Reposted from Hype.

The Preview

Now if it’s user experience you’re after, Apple are seriously innovating in the desktop space. Tiger includes fast contents searching of all the data on your machine (files, emails, everything), a system that has the same sensibilities as Gmail.

Another great innovation is the Dashboard, basically a flip down layer that you can put little applications on. They’re always running and so they’re always just a single keypress away. There’s a calculator, a calendar, stickies, your address book and lots more. New apps can be written in JavaScript, making them an absolute breeze to create. Want a todo list? Probably take an hour or two to make one. What about a little app that tells you when Hype was last updated. Think that should take a similar amount of time really?

There’s lots more in the next release of OS X. It’s not going to be around until next year though. A break from tradition — Apple have been releasing a new version of OS X annually since it’s first version in 2001.

I think it’s good that Apple are innovating in this area. Microsoft certainly aren’t. They’re focussing on the server because they’ve got the desktop sown up. They’ll just keep pressing out identical uninteresting versions of Windows as far as the everyday user is concerned. The open source community is doing some great stuff. Dashboard for example is inspired by a Linux app of the same name from the Ximian crew that’s hotting up pretty fast. It’s decreasing energy states: Linux developers are just bouncing off the walls with ideas, Microsoft coders have slowed to a glacial pace, somewhere in the middle Apple are taking the best of both.

July 3rd, 3 — 7, and July 17th, 3 - 7.

So the question again is, what to play?

Last time I succeeded by quickly lowering my expectations of what I could achieve in a live setting. This time I should probably do the same. I’m interested in performing with Chuck, but I haven’t managed to get that to make much more a single continuous tone or bloopy effect yet, so it’s unlikely that I can perform for four hours without seriously pissing off the clientele.

The safe option is to do what I did last time again, but with a bit more planning. Essentially compose a set list, rip those tunes to WAV, open in Live and mix with them in a sample like manner instead of standard beat matching. Probably should drink less this time as well.

I really want to try out cool fantastic stuff though. It all depends on how much time I get to set up. Last time I spent a few hours ripping tracks ahead of time and that wasn’t enough. This time I already have tracks ripped so I can blow my frantic prep time on actually making loops and thinking about the set ahead of time. If I was being really organised, I would sit and play with Chuck a bit so that I could at least play around with it for half an hour. However, that would be quite a lot of time, and I have a busy week ahead of me.

It occurred to me during the week that I could combine Chuck and Max/MSP for some interesting effects. Create playing machines in Chuck and control them with Max/MSP knobs and dials that output midi. Might try that at some point.

I have a beer belly. A little one. I’ve always had it, as long as I can remember. Generally I’m an average height, fairly skinny guy, but with a paunch. It’s got a little bigger recently, since I had my bike stolen. I’d stopped swimming and then the bike went and I haven’t been getting out a whole lot. Combine this with the fact that I eat well and you have paunch. Note, the title of this post is a reference to my flatmates paunch, which has been named. I prefer not to name mine. George is bigger, but then we have different body types anyway.

Anyway I’m a touch narcissistic, so I thought it would be nice to burn that little ridge away. The web is out there waiting, so I searched it for exercises burn abdominal fat. That was a good search, instead of the TRY TH3 AT|<1NSS DIET N0W ads I was expecting, I got some handy stuff.

It’s not possible to point at the fat and say “I’M GONNA DO LIKE 10,000 SIT-UPS AND KICK YOUR ASS!” This I could probably have guessed. My favourite quote comes from How to reveal your six pack (which I have no intention of doing): “Abs are not made in the gym, they’re made in the kitchen.” Well, fuck that then, I have no intention of stopping eating like a king. Now, where are those sausages.

I do actually have an OK diet. My girlfriend takes care of that. I eat meat quite a lot. I don’t really know the first thing about food groups and stuff, so I have no idea what to eat when told to get most of my dietary fat from essential fatty acids. I could probably move my diet around a bit, though I would find it hard to adopt any form of regime. I like to try out new food and I’m not really that bothered about the tubbyness to actually work at something.

What I do need to do is more regular exercise. When I had my bike I was riding most days. I would ride for about an hour or so, mostly at a steady clip, but with occasional sprint (still a 15 year old at heart) and at least 15 minutes of slow meandering. I miss my bike and I plan to buy a new one pretty soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

It’s quite a surprise that I’ve noticed the tub getting bigger, I’d never really monitored it that closely. It definitely struck me a couple of times in the last week that it wasn’t flattening out so much after meals any more. It’s not big, but it is fairly well-defined, one might say protuberant.

I suspect the lack of exercise is the critical factor. I’m eating my normal diet. I haven’t actually had a drink this week, although I did drink a fair bit last week. I’m happy to exercise really. I’m more interested in maintaining the general good operation of my cardiovascular system than getting a rock hard six pack for the beach. Although, when I think about it, I’d probably be much happier dying suddenly from a heart attack than losing my mind over forty years. Although I guess you don’t actually die that quickly, your body must start getting really crap at stuff long before that.

I’ve been making a new simple CMS for my new company’s website. It’s based on the Hypothetical code, but instead of injecting portlets into templates, it creates simple XHTML output and offers you the chance to transform that with XSLT (and also decorate it with CSS of course). I wondered how quick doing an XSLT transform with Sablotron under PHP was.

InfoCMS
Parsed 20 files
Executed 1 database queries

Start	0.00
Init complete	0.15
Mapped request to view	0.01
Parsed VInfoRead.php and dependencies	0.00
VInfoRead constructed	0.02
Rendering page	0.00
Created initial representation	0.00
Transformed representation with XSLT	0.00

Total	0.19 seconds

Not too shabby! Although, to be honest, my XSLT is pretty simple:

<xsl:transform version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0"
            indent="yes" encoding="utf-8" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
            doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/>

    <xsl:template match="*">
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
	</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>

InfoCMS will hopefully be released open source sometime soon. I’ll extoll it’s virtues further at some point. It’s going to be quite good I reckon. Simple but easily extensible.

Been playing around with Chuck, a realtime audio programming environment, again. Got a bit further this time, i.e. as far as playing a sample and doing some other bits and pieces. Not very close to making anything that you could call music yet though.

I had the honour of being the first person to post to the mailing list, I hope they are responsive, as close contact with the developers is going to be pretty much essential given the rough and ready state of the documentation.

I found out that Chuck is a project of Perry Cook, one of the guys behind the Synthesis Toolkit (STK) which is a C++ API for sound making. I had a play with this last year. This is a good thing as STK is very powerful and contains lots of interesting audio potential. Chuck and STK are already integrated to a limited extent, but one would expect to see more STK stuff going into Chuck.

As regards the whole idea of programming music machines on-the-fly: it’s tricky! Even with some pretty frantic Vimming, there’s still a lot of time lost. Compare this to playing Ableton Live with keypresses and mouse scratching. I suspect that a successful programmer/musician will have to make a lot of use of high-level language features. Chuck’s .lex file seems to indicate that there is (or will be) support for functions and even classes. I wonder if it will be possible to create a class instance within the Chuck VM and modify it whilst it runs from other code. That would be handy, but would require some kind of central object model.

Another idea was that it would be handy to have a Python-style toplevel interpreter. For example, if I set up shred playing a loop, a bass-drum, I might want to suddenly change the interval between hits, and then almost immediately change it back again. For example, to do a rush at the end of a quad of bars. Creating a new text file to set the interval one way and then another text file to set it the other way and then doing replace operations on the VM is annoying. Chuck usefully allows you to access the VM from within code, so you could set up a script which automates this, but say you don’t want to automate it, say you want to play it by ear (literally). With a toplevel you could define library code so that these changes require only single line instructions and then play them much more easily.

Maybe what Chuck really needs is someway to associate functions and code with time ranges. Some way of saying, in 8 bars time, run this bit of code. But that would still be limiting. I find performing to be really self-referential, I play around until I hit something I like, then I repeat that. Chuck needs to allow much easier and more rapid prototyping of musical ideas. Sadly, I’m not sure that code is the best interface for this. When playing with Live I very much appreciate being able to latch on to a control with my mouse and then jam with it. And also be able to hit keys to play samples at the same time. Even the most deft master of multiple terminals couldn’t do as well as that. But then maybe this is a style issue. Maybe I jam in real-time because I’m not actually a good enough musician to get into the deeper stuff and I’m limited to making funny noises on top.

Charles Kennedy is no Tony Blair, but his party is growing year on year. The Liberal Democrats have, by slow and sure hard work, created a party which is perceived to deliver good councillors, back bench MPs and particularly MEPs. Their strong showing in this week’s elections is interesting, but the European parliament votes aren’t released until tomorrow. I’m interested to see what happens.

I personally voted Green for London Assembly and the EU, I think the same “steady base” label can be applied to them. They are the only party who mentioned the EUCD and software patents as campaign issues, which was the deciding factor for me.

If the Liberal Democrats can produce a leader who is more charismatic than Charles Kennedy, who is a good politician, but doesn’t have the superstar potential sadly required to become prime minister, they might be able to make surprising gains in the next few general electons.

Maybe they should recruit Ken Livingstone… ;-)

Got sick of Safari pausing for five or six seconds after a form is submitted, so it can update it’s Form Values file. Deleted it. Is this the end for my use of the internet? Can I actually remember stuff without Safari doing it for me?

Nah, I’m sure I’ll be fine…

I installed Unsanity Shapeshifter (no link — sour grapes) to try out some themes. Not sure why, theming is a red herring even on Windows, rarely do people create something nicer than the default, what chance do they have of beating Aqua!

There’s actually a longer story here. Vim has giving me some trouble, going into diff mode by default whenever I loaded it. This had been discussed on the Vim-Mac mailing list but no answer found. In an effort to fix it, I compiled version 6.3, just released, but to no avail. So I posted my results to the list and somebody happened to mention that they had found that the problem was caused by the Unsanity’s APE framework. I had installed this at the same time as the Vim problem appeared. Very random (and deeply suspicious) that APE should break Vim.

So I went to uninstall APE, but unless you’ve got one application enhancer installed the APE pref pane just fobs you off with a “Now install enhancers!” message. So I installed ShapeShifter because it was vaguely interesting and I just wanted to install something. Once it was installed I could get to the APE uninstall button. I uninstalled and it fixed Vim. Then I rebooted.

Bad bad bad. When my Mac came back up, half my applications just hung before producing any menus or windows, Mail, iCal and Safari were affected, while others (including, luckily, Internet Explorer) were not. My anger rising, I rebooted again and again. Luckily, OS X must have mended itself, because I’m now back to where I was when I started. Feeling unclean, I actually put myself through all that rigamarole and terror once more in order to completely purge my system of both ShapeShifter and APE.

Bad show Unsanity.

Voting in all elections should mandatory, on penalty of £50 fine.

Everybody should get the day off.

Wandering through Fulham today I saw Simon Hughes, mayoral candidate for the Liberal Democrats, campaigning. So I stopped and asked him some questions. I started by asking him about online government and what his feelings were about it, he said we need more, but had no immediate concrete ideas, he alluded to the lib dems being up on this sort of thing generally and talked about regular consultation of Londoners, though not solely online. He started into policy shpiel so I cut him off relatively quickly by mentioning faxyourmp.com and asked him if he had heard of it. He said he had and when I questioned him about his response rate replied openly, saying he had started out badly, but had got better (his page on theyworkforyou.com says he replied to 42% of faxes). I also asked him about theyworkforyou.com and again he replied that he thought it was a good idea. I told him that my most burning issue with this set of elections was the number of people who weren’t going to vote in them and he very much agreed with me on that. However, at this point (about five minutes in) he wound the conversation up, not unpleasantly, but he obviously didn’t want to stand and debate with me all day. He finished by saying that he was the youngest and most modern of the candidates and to make sure I used my vote on Thursday.

As I walked back to the flat I thought of loads of other questions to ask him, but there you go. It was an interesting encounter, but I can’t let being starstruck sway me really. He didn’t convince me of much, but that was because he was on the sell. I guess no candidate can afford not to be at the moment. I would have liked to ask him “why shouldn’t I vote for Ken” and got a short, pithy and brutally honest answer, but there would be no chance of that. The outcome of the whole event is no effect, I’m still just as unsure as I was before! The issues are all a bit student president for my liking., keeping the tubes open etc. The first and second choice model for the mayoral election means that I’m considering playing fast and loose with my first choice, but I’m realistically very attracted to both the Greens and the Lib Dems. However, I’m feeling defensive, I don’t want to see Steven Norris elected, but I hope there’s little chance of that.

Just got back from NotCon, could have blogged while I was there, but was busy on the IRC chan — irc://irc.freenode.net/notcon (log). I really enjoyed the day, the highlight for me was the group. I really liked being hooked up to a busy network and chatting to people on IRC in the background. Tom Coates of plasticbag.org (who I met at the blogmeet a few weeks ago) had SubEthaEdit running and was using it to take notes. All the Panther users contributed, including me. The final file is a treasure trove, especially as I missed the first couple of hours. It was just great editing the file and contributing and it was much slicker than a wiki.

The talks were pretty good, the political stuff downstairs was the most interesting IMHO. The techie stuff was a bit obvious really. I would link to everything, but all the URLs are on the NotCon pages. The best stuff was Tim Ireland’s MPs and Weblogs and, of course, Alex McLean (of Dorkbot) and his live hardcore coding.

Phew, bit tired now. Might blog more when more awake.