News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • PC, Vista, Music

    I was trying to do some music, using Reason on my dual G5 Mac, and for reasons (sic) that aren’t clear to me, started with two tracks of arpeggiated Combinator patches. Believe it or not, just those two tracks was enough to give me the dreaded “Your computer is too slow” message. Ugh.

    Normally, when this happens, I go through the rigamarole of rendering one of the tracks to audio (then slice and reload), or simplifying the sounds I’m using or some other hack to reduce the CPU load, but just for grins this time, I decided I try installing Reason on my PC instead. Time to figure out just exactly how much faster the C2Q is than the G5s!

    So, I installed Reason, the driver and automapper for my Novation keyboard, and the absolutely required to do anything useful musically on a PC ASIO4ALL — link removed, since it now goes to a spam site — universal ASIO driver. [Ah yes, I remember the “joys” of doing music on a PC.] And finally, I was ready to go.

    I recreated the original two tracks I built on the Mac, and then started layering more; not, you understand, to build something musically pleasing, but rather just to see exactly how many layers I could end up with. The result was this:

    What you are looking at is 13 Combinators, for a total of somewhere around 135 (!) individual modules. The result is, of course, an absolute mess, but if you want proof click here:

    A mess

    Remember now, I started with the original two tracks that brought the G5 to it’s knees, and it has another 11 layers added on after that. Unfortunately, that really was the limit, I tried for one more layer, but hit the “your computer is too slow” boundary. But still…

    Wow!

    Hm… Now if that’s what you can do with a Core2Quad, I wonder what you can do with one of these. 🙂

  • Dennis rocks!

    Most people in Ottawa will know that last weekend was the Ottawa Race Weekend. This year, Dennis had an opportunity to get credit for participation as part of the school’s phys. ed. program, and he went for it:

    Dennis ran the “MDS Nordion 10K” race, with a very creditable time of 1:07:01.

    Of course, he did no training of any kind before the race, so Deb and I spent the whole hour, standing at the finish line, worrying about whether he was going to have a heart attack before he got there. In the end, we didn’t see him go past us — he was lost in the press — but we got a one word text message (“Done!”).

    He complained of being a little tired, and had one blister, but nothing that stopped him from wanting to go “hang out” with his friends soon afterwards. What a guy! 😉

    You rock, Dennis!

    For what it’s worth, here’s a picture I took of the press at the starting line. I don’t think Dennis is actually in this picture, but with the limitations of the iPhone’s camera, it’s hard to tell. Oh well, next time I’ll remember to bring the video camera. 🙂

    Btw, if you’re interested, here’s a link to Dennis’ official results:
    Ottawa Race Weekend: Results

    (That last link no longer works, of course.)

  • Update on Lucky’s health

    For those who hadn’t heard, Lucky developed some kind of severe G-I issue more than a week ago, which we were unable to get under control despite several visits to the vet and everything we tried at home. This eventually culminated in us admitting him at the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital on Friday night.

    The great news is that he seems to have stabilized, under the excellent monitoring and care of the OVH staff, and we brought him home again today. He’s still on several different meds, and is getting many small meals of a custom “Gastro” diet, but hopefully a few more days of TLC will have him all fixed up. We still don’t know whether there is some underlying issue that needs to be resolved, but for now we are not going to go for further tests, unless he gets worse.

    Update: We’re not out of the woods yet; he was off his food again this morning (Tues). 🙁

    Update 2: We’re now on a third antibiotic. As long as we can prevent his appetite from failing again, this one should do it. (Thurs.)

  • SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone (Updated)

    So, as you may already know, I have a Slingbox Solo. I continue to be quite happy with it, and use it regularly to watch TV on one computer while playing WAR on the other.

    One of the things that made this device particularly compelling to me, however, was the claim that they were going to come out with SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone. When SlingMedia first announced this, they said it would be available sometime in the first quarter… Well, apparently that didn’t work. However, it was submitted to the AppStore early in April.

    So what’s going on?

    Some people in the industry are reporting that carriers have pushed back on this app, since they didn’t want to support the increased demand on their networks. Others are saying that because of the nature of the app, Apple is just being extremely careful about it. Personally, I find that somewhat unlikely; any company that could (briefly) publish a shaken baby app can’t be all that careful.

    In any case, it’s been a full month now that Apple has been sitting on the app, and it’s time to let it go. Either that or, hey SlingMedia, just release it on your website. I’ll jailbreak the phone to use it, so help me Apple, I will.

    Update: SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone is out. Apple and Sling Media bowed to the carriers, and removed the ability to stream over 3G, even though beta versions of the app supported it. That, together with the $30 (!) price tag, was almost enough for me to bail on it. I did decide to buy it eventually, and the capsule review is “works well over wifi”.

  • Swine Flu

    (Interesting! The CBC links in this article no longer work, but as of this update, the ABC one still does.)

    I hope we’ve all been taking this seriously, but in case you haven’t…

    Swine Flu is in Ontario, we just haven’t gotten the tests back yet:

    Ontario probes suspected swine flu cases amid pandemic fears

    It’s not under control in Nova Scotia:

    Swine flu symptoms spreading beyond Windsor, N.S., campus

    And for good measure, here’s a US link:

    Swine Flu: What You Need to Know

    And just so you know, if the Mexico stats hold, it’s killing about 6.5% of the people who get it. So, wash your hands with soap and hot water, stay away from people who are coughing and sneezing, avoid crowds, and look around you: 1 out of every 20 people you know who catch it is going to die.

  • It’s Spring!

    Ah, Ottawa in the Spring. What a wonderful time of year. Birds singing, the grass starting to show, the trees budding…

    To give some of you less fortunate ones a chance to understand what their missing, here’s a shot from outside my house this morning:

    Just beautiful.

  • Gerald, how could you?!!?!

    It’s the end of an era, for the Knights of the Lambda Calculus. 🙁

    Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

  • If my mind was this cluttered… Oh, wait.

    I’ve been busy on many fronts lately, and haven’t had time to blog. In lieu of real content, here’s a picture of my office…

    (Click on it to get a bigger view.)

    Some things to note:

    • You can see by the height of the chair that I have put my desk back in “stand up” mode. I’ve only been at it for a couple of days, and so my back (and feet) are still pretty sore, but I must say it’s a great way to remind myself that I need to lose weight. It usually takes about 3 weeks to get used to it again.
    • I do still juggle, especially on conference calls [pssst… don’t tell anyone. 😉 ]. The balls on the desk are actually made of wood; they’re great for training you to catch properly since they hurt if you do it wrong (but you don’t lose fingers like you do with knives). The pins (stuck in the back of the desk under the Escher print) are just for show, I haven’t used them in years. Oh, and there’s a unicycle just out of frame behind the cello case on the left. 🙂
    • The silent cello is still at work. I try to get 10 or 15 minutes to play it at lunch, but that’s about the best I’ve done.
    • Yes, my main development machine is a MacBook Pro.

    Anyway, stay tuned hopefully after EclipseCon is over, next week, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming updates.

  • 6 out of 10

    Here’s something to give you pause:

    60% of world’s population now has cell phone, highest ever

    (and, of course, that link no longer works)

  • Rubik’s TouchCube

    I saw this over at Engadget…

    Rubik’s TouchCube splashes modern day onto timeless classic

    The post describes a new variant on the Rubik’s Cube with no moving parts, which uses a microprocessor with embedded LEDs to display colors on the faces, and touch sensors to recognize gestures that allow you to “rotate” those colors. Here’s a picture from the Engadget post:

    Now, at a purely pragmatic level, this doesn’t make a lot of sense; why would you replace a perfectly good $5 toy with an electronic version that will cost ten times as much. [ed: Gizmodo is reporting that it will cost $150.] However, It did get me thinking again about intelligent devices…

    One way to look at it is that this device is just as a “middle ground” between a purely physical object (i.e. the original toy) and purely virtual expressions of that toy — something like Erno’s Cube for the iPhone:

    There’s more to it than that, however.

    I don’t know whether the TouchCube would be as satisfying to use to actually play Rubik’s Cube as the original is, but assuming they got the responsiveness right, it’s probably close. The thing is though, once you’ve separated the physical gestures from the resulting visuals, you can then start looking at other uses for it.

    Obviously, the TouchCube could be used to play different games; you could, for example, play memory games (à la Simon) on it. If nothing else, this gives it more long term play value.

    Now, imagine building in a little more awareness of its surroundings, then you could do things like:

    • dim the colors so you can play in bed at night
    • play competitively, with feedback from other nearby TouchCubes
    • or how about having all faces on the cube flash red when your cell phone gets a call — I could just see it, sitting on my desk, warning me when I forgot to take my phone out of silent mode, with send to voicemail being connected to stroke the top.

    The possibilities are endless, but there are pitfalls. If we were going to live in a world where intelligent devices like this are common, we would have to ensure that they followed a common grammer for communication so that we didn’t end up increasing the cognitive overhead unboundedly (“So, my chair just jiggled. Does that mean the phone is ringing, or that I have to lose weight?”). They would also have to communicate with each other to allow the most capable device to provide the information (but also just to avoid being blinded when everything in the room simultaneously flashes at you).

    Anyway, there’s nothing new in this ramble; people have been talking about this stuff since the ’60s. The TouchCube just got me thinking about it again, and hopefully this post did the same for you. 🙂