Blog - page 4
This is my blog. Sometimes in these posts I’ll talk about research or art projects I’m involved with, sometimes I’ll just ramble about other stuff which is keeping me up at night. If you’re interested in a certain topic, click on a tag to see just the posts with that tag:
acma acmc ai ccc covid19 cs4all cybernetics elixir emacs extempore gigs lens life livecoding media phoenix python reimagine research student-project teaching tools ux web widgets
If anything here sparks your interest (or your ire!) then get in touch via email or discuss on HN.
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.
07 Feb '19
Reimagining Engineering & CS at the ANU
My pitch to be a Reimagine Fellow as part of the current reimagination project in CS/Engineering at the ANU.
06 Feb '19
Class discussions on Discourse
In 2018 I (with the support of the Teaching & Learning IT team in my School) switched from Piazza to a self-hosted Discourse instance for class discussions. Specifically, I used it for COMP1720: Art & Interaction in New Media, a large-ish (~200 students) introductory code/art programming and interaction design course. This course is open to both CS and non-CS students, and can be counted towards a major in both the CS and the ANU School of Art and Design.[^artgit]
31 Jan '19
On livecoding annotations and visualisations
I’ve just finished reading Charlie Roberts’ interactive web essay on
annotations and visualisations for live
code. If you
haven’t read it, go do that now—and make sure you have some
speakers/headphones to listen to the code examples, because it would be a real
shame to read it without watching/listening to his ideas in action. All the code
samples (with the visual annotations) are live-editable, both running “whole
blocks” and re-evaluating individual expressions with ctrl+enter.
29 Jan '19
Oils from 威海
One of my academic responsibilities is teaching our ANU Computer Science programs into our various partner institutions overseas. One of these partner institutions is Shandong University WeiHai (SDUW).
22 Jan '19
Old livecoding photo roundup
I’m trying to find all the photos of me doing livecoding gigs over the past 10 years. If you’ve got an old photo of me doing my thing, then can you either email or tweet at me to share it? I’ll give you authoreal credit and hugs.
17 Jan '19
highlight.js with xtlang support
How to add Extempore syntax highlighting to web content.
02 Jan '19
The annual benswift.me re-write: 2019 edition
Welcome, traveller. You’ve managed to find my blog without being eaten by a grue. If you haven’t visited for a while, you might have noticed that I’ve re-written my website. Again.
28 Sep '18
Another reveal.js plugin for Jekyll
I use Jekyll to create my course websites and
reveal.js to create my lecture slides.
Both of them are awesome, and allow me to focus on writing (hopefully) great
content, and the formatting/presentation stuff stays out of the way until I git push the updates to the server.
22 Jun '18
Hosting a self-built jekyll site on GH pages
This blog is built from markdown files using Jekyll hosted on GitHub pages, which saves a lot of hassle involved with DIY hosting[^hassle]. There are a bunch of useful tutorials on how to set all this up.
22 Jun '18
CHI hangs
Here’s a photo of Kieran and I hanging out at CHI. I’ll write a more detailed trip report some other time, but from the general chats I had with people (and random unsolicited blog posts) it seems like the ritual started some conversations.
06 Jun '18
ANU Laptop Orchestra
One of the coolest parts of my job is doing livecoding gigs—here’s a recent set I did at Smiths as part of Soundscapes #21. A big shout-out to Ushini Attanayake (not in the video, sadly) who did a fantastic job of her first livecoding set.