09.28.09
“Hello /dev/world!”
Just about to give my Quartz Composer talk at the /dev/world conference. I’ll wrap together the talk and all the materials and files a bit later this week and post it up for people to refer to.
07.02.09
Some useful programming resources…
I’m waiting on a phone interview with someone from Amazon Web Services, and I’ve been reading and preparing. I have found a few resources that I want to keep around, and spread the word for others.
Firstly, the excellent Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky on the interview process. Use what they say to reverse-engineer what you should do!
Secondly, some online resources so I don’t make (too much) of an ass of myself in the interview — some quick references on core topics in case I get a brain freeze:
Java quick reference/cheatsheet, Java console/file IO
Wikipedia’s list of data structures
Dictionary of Data Structures/Algorithms
Useful bit operations, but CatOnMat has heaps of other useful articles too.
Finally, sorting and searching algorithms.
I’m astonished how rusty I feel with respect to a few of these big topics: my courses have moved on to stuff like programming paradigms like Scheme and concurrency/threading. I need more time to follow up on my own coding project ideas!
UPDATE: So, it was someone with a background in computer security and operating systems. All I know about OS is stuff I’ve picked up from Slashdot articles and interesting articles on IBM DeveloperWorks 
He scaled down some of the questions to more DSA type things when it became clear how little I knew about network programming, but it was still pretty embarassing for me. I do have a piece of homework to do, so hopefully that means I’m still in the running…
06.25.09
What am I up to now?
A bit of a brain dump about what I’m juggling at the moment:
First up, uni exams and the Duke site coordinator role.
Second, I want to write a Scheme interpreter on the iPhone. Bring together what I’ve read in The Little Schemer, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and the iPhone Developer documentation. It can’t be sold in the App Store (No programming environments, nothing that can process user input) so it’s more of a code kata exercise in sharpening my skills.
To that end, I’m reading a book I picked up from the bargain bin in the USA, C Data Structures. I’ve covered a lot of the topics in Java for uni assignments, but I want to learn the C equivalents so that I can flexibly move between imperative and OO styles in writing the interpreter. The book is well structured, but with annoying typos and bad typesetting all over the place. the decrement operator (–) appears to have been replaced with an em-dash in quite a few places, so the code and explanations get rather cryptic sometimes! Also, Practical C Programming would be next, keeping up the O’Reilly gold standard for technical books so far.
Third, I have some creative projects on my mind. I want to follow up from the Audium experience with a spatial sound experiment, possibly during the Adelaide Fringe next year. Dave Bartholomeusz has said I can use all the equipment that isn’t on hire, so we have maybe two dozen mackies and subs to play with. Routing all the sound is going to be an interesting exercise in concurrency, I’m thinking that I may have to pre-render the audio tracks and then sync in real-time, or have multiple computers and mixing desks if we are doing a real crazy job of it. If anyone knows any elegant solutions, let me know!
Also, I have a few ideas for Quartz Composer patches using the new Snow Leopard version of QC. I was also thinking it would be cool to set up a github repo so that I can share them around and other VJs can experiment with them or branch off in their own interesting manners. There’s certainly a lot more room for implementing Quartonian in an elegant way using Xcode and QC now than ever before.
What else? A gigantic stack of books. A talk at the AUC /dev/world conference in September. Friends to catch up with. Snowboarding in Mt Hotham. More books to read.
That’s it for now. I’m going to get a coffee and study my notes for the Advanced Programming Paradigms exam at Cibo.
06.15.09
Some tips for travellers to San Francisco…
This is my second time in SF, and it’s an awesome place. In the spirit of helping others to get the most from the city, here are my tips:
- Read up beforehand. I recommend the book, “San Francisco Bizarro”, and the LaughingSquid.com blog. BoingBoing.net also covers some cool things in the Bay Area as well. Upcoming.yahoo.com has a great list of events, and there are several street press magazines you can read once you arrive.
- Public transport is pretty good. The BART is an excellent means for getting from SFO to your accomodation, and the Muni has been fine for getting around places not near the BART.
- Accommodations can be pretty expensive, but if you know where to look they can also be pretty cheap. I found a good place through AirBnB.com, and some hotel rooms through google searches. The Taylor Hotel (615 Taylor Street) is two blocks away from Union Square but only $60 per night (about $70 with taxes included). It isn’t luxurious, but it is central and it’s a third of the rate at the Marriott I stayed in during WWDC. I’ve also stayed in the Pacific Winds backpacker hostel. It was good and the people were fun, but you don’t get any personal or private space. I find I can cope with this fine for a week or so, but then need a couple of days where I have my own private space to chill out in. After that I can happily return to shared accommodation. Try not to be in denial about your needs for personal space, even if it’s only for a couple of days — it will be a lot less stressful for you and the people around you!
- Be aware of your surroundings. The Tenderloin is an area in central San Francisco that is just off Market St, and I have been repeatedly warned that it gets dangerous after dark. The cheapest hotels in the city centre tend to be on the edge of the Tenderloin, and will be safer to approach from one direction than another.
- Usual traveller rules apply: don’t make yourself an obvious target. Talk to other travellers and the reception staff at the hotel. Don’t keep all your valuables in one place: I have money and a credit card in my wallet, in my backpack and in my laptop bag.
- San Francisco has mild winters and some decent free health clinics, so there’s a significant number of homeless people around. I haven’t seen any of them do anything beyond begging or sleeping in the street, but it is pretty full-on at times. Yesterday in Union Square (Taking photos of Macy’s, Tiffany’s and Victoria’s Secret massive flagship stores) I watched a guy who might have been 18 searching a bin for leftover food. Some of them smell really offensive. Some have mental disorders. Keep your cool and keep walking — unless you really want to spend some time talking to them or you want to give them some money. But decide ahead of time how you will deal with them, because you are in for a pretty upsetting time otherwise.
- Tipping. I think this is a pretty bullshit way to organise things, but it isn’t my country. The minimum wage is so low here that service staff need tips to cover their rent and food expenses. Not tipping or giving a low tip (less than about 15%) is seen as an insult to the service. This leads to all kinds of predatory behaviour, especially in more expensive restaurants. If they can convince you to get a dessert and a coffee for $13, that’s an extra $2 on their tip. Prepare for some very friendly behaviour followed by a lot of upselling on drinks and desserts.
- Coffee. I like the Italian-style coffee in Australia (Cibo, Lavazza, Illy, etc…) and the regular American taste is way too bitter. It has been explained to me that they assume you will have a lot of sugar or a syrup shot, as well as cream or milk, so they blend and brew a more bitter coffee to balance the flavours. Go to Caffe Trieste in North Beach or Blue Bottle Cafe in SOMA for (in my opinion) an enjoyable coffee. They will both have lineups continuously, so be prepared to wait for a few minutes to get served. I find that Starbucks can be great if you go in there looking for an adult milkshake!
Most of all, make friends with the locals! SF seems to be the collection point for the smartest, most creative and curious people in the western parts of the US, and if you are open to it you can discover some amazingly cool people very quickly. It isn’t all about Silicon Valley either, there is a lot more culturally active stuff to engage with than you would think. SFMOMA and the Exploratorium need to be experienced, at the very least, and I highly recommend doing the bike ride from Fisherman’s Wharf across the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day!
06.07.09
Audium
Went and saw the Audium in San Francisco (1616 Bush St, look up details at http://audium.org ) and had my mind thoroughly blown.
I probably take the title of my blog too seriously: I don’t post random stuff, I wait for deeper ideas to come along. Trouble being, I don’t have time to write them up as well as I’d like. The Audium was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had recently, so I’m just going to get this up and figure out what I think while I’m writing.
Stereo traps us in a lot of our audio experience. It’s good enough and cheap enough to do the job most of the time. I have been to amazing gigs — Alex Carpenter’s Music of Transparent Means, Merzbow in the Big Star basement — where the surround sound was unbelievable. I have been in noise bands, overwhelming the room and the performers with dense walls of sound. I have done listening meditations in interesting places, trying to immerse my self in the experience of the moment.
The Audium very rapidly reminded me of all these experiences and more.
176 speakers, multi-track location control, someone in charge who has experimented with this for 30 or 40 years. Even the architecture of the place communicates something important about the experience you are about to have.
The closest you have ever been to a sound system with this fidelity of location and presence is in a movie theater. There is no way you’ll see a film with a soundtrack that is this intense: multiple moving sound sources quickly pulls your full attention out of the visual realm. The performance rapidly overwhelms, becomes a raw and pure experience of attention. I was shocked when the lights came up at the end, having completely lost track of time.
I write about an experience that is, by definition, only capable of being summarized in text. I can tell you what happens around the experience, but the experience itself — the point of the experience — is beyond explanation. Once you have experienced the overwhelming presence of the sound, we can talk about it. Until we have these shared referents, I can only vaguely indicate what it is like.
In short, you should see this if you are in San Francisco. I am determined to experiment with multi-source / locational sound myself now. I have a whole bunch of ideas for a show in next year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival and a long list of people to contact about making it happen.
05.12.09
Twitter and your cyberspace lifestream.
I recently read David Gelernter’s article on edge.org, “The Second Coming”. Later the same day, I read some reactionary screed against twitter in a newspaper. The contrast between the two was pretty extreme, and got me bubbling away with a few ideas on the interesting transitions our culture is going through.
I present these ideas in a semi-edited form, for your appreciation and re-use. Nothing here is necessarily true or final, in a cunning demonstration of my eventual conclusion…
Firstly, Gelernter describes something that underlies what is compelling about Twitter, in a very tangential way:
Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehicles moving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody (like an aircraft’s contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallized experience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is a company, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff and customers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated — what’s left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace.
I’ve talked about twitter being like telepathy before, but this really catches another compelling aspect: twitter crystallizes conversations in a more accessible way than I have experienced before. Discover someone because a friend replied to something they said? You can uncover the entire conversation chain of replies, look at the branches in the discussion, find other new people of interest. When you find someone who is really interesting to you, you can look through their history and the conversation streams they have been a part of.
There’s a layer of people who have heard of twitter but who don’t have any experience deeper than following celebrities and their friends. This is the shallow part of the experience, and complaining about it is like listening in on two people who are getting together for lunch and gossiping about famous people. It isn’t interesting to an outsider, but is the lubricant for a lot of social interaction.
The fascinating thing about twitter is the easy emergence of groups and communities that dig deeper. Allow me to demonstrate.
Let’s say we have a group of people who find each other by some opt-in resource, say twittgroups.com . There are varying levels of quality of poster in there. The people who spam or waste time get unfollowed or ignored. The best posters turn up more often in useful conversations when people search or look at the history of interesting discussions. More followers within the community of interest means a greater ability to call on the resources of the community for their projects.
Twitter simplifies contributing to communities of shared interests. It makes it easier to find valuable people without the complications of facebook and myspace ‘friend’ relationships. It freezes the contrails of discussions without adding friction to the conversation itself. The way these build on the core mechanic of Gelernter’s lifestream — the ‘crystallised experience’ — is one of the elements that makes Twitter indispensable to me and many others.
02.16.09
Hakuba cheat sheet
So. I’ve been on holiday in Hakuba with some friends for a devastatingly bad season. We’re getting springtime weather about a month early this year, with the usual snow dumps for this period arriving as rain.
Despite this, I really like the resort and I can see how much better this would be under regular conditions. There’s not much info provided in English by anyone other than tour operators, so I thought I’d write up what I have learned about staying here and getting the best out of the mountain.
The Area: Nagano is a large Japanese town near here, about an hour away by bus. A lot of the 1998 Nagano Olympics were held here in Hakuba.
Hakuba is the supporting town under a set of resorts that line the valley. Here’s a decent map of the resorts
Hakuba basically runs along the train tracks and up to the base of each resort. There aren’t pedestrian walkways, so if you go on foot then you have to share the road with the cars. The bus services on the mountain are ok, but aren’t loop shuttle services, they’re scheduled. This being Japan, they are on time as well. We have hopped on buses at exactly the time they were meant to be at the stop and they have moved on one minute later, so if you aren’t there early you could be waiting an hour for the next bus to come.
There’s a night bus service which costs 300 yen, and you have to buy tickets before you board. The bus services during the day and just after the resorts close are free, though.
Getting here: Train to Nagano/bus to Hakuba is the fastest route, but if your flight arrives too late (or is delayed) then you are in for a 5 hour bus ride from Narita airport. Check with your travel agent or the bus/train timetables.
Staying here: Each of the mountains has some accommodation at the base, and there’s lodges and hotels spread across the valley. We stayed at “Four Seasons Hotel”/Oharuka No-Yu, which is a hotel above Echo Land. Echo Land is an area with a bunch of tourist friendly shops/restaurants/snow gear shops. It is between Hakuba 47 and Happo One, so the buses go down to one of the main streets, across and then back up to the mountain.
General Notes: This is on the main island with easy train/bus access, so there are lots of daytrippers on the weekends. If you were going to take a day off for cultural activities, it should be a Saturday/Sunday.
Japanese skiers/boarders are at a wide range of abilities. You’ll see people who have been engaged in snow sports all their lives go screaming past you at high speed. You’ll also see people who are obviously struggling with their first experience of snow. They usually have really good green runs for learners at the base of the mountain — No obstacles, really even gradients, but very well used and hard packed snow. If you have learners with you, get them used to their skis/board and then move to the intermediate runs as soon as possible, the ground will be much more forgiving when they fall.
The resorts were done with skiers in mind: wide open flat runs. The level 5 runs (dotted black lines on the maps) usually mean moguls. There aren’t very many areas where you can muck about in the trees without going out-of-bounds. Which brings me to an important point –
You will see areas that look awesome from the chair or the run. Some of these are genuinely awesome and quite safe if you are experienced. Others lead to avalanche danger, hidden obstacles and creeks. Case the area very thoroughly before you duck a rope, because you could easily end up dead if you screw up.
At Niseko, there are forbidden areas between the resorts, but you can do the trees between runs without risk of penalties. They will post that areas are beyond ski patrol and you’ll be personally liable for a rescue if you need it, but experienced groups can safely enjoy these areas up until the ropes are up for the forbidden zones. Hakuba doesn’t do this DMZ stuff: if you go outside the runs, ski patrol will take your pass if they catch you. This frustrates the experienced and adventurous snowboarders, because the most fun terrain is off-limits instead of restricted to people who know what they’re doing.
The Resorts:
Hakuba 47 / Goryu: These two link at the top, so you can travel back and forth between the resorts on the one pass. The higher up, the better the snow and the more expert the other people. If you hike the peak (doesn’t take very long, isn’t too steep) , you can do some excellent drops right over alongside the Alps 4th chair lift. We happily spent a day with 30-40cm fresh snow doing loops around the Alps 3rd chair lift, going in for lunch at the top of the Goryu gondola and then coming back out to the same area. Some nice jumps around the place, ungroomed areas alongside the main run and some moguls for the skiers. Didn’t spend much time lower down the mountain though — mainly busy beginner and intermediate runs from what I saw.
The cat trail for beginners down 47 is quite nice if you want to spend some time checking out the Japanese forest scenery, but is pretty dull so far as the actual boarding goes. Take some photos for your friends/family who don’t do snowsports, because they can respond to this kind of steep, alien landscape better than a flat white expanse of ski run.
Happo One: A few people working on mountain have season passes for just this one mountain: I’m not sure if that’s just random luck or expert opinion, but it’s a big, central resort that covers all the bases: park, long intermediate runs, some excellent ungroomed areas that aren’t out-of-bounds. A friend of a friend took us around here, and we struck out along a ridge to the right (as you look up the mountain) from the topmost lift: it was windswept when we did it, but had the potential for amazing powder runs during better times. There’s an amazing shrine at the base of this one too, which exerted some strange voodoo attraction on me: I have no idea whether it is a Shinto or Buddhist temple, but I’ve gone there twice to meditate briefly next to a massive tree that dominates the clearing below the temple. Weird. Compelling. Check it out if you have a chance.
Iwatake: I loved this mountain the first time I went there, even though the conditions weren’t that good. It isn’t as large as the others, has green runs near the top (better quality snow for any learners you have with you) and a few long challenging runs. I suspect that getting to know this mountain would pay off handsomely on powder days — it feels like the kind of place with some excellent opportunities for powder runs off the edge of the groomers. The reverse face of the mountain is in use as well, so you can respond to the wind/sun conditions over the day. The advanced runs on the reverse side were closed to us, but looked awesome — steep, narrow run. Reminds me of the Gun Barrel at Hotham, though waaaay more awesome 
So yeah, my personal favourite mountain, based on some weird gut instinct from one day’s experience.
Tsugaike Kogen: Furthest big resort from the main part of Hakuba. You have to go to Iwatake and catch the loop bus over, if you aren’t staying at the base of it. Had the most snow of all the resorts in the area while we were there, but we went on a warm day and it was wet and slow. Under better conditions, you could happily spend the several days exploring the entire place. It seems a little less busy than the other resorts which are of similar size. We were told by a local to hike up from the lift above the Jib Park on the right hand side of the mountain and to do a tree run. Sadly, looked like being a really slow proposition under the conditions and we cased the entire mountain looking for an area where we could get some speed. There’s a place at the middle gondola station that you can rent two-person sleds from, and I wish we had done that for the afternoon because it looked like a ridiculous amount of fun.
Other stuff:
Bamboo Good coffee place at Hakuba Station — free wifi and lots of the Australians working on the mountain come in for their daily caffeine intake. Friendly Aussie barista as well, excellent place to get the goss about the mountain for snow conditions, places to eat and places to drink.
Zen Soba noodle restaurant diagonally opposite the 7-11. Awesome food, definitely order their soba dishes and the octopus/olive oil/garlic dish.
I’ll update this article as people comment or email me with their experiences.
11.20.08
The first rule of iPhone dev club is …
Hanging out in Sydney with some friends has been awesome. Much love to Mike G/Kerenski for the handmade noodles and beers, and much love to Sam and Sally for the Crack Fox and, well, even more beers.
Also, thanks to the bookstores of Sydney for the new books by Warren Ellis and Clive Barker. Kinokuniya and Galaxy Books, you rule… Maybe next time I’ll make it to Gold’s on King St 
10.21.08
Why is twitter so compelling?
Twitter is like telepathy. You get to know what people of interest to you are thinking in a continuous stream.
Twitter is like eavesdropping. You can listen in to conversations between smart/witty/angry people.
Twitter is like talkback radio. You can jump in with opinions and suggestions.
Now to convince more people in Adelaide to use it
09.28.08
Hello /dev/world!
Thanks for looking me up
Please introduce yourself at the conference, or become part of the #DW08 channel on twitter.com.