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.