#indiewebcamp 2012-08-15

2012-08-15 UTC
dascher, brennannovak, tantek and tilgovi joined the channel
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aaronpk heh, did we ever figure out what markup needs to be on the page for statusnet to recognize a URL as a person?
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aaronpk it was some voodoo involving a certain combination of things in the author tag, right?
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aaronpk alternately, suggestions on a good way to test pubsub publishing?
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@BarnabyWalters So: http://t.co/h3KdaVIB. Yet another siloed content storage thingy. Woo /sarcasm #indieweb http://t.co/suRlllP1
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@BarnabyWalters an #indieweb proposal for dealing with the exciting new silos getting released… http://t.co/O7baRxac
brennannovak, DrPiD|Home, dascher, dascher_ and aaronpk joined the channel
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tantek Feedburner closing? http://bestbloggingtipsonline.com/were-leaving-feedburner-and-why-you-should-consider-moving-your-blog-too/
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tantek http://thewayoftheweb.net/2012/08/is-feedburner-about-to-be-closed-by-google/
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barnabywalters aaronpk: liking the shiny new aaronparecki.com
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barnabywalters I'd not seen the randomly generated art thingy before, that's surprisingly effective
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aaronpk thanks!
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aaronpk yes, it is surprising!
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aaronpk easter egg: you can navigate pages with the left and right arrow keys
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barnabywalters sometime I'll dig chrome out and listen to the music — no flash on safari
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barnabywalters ooh, cool
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aaronpk ah yea, I still have the music in a flash player
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aaronpk oops something's broken with that page
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barnabywalters yep, some of the text overlaps
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aaronpk looks like it's missing some CSS
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barnabywalters oh, and the title of the 'pages' page is 'videos'
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aaronpk haha oops
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aaronpk you know chrome doesn't show the page title anywhere anymore, it's annoying
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aaronpk i guess it's in the tab, but I always have like 20 tabs open so I only see the first 2 letters of each
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barnabywalters well that could explain it!
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barnabywalters does chrome do the title-in-tab shortening thing that safari does?
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barnabywalters showing only the unique bit of a title if there are multiple titles with the same prefix/suffix?
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aaronpk not sure.
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aaronpk this is what I see: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7250/7790356834_db24fb3ccd_o.png
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barnabywalters ha ha! Yep, that's pretty full-on
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aaronpk wow i've got a weird caching bug
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barnabywalters gotta love weird caching bugs! What's happening?
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aaronpk ah, it's not adding the extra css files when it's being retrieved from the cache
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aaronpk i may have gone a little overboard with the optimizations :)
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barnabywalters I've never really done much optimisation, so I've been trying to eke out the performance on my new system
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barnabywalters essentially: lots of caching
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tantek what do you guys think of Feedburner going away?
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tantek is it time to finally obsolete feeds completely (per their being a DRY violation) and get everyone to switch to publishing/consuming hAtom?
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barnabywalters I won't notice it leave. In fact, I didn't know it was going away
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barnabywalters +1 a lot to consuming hAtom
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barnabywalters ATOM is nicer than RSS but still a pain, and no-one's agreed on a good JSON feed format.
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barnabywalters how do we go about getting everyone to switch, though?
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aaronpk I think feedburner shutting down just goes to show that xml feeds just aren't going to work
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aaronpk I only know a handful of people who still actually use RSS readers
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aaronpk everyone else uses facebook or twitter to get feeds of content
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aaronpk also hackernews and other curated sources, like prismatic
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aaronpk it's an interesting shift from what everybody thought RSS was going to solve
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aaronpk barnabywalters: ahh much better http://aaronparecki.com/music-and-sound
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barnabywalters aaronpk: yep, that's much improved! Digging out chrome…
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barnabywalters for some reason some of your 8th grade pieces sound strangely familiar
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aaronpk that is quite strange, heh
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barnabywalters aaronpk: some nice music there. None of the Laser harp though :(
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aaronpk ah yea, I never made a recording from that
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barnabywalters wiimote music is *awesome*, how much of that is automated?
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aaronpk that's a tricky question
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barnabywalters well: what is the wiimote controlling?
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barnabywalters looks like the overall structure is thought out beforehand, and the wiimote is controlling tempo, some percussion, dynamics and particular chords
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aaronpk Underlying the whole piece is a weighted directed graph describing the probability of changing from one chord to another
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aaronpk At any given time the whole program is in one chord state, for exmaple Cm
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aaronpk The program pumps out a consistent beat of eighth notes, and there is a graph describing the probabilities of each note of the given chord that will be played that beat.
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aaronpk see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/5060511558/in/set-72157625115361798/
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barnabywalters that's pretty nifty
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aaronpk The long axis of the wiimote controls the loudness of each eighth note.
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aaronpk So to accent particular beats, I can whip the wiimote forward, and to make a note softer I pull back.
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aaronpk The trigger finger tells the chord system to change to the next chord.
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aaronpk When I'm looking at the screen I can see the next 5 chords the graph has picked out in advance, which allows me to plan out phrasing and timing. http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/5059912651/in/set-72157625115361798/
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aaronpk that lets me do things like if I notice a V-I sequence coming up I can phrase it appropriately
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barnabywalters nice
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aaronpk That's the basics.
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barnabywalters This is cool. I don't muck about with electronic sounds and music interfaces nearly as much as I should.
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aaronpk Oh, the +/- buttons shift the probability graph for the chord to favor lower and higher notes.
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aaronpk So I can go into a "lighter" feel by pressing "+" and then it sounds more delicate.
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barnabywalters so it's quite expressive then?
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aaronpk quite, and it comes out very different each time you play it
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aaronpk in fact the first two recordings didn't sound nearly as good
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barnabywalters It'd be interesting to integrate this into a live performance by giving the control to a member of the audience, then improvising over the chords on a live instrument
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aaronpk that'd be neat!
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aaronpk I think you'd have to control the timing of the chord changes in that case tho and not leave that up to the audience member
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aaronpk Actually most of the people I handed the controller to couldn't figure out how to make it actually sound good haha.
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barnabywalters certainly
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barnabywalters I imagine it's not the most intuitive of interfaces
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barnabywalters then again, most people who have a go on my hurdy gurdy can't figure out how to make it sound good, so perhaps that qualifies it as a legitimate musical instrument :)
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aaronpk it definitely is something you can learn, and takes a while to practice
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aaronpk all said and done I spent about 60 hours in the studio working on the programming and recording the final piece
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barnabywalters well, from the acoustic instruments I've made I've found the process of making them makes understanding how to play them a whole lot easier — no reason for it to be any different with electronic instruments
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aaronpk just updated this with this description and described a few more parts! http://aaronparecki.com/2009/192/article/1/wiimote-music
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barnabywalters it'd be interesting to do some chord progression analysis of tunes from different styles and weight the chord picker accordingly
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aaronpk yes, this one was based on typical western music
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aaronpk my goal was to make it sound like "normal" music people would hear. I didn't want it to sound super experimental.
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aaronpk I think I succeeded because most of the youtube comments are things like "fake! he's just dancing around listening to a CD!"
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barnabywalters ha! brilliant
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barnabywalters I judged my GCSE photography retouching in a similar way — my goal was to retouch well enough that people would ask me what it was I'd changed
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barnabywalters it certainly doesn't sound too experimental
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tantek btw Aaronpk your entry here is a bit messed up: http://indiewebcamp.com/2013/Guest_List#Creators (photo.jpg?) and Amber's lacks a photo also.
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aaronpk aw first casualty of my redesign
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aaronpk forgot that file was referenced
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tantek thinks /photo.jpg makes more sense than /humans.txt :P
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tantek I made a Lanyrd for next year's event: http://lanyrd.com/2013/indiewebcamp/
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tantek.com edited /2013/Guest_List (-15) "lanyrd" (view diff)
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tantek.com edited /Main_Page (+250) "add Lanyrd to 2013, reorganize previous indiewebcamps section, group/cluster headings better for 2013" (view diff)
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