Current Projects for December 2007

Dec. 27, 2007

Filed under: Programming Django Music Projects

My current projects and how I feel about them:

Music

My band, my beloved band. I feel really good about the music, about the band - but still gigs elude. I had one almost lined up, but it didn't fit with our drummer's schedule. Here's hoping that '08 will bring many live shows and local success.

I'm also making a little ambient electronica on the side - haven't come up with a good name to release it under though.

Star Power

I recently made the happy discovery that some Radio Shack stores sell electronic parts from Parallax, including but not limited to accelerometers. We've all played Guitar Hero, right? Where you tilt your guitar to enable Star Power, and all the notes turn blue? I'm working on (read: i have written the microcontroller code but not built the actual circuit) Star Power for one of my electric guitars. Tilt = blue LEDs and overdrive!

This is the first physical computing project I've done, and it's made me really appreciate the Arduino development environment and SDK. It makes easy for anyone with a little programming experience to jump in and start making things blink. I think my next project will probably include the Lilypad wearable sensors and microcontroller, and will require me to get Emacs set up for it, because even though the Arduino is really nice and lowers the bar, I miss my favorite text editing shortcuts while using it, and find myself copying and pasting from other editors a little too often.

Metaverse Apartment

Like a lot of people, I became interested in the idea of a persistent virtual world after reading Snow Crash, and like a lot of people, I became disinterested after trying out a few of the centralized, for-profit worlds on offer like Second Life, World of Warcraft etc. I really like MUDs, though I haven't had the time to play them lately, but what I have really been interested in is something that lives entirely on one of my computers, in my control, that other people can connect to and also link to in-world, creating a peer-based virtual environment.

My rediscovery of the Croquet project got my brain-wheels churning on the topic again. It is a platform for peer-to-peer virtual worlds that can run on OS X, Linux and Windows, implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.

I'm currently about half way through the Squeak Development Example provided at the Squeak site, and feel ready to start building a world with the Croquet development kit. This is particularly good timing, as my interest in programming has risen greatly of late, and learning Smalltalk seems like a good way to broaden my horizons and learn about What Came Before.

This website

I tool on a Django-powered website at work, and decided to write a blog using that framework for this site, moving away from the Wordpress install that had served me well for a few years. I picked away at the project in what little spare time I have, and here it is, roughly feature-equivalent to the setup I had before. I hope to continue to add features and refine the way the site works as time goes on.

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