I have been off in a weird world ever since I decided to launch some “spangly information radiators” in the office.
Predominantly I have been writing scripts which harvest all sorts of stuff from data local to the office, then attempting to visualize it. The trouble is this is a route to madness! There are so many different ways of seeing data, its like some mad acid trip. I digress…
My current slow burner is visualizing time-scoped changes in a subversion repository as a piece of music. I had originally thought of some ruby kicking out some MIDI in a text file but MIDI looks to be old hat. Over the weekend I bumped into open sound control (OSC) and ChucK. Chuck allows generation of sound and is capable of running an OSC server.
The final piece of the jigsaw (in terms of kick-starting me) was an excellent article linking ruby to OSC and to ChucK. I now have the core technology to go crazy!
Its a fun experience to have code make music and armed with this knowledge (at some point) our subversion repositories will all be making pop-tastic tunes covering the last iteration. I’m going to mix in text to speech to cover keywords such as “crash” (and link to cymbals or similar). Any-way, start small…
No idea when I will complete this (sketching out the basics on paper at the minute), as I now have a mad backlog of personal projects. Decided to start knocking them off one-by-one. I’m finishing the processing based mind map prototype first! Hopefully after a virtual TinyMud party I will start posting on this proper (winter is a good time for code to grow).
Must stop playing advance wars on the DS. It started as an idle time filler, it’s now consuming all my spare time – To the detriment of all my current projects! If its not one addiction its an other… Maybe I need a “spon$er” me to stop playing campaign. Tomorrow I will go cold turkey, honest.
BBC 6 Music played bits and bobs from an album by Don Bradshaw-Leather – “Distance Between Us”. It was a fantastic. Unfortunately it looks to be unavailable (legally) now which is a shame. Would recommend to anyone that they track it down, the “official” site is (I think) here.
Given informal and positive comments about my automatic “mind map” experiments I have decided to write a Java applet demonstrator.
Having no experience of Java Applet writing (or Java for that matter) I have decided to not learn another very similar language and go a lazier route, namely via processing. Ok, it is basically Java, but it removes the irritation of needing to read up all about swing etc. just to draw a line and have a simple update loop.
Tonight I played with traer physics and animation libraries and reckon with some minor tweaks and a bit of networking magic I can get the random arboretum demo to fit my needs.
How the world waits in anticipation…
As someone who seems to be permanently attached to a beard I would like to experiment with some more modern/crazy styling options.
My current idea is to make a stencil with some interesting patterns on it, apply it to beard and run a trimmer over it. This might work better with stubble? If I can overcome the fear factor of producing an absolute mess I will report back…
I’m going to push for the company to purchase some wireless photo-frames. These would make really cool information radiators for the office.
Place them in social areas e.g. the kitchen and beam useful and interesting stuff to them! I like the “API” i.e. just images. Can imagine all sorts of fun data and feeds – Burndown’s, build stats, mash-ups of company stock performance and random interesting data and pictures.
Grandad and the Marrow
The Background
I make this story up each time I tell it to my 6-year old, this is rough and from memory. Feel free to adapt! If you like it then Grandad and the sticky tape might well be published!
The Story
Each year the village held a fete, part of which included a great vegetable competition.
Grandad was always trying to win a prize for his marrows, but they were either too small, too weird or just plain silly.
One evening he was leaving the pub when, “puff”, a stinky cloud of smoke appeared and a strange man stood before him.
The strange man said “I can grant you your wish to win the marrow competition at the fete this year, but whatever you do, you must not eat the marrow!”
Grandad (slightly amazed and dazed), just nodded. The strange man disappeared in another stinky puff of smoke.
The next morning Grandad had completely forgotten about the events of the evening.
As time went by, his marrow grew and grew, amazed Grandad thought nothing of it, soon he needed an even larger greenhouse, eventually even this was not enough to contain the vegetable!
The day of the fete arrived. Grandad enlisted children from the local village to help pull the marrow to the village green, suffice as to say he was very nervous.
He waited in anticipation of the judging, eventually the mayor came out and congratulated him on winning the prize for best marrow. But she needed to ask a favour, the caterers had failed to turn up, so there wasn’t any food for the celebratory feast. She wondered if they could use his marrow. Grandad agreed…
The marrow was so large they managed to make marrow soup, marrow pie and marrow ice-cream for the whole village! Grandad didn’t eat any as he was feeling too overwhelmed.
The village all went home to sleep…
In the morning Grandad awoke to the most peaceful of days, all was quite in the village – Too quiet! Where were the children playing in the street?
He went downstairs and knocked on his neighbour’s door, eventually he heard a faint “hello”. He replied and asked why was the village so empty?
His neighbour opened the door. To his surprise their ears and nose were tiny marrows and they had marrow arms and legs!!!
Over the week the people returned to their normal state of existence – Grandad went off marrows.
I have read the books and worked in “agile” teams. I can see the simple (lean) roots and the reason for change, but something has started to niggle me. The “agile” mantra is fundamentally about project management . I have seen little to persuade me that software engineering as a practice has gone through the same paradigm shift.
Fundamentally we work in the same ways, yes we have test driven design, yes we unit test, but are we looking beyond this to “agile”- value driven development environments that reduce the cost to create code, that allow customers to even create some of the assets? I don’t see it (personally). Where is the blend of computer science and mathematical rigor in our work? Why are we, for example, defining “glue” logic by hand – Code it in a formal state machine description? Tie components together using a formal language and build tools that testers and customers can use to work in this language (under the hood). Unite all customers around the code, do not exclude or provide layers requiring interpretation (and a chance for errors).
The more I read about flow based programming and look at the games industry (especially in the area of “tools” which allow children to construct robust software). The more I think we (as software engineers) should be re-thinking how we actually construct and build software and more importantly how we allow different stakeholders to access and modify it.
Finally Moo is released, see: Moo for installation instructions. Please leave comments related to the release here. Enjoy!
Change the recycle bin so that when its emptied the content is distributed randomly to other people’s recycle bins. Would need an opt in scheme and some filters – Total mayhem, content keeps increasing.
OK – It opens a channel for more spam, bad-ware and major content leaks, but ignoring reality…
