Archive for January, 2007

Hackfest 111010 Postmortem

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

30 Jan 2007 – post sonic generator

We met Jeremy, completing his PhD thesis in computational chemistry.
Mark, Graham, Alex, Martin, and Lauryn went to Sonic Generator II.
The comic book improvisational piece delighted us all.

Alex- thinking about typo detection- will hack up Google maps.
  Tried to speak to a girl who looks like Jenn but is not Jenn.
  Zach not coming, its too late.

Mark- getting a new copy of IntelliJ (closed source Eclipse). TextMate instead.
  Going to implement Paolo Soleri in js livecoding environment.

Graham- turning in first MIR assignment on classifying tabla strokes.
  investigating embedding chuck into openGL program.

Posted in Computer Graphics, Computer Music, People, Places, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 111001 Postmortem

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

23 Jan 2007 – tuesday nights

First Tuesday night ever (we think).

New progress on organizing the colo.
Mark nominated as treasurer, Luke as head admin.

tonight:
Erik- working on a standalone programmable blogging engine
that will serve as the home for his other projects:
 wIDE, scheduled events and triggers on posts
Wants to get posts, comments, users working in a RESTful manner tonight.

done- got authentication system, got rudimentary posting done

Mark- fixing a problem with contractIDs.
Would like to send a udp message to python udp-server.

Graham- compile firefox. find out where it’s crashing.
Make ‘chuck –status’ work in firefox plugin. (has since fixed it with AddRef).

Alex- drinking coffee and watching. Researching GMaps for runners problem.

Posted in People, Project | No Comments »

Senior Seminar / Final Quarter Chapter 2

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

This week has been busy, but rewarding.

Senior Seminar:
   This week I met with my professor on Wednesday. I showed him a possible outline. He thought it was too much for a 30 minute talk, so I am pairing down the focus for the talk to just the Fourier Transform.
    I began reading a book entitled "The Discrete Fourier Transform" by D. Sundararajan. It is pretty clear so far, and seems to be a good starting point.
    I started making power point slides on the Sampling Theorem before I met with my professor, so I will have to go back and edit the presentation.
    I  took a break from reading Virtannen this week. The paper for the class will still be about polyphonic source separation, but for now I need to focus on the talk.

Latin:
    I got caught up. Practiced declensions, and read the stories from chapters 21 and 22.

Real Analysis:
    I did another homework assignment.  We had a quiz on Wednesday. I got 9/10 on the quiz and 8/10 on the first homework assignment. Hopefully this trend will continue. This class is really interesting.

Things are coming together.

Posted in Misc, Personal, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 111000 Mortem

Friday, January 19th, 2007

18 Jan 2007 – octane x mstreet

Tonight, Alex and I met at Octane. DJs were funky, not too loud, louder.
Mark called us up to his place at MStreet, college people and Jason were there.

What we worked on:
Alex- Proposed a problem as a potential GMaps hack (more below).
Graham- Adding VM status functionality to ChucK firefox plugin (XPCOM).
Mark- Porting OpenSoundControl to Mozilla via XPCOM.
Jason- Adding new features to his Q&A site startup, Qaboom. (smileys in chat, etc)

gmaps-
Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and n-3 other computer scientists are in a running club. They need an application to determine the most fair meeting point (similar to the centroid for street distance), so that they all run an equitable amount to reach the meeting place. Alan is a stronger runner than Charles, so we can expect him to be able to run farther by some scalar, like 2. Our algorithm should take this into account.

xpcom-
Both Mark and Graham were having binary build problems with XPCOM. First, we both had an issue with xpcom_Glue. G solved it only linking xpcomglue_s.lib (instead of that and xpcomglue.lib) into his binary. M solved it by building his project with more recent Makefile as a starting point. Sometimes one wishes the C++ compiler could be a little less literal.

XPCOM is in general a neat toolkit for making cross-platform software, it is not without its pitfalls. Several great resources are informative but contain out of date elements (book, component tutorial) with nods to the changes only in web accessible mailing lists. Since this is open source, some of the burden falls on us to update the materials. (Maybe M and I can do that after we finish our components.)

An application or applet has many components end-to-end, in different languages and systems. Possibly you will have binaries in C++  XPCOM, scripts in javascript, chrome configuration in RDF, and UI specification in XUL. Starting a project and debugging is therefore an extra-long chain of getting little things wrong until you start getting them right, and tutorials are long and laborious. On the other hand, splitting the effort between subsystems seems more flexible. It would feel wrong to put the config or UI stuff in procedural code, or the scripting stuff in binary. Startup time vs. flexibility, probably a reasonable tradeoff.

Posted in People, Places, Plans, Project | No Comments »

Senior Seminar / Final Quarter Chapter 1

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Hello everyone. I’m Mike. I’m studying mathematics at University of California at Santa Cruz. This is my last quarter and I have a talk that I have to give, and a senior project that I have to do.  The idea of these posts will be to track my progress on this project, and my progress in my other classes. I hope that this will help motivate me to do my very best in my last year in university.

Here is the class rundown in order of difficulty:
   Senior Seminar
   Real Analysis
   Latin 2
 
Here is the broad view:
   Senior Seminar:
       Give a 35 minute talk on a mathematical topic, on February 7th
       Turn in a 10 page paper on the topic by the end of the quarter.

    Real Analysis:  
       Weekly homework. Due Wednesdays.
       Reading.
       Tests.

    Latin 2:
       Homework for class 3 times a week.
       Reading.
       Tests.

Listing these is already starting to make things feel more manageable.

Now for some more details on my Senior Seminar:
    I want to study polyphonic source separation algorithms. Through what little research I have done so far I have realized that this is too broad a topic to fit into a 35 minute talk. So, my first task is to narrow down what I will talk about. As it stands right now, maybe a short talk on the Discrete Fourier Transform would be good. Right now, the basic structure might go something like this:

1. Explain in broad terms how digital audio works.  Samples, sampling frequency, possibly the sampling theorem, Nyquist frequency, etc.
2. Explain the mathematics of the Discrete Fourier Transform. Maybe, talk about the Fourier Transforms uses in other branches of math and science.
3. Explain what polyphonic source separation is, and how the Fourier Transform is used as a tool in polyphonic source separation algorithms.

    Somewhere in there I want to talk about psycoacoustics, and cognitive science, but maybe there is not enough time to do that and I will have to save it for the paper.

In conclusion I will leave a list of things that I need to do in the following week:
    Senior Seminar:
       Continue reading Tuomas Virtanen‘s thesis on polyphonic source separation.
       Write a possible outline, and bring it to my professor on Monday.

    Real Analysis:
       Complete homework assignment. Do at least 1 problem every day.
       Finish reading chapter 1. Begin Chapter 2.

    Latin:
       Catch up on backlogged homework. (Tomorrow!)
       Stay caught up. Do a little every day.

Next time I will review my accomplishments, and I will describe a technique developed by my parents to help get ideas down on paper.

-Mike

Posted in Computer Music, Misc, Personal, Research | 1 Comment »

ASP .NET (for work, ARGH)

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

hey gentlefolk;

long time no post.  sorry!  🙁

i was wondering if anybody had some good resources for ASP .NET that they would like to share?  work has decided to send me in this direction and i need better guidance.  i’ve been using these articles:

http://www.asp.net/learn/dataaccess/tutorial01cs.aspx?tabid=63

and

http://www.asp.net/learn/dataaccess/tutorial02cs.aspx?tabid=63

but then it goes off on a tangent, which doesn’t apply to my current situation.  i’ve got the rudimentary framework in place (data access layer, business logic layer) for my application, but that’s about it.  any links or books you recommend would be of great help.  danke!

Posted in A Boring Default, atlChat | 3 Comments »

Hackfest 110111 Mortem

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

11 Jan 2007 – no djs!

what we’re working on:
Mark- compiling chuck OSC support for XPCOM.
Puyan- copying theory notes.
Graham- working on chuck firefox plugin.

progress:

Graham- looked at miniAudicle source code.
Spencer mentioned that it was an example of a classic chuck embedding.

Posted in Computer Music | No Comments »

Hackfest 110110 Mortem

Thursday, January 4th, 2007

4 January 2007 – more loud djs

The music seemed to be less loud tonight. But it was because they moved the PA from the tables area over to the bar area. Which made the experience slightly better.

Mark and Graham have a great collaboration idea. We want to improvise together (js and ChucK).
This was inspired by Mark’s shape livecoding work.

Our plan is to have one of us create a "pulse" of OSC events – and then both of us can create synthesis code that works within the pulse. That way, both the graphics and music are synchronized.

Since it doesn’t look like javascript has support for OSC yet, Mark may have to create an OSC implementation using priviledged js code that uses a socket library (nsIServerSocket). Once this is done, we should be able to start jamming together.

Posted in Computer Graphics, Computer Music | No Comments »