I’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 [...]
Text
by Alex on December 13, 2010
Text 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 [...]
Pure dyne
by Alex on January 20, 2010
I’ve been through a few linux distros over the years, neatly getting progressively easier to install and configure as I get less willing to spend time recompiling kernels, culminating in ubuntu, enjoying the attention to detail and simplicity of use. Recently though, I’ve had to give ubuntu up and go back upstream to the rather [...]
Acid sketching
by Alex on November 8, 2009
I’ve been thinking about visual languages and the morphology of symbols (as opposed to words) for a while. I had the opportunity to start putting some of these ideas into code at a really excellent openframeworks workshop this week, run by Joel Gethin Lewis and Arturo Castro. Here’s what it does: Makes the point nicely [...]
Saturday night stream
by Alex on December 10, 2008
I’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 [...]
Dorkcamp and new demo
by Alex on August 12, 2008
Two posts rolled in to one, to annoy the aggregators a bit less (sorry haskellers, more haskell stuff soon). First, dorkcamp is a lovely event in its third year. The idea is for around 60 of us to go to a campsite an hour out of London, well equipped with showers, toilets, a big kitchen [...]
The physical modelling of drums using digital waveguides
by Alex on May 7, 2008
Joel Laird completed a fine PhD thesis on physical modelling drums in 2001, which included C++ sourcecode for an accurate model of a drum and a felt mallet for hitting it with. I’ve been in contact with Joel and am very happy to have prompted him to license the source under the GPL. A .tar.gz [...]
Rhythm space
by Alex on April 18, 2008
I’m working with Jamie Forth on ideas around spaces of rhythm. Here’s a demo (which might not work in feed readers): [kml_flashembed movie="http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma503am/software/space/audio.swf" height="300" width="400" bgcolor="#000000" /] The space has two quality dimensions, “intensity” (X) and “disorder” (Y). Drum patterns are arranged along these dimensions, so more intense ones are towards the left and more [...]
Following your imagination
by Alex on January 14, 2008
This entertaining article supporting test-first development has been playing on my mind. The article is beautifully written so it is easy to see the assumed context of working to deadline on well specified problems, most probably in a commercial environment. It saddens me though that we accept this implicit context across all discussion of software [...]
Textual patching
by Alex on January 7, 2008
I wrote a perl script that allows you to compose puredata patches in a text editor. You define the patch using ASCII art like this: *————————* | .——–. \ .-x——–. | osc~ 5 | * | osc~ 500 | `-x——’ | `-x——–’ | | | .-x——. | | | *~ 300 | | | `-x——’ | *—* | | | *————* .-x——. | *~ 0.2 | `-x——’ | * |\ | * | | .-x-x–. | dac~ | `——’ Then run the Perl script over it to produce [...]