Software over the rainbow

Like, for example:

A 20th century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything, whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can.”

It’s Alan Kay, summing up in his wonderful “Early history of Smalltalk”

Antecedent:

A couple of months ago, having a look at some old stats in my last.fm profile, I realised how much I could remember a given time by just seeing the music I used to listen to (that old (unfinished?) project by marcos weskamp and didier hilhorst came to mind inmediately).

The source:

Last.fm keeps weekly data about what we listen to. We also can (could) construct a radio link based on various artists. For example:

lastfm://artist/bibio/similarartists

The application

A web page that, given some artists that I used to listen to in a given time (e.g: december 2005), constructs the url of a last.fm radio with those bands, so I can somehow “transport” myself to that time by listening to similar music…

And I’ve done it, but…

Last friday, the multiple artists station feature stopped working. In fact, I had some suspicion, but I thought that… nothing. I didn’t think of it and kept working.

So it is basically useless in its actual form, but it was finished (as a proof of concept, at least), so here it is:

Last.fm time machine (if it had worked i’d have looked for a better name).

I’m not sure if the idea can take another direction to become useful. I’ve thought of having a look at xspf to see if I can generate playlists instead of radios, but by now I don’t really know. If you have any ideas…

At the very least, it’s been useful to clean the dust over my php, use the last.fm webservices, a little bit of ajax (thanks mr.sofa naranja) and above all, to finish something.

By the way, avidos let me stay in their hosting to do some tests while mine hadn’t php5, and ignasi tudela tried to help me with the design, but apart from using Georgia and taking his colors for the different seasons, I didn’t pay him much (deserved) attention, and you can see the results. Thanks to both.

There are some words I’ve put under suspicion. They’re like magic. When they appear everything seems better, more pleasant, more adequate…

I still don’t know what it is, but I’m somehow annoyed. Perphaps they appear too frequently in advertising, products, speeches… I think they hide some… swindle.

3 come to mind now:

• New
• Easy
• Original

do you have more? do you know what it is?

This won’t work for the next hours. If you were thinking of sending me an email (quite unlikely unless you do spam for a living) use jesusgollonet … gmail

See you soon.

update: wow. It didn’t hurt. Should be ok by now. If you see anything strange, please let me know

Last week I went to a two-day openframeworks workshop run by Zach Lieberman at hangar.

As said here before (and elsewhere), openframeworks is an open-source library to help other artists and students produce works through coding, written in C++. Yes, this might sound familiar. Its philosophy and intentions are very similar to processing’s.

However, openframeworks is not an IDE, but a set of coherent wrappers around useful libraries. As zach puts it, it is more of a glue that puts together different pieces:

• OpenGL for graphics displaying,
• FreeImage for image manipulation,
• Freetype for font displaying and manipulation,
• rtAudio for audio.
• Quicktime (mac or pc), directShow (pc) and (soon) Video4Linux (linux) for video grabbing and playing

Some of the key concepts behind openframeworks:

• Its focus is to simplify things. The main intention is that “you don’t have to look at much code when you’re beginning” (which is far from easy in c++).
• It’s conformed of reusable pieces, not stitched together. You can use any of its parts independently.
• It pretends to give you direct access to data e.g: pixels of the image, low level audio

I’ve been using it for the last couple of months. I had never done anything with c++ nor I had any idea of where to start and openframeworks has definitely made the learning curve way smoother. Having been around for ages, c++ has lots of picky details to worry about (pointers vs variables, preprocessor, different compilers, uncompatible IDEs….) so having some sort of blueprint which shares some of the programming concepts with processing makes you feel a little more like at home.

Although it’s been used extensively to give workshops and classes, it’s in super-alpha state (even the installation process was being tested on our workshop). Zach is working with Theo Watson on a really-soon-to-publish release. Most of the stuff will work on win, mac and linux.

So stay tuned.

Should we be learning from las vegas?

Friendship in C++: A friend of a class is an external function or class that has access to the private and protected members of this class. Isn’t it lovely?

More favorites:

• In chuck, function declaration is fun.
• maybe() (also from chuck): a method for the non-decisive programmer. Returns 0 or 1 at random.