When I was at TelekomNet, I was teaching the graphic designer Alex Fedorov to write some code. He was recursively creating nested tables, and forgot to close a tag. The result was something like this:

James Patten and Ben Recht created AudioPad, which is a mixing board for DJ’s. The functions are projected onto the tabletop, and the user selects them by moving checkers around. The checkers are tracked by an antenna array. It’s a really neat interface, and it’s almost like having many different mice to work with, instead of the computer idiom of having one mouse that can transform itself into an object by selecting the object. For starters this gives us with two hands more expressive powers, and it also lets two or more people collaborate.

It occurs to me that painters and 2d artists generally work with one hand, whereas sculptors sometimes work with two.

MusicXML is a XML language for music scores. I have been playing around with it and composition software for several months. I have been using some composition software (Finale) that can generate an MP3 from a score. I have a few scores of classical and modern pieces. Perhaps I don’t have the instruments right, or something else, but the result is full of cracks and often sounds like dire organ music — it’s a lot of fun to listen to. I have a recording of ostensibly the same piece of music, and the two sound nothing alike.

MusicRain is a cool online score viewer / score player written in flash.

WordPress has proved pretty useful as a base to build client websites with. It’s easy for the client to add custom pages, and it’s operation is well documented by WordPress. I have been working with a lightweight framework that allows easy creation of custom data entry and presentation apps, similar to Ruby on Rails or PHPCake, but integrated into WordPress as a WordPress plugin. When we get it to a releaseable point we’ll tell you.

And then last week I decided to start this blog. I am having a lot of fun.

Here are some other plugins that I’ve been using both here and at work:

WordPress-phpMyAdmin - creates an admin panel with phpMyAdmin running in an iframe. Simple and useful.

cforms - A contact form plugin. The neat thing about this is that you can define custom fields for a form, have validation on those fields, and have multiple forms. However, it doesn’t seem to have functionality to put the data into the database: which would be really, really nice. I’m using it for my contact form.

Google Sitemap Generator - This seems to work. It indexes posts & pages and lists them by permalink. It produces xml like this.

WordPress plugin uploader -this is pretty cute, it lets you add plugins through the admin interface. It includes a 250kb php script that does zipping/unzipping.

Cornell University put out an RFP for a new university wide events calendar in December (Cornell Event Calendar Solution Group). I have been working with Cornell clients who want a tool to list events sponsored by their department, and I recognized the need for a university wide events calendar. I understand that the Cornell people are considering Bedework, and so I looked into it.

Bedework is an open-source university events calendar project led by RPI staff. It seems to be a very active project, and is getting some good feedback from the open-source and university community. I downloaded it and played around with it. It comes with a nice quickstart installer which lets you play around with it, and it seems to have the sort of functionality that Cornell is looking for. The developers have put a lot of work into interoperability and having a complete feature set. The calendar is written in Java. The Java code exports xml to the frontend. The frontends are quite clunky, but the development team has made an Ajax front end a priority, so this may improve soon. It has support for multiple database backends through the hibernate library.

It seems like Bedework is poised to become a popular product for universities.

I needed a mp3 cue point creation widget written as a standalone ActionScript 3.0 project, so I started working on one. It occurred to me that once I get the sound graph built, and the sound navigation built, somebody might want to build in some editing functionality. So I put the project up on Google Code as as3soundeditorlib.You can see the demo here.

Here’s the screenshot:

Welcome to the newest page on the web (at this instant). I am working with ActionScript 3.0 on a few projects, some TOP SECRET. But never fear, I have an open-source project to create a standalone sound editor and cue point generator in ActionScript 3.0. I’ll share my techniques and code, and point you to good ActionScript 3.0 resources on the web.

Charles a.k.a “Toby”