Blog - page 2
This is my blog. Sometimes in these posts I’ll talk about research or art projects I’m involved with, although I also blog about my research on the c/c/c blog. Sometimes I’ll just ramble about other stuff which is keeping me up at night. If you’re interested on blog posts only on a certain topic, there’s a tags index.
If anything here sparks your interest (or your ire!) then get in touch (twitter, email) or discuss on HN.
08 Nov '19
COMP1720 2019 major project exhibtion
If you’re around the ANU campus tomorrow (Saturday Nov 9) then come along to experience the COMP1720 Art & Interaction in New Media major project exhibition. This year’s theme is listening in/listening out.
07 Nov '19
code/creativity/culture curriculum design workshop
a half-day workshop at the 2019 CECS Reimagine CoDesign Culture Lab
31 Oct '19
LENS showcase S2 2019
Last weekend the S2 2019 LENS cohort (the ANU Laptop Ensemble) gave their final performances as part of the ANU School of Music’s composition showcase. Thanks to everyone who attended, and congrats again to the students who learned a bunch of computer music stuff & build/composed and performed a working piece in one crazy semester. And an especially big thanks to my LENS co-directors Charles and Alec.
21 Oct '19
Ben and COMP2300 next year
Students1 are starting to turn their gaze towards 2020, and so I’ve been getting a bunch of emails asking me if I’m teaching COMP2300/6300 Computer Organisation & Program Execution again in Semester 1 2020.
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well, the organised ones, anyway ↩
16 Oct '19
Making Altair/Vega-Lite charts readable without squinting
My love for the Grammar of
Graphics
runs deep, and in particular for Hadley Wickham’s famous ggplot2 which showed
me the light back when I was a young PhD student. Seriously, once you have your
head around how it works it gives you datavis superpowers. These days I often
work in Python, and for datavis I’m enjoying
Altair which is based around the same
philosophy (and outputs to Vega-Lite for
rendering in the browser).
16 Oct '19
Package managers: update or upgrade?
update or upgrade?Quick quiz: for the following language/system package managers, what’s the name of the subcommand to update1 your project/system to the latest version of one (or more) of your project’s dependencies?
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or, y’know, upgrade ↩
15 Oct '19
Sound file I/O in Extempore with libsndfile
libsndfile is “a C library for reading and writing files containing sampled audio data”, and it’s pretty great. Here’s a quick crash-course on using Extempore’s libsndfile bindings to read, process and write audio data files.
14 Oct '19
IoT China Study Tour not happening in 2019
In the (Australian) Summer of ‘16/17, ‘17/18 and ‘18/19 I ran an Internet of Things China Study Tour at the Beijing Institute of Technology. They were good times.
01 Oct '19
Laptop Ensemble in the Canberra Times
The ANU Laptop Ensemble (LENS) is in the Canberra Times this morning: ANU School of Music’s new orchestra is far from conventional.
18 Sep '19
Xinyu’s Extempore tutorials
These tutorials are part of Xinyu Hou’s research project to create a set of PRIMM-style tutorials for learning to make sound/music in Extempore.
30 Aug '19
I’m a Reimagine Fellow
If you’ve been following the CECS newsletter, you’ll know that the inaugural Reimagine Fellows have been announced, and I’m one of them 🙌🎉🥳. It’s very exciting, and it means the c/c/c studio is going to be a real thing in 2020 (and beyond). It’s also a relief to be able to tell people, since I’ve had to keep the good news under my hat for the last couple of months.
06 Aug '19
Making the most of meetings with research students
Some questions to structure the regular one-on-one research meetings—modify as necesssary.
29 Jul '19
Livecoding gig this Friday 5:30pm @ ANU Drill Hall Gallery
For those who visit my blog to hear my livecoding gigs, there’s one this Friday. If you wanna see me perform with Charles Martin (on percussion & electronics) and Kieran Browne on livecoded visuals (live GLSL shader hacking). We’re playing 5:30pm–7:30pm @ Drill Hall Gallery as part of the Ildiko Kovacs: The DNA of colour exhibition.
24 Jul '19
Livecoding article on the ABC
In case you missed it, I was interviewed for an article on the ABC News website which came out last weekend entitled The Australians making music with computer code. A nice look at some of the players in the Australian livecoding scene.
17 Jul '19
In-place XML tree mutation for Jekyll productivity
I wrote a reveal.js plugin for Jekyll so that I can make nice slides (especially for my ANU courses). Recently, though, I’ve been touching up the COMP1720 slides for 2019 and it’s getting really slow to build the website.
20 Mar '19
The c/c/c studio
A project plan for my CECS Reimagine Fellowship
09 Mar '19
Mapping over table rows in org-mode
I’m an Emacs guy, and so if I’ve got some simple tabular data I’d much rather keep it in an org-mode table than have to fire up Excel.
26 Feb '19
On parental leave and auto-reply messages
I’m now (as of the date of this blog post) on parental leave (thanks, Brian 😊). I’m about to set up an email auto-reply which will guard my work email address until 15 July.
21 Feb '19
A dynamic Reimagine logo
I keep harping on about the Reimagine project because I’m super pumped about what it means for the way we do Engineering Computer Science here at the ANU (see here and here for more info).
16 Feb '19
Algorithmic uni marketing billboards
In the spirit of Murdoch University’s free your think marketing campaign, I’ve put together a dynamic full-page ad billboard as my pitch for the ANU’s next marketing campaign.