Category: Programming

David McCallum: Warbike

Image of guts of the warbikeArtist David McCallum has a cool project that was featured on the CBC radio show Spark. The Warbike Project is a bicycle with a device that creates a sonnification of wireless network activity it encounters as you bike around. Bells play as the device encounters a new wifi network and so on. You can sign out the bike now at Interaccess in Toronto.

The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?

Adobe Labs – Apollo

Adobe has developed Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR) as a web applications development platform. AIR was previously called Apollo and reminds me Konfabulator and OS X Dashboard applications. With it you can adapt web applications into desktop applications. AIR lets you take an application written in HTML, Flash, AJAX, and JavaScript and create a runtime desktop application.

So, why do the Dashboard widgets only run when you turn the Dashboard on? Why not let them run like other applications? Konfabulator did. And … regarding Konfabulator, they seem to have been bought out by Yahoo are now supporting Yahoo! Widgets.

Is there a name for these small, easy-to-program, networked applications? Niall Kennedy and others call these tiny tools “at-a-glance” applications. Kennedy has an Engadget story that talks about Dashboard and its history.

I’m thinking this would be a good way to teach interface design to students comfortable with web design. I also think we could do some neat stuff with web services like those from TAPoR.

Scratch: Block Programming

Image of ScratchScratch is a visual programming language for kids developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. You program by plugging blocks together and you can then share and comment on projects through the web site.

I heard about this listening to Nicholas Negroponte’s TED talk on “The vision behind One Laptop Per Child.” (A project to develop a $100 laptop for millions of kids to learn with around the world.) Scratch is the sort of free downloadable programming environment he imagines will be used on the OLPC by kids.

TiddlyWiki

Shawn recently introduced me to TiddlyWiki, which Stéfan Sinclair has also blogged. It is a web page (with over 5000 lines of code) that acts as a wiki if you have write priviledges to the file. It is an extremely smart and simple tool that I don\’t really think of as a wiki since it really is more like a web page application for private and local use. You can use it to keep notes on your local computer just by saving an empty page.

I have the feeling there is a principle to technologies like TiddlyWiki – simple objects that are both application and data, documents that carry the smarts needed so you don\’t need a separate application (well actually you do need a browser.) Reminds me of the document-centric view of OpenDoc that Apple tried unsuccessfully to promote. What other TiddlyWiki like doc/apps can we imagine:

  • A Curriculum Vitae that one can add items to and reorganize in different views.
  • A Bibliography that lets you maintain references and then export them.
  • A Analyze Me TiddlyWiki that lets you paste in data (or text) to study and then lets you run analysis on it to get results that become part of the document

Live coding: Impromptu

Live coding is coding as performance. Matt alerted me to a Impromptu which is a programming language designed for sound coding performances. There is a gallery of sound performances and code at the site to give an idea of what the live coders might be typing to get what effects.

Live coding would seem to be connected to realtime coding competitions like live coda when the coding challenge is performative and the competition environment can be witnessed as a performance.

Pedagogically I wonder if live coding is more effective than write-compile-run coding. Certain languages like Ruby have live coding environments that let you type commands and see the results immediately. What is different here is the idea of language created for live coding in a performative context.

Communications From Elsewhere »

Communications From Elsewhere is a journal (not blog!) by Josh Larios with some interesting text generators including a Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates “completely meaningless” essays using a modified version of The Dada Engine written by Andrew C. Bulhak.

For more on The Dada Engine see the technical report from Monash University, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks. The Abstract reads:

Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.

Josh has collected and connected different “Text Generators” to his journal, including an Adolescent Poetry Corner and a Time Cube screed generator. (For an explanation of Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory see DmitryBrant.com ¬ª On Time Cube. The Time Cube site is another story.)

ESCI LiveCoda

Steve Ramsay sent me this link about esci (livecoda) – a realtime coding competition that was run in a bar in Australia. The teams were given a graphics stream problem (where they had to correct color problems) and timed. Teams of 4 could work in their favorite language. The winners were the team that took the last time. Not surprisingly teams that drank didn’t do as well. Reminds me a bit of Rebecca, but more fun.