hackety.org is a website for artful computer hacking. they're interested in how hacking weaves into life

just read about this on the toplap list :
Clojure was developed by architect / programmer Rich Hickey who has worked on projects such as scheduling, automation, election displays, fingerprinting, audio analysis, machine listening.

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection."

DrupalCon was held recently in Barcelona. I didn't make it this year. the schedule looked good though, and from all reports it was the best drupalcon ever (as it is each year!!). there's a wrap up post on the drupal site with links to some of the slide presentations, videos of the sessions on archive.org - search for drupalconbarcelona2007 tag, or try the mirror site.

drupal for facebook was a session by Dave Cohen. he's started a Facebook project on the Drupal site. the video of his presentation is online as well as the slides
there's a demo on facebook. I'm already feeding facebook with my drupal site blog entries using the RSS capabilities of Blog Friends and the built in Notes application, but it'll be interesting to see what the Drupal guys build.

and, speaking of facebook, mashable have reviewed widget box, a wizard for creating Facebook apps

I'm trying out making music using live coding techniques, with 2 pre-requisites - that it's easy and fast to do & learn - probably not the right pre-requisites (might upset real musicians :), but it's where I'm at for the moment.

so, I'm trying chucK. this is the first chucK tutorial. I used the miniAudicle IDE instead of command line interface. it was very easy to load the songs into the IDE (miniAudicle) and play them. I had separate files for each module and adjusted some of the parameters to change the sounds, then clicked the 'replace shred' to 'take' the change and add this file's sounds to the output audio.

this it meets my criteria - easy and fast to use. now I just have to make it sound musical instead of a collection of random sounds & tones :) (the hard part)

chucK documentation
chucK community / mail lists
chucK miniAudicle documentation
chucK wiki
chucK projects - some people are hooking up chucK apps and Processing for java based visuals, plus there's many examples of laptop instruments, as well as a Max patch and more

listen to the audio :
chucK_tutorial01.mp3
loscha_com_tambura01.mp3 - from the loscha.comchucK tutorials ( Loscha is in the Australian band Toydeath - a circuit bending performance experience ) - this piece reminds me of the original samples of the bridges in the Jodie Rose Singing Bridges project and cd.

ChucK is a new (and developing) audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and now, analysis - fully supported on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a new time-based, concurrent programming model that's highly precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), as well as dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly. In addition, ChucK supports MIDI, OSC, HID device, and multi-channel audio. It's fun and easy to learn, and offers composers, researchers, and performers a powerful programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis/analysis programs, and real-time interactive control. ChucK is one of the programmes used in live coding circles. visit http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ for more details.

I've been trying out some processing apps - Substrate is one of my favourites. written by j.tarbell from complexification.net. it creates a generative image from colours in a specified source image using a simple algorithm.

I used this photo of Auckland countryside as the source image. here's the results:

http://complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/ for j.tarbell's amazing works.

some links for drupal features and module development.

CVS
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/ has an example/browsable view of the drupal code & contributor code CVS system.

themes

http://themegarden.org/drupal50/ has some drupal 5 themes, though it seems the themegarden has recently been closed.

http://drupal.org/project/Themes has some screen shots of themes.

artists sites & groups

http://groups.drupal.org/art-music - this replaces the http://www.drupalart.org/ site.

CCK - Content Construction Kit

http://groups.drupal.org/content-construction-kit-cck - group for Content Construction Kit (CCK). this is the new system to replace flexinodes and allows you to create different fields.

http://drupal.org/node/101723 = Content Construction Kit handbook

http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/88 - lists the different field types for CCK

Views

http://drupal.org/project/views - there's also a system called Views which are like database user views and allow different collections of information to be collected and then displayed once integrated into the theme. from this page:
"This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes."

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/views

theming CCK fields

theming individual CCK fields - http://drupal.org/node/62466

theming CCK & views to create a scheduling grid (good examples of how to customise which could be applied to other CCK node types) : http://groups.drupal.org/node/2647

http://oif.eafarris.com/cck_theming_in_drupal_4_7 - this is the site of the creator of freelinks module. he's using CCK on his site and shows an example of how he made and themed a custom version of weblinks module in CCK

tutorials & documentation

http://groups.drupal.org - for general info on different sections of drupal project

drupal video tutorials and screencasts -
http://drupal.org/node/124318

support @ bryght.com - http://support.bryght.com/

http://drupal.org/handbooks

writing your own drupal modules

http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo = a group for writing your own drupal modules with some lessons/tutorials

http://drupal.org/contribute/development has some ways people can help with drupal development

http://docs.drupaldojo.org/getting-started-with-drupal-development - there's a coding lesson coming up on 11th march. & they're working on a "Getting Started with Drupal Development" handbook

http://drupaldojo.com/lessons/ - has some of the lessons

http://drupal.org/node/508 - module developers guide

http://drupal.org/node/17914 - how to build drupal 4.7 modules

http://drupal.org/node/82920 - building drupal 5 modules

http://drupal.org/node/318 - drupal coding standards

http://api.drupal.org/ - drupal api's

http://drupal.org/node/49768 - drupal object reference

http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD - examples from drupal head

The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file.

Sophie, the Institute's first piece of software, is designed for reading and writing next-generation electronic books. Sophie will facilitate the easy construction of documents that are designed to live on the network and to use multimedia and time in ways that are currently difficult, if not impossible.

HelloWorld! squeak file

visit squeak plugins page if you can't see the app below

or click here to open hello world squeak test app if you can't already see it. once the page opens, scroll to the toolbar at bottom of page and add things to the test page - you won't be able to save though!

hrmm... that didn't work at all :(

useful links to docs / info :

http://www.squeak.org : one of the main squeak sites

http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/ : book on squeak "Squeak: Object-oriented design with multimedia applications" by Mark Guzdial

http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/ : uni course using squeak that the "Squeak: Object-oriented design with multimedia applications" book was based on

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/Videos/ : video tutorials - don't seem to have sound in all of them though! screencasts

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak : Squeak Swiki

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2983 : documentation

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/82 : a self study course in squeak

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/20 : other squeak websites

http://www.univ-savoie.fr/Portail/Groupes/listic2/membres/Stephane.Ducas... : pdf books on squeak

Alice is a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world.

Squeak is highly portable open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia facilities. Squeak is the vehicle of a wide range of projects, ranging from educational platforms to commercial web application development.

The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using the downloadable Croquet SDK, software developers can benefit from a flexible enough framework that virtually any user interface concept could quickly and easily be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations.

Impromptu is a programming language based on scheme which can be used for live programming purposes eg live coding of music. visit http://impromptu.moso.com.au for more details

AdaptiveMusic.net is a research community exploring computational arts practices, in particular the development of adaptive music environments. The community is based at the Queesland University of Technology at Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Australia.

Runtime// Live Computational Arts Symposium
A day of presentations, demos and discussions about algorithmic sound and image performance.

Saturday July 8 2006, 10 am - 4 pm

Venue: Queensland University of Technology

earlier this year I did a max/msp course at goldsmiths college. the class was taken by the very clever and talented sebastian lexer who puts on the interlace events in london and performs at various events and festivals. if you're looking for a max/msp course, I highly recommend this one - whether you've used max/msp before or not. the projects by the other class members were really cool also!

apart from the class notes I took we had to do a little project for the last day (4th day). I'd recently gone on the gps for artists workshop on Isle of Wight and bought myself a handheld gps device to record data on the driving trips I was doing. so, for my project, I made, with a lot of help from Sebastian! a patch which read gps data from a file, then parsed it into smaller sections to break it down into the different fields such as longitude & latitude, speed, direction, time, altitude etc. then I connected these values to the inputs of a vst filter/plugin called ambience, and played an audio recording and had the gps data adjust the filter parameters by stepping through the gps co-ordinates. also, the longitude & latitude are mapped to an x & y co-ordinate of a graph, so when the gps points are moved, you can see the x/y co-ords move too. for this version of the patch, I selected co-ords which would move around the screen according to the scale I chose. obviously if the area travelled is quite close, then the scale needs to be adjusted or you won't see much movement.

one day I'd like to expand the project so the gps data generates a music soundscape using samples I've recorded along the way. also it'll display geotagged photos taken on the journey as the gps points are processed.

attached is a screen shot of the patch and the actual patch, and some sample gps data. if you want to try it then you'd need your own audio file to open (any will do) and have the ambience vst plugin.

http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/music/ems/index.html

max/msp course notes
day 1
19 March 2005
Goldsmiths College, London

bang & toggle -> easy way to see what's going on in the patch; test; use it to print values

apple m = status window
number box passes on info when it receives the bang

toggle
- off when 0 (int)
- on for any other int value
- if it gets a float, it truncates the decimal to give 0 or 1 eg 1.57 would give 1; 0.73 would give 0

1/4_Inch is proud to present another wild night of entertainment on Thursday 29th July from 8pm. This event will showcase 3 Interstate artists and promises to be more lively than a feral monkey with fleas. Artists performing on the night are Ross Bencina (Melbourne), Scott Sinclair (Brisbane), and Hydatid (Brisbane)