lowtech music for hightech people

Check out Micro Music. I've always loved the music in the old Atari, Commodore, Apple, Ninetendo, Intellivision, etc games. I bought a SidStation and love it for that reason alone. Well, if you remember I also bought the nanoloop cartridge for the gameboy. I've just recently started playing with it and I love to hear what people do with these devices. Well, I stumbled across the micro music website via MSNBC (it came up in a google search for "gameboy music"). I've been downloading music like crazy! WOW! I feel so inspired. And all of this time, I thought I was alone in my love of 8 bit crunchy madness. The ultimate in electronic music goodness! I'm going to be a very busy boy! Check it out....I've yet to hear a bad composition! A cool on-line community that I can't wait to be a part of!

Seems I'm Not Alone

James Robertson had this to say about Bob Martin's post about debugging. I admit that I totally agree! And no, James, you are not alone!

Am I a Bad Programmer?

I reckon I must be. Bob Martin wrote that Debuggers are a wasteful timesink. I have been doing TDD now for about a month, so I'm no expert nor do I claim to be. I've been trying to do TDD in the programming that I do in my spare time, and I still need and want a good debugger. I use a debugger a lot as an exploratory tool. And while looking at a test sure does help (I would rather have a test than not), I still walk through the code with my debugger when I'm in code that I'm new to. I can't tell you how many programming mishaps I have found this way. Sure, the tests ran, but I found things that weren't quite right. To me, a debugger allows you to see the program as it is alive. Simply looking at code is like looking at something dead and reason how it is when it was alive. I'm not an archealogist, so why guess when I can run the program?

I'm not trying to downplay TDD, but I am amazed that anyone would say that debuggers are bad. I see no problem with being too dependent on them at all. I have found that I am generally using my debugger in new code and when my tests fail. I like TDD because I have a short piece of code that I can execute without running all of the program to find a problem. Thus, it makes debugging a lot shorter and easier. I think the two go hand in hand.

Extreme Computing Festival of Inappropriate Technology

Oh, this sounds like fun! Check it out here. I want to go just for the name of the conference alone. Am I the only one that likes the name?

The Dreams And Schemes Studio Is Operational!

Yeah! I finally got all of my stuff connected up in our new house! I played down there for a long time and I think I'm going to love the new setup!!!!! So, the next plan is to learn the FS1R and start creating music AGAIN!

Great FS1R Resource

I found this and thought it was really cool. I was trying to look for a FS1R editor and came across this page. Lots of information and stuff to download. Looks like I'm going to be a busy boy! I've been waiting to get fully moved in to learn this great synth. Should be a lot of fun....=) Anyway, if you have an FS1R, check out the page!

I want one

Seems Bob Moog is celebrating 50 years of electronic music excellence. Check it out here. It has got to be the sexiest calendar I've seen in a long time. Maybe one of these days, I will actually own a moog...=) The voyager is one awesome looking and sounding synth! Thank you Bob Moog for giving the world so many wonderful toys of joyful noise!

Funny Post

I got this from the Perpetual Motion Board:

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later
discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested
trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a
protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney general John
Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the
notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by
the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Ashcroft said. "They desire
average solutions by means and extremes, and
sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute
value. They use secret code names like "x" and "y" and
refer to themselves as "unknowns", but we have
determined they belong to a
common denominator of the axis of medieval with
coordinates in every country.

"As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there
are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft declared.

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush
said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of
math instruction, He would have given us more fingers
and toes. I am gratified that our government has given
us a sine that it is
intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are
willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky
statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of
influence," the President said, adding: "Under the
circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make
our point, and draw the line."

President Bush warned, "These weapons of math
instruction have the potential to decimal everything in
their math on a scalene never before seen unless we
become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to
factor-in random facts of vertex."

Attorney General Ashcroft said, "As our Great Leader
would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is
uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply, their
days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around
their necks."

Fun With Javascript

OK, I've decided to make my quote page a little adventurous. Check it out here. The page is completely generated by Javascript and if you are running IE (yeah, I know, bitch, bitch, bitch), you will get an extra special suprise. I have no excuse to this except that I was playing around and got a little carried away. Feel free to look at the source or what have you! My Javascript-fu is becoming strong!

He's BACK!

Finally, got my cable modem talking to my wireless in my new house! I can now proudly walk anywhere in my house and blog! How exciting is that?! Life is getting back to normal. Expect more posts now!

Funny, but true

Great article on security can be found here. Thanks to Sam Griffith for sending it to me. Kind of reminds me that we should always have the user's best interests in mind. And if it conflicts with our personal convictions of what is right, then we still need to choose the user's interests. Great article on usability as well.

MOVED!

We are in our new house and I am one happy boy. I apologize for the lack of posts, but it's been hectic around these parts. I will be blogging more after today because high speed internet comes my way! YIPPEE! I know my wife is happy now too. She did most of the work of getting everything in line.

Interesting Article

I just read the following article: 640KB ought to be enough for anyone. The author mainly states the obvious and it's nice to know that MS are trying to make their OS richer, but I was shocked and appalled at the following statement:

Outside of the PC mainstream, we've seen many sophisticated demonstrations of the power of network effects fundamentally based on client-side object models and dynamic binding of independently-created components. From the power of piped unix commands, to the elegant and incredible sophistication of language-derived Lisp, Smalltalk, and Squeak environments, we know that the power is there to be had. But again, none of these environments has become mainstream - each perhaps having remained niche by drowning in its own idealism.

My first reaction to this is WHAT THE #$%^&?! The only reason Smalltalk and Lisp have not garnered enough support is because of marketing plain and simple. It's easier to move to a C-based syntax language which is what most developers are raised on. Thus, they are most comfortable. People like using things they are used to. Programmers are humans too. Why do we always ignore that? I hate the common assumption that Lisp and Smalltalk failed because of the smug users of both languages. I think it's a cheap cop out. Lisp and Smalltalk are strange beasts. I didn't like Lisp at first because it was different, but I persisted and it has rewarded me over and over. In fact, I program very different today because of my encounters with both languages. I hope this doesn't sound smug or like bad apples. I don't mean it to. I'm proud that there are languages like Lisp and Smalltalk out there. And guess what? There's more of them! I'm glad language designers are out there that want to push the envelope.

Now with that being said, I still think Lisp and Smalltalk may have a long way to go. In fact, they will probably never gain mainstream acceptance. I think the ideas of both will live on and continue to influence future programming languages. I'm fine with that and accept it. if I had a million dollars, I would glady put it behind Smalltalk...=)

Gleamed From The Squeak List

Alan Kay made the following post on the Squeak List and it points to a lot of stuff that I need to look at. The amount of history in this man's head is amazing. Anyway, I thought I'd share:

--- Alan Kay wrote:
> Hint: as I mentioned previously, you don't need a
> method dictionary,
> classes, inheritance, etc. You don't even need
> "state" in the way it
> is usually thought of. The essence is that of
> communicating computers
> as looked at from the outside. If you can make the
> insides look like
> the outsides "all the way down" then you have
> something very
> interesting and powerful.
>
> And yes, the original theory of Smalltalk was just
> this (since even
> the syntaxes used are definable by interior actions
> of how the
> "computers" recognize and receive messages). The
> interesting and
> difficult parts here are design decisions about
> architectural
> conventions that allow the universal mechanisms to
> be used with
> minimal pain and maximum expression and scalability
> by humans.
>
> Each of the 4 Smalltalks in the 70s made different
> choices (plus the
> PIE system of Goldstein & Bobrow), and it's a pity
> that there have
> been so few experiments since Smalltalk-80 came out
> of PARC.
>
> But check out some of Mark Lentzner's stuff:
> Codeworks, Wheat, etc.
> Look at Joe Goguen's ideas about closer analogies to
> algebras as the
> interface, etc. Ken Kahn's various designs over the
> years are
> extremely interesting. Several of the designs I did
> after leaving
> PARC -- Rainbow, and the original Playground (quite
> different from
> each other and I'm not sure where either set of
> papers is anymore) --
> still seem to be interesting to me. David Reed's
> NAMOS is the basis
> of Croquet. And, of course, Andreas Raab's not too
> far away Tweak
> design is a *really interesting* set of ideas....
>
> However, there have been many interesting ideas over
> the years that
> have had little effect because they lacked enough
> pragmatic reality
> via great implementations (and certainly vice versa:
> an incredible
> number of systems used today have weak ideas but
> were implemented
> well enough to spread).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>

Omaha Is Looking Better and Better

Yesterday, we decided to head out to a local shop called Sonic Highway. The reason for the visit was that the store was listed as an electronic music equipment dealer. So, I had to check it out! The store owner was incredibly nice and showed me all of his toys! He had a super nice studio in the back of the store that had a HUGE DOEPLER modular synth! It was beautiful! He also tempted me with the Jomox Sunsyn (this thing sounds absolutely incredible). I wish I could have stayed longer, but I plan on making many more visits and save my money for a modular. His store even has a nice online presence at Sonic Highway. It's nice to finally have a local electronic music store that I can go and talk shop to. Maybe I'll even meet a few electronic music heads! Omaha is going to be cool place!

FreeRide Is Alive

The much anticipated (at least for me) Ruby IDE is still alive. For some odd reason, I used to have an old URL that didn't work anymore and thought the project was dead. Well, it's not and downloaded the latest from this site. It seems the debugger is now hooked up for windows (I didn't verify that, but the button is there!) And while you are downloading, poke around the entire Ruby Forge site. It's very cool. I think all of the Smalltalk's need something like this. Squeak has SqueakMap and VW has one. But, it would be nice to have one for VA and Dolphin. If there is one, let me know!

Meetup

Nice idea. Sign up now...I want to meet more Smalltalkers!

Squeak People

It seems some folks have started a Squeak advocacy site for the people involved with it. It seems a lot of the heavy hitters are there and I was just browsing around tonight. I don't have the muster to join it yet. I just don't feel like I'm a part of the community yet. I know I've done the Java Serialization and worked with the SBlog challenge...But, I'm not finished with the Java Serialization framework yet and well, I wasn't able to help finish with the SBlog stuff. I just see myself as a Squeak newbie and not worthy of being listed with the awesome fire power already up there. I'm just a mere mortal.

I Hate Keanu Reeves

Ok, not only does he get to star in one of the coolest movies all time (River's Edge) along side Dennis Hopper, but my wife tells me that Alice Cooper used to be his baby sitter! Can you believe that?! Some people have all of the luck...

Cool SmallBlog User

Check it out here. It seems somebody is using the SBlog code! We've recently renamed the SBlog project from SBlogLite to just SmallBlog. I spent sometime with the code this weekend and look forward to adding to the code base. Go check out this blog, it's all Squeak and Seaside. Very cool. It's also cool because it looks so stylish...=)