Christine Duncan gave us a wonderful performance of her 8 octave vocal range, with clicks and barks and whoops, poetry and music combined. Hexaphone, or rather four members of Hexaphone also performed a variety of works.



One of my favorite was a performance of a John Cage piece where two performers would play a game of chance, in this case, Snakes and Ladders, and the game board was mic'd and amplified just below the point of feedback. Very fun and reminded me of John Cage's work with the I Ching.

spectra

Color rendering of spectra - in C!

therm

I want to plot a temperature plot for the FFTPNG code I'm writing, here are some resources:




Wavelength and Colour
converting colour and wavelength at gamedev.net
How can I transform wavelength data into RGB data when using the Image Processing Toolbox?
Spectral and XYZ Color Functions
Colormap question


FORTRAN code for Approximate RGB values for Visible Wavelengths


Rendering Spectra


The best resource of them all was Color Science at midnightkite.com

power spectrum

I've been working with the PowerSpectrum code inside of Marsyas, and this led me to read up about Spectral Density on Wikipedia. The PowerSpectrum calculates the Spectral Density of a Spectrum inside Marsyas.

This led me to the very interesting topic of Colours of Noise. I'd heard of white noise and pink noise, but never of Green Noise, or Azure Noise. Wow, my mind has just been blown.

ftp

FTP directory for the Create project at USCB

Video and info about Point Line Cloud, an album from Curtis Roads (wikipedia article).

xv

xv
download xv
xv jumbo patches
xv jumbo patches readme
Download Jasper - necessary to get those xv jumbo patches working

stl

STL Programmers Reference Guide.

gdb

Needed to examine a coredump with gdb for the first time in quite some time today.

Such a big change going first from Ruby for the past two years, to Actionscript 3.0, where you need to compile, to C++, which feels pretty gritty!

make

Working with Makefiles. It has been a while, and I needed to brush up on how to declare and use variables:

To declare:

LIBS = -lpng -lfreetype -lpthread -lasound -lmad -lvorbisfile

To use:

tutorial: tutorial.o
    g++  -O3 -Wall -fPIC   -o tutorial  tutorial.o /usr/sness/marsyas/lib/libmarsyas.a /usr/sness/lib/libpngwriter.a ${LIBS}