BTW, I'm hanging out in Norwich with the Thickthorn crew at the moment. Well, not now. They're all asleep. But during the day. I'm actually heading back to da smoke tomorrow to get back into the work routine. I came up to begin work on a new project which is design and build of a smallish site (about 150 pages). Got to get feedback on the design. If all goes well, I'm outta here. Otherwise, um, I'm not sure. It's been nice hanging around here again though, playing F-Zero GX and Soul Caliber II. Ian's been up as well and it was good to see him again.
I got talking to Martin today and told him about the cool things I'd seen with computers and music at Dorkbot and how this had inspired me to start coding sound stuff. He liked my idea, which basically revolves around building a synthesis machine that has loads of STK's functionality compiled in and then allowing other systems to control it via SKINI messages. One system would be a graphical frontend built with SDL. Others could be built in any kind of programming language as SKINI is just text sent down a TCP socket. I forsee there being a command line interface of some kind. I also like SuperCollider's idea of being able to create objects within the synth server. Those objects could be created visually and then tweaked algorithmically using a Python program for example. Synchronisation is going to be an interesting problem to solve.
This evening I got into doing some actual coding. I copied out the "Hello, Sine!" STK example and built it on the command line. Then I built the real time version that played the sound (via CoreAudio on OS X) rather than dumping it to a WAV file. Then I integrated that code into my SDLAudioTest project from my last experiments. This is a SDL/Cocoa shell app that has a window (currently empty) and can make noises.
STK uses a sample for your basic sine wave, which makes sense. Why calculate the data each time when you can store the thing? It's tiny anyway. Mac OS X applications are a directory structure and there's a place to put resources such as sound files. Once I brought the file into my project, I had to work out how to use the CoreFoundation functions to get a filename string of the location of that file. Now that I've done that the thing is nicely self-contained.
Next stop is a basic piano keyboard interface in the window.
3:16, Tuesday November 4th, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments
Just bought The Design of Sites. It looks fascinating. I'm hoping it will cover a lot of the areas where my knowledge is deep, by my argument is unconvincing.
14:52, Monday November 3rd, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
The window decor has changed for Panther. Instead of the grey and white stripes on the title, each window now sports a light grey grad fill. It's a bit of a return towards the creeping grey that eventually made OS 9 look so ugly, but for now it's OK. The gem buttons - close, minimise, etc - are now also set back into the title bar instead of sitting on it. Again, I think I prefered the old version, but it's not big thing.
What I do like is that they've chucked Sendmail out of the window and installed Postfix instead. Woo hoo for a mail server that doesn't have to run as root!
Journalling is now enabled by default on HFS+ it seems. It can be disabled with the new disk utility.
Also SMB name resolution seems to work as well. I just asked Mart to connect to my machine and he was able to connect to \\Margaret rather than my IP. I didn't just appear in his Network Neighbourhood though, but then neither do most of the Windows machines :-)
0:14, Sunday November 2nd, 2003 • feeling critical • no comments
Installed Panther today. It's a bit of an anti-climax. Apple claim 150 features. It depends on what you would categorise as a feature really. I couldn't point to 150 things around the OS and say, "hey, check this out, it's the coolest!" In fact, there's only really Exposé that's worthy of that. Now there's a feature. I'm going to have to see how it fits into my daily life really. And there we have it IMHO. Panther is not a wow OS, it's an evolution that is going to make my working life much easier. When it comes to things that are going to save me time, the list looks better:
Exposé first of all, I mention it twice. It has three modes though and they're all cool.
Better file dialogs system-wide.
Save as dialogs allow you to click an old file to overwrite! Finally! I've been waiting for this all along, it's going to take a while before I remember I can do it.
Maximum mouse speed is much higher! Hooray!
Junk mail filtering is better in the new version of Mail. Only a little bit. But then only a little bit of my junk got through the old system.
Preview is faster than Acrobat Reader now and does haven't have Reader's long load time.
Much much faster interface all round. Windows are snappier, scrolling is faster, GUI mouse operations feel like less effort.
The new Finder I'm not sure about. It doesn't really fit the way I use either Finder or hierarchical systems like Explorer or GMC etc. With Finder, I traditionally have a window for each folder, I know where those windows go and everything has it's place. With Explorer I have one window with which to view everything. That window stays where I put it and that makes me happy. With the new Finder I can kind of have one window, but if I double click a desktop folder ot connect to a server, a new window opens and it's the wrong place and it's the wrong size. This sounds pretty anal, but that's the way I use my file navigator.
The new mode of operation for connecting to CIFS/AFS shares looks pretty good, but I don't really connect to network machines that much.
Other than that, there's not a lot to report really. I get the feeling that I may well dig out more stuff over the next few days as I get back to work.
I've been slowly reading On Lisp still and probably not picking much of it up because I haven't really been able to think of anything to use as a testbed for code techniques.
I realised this was silly and decided to stay within the bounds of what I know and implement a simple web site engine of some kind, probably towards the CMS end of the spectrum, although we'll see. For now I've created a teeny weeny script that uses two functions to facilitate the generation of valid CGI output. Check it out (feedback welcome).
I found just writing this taxing enough (it took about three hours to get to that point). I had to learn basic string manipulation and that involved learning how to learn about particular functionality rather than style. On Lisp is aimed more at people who can survive down in the trenches with Lisp already. I found the HyperSpec too far in the other direction and there's little in between. Although the Common Lisp Cookbook is pretty useful.
