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.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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