Storm Sewer Sounds. Brilliant – from the MoM Group –

I always wanted to put sound coming out of my storm drain, so this year I did! I used a 1X2 piece of wood and duct taped my two self powered speakers on it, then I taped the CD player in between the speakers. I put two eye hooks on the ends of the wood and used wire to hang pictures on each eye hook. then I twisted it in the middle to make a loop so I could hook it to a chain to lower it down the drain. I tested it last night and it was awesome! It freaked people out as they walked by! I was talking to a neighbor who was walking her dog and she said she was wondering were the sound was coming from. she said she heard it from the next street! I took a walk down the block and sure enough the sound was coming from all the gutters! HA I found a way to haunt the whole neighborhood! The sound was traveling thru the pipes! If you have storm drains in your neighborhood this is a must try! oooo also forgot I used the whisper MP3 that was posted on the list! man did it sound cool! Imagine walking by the storm drain and hearing that!

Abrupt Climate Change. Fascinating article, pointed out in a letter to SNS – Can Global Warming Trigger a ‘Little ice Age’. The key insight being that an “ice age” could come on us very suddenly…

SlickEdit. As I get into more coding work I am going to have to pick up a good editor. Used to use SlickEdit and will probably try that again. At $299 it is a lot more expensive than it used to be tho…does the Visual Studio editor deal well with non-MSFT languages like PERL and PHP? Oh I see that ActiveState has a Visual Perl plug in for Visual Studio…that costs $295. I guess $300 is price to play…need to look around for some lower cost alternatives. Where is Borland when we need them…

Pinewood Derby. Helping my son build a boat for science class, I started reminiscing about a similar project from my youth. My Pinewood Derby entry – I slaved over it, with only help from my dad on the powertools. My car looked terrible, it was basically a box with lead weights attached, spray-painted gold. Clearly some of the other kids were way more skilled than me, or had had substantial parental help. But despite looks, I came in second that day, which was pretty exciting. I won a pen and pencil set which was way cooler than the first place prize, a canteen.

Gosh knows why I remember this day with such clarity. Clearly it had a big impression on me. In some way I was really proud of the achievement. And there is something primal about working with your dad on a project like this. I hope my son has the same memories. Obviously a lot of people care a lot about the Pinewood Derby – a lot of info up on Google about.

Happy Birthday Annie! Hope your day is great.

Halloween Lighting. Started to deploy lighting tonight. Step one – replace all the bulbs in exterior carriage lights with flicker bulbs. These bulbs can be hard to find at retail, I get mine at Kelsun Distributors in Bellevue. Next is to place all the lightning lights. I have a variety of lights that trigger off my thunder soundtrack – a mix of small strobes, big strobes, 120v incandescent floods, and this year i added in some 12V floods as people on the MoM group say they respond more quickly (basically, lower voltage lights have faster response times). All together I have about 20-30 lights that go off with the thunder spread around the yard. All I did tonight was place the lights. This weekend I have to distribute my DMX control cable and actually start triggering them.

Blosxom under IIS. Ok this is harder than I had hoped. Got Perl for IIS from Activestate, that installed easily enough and seems to work ok on a variety of samples. But blosxom craps out fast, i suspect some simple file syntax problems. Mail into Rael, and if no satisfaction there, I guess I will get a Perl debugger…

Jambient. Dug into the specs for Jambient a little. While cool, it will not do what I want for Halloween. It does let you place multiple sound sources in a 3d space and dynamically move them around. It only supports two stereo speakers tho. There is reference on the site to supporting quad speakers with DirectX8, but I want something that could support an arbitrary number of speakers. Also I think Jambient assumes a single listener at a single location and that is not really what I want. In practice the effect may be the same but my design assumption is multiple listeners in multiple locations, where the dominant sound at that location is the local sound effect (say my graveyard noises) with the occasional mix in of a panning sound (a ghost flying by). I think I need to talk to an audio engineer to really lay out my specs precisely.

Also Jambient is really designed for realtime usage by an operator, I need full scripted/programmatic control based on events.

College Football Rankings. Wow The New York Times’s Computer Ranking is pretty far out of sync with conventional wisdom. I love the buckeyes at 4 but Miami at 6? Texas at 20? I guess time will tell.

Children and the Internet. Ananova - Children ‘know more about internet than books’

Theatrical Sound Control. As I’ve been putting out my sound systems for Halloween (5 sets of Bose outdoor speakers, 3 run by separate CD players, 2 run off a single amp with a thunder&lightning sound track synced with lighting effects), I’ve started to realize what I really want for my sounds at Halloween.

I want to home-run all my sound systems to a single PC with multiple sound cards. On this PC I want to run software that programmatically delivers the sounds to any combo of the speakers. And I want to be able to gang all the speakers, or any subset of them, into a surround sound array for any of the sounds I choose to deliver. Obviously the sound to any speaker set should be able to be a mix of any number of sounds from the PC. And on the PC i ought to be able to programmatically control the start/stop of sounds, as well as their locale in space.

With this system, I should be able to achieve the following kinds of effects – ambient wind noise playing thru every speaker, with a natural ebbing and flowing that is spatially coherent across all the speakers; thunder and lightning centered near the front door but mixed in at all the other speakers, attenuated by distance; ghost moans floating across the yard (hopping from speaker set to speaker set); graveyard sounds in the one corner. And this should all be programmatically controllable at the PC.

I’ve started to look for software that would let me do this. Some quick web searching turned up theatrical sound control software at Harmony Central?: Software: Abstracts, Crescit Software Inc. - SFX, WebRing: hub, and Stage Research, Inc.. Many of these seem similar to the lighting control software I use – similar paradigms, similar kinds of overlapping cueing. I don’t see much discussion of surround sound effects tho and that is important. I see products like those from Minnetonka that let you author surround sound, but I want to be able in my sound control program to take any input sound (stereo, mono, or surround) and programmatically move it thru the space of my halloween display, and have the software compute automatically on the fly the correct speaker inputs across all my speakers.

Copyrights. The Numbers Don’t Lie (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

copyright has been extended for forty years over the past forty years

OSU 27, Northwestern 16. The Columbus Dispatch

“Horrible,” Clarett said. “We won, though.”

DMX Accessories. Some good stuff up at Doug Fleenor Design. Notably the DMX512-to-10v analog converter. Great for animatronics. a little pricey tho. Might be worth it if absolutely weather proof.

Where are the young programmers? Tong and I were just talking yesterday, asking ourselves “Where are all the young programmers?”. When we were starting out, it was cheap/easy to write Mac and DOS apps – programming tools were available for <$100, the machines were readily available. Nowadays if you want to target Windows, tools are more expensive, or you have to bury yourself in .Net which is an overwhelming amount of stuff to learn (and is quite expensive). The Java platform has been hijacked by IBM and turned into a corporate thing, it is also expensive (time and costwise) to embrace.

So if you are a young poor geek these days, what do you cut your teeth on? Building your own blog/website is surely one answer. Cheap to get started, tools are cheap too. Game Mods are another vibrant community. Skin development for Windows, Winamp, etc. is another hotbed. What is the growth path for these developers? What are they going to do in their late 20s, in their 30s? They aren’t really on a path to become .Net developers or EJB developers. What platform is going to grow up with them? They don’t want to use “their father’s platform”.

We don’t know but we are fascinated by the issue. (BTW, my own programming start was an Apple II disk/hex editor. I was driven to get all the strings off my Wizardry floppy so I could solve a puzzle that was holding me up in the game.)