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."

this is great! I installed this greasemonkey script to import Facebook events into Google Calendar by P. Organisciak, so now it's easier to add events to the site! I'm not using the drupal events module any more as it had a problem creating thousands of repeating events (which should have ended), so I linked one of my google calendars - the aliak.com one - into the site instead. plus this way events are easier to import and people can use it easier with their own google calendar (if they have one). perhaps the drupal module works better now I've upgraded to version 5. but adding manual events is a pain - very time consuming which means I miss a lot of them. the google calendar allows me to add them simply from gmail as the emails arrive and now with a single click from Facebook also! I just add the url and adjust the text as I prefer. cool!

Watch the video

this was taken yesterday. it shows the street where I'm living and a couple of the surrounding streets here in Jerusalem. and a little adventure I had whilst standing still too long in the mall yesterday ...

10/11/2007

made with Isadora - patch with controller attached

I made a simple controller / gui. this screenshot is showing controller on left and the patch on right. you can run with just the controller and hide the patch

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the term 'copyleft' wrote about Free Documentation in his book "Free Software, Free Society : Selected Essays of Richard Stallman".

"The biggest deficiency in our free operating systems is not in the software—it is the lack of good free manuals that we can include in our systems. Documentation is an essential part of any software package; when an important free software package does not come with a good free manual, that is a major gap. We have many such gaps today. "

"Free documentation, like free software, is a matter of freedom, not price. The criterion for a free manual is pretty much the same as for free software: it is a matter of giving all users certain freedoms. Redistribution (including commercial sale) must be permitted, on-line and on paper, so that the manual can accompany every copy of the program. "

FLOSS Manuals is a site dedicated to providing free and open source, FLOSS manuals on a variety of technical topics such as audio editing, VOIP, video editing, streaming, free culture, audio editing, media players, and more. visit their site to read the manuals : http://en.flossmanuals.net/

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.

online video editing sites

Andrew Garton's posted a question asking for recommendations for online video editing systems. I did a quick google search & asked on the videoblogging list. making a list below (& replied to his post) for reference :

(read more)

Watch the video

a chat with Richie, from Melbourne band / crew WD40, who builds sound toys and instruments for outdoor parties and festivals - for both kids and adults. he discusses his thoughts on the importance of play. midway through some people walk past and one starts playing a piano down the other end of the room so there was a nice chat about instruments and the piano Richie has at home.

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.

Cinegage Utilites have developed an elegant solution to posting videos on websites with their vPIP utility. Now it's easy to post multiple videos on a single page and have them play one at a time. The Play in Thickbox feature is pretty cool too - the video movie plays as an overlay on the page you're on. Visit the Cinegage Utilites website to download and find out more : http://utilities.cinegage.com/videos-playing-in-place/ or click on the image below to view a quick demo (& an elephant in delhi)

this is a test only to check I can load processing applets on this site.

this is one of the basic tutorials (with adjusted parameters) - nothing too exciting!

width="400" height="400" mayscript="true">

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Source code: sketch_060416a

Built with Processing

Vade's blog also mentions a Processing workshop he went to - Daniel Shiffman's workshop pages has tutorials and examples for Processing. his website is http://shiffman.net/ - check the examples here also.

Shiffman teaches java programming :

beginners course info

advanced sessions

the class delicious links are @ http://del.icio.us/tag/natureofcode/

& class wiki is @ http://www.shiffman.net/coursewiki/

NYU colab site has some good info & links on multimedia, processing, max/msp, gps and more
http://colab.hunter.cuny.edu/colabcms/news.php