News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • 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. 🙂

  • Happy Birthday, Tim.

    Apparently, he has two girl friends. 😉

    (… and no, that’s not them in the picture. 🙂 )

  • 36 seconds…

    … of something made with the SVC-50:

    SVC-50 sample

    It’s just a drum loop, a second random loop off this month’s computer music, and a couple of cello tracks with significant processing.

  • At last! Now, no one can hear me.

    I stopped at Long & McQuade one day this week and noticed that they had a Yamaha Silent Cello sitting in a box. I have always wanted to try one of these instruments, so Friday I managed to coherce Ken and Steve — no, it wasn’t that difficult — to go on a road trip at lunch time to see if it had been put on display yet. It turned out that it hadn’t been, but the salesperson who worked in that section was happy to set it up while we waited. I was pleased to see that he knew stringed instruments well, going from removing the packing material to having it fully set up and tuned in about five minutes.

    While waiting for it to be prep’ed, I looked through the cello bows they had in stock to see if there was something interesting to play. For grins, I ended up trying a fiberglass bow. Um… no. It seems that fiberglass bows have considerably more flex than pernambuco, and there’s something about the lack of grain / direction to the flex that felt very weird. Oh well.

    Since the silent cello is (nearly) silent without amplification, the salesman asked if I wanted to try it with headphones, or go for an amp, and I (being the brave soul that I am) went the amp route. After a little initial awkwardness I found that it was quite natural to play. Ken helpfully snapped a candid shot with his iPhone, then used his psionic powers to annotate it with exactly what I was thinking…

    Anyway, the summary is, money-or-no I decided to get it. Hopefully, somewhere between a year-end bonus and a tax refund I can clear up the $1500 damage. (Of course, any cellist will tell you that $1500 for an instrument is cheap, but that doesn’t make it any easier.)

    The thing is, it really is exactly what I wanted. Even though the SVC-50 is the cheapest of the models Yamaha makes, and is missing some of the sensors that are in the more expensive ones, it still sounds quite good — better, in fact, than the sound I got from the piezo pickup on my “real” cello. It has a built-in headphone amp and a line in jack that I can use to connect my iPhone, so it will be the perfect tool for practicing at work[*], while listening to the pieces for the orchestra.

    It’s also perfect for connecting up to music software, since you can hear the processed result without having to block out the original sound of the instrument. I’ll try to get something recorded soon, so you can hear what it sounds like.

    It’s very cool!

    Here’s one last image, from the official Yamaha site:
    Yamaha SVC-50

    [*] Since everyone I have said that to has replied “Aren’t you supposed to be working instead?”, I’m compelled to note that I mean at lunchtime.