Experimenting with webcam overlay. Video recorded using gstreamer, source for screencaster here (screensave.c).
UPDATE, here’s another from a different angle to appease douglas.
Archive for the ‘haskell’ Category
Pitter patter
Monday, April 4th, 2011Workshop output
Monday, February 7th, 2011The Text live coding workshop went really well, surprisingly well considering it was the first time anyone apart from me had used it and (so I found out after) most of the participants didn’t have any programming experience. The six participants took to the various combinators surprisingly quickly, the main stumbling block being getting the functions to connect in the right way… Some UI work to do there, and I got some valuable feedback on it.
Once the participants had got the hang of things on headphones, we all switched to speakers and the seven of us played acid techno for an hour or so together, in perfect time sync thanks to netclock. Here’s a mobile phone snippet:
The sound quality doesn’t capture it there, but for me things got really interesting musically, and it was fun walking around the room panning between the seven players…
Text update and source
Monday, January 31st, 2011I’ve updated Text a bit to improve the visual representation of higher order types (you’d probably need to full screen to view):
I won’t be touching this until after the workshop on Saturday.
I’ve also made the source for the visual interface available here under the GPLv3 free license. To get it actually working as above you’d also need to install my tidal library, Jamie Forth’s network sync, my sampler, the nekobee synth, and somehow get it all working together. In short, it’s a bit tricky, I’ll be working on packaging soonish though.
Test run of Text
Friday, January 28th, 2011I’ve been rather busy writing lately, my PhD funding runs out in April, and I hope by then I’ll have finished and will be looking for things to do next.
I have had a bit of time to make Text, a visual language I mentioned earlier, a bit more stable, here’s a test run:
A bit of a struggle, partly due to the small screen area I gave myself for the grab, but also due to some UI design issues I need to sort out before my workshop at Access Space in Sheffield next week, on the 5th February. Access Space is a really nice free media lab, but will turn nasty unless I free the workshop software, so expect a release soon.
In case someone is interested, here’s the linux commandline I use to record a screencast with audio from jackd:
gst-launch-0.10 avimux name=mux \
! filesink location=cast.avi \
ximagesrc name=videosource use-damage=false endx=640 endy=480 \
! video/x-raw-rgb,framerate=10/1 \
! videorate \
! ffmpegcolorspace \
! videoscale method=1 \
! video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480,framerate=10/1 \
! queue \
! mux. \
jackaudiosrc connect=0 name=audiosource \
! audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2,depth=16 \
! audioconvert \
! queue \
! mux.
Text
Monday, December 13th, 2010Text is a experimental visual language under development. Code and docs will appear here at some point, but all I have for now is this video of a proof of concept.
It’s basically Haskell but with syntax based on proximity in 2D space, rather than adjacency. Type compatible things connect automatically, made possible though Haskell’s strong types and currying. I implemented the interface in C, using clutter, and ended up implementing a lot of Haskell’s type system. Whenever something changes it compiles the graph into Haskell code, which gets piped to ghci. The different colours are the different types. Stripes are curried function parameters. Lots more to do, but I think this could be a really useful system for live performance.
hackpact week 4
Thursday, September 24th, 2009Ok the third fourth week of hackpact actually started yesterday, but I didn’t think my contribution then warranted a new entry.
hackpact23
Bit of an error with the screencast, see if you can spot the problem. Pretty happy with the sound though. (will take a while to appear due to vimeo’s encoding queue)
I’m musically humbled by my son who has taught himself how to play the guitar and sing the blues. He’s two today (24th), happy birthday Harvey.
hackpactoops
Well I made a blueberry birthday cake for young Harvey on the 24th, which is a hacklet at a push, photo when I find the transfer cable. No creations at all on the 25th or 26th, I was away for the weekend and thankfully didn’t get a moment with my laptop. I did record a session last night thought that I’ll upload at some point…
The hackpact has been really good for making me get bored with my software and develop it further. I need some longer term development time now though to play out some of my frustrations I’ve been feeling over the last month. In particular using a command line interface is feeling like a big limitation, I need to express relationships over more than one line. Maybe I can adapt the yi haskell editor for my needs.
Next month I think I’ll switch to making a fixed recording every week. I’ve never really made fixed recordings so should be interesting.
Now I’ve fallen off the hackpact wagon I’m not sure if I’ll be able to totally get back on, particularly as I need to finish my PhD upgrade report by the end of this month. We’ll see..
Hackpact week 3
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009It’s the third week of the hackpact. A few have fallen by the wayside, others are doing impressively well. Adam is doing great learning supercollider, Sam is cracking away on a diverse range of ideas, Joe has put a lot of himself into his involved hacks, poetry with a smell of solder, Gabor pushing fluxus in wild new directions every day, Scott still soldiering on with ChucK every day, part of the inspiration for the hackpact and now part of it, and Cormac‘s easy sounding but in reality clearly really challenging rule based photography project that he’s tackling with increasing need for imagination. Honorary mention for Dan who threw himself at the project with some ace daily projects before going offline for a bit, hopefully he’ll rejoin us.
I hope I haven’t missed anyone, sorry if I have — let me know.
hackpact15
Another screencast with some good moments and also a couple of bugs found… I realised I forgot to switch off cpu scaling, so there might be more jumps in the recording.
hackpact16
Preparing for the haskell users group talk, so I tried to make some ultra quick demos of features of my pattern language. Failed really, I kept getting distracted at making the patterns sound better rather than demonstrate how they work, so I will likely just do a live demo instead.
The results are on youtube — I’m doing the presentation in google docs, and youtube is the only way of getting videos in there. In fact this is the only way I found of making a presentation with videos in under linux. Video support in openoffice sucks and didn’t work anyway, the html based s5 gets all slow and glitchy with videos in, the video library used in the python based bruce wouldn’t play any video I found, etc, etc…
hackpact17
Got through the haskell users group talk in one piece, happy with it actually. I managed to do some short sub-minute demos for it today which I think made it easier for people to follow, and I think count as today’s hackpact. Here’s the final presentation in full:
hackpact18
Uploaded my current Haskell stuff. Not very useful at all without instructions for how to install and use it which I’ll get to soon in a proper release, but some might be interested to read through the Pattern module at least.
Big shout out to Kassen, while he is behind on documenting his hackpact stuff he assures that he’s still doing daily hacks in the background. Hope to hear more from his side of our acidpact soon.
I’m pretty tired, going to try and make a new screencast tonight nonetheless.. Ah, here you are. Got rid of need for explicitly calling parser by using the overloaded string literals extension, thanks for the tip Ganesh.
hackpact19
Today’s screencast is here, although it’s not all that. No update tomorrow, we’re off to do some live coding at Plymouth Planetarium, documentation will hopefully surface eventually.
hackpact20
Well the planetarium experiment went well, hopefully will turn into a tour. Some documentation to appear sometime soon.
hackpact21
Too tired to make music, so worked on a poster design. Ended up too gloomy, to rework.
hackpact22
[[blue, blue [lightblue lightskyblue lightblue, lightblue lightskyblue lightblue ~] blue, blue], blue lightblue ~, blue]
Saturday night stream
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008I’m going to do a live a/v stream from my sofa 10pm GMT this Saturday 13th December ’08, livecoding with Perl and hopefully also a little language parsed with Haskell. You can find info about how to watch, listen to the stream and join the chat over on the toplap site.
I did something similar last weekend, a remote performance to the Piksel festival in Norway, and I enjoyed it so much I had to repeat it. Hopefully it’ll become a regular thing, yeeking has already offered to do the next one.
I’m doing the streaming with gstreamer, I don’t know if it’s possible to do live screencasts in this way with anything else and it offers a huge amount of control. I reached the limits of gst-launch so have written a little gstreamer app to use for this weekend. I’ll be releasing that soon…
Another thing – it’s the xmas dorkboteastlondon tomorrow (thurs) and one of our best line-ups ever. Unmissable if you’re in around…
Vocable bugfix
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007Apologies to those who weren’t getting any sound from vocable, here’s a version with a quick bugfix from Rohan Drape that makes sure control buses are properly initialised. It should work for everyone now. Thanks Rohan!
By the way you might notice that vocable records everything you do under the ‘logs’ directory. I’d be really interested in seeing your log files and the dorky words and funky rhythms you are typing in. Please send me a copy if you don’t mind — don’t be shy now…
More vocable synthesis
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007Another screencast, a short one this time, which I’ve been using as a demo in talks.
