Python oriented riddles and puzzles. I got up to level 7 yesterday. An
interesting waste of time.
Reminds me of similar puzzles xach setup
a few years ago.
Category Archives: software
os x 10.4 article
Definitely the best review of “Tiger” I’ve seen. Very detailed, and even mostly spin/marketing/zealotry free.
Though, it does certainly dim my expectations of Tiger. “Spotlight” seems to just be the revenge of eazel/ nautilus/ medusa/ fam/ gnome-metadata/ gnome-vfs . (And I suspect, a lot of the same people are involved). Not a bad thing, but definitely not all that the hype promised. Seems like a decent first step though.
Automator sounds quite potentially useful, but hard to say without using it. Any thing that provides easy hooks for extending functionality is always a plus.
Even the shiny marketing hype made Dashboard seem kind of boring and useless, and with more details, it seems even more so. I can only hope there is a scrolling rss reader widget so I can pretend like it’s 1998 again. “Hey dude! It’s not a homepage, it’s a ‘channel’! And it’s on my desktop! Whoa!”.
CoreData should be useful for ISV’s, so hopefully some interesting apps will come out of it.
freesound
“The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. “
Dabblers And Blowhards
Or to quote xach:
Any sufficiently ambitious geek essayist contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of Philip Greenspun.
how to solve a problem
Started searching around Wikipedia for information about problem solving approaches and techniques. Looking for some general information to possibly use to help structure the content of the linux troubleshooting guide I’ve been slowly working on.
One of the more interesting things I found was TRIZ, a problem solving approach oriented towards mechanical devices, based on study of a large number of Russian Patents. The idea basically being to determine the contradictions inherent in a problem, and then attempting to dissolve the contradictions. Take a look at this page to get a better idea.
The first two things that came to my two track mind were of course, what would be the equivalent “contradictions” and proposed dissolving strategies for software and/or creating music. The software case has a lot of obvious analogies to the machinery case. The music (and any “art”) for that matter is a bit more difficult. Need to think about that.
On a similar note, I found a web reference for the list of problem solving ideas I first saw in Conceptual Blockbusting. See the Flexibility in Strategies.
Anyone know of any similar ideas or approaches?
screensaver ideas
Once upon a time, I wrote a screensaver for xscreensaver. So, though I’ve barely looked at xscreensaver code in years, I still occasional think about ideas for screensavers.
1. A “meta” screensaver. This would render any other screensavers into a texture, that would get texture mapped to some 3d object. You could even go recursive if you wanted.
2. A version of webcollage that would point at images sources that are Creative Commons. This would be pretty easy.
3. A fake road map generator. Just randomly create something that kind of looks like a streep map. City maps would be easiest, but highway style maps would be cool as well. Think google maps, but totally bogus.
4. “old growth”, a screensaver that would draw what looks like a cross section cut out of a old tree, and then label the rings with historical dates and info. Something sort like this.
cc in effect
All the content on www.adrianlikins.com is
under a Creative Commons license now.
Not that anyone really cares, but it makes me feel better.
ideas
This is the start of an experiment. The goal being to start recording all those various ideas I have and never bother to write down and soon forget. We’ll see how it works. Alot of these will probably only make sense to me.
Todays ideas:
- add “loop windowing” support that can be controled via midi CC controllers. You could control the index of which cycle to loop, and how many cycles to index. Doing this via the already existing “cycles” shouldn’t be too difficult.
- But, the more interesting idea would be to the same thing across any subsection of a loop. Position and length of the section to loop would be deteremined by CC as above, but could be any part of the loop, not just “cycles”. Sort of a granular approach. Something like Grainstates in Reaktor
- ping-pong or scanner mode of loop playback. At the moment, sooperlooper supports playing a loop forwards or backwards. The idea would be to add support for playing forwards, then backwards, then forwards, etc. It already crossfades loops, so this could be interesting when doing “granular” type looping and ambient/noise type stuff.
And I seem to have already forgotten the other ideas I was going to include in this entry. How about that.
why python is doomed
ASPN : Python Cookbook : Generator methods
This recipe enables the use of the yield statement within a method by decorating that method with a wrapper for a generator object.
giant images
Giant images for fun and profit.
Big posters are cool.