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.)

Rats. One of my Halloween displays will be a cage of rats. The cage door will rattle every once in a while and a little burst of fog will come out of the central den. There will be a sign above the den – “Ben” – referring back to the movie Willard I saw as a kid. Amazingly I find they are doing a remake of Willard. I still remember the night I saw it first – at a drive-in – a triple feature – I forget the first show – then came Willard – followed by some creepy Dr Phibes movie. My sister and I were wrapped up in blankets in the back of the station wagon watching. I am pretty sure I fell asleep part way thru Willard. But it obviously left an impression on me, I remember the night well. Drive-ins are a lost treasure.

Anyway back to the display. I’ll have a creepy squealing sound coming from the cage too. I tried various rodent squeals but they are too high pitched to be creepy and loud – all the energy gets dissipated as high frequency, not enough volume or rumble. A pig squeal comes out great tho.

Sonomic. A nice site for sound effects – Sonomic: Sample and Sound Effects Downloads. Kind of pricey but you get full WAV format sounds, and when you have to have that perfect pig squealing sound, this is an ok source.

Sidekick as the perfect mobile blogging device. Some conversation about this – Sidekick, your mobile blogging pal - Quick Topic. I still like the idea of a blogphone.

Online Federal Tax payment. Tong points towards this site as the new age way to pay your taxes. But what is with the big disclaimer to not bookmark the site???? Are we supposed to remember this URL by heart? If we can’t bookmark it, am I allowed to write down the URL or blog it? Strange.

My site Architecture. Starting to think about the next iteration of my site architecture. The current site is just blogger driven+some minor template mods. There are a lot of things I want to do tho that I am not getting from this architecture – a good search interface, a good URL command line interface, categories, private password-protected posts, server-side aggregation of various feeds, complete separation of content from template. Bloxsom is an interesting alternative, and of course I have already paid for Radio.

MusicDish. Fascinating account of royalty accounting discussions in front of the Senate – MusicDish Industry e-Journal. I had little sympathy for the corporations in the recording industry before, this is eroding even that.

Lou Gerstner’s Farewell Letter. An interesting perspective – A MASSIVE SHIFT IS UNDER WAY IN OUR INDUSTRY

Carrie’s Page. Hey my aunt is the only cool member of my extended family apparently – the only relative with a web presence at all – Just My Dogs by Carrie Hutchman

Downloads from MS Research. Interesting bag of stuff up here – Downloads

National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Finally read this over the weekend. One glaring hole I saw was the lack of treatment of vendors of cyberspace equipment as a class separate from enterprises/businesses.

A motivating example: I have, on my Windows XP system, software and hardware created by the following vendors: Microsoft Corp, Award Software, Intel, ATI, Creative, Voxware, DSP Group, Sipro Lab Telecom, Fraunhofer Institut, Radius, Toshiba, HP, Buslogic, SCM Microsystems, Lotus, Adobe, AOL, Macromedia. These are just the vendors I could identify. This is just the software and hardware that comes on the PC as I bought it.

Additionally I have installed software (sometimes downloaded, sometimes purchased at retail) from the following vendors: Microsoft, Symantec, PersonalBrain, Xteq, Panterasoft, Lavasoft, RIM, Caesius, tamosoft, EasyDesk, Macromedia, Paramind, Apple, Dummysoftware, Winzip. Alkonost, Izymail, Groove. And probably two dozen more that I have uninstalled and no longer have a memory of.

In each of these cases, the corporations that created the software may or may not be located in the US, and if outside the US, may be located in countries whose interests are not aligned with those of the US. Even if located in the US, the companies may very well use foreign development offices, or may subcontract development to organizations located in other countries..

How are we insuring that all this software and hardware is performing the functions they are intended to perform, and don?t include some functionality hidden away to be accessed illicitly by some third party? Is there any inspection of this technology before it is made available in our markets? Who is doing the inspecting, do they have adequate access to source code and source design documents? Once inspected, how do we know that changes aren?t made by vendors ? is there any digital signing of executable content to permit detection of changes later?

There are a ton of issues here. Not at all sure what I think the right strategy is. But this is a hole you can drive a truck through.