rant

Thoughts on tools, design, and feedback loops

2012-08-16

I just watched Inventing on Principle from Bret Victor and found this entire talk incredibly interesting. Chris Granger’s post on Light Table led me to this, and shortly after, I found the redesigned Khan Academy CS course which this inspired. Bret touched on something that basically anyone who’s attempted to design anything has implicitly understood: This feedback loop is the most essential part of the process. I reflected on this and on my own experiences, and decided on a few things:…more

My experiences with Apache Axis2/C

2011-07-15

(This is an abridged version of a report I did at my job; I might post of copy of it once I remove anything that might be considered proprietary.) I was tasked at my job with looking at ways of doing web services in our main application (which for an upcoming delivery is to be separated out into client and server portions). Said application is written primarily in C++, so naturally our first look was into frameworks written for C or C++ so that we would not need to bother with language bindings, foreign function interfaces, porting, new runtimes, or anything of the sort.…more

OpenFrameworks, try 1...

2011-06-13

My attempts at doing things with OpenFrameworks on MacOS X have been mildly disastrous. This is a bit of a shame, because I was really starting to like OpenFrameworks and it was not tough to pick up after being familiar with Processing. I’m pretty new to XCode, but it’s the “official” environment for OpenFrameworks on OS X, so it’s the first thing I tried. The first few attempts at things (whether built-in examples, or my own code) went just fine, but today I started trying some things that were a little more complex - i.…more

I can never win that context back

2011-06-10

I stumbled upon this: http://www.soyoucode.com/2011/coding-giant-under-microscope-farbrausch . . . and promptly fell in love with the demos there from Farbrausch: .the .product .debris .kkrieger Magellan That melding of music and animated 3D graphics grabs a hold of me like nothing else. I don’t really know why. The fact that it’s done in such a small space (e.g. 64 KB for the first one) makes it more impressive, of course. Maybe that should be a sad reflection on just how formulaic the things I like are, if they’re encoded that small (although, that ignores just how much is present in addition, in the CPU and the GPU and the OS and the drivers and in the design of the computer), but I don’t much care - formulas encode patterns of sorts, and we’re pattern-matching machines.…more

2009.06.18

2009-06-23

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