yummy ...
MIDI Control for Music with Wii Remote: Teaser
Must. Hookup. To. Guitar. (via Ableton Live via TonePort)
I can already imagine the hours of practice I will be avoiding.
Isn't it great when folks use standard componentry?
Photo 'I wanna be a guitar hero', with a nice CC license, by ckirkman. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
Technorati ProfileDave Shields posted a blog entry the other day, "Yogi Yarns - On being lucky. First is not always best", in which he talks about his involvement in IBM's first official open source project, Jikes. Dave's current posts are a great read on open source in general. Highly recommended.
I couldn't resist sending him a note though, about a small piece of source code that I managed to convince my IP Lawyer at the time, Mr. X, to 'give away'. This was 1994, and giving away source code wasn't something that normally happened in IBM at the time. Dave reposted my note in his blog.
Of course, the real credit goes to Mr. X. I swore I was going to give Mr. X a heart attack at some point, with all the "crazy talk" that I threw at him. For some reason, he actually listened to me during my tirades, and realized that this particular rant, of wanting to give some customers some relatively harmless / worthless code, was not a completely stupid idea, and ran with it. The resulting license that he had me add to the distribution bares a striking similarity to open source licenses you see today. Remember, this was 1994.
Of course, the real reason I responded was that it's impossible to resist someone saying a record can never be broken. The question is, who's going to break Mr X's record?
I'm also reminded of an opposite case. Way back when, this guy I'd never heard of, Ward Cunningham, had a program on his web site called WikiWikiWeb. I was facinated. So much so that I wrote a lame clone of it in REXX for OS/2. And then told Ward about it. This was about the same time, 1993 or 1994.
Ward emailed me a few months ago, asking me if I still had the source. I never distributed the source, because, that was something that simply wasn't done. I had written some of it at work; it was IBM property, I couldn't just give it away.
I had a fun night, that night I got the email, trolling through lots of my old source code. I have stuff going back to the early 90's. But I couldn't find my wiki clone. Sad. If I HAD given the code out, there'd be a much better chance of it still be available, somewhere.
Update: Mr. X is Greg Doudnikoff.
Photo 'Mr - X', with a nice CC license, by Luiz Carlos. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
In Should You Choose RELAX or JSON Now?, Robert Sayre claims "100% of the data-oriented use cases can be served better and faster by JSON. No 80/20 truism."
+1
I've had a love / hate relationship with JSON over the last year, but I'm currently very positive on it. It has all the basic data types you need, and no more: numbers, strings, boolean, hash tables, arrays, and null. And it's not a document.
Photo 'stop', with a nice CC license, by MarkNick. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
Yes, we camped out. At our local Target, which we believed was going to have 60 wii's available, and they did. My wife got the 5pm - 10pm slot, I got overnight. Kids stayed the entire time. It was frosty cold; literally. One of the shots in the flickr set shows the frost on one of our sleeping bags. The hot apple cider, hot Bojangles biscuits and hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts helped a little, but not enough.
I should point out this was the kids' idea. I was quite happy to wait till they became available on Amazon, and order from there. But they've been working us for the last few weeks about camping out, and when it finally came down to it, we folded pretty easily. The plan had been to head over at about 4am. Plans changed when we drove by at 4pm and saw about 9 people in line. By about midnight, there were 47 people in line. I think we could have arrived at 4am and just made it.
The crowd was great. Mostly young-ish nerdy types. The only shots I heard came from the Gears of War session someone had going. Power supplied by Lowes, next door, via an extremely long extension cord. Target really did this right. Came out at about 7pm to tell people they'd be opening the doors at 8am, and handing out vouchers at about 7am. That's the boys, to the right, holding our #16 voucher. Target let folks in early to use the restroom, also. Everyone was very friendly.
The Wii setup was easy, I guess. My 13 year old did it. I got it added to the network; it was no more difficult than adding any new device to our network was. Which for me, is a number of steps (security, dhcp, etc). For most people, I'm sure it will just 'work'.
The boys played Wii Sports all day; that's not my type of game, but they enjoyed it. Note you will need to have more 'open space' in your gaming area than normal, to allow for folks making full swinging motions with bats and rackets, as well as making plenty of boxing motions.
The boys didn't have enough money to get any games, so I bought one, and gave them the choice of Super Monkey Ball, Need for Speed, or Excite Truck, which seemed like the only ones I'd really play. They chose Excite Truck. Finally got to play last night at about 10pm.
The wii controller is quite cool. Bluetooth. Wonder if my Mac can see it, and what it would do with it? For the driving game, you basically hold the controller horizontally, then tilt it to steer and some other actions. I felt like I had to hold the controller a little unnaturally to do this, but once I got in the groove (a few minutes), it was pretty comfortable and easy.
BTW, as an additional non-proprietary thing they've done, you can use an SD memory card with the system, somehow; looks like it will show pictures from a phone or camera right now.
The internet connection doesn't seem to do much right now. One section of the system seemed to indicate that we'll be able to browse the internet soon. Showing an image of a Google web page. I guess if you're trying to show people you can connect to the web, showing them Google gets the idea across right away. Though it makes me wonder if there isn't some Google linkage coming. I'll be interested to see if they have some way to 'extend' web pages to do something interesting on them, when browsing on the wii. Also interested to see if people end up finding some networkable things on the wii. I was able to ping mine, but it doesn't have port 80 open.
Looking forward to downloading VectorMan from the Genesis section of the downloadable classic games area. Hope it's just $5, like a lot of them are.
Two of my IBM colleagues, Julian Dolby and Graeme Johnson, recently presented at the International PHP Conference. Their presentation, PHP: A Language Implementor's Perpective, is available here.
I should point out that the topics presented here are research topics undertaken by IBM. Both presentations are the result of IBMers taking research and development experience in programming languages and applying that to PHP. And specifically, the challenges that PHP presents.
Brief overview ...
Julian's presented on static analysis of PHP, specifically, how static analysis can be used to identify security problems.
Graeme's presented on looking at the PHP runtime through the eyes of someone who has been developing Java VMs for the last decade.
Interesting stuff for folks interested in the nuts and bolts of dynamic languages and runtimes, and of course, specifically, PHP.
BTW, this was the same conference that Tim Bray presented on web frameworks, and then blogged about in Comparing Frameworks.
Enjoy ...
Photo "the art of runtime performance optimization", with a nice CC license, by bitmapr. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
I've been using Bloglines for ... a while. I wonder how long? What did I use before? hmmm ... Anyhoo, one of those things that shakes your belief in a product happened to me last night, as I was adding a feed to my bloglines collection.
All of my feeds disappeared.
For a few hours, at least. This morning, everything was back the way it used to be, including that new feed that I had tried to add.
Important Lesson: make a back up of your feed list every now and again. This would typically be in OPML, which everyone seems to be able to export and then import. There are all sorts of ways you can lose your feed list, including some suprise ones.
My last copy was just over a month old, which was good enough for jazz.
While it was down, I decided to poke around and see what else was available. I had recently loaded my bloglines opml into Google Reader to give it a try, so I continued to give it a try. I rather like it. And it's small fonts. (I think I'm quite fortunate that, of all the problems that people start accumulating when they get old, I don't have problems with my vision). I think I can get used to it.
Also took a quick tour of feedlounge, because I've heard good things about it. $5 / month. I can deal with that, I think. I just played a little, I should do another 24 tour with it I guess.
I used to use Shrook back in the day, and when I found it on VersionTracker, the reviews didn't seem so great, so I didn't bother.
Listening to a slightly old MacBreak Weekly today, I heard Leo put a good word in for NetNewsWire, which I guess got bought by NewsGator sometime in the recent past. I should try that also. I think the same show mentioned both Daring Fireball and The Macalope which I should try reading (again, for Daring Fireball).
w/r/t the online vs. desktop dilemma, I think I'm still firmly in the online camp (bloglines, google reader, feedlounge). Because there are still occaisons where I'm on some rando computer and want to check da feeds.
There are a number of downsides to Google Reader compared to Bloglines:
Update: fixed a typo, added the picture
Photo "civilized reader", with a nice CC license, by ytang3. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
A colleague of mine, Andy Wharmby, sent me a link the other day.
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39320
Terribly exciting, no? Well, maybe not for you. But a bunch of us in IBM were quite happy.
![the squashed bug by [n]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v7QuWojbUT9GbffUnxtv4cj_y2JTijaiDv6Eq1N5R0Sbe63PiLtKX89jAz3BNa7v0cEGeI3hpCT4KjY0SiII3D7SYAWDXdT9ZAo7G-BRremOEHkz3iejkz=s0-d "the squashed bug by [n]")
Andy's got a cool job right now, which is: learn the innards of the php runtime. As IBM is getting more serious about PHP, we figured we had to get our fingers into the fun stuff, especially since we have a little experience with virtual machines and runtimes like this. Andy, for instance, has been working on the Java VM for a while.
Even so, getting a bug report like this filed doesn't seem like such a big deal; it's open source baby! My mom could submit bugs reports. But my mom doesn't work at IBM. We're fairly strict about work-related open source activities, after some of the events that have transpired over the last few years; we need not speak of that. Strict means getting approvals, etc. And to be precise, it's not the filing of bugs that anyone in IBM cares about, but shipping code, and by implication, submitting proposed fixes. Which Andy did. It's not an impossible chore to get this stuff done, but it takes some time to get everything lined up.
Everything's lined up.
BTW, Andy's fix was accepted with a small tweak from the Marcus and some eagle-eyed code checking from Pierre ... good to see the community keeping us honest.
Oh, Andy, I can't seem to find your blog. Where is it? :-)
Photo "the squashed bug", with a nice CC license, by [n]. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
So, this dWorks blog supports tagging, which is great and all, but doesn't seem to support generating a feed of entries based on the tags, which isn't great. I asked the various &dieties; that I knew, Elias Torres, who I ended up having a great extended call with today, and James Snell, if they knew how to do this. In fact, I remembered James posting a blog entry with some roller atom generation hacks. Upside, they thought it was possible, but didn't have anything they could give me at the moment.
I started with James' blog post Deploying a Comments Feed in Roller, which got me most of the way there. And then tweaking from there.
Here's what I have so far: http://www.muellerware.org/projects/FeedTagged/index.html
Debugging these templates is ... a pain. And the programming facilities, using Velocity, aren't quite complete enough for my tastes.
One problem was the $requestParameters macro will give you the values for a particular query string parameter, but it gives you the values as an array (which is what you want). But Velocity doesn't seem to have any way of accessing arrays. Which seems totally insane. I found a little utility object the roller exposes called $utilities with a method called stringArrayToString which was ... good enough.
How did I find the $utilities variable? Roller's help. Notice however, no description of what $utilities is, is actually provided. How did I find stringArrayToString?
Debugging even something as small as this template is quite painful. One false move, and you'll get a 500 back from your server, with no indication of what the problem is. The trick is to create another template that you can plop tiny bits of code to exercise, and test that first. Want to know what class the $utilities object is, so you can find what methods are available? Just put the string $utilities in the 'testing' template, save, and then view the template. Voila. Hopefully you'll get the default toString() representation of the object, yielding the class name. From there ... google is your friend.
The crudest form of doIt / printIt I think I've ever used, but good enough for jazz.
Anyway, looks like it's functional, and validates.
Photo "Blade Here", with a nice CC license, by alykat. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.
I'm kinda bummed I missed the Zend/PHP Conference, which is wrapping up today. (Still waiting for the day when I can pay a few dollars and attend conference sessions virtually). Lots of interesting people, sessions and announcements. Right before the conference, someone had suggested tagging stuff about the conference with "zendconference2006". A few things tagged at del.icio.us and technorati, and boatloads of pictures got tagged at flickr.
IBM had quite a few folks presenting talks or in panels, including:
Whew!
Here's a list of pointers to other coverage.
update: fixed typo
