Wikis revisited

I've always thought that web-sites should be easy to produce, edit and maintain, and I've done quite a bit of work on making this possible, but very little of it has escaped from research into the real world. But I'm very much a nudger, and so I'll keep trying something until it sticks, or else I just keep trying.

So after having used Joe Kraus and co's 'JotSpot' wiki some years ago, loved the coherent way it worked, and seen it bought by Google. I then tried out Twiki, which was favoured by many, but which never really captured my attention because it lacked the depth and compactness of JotSpot. More recently, I was very tempted by TiddlyWiki, which is a brilliant idea - a wiki in a downloadable web-page, where the wiki is all done in JavaScript. Very cool, very clever, and the collapse/expandability it provides for web-pages is really useful, if a little unfamiliar to most web-users. But there's a slight disadvantage to having all of the code for the wiki in the page itself - it is a big download. But then this is also solved by hosting the wiki, as per the amazingly familiar Tiddlyspot, and that's probably my current second choice.

Second choice? Yep, second. Because I've reverted to my first love: JotSpot, now in its new guise as Google Sites. Apart from a few changes that make editing easier (and less flexible), plus less ability to get 'under the hood' and admire the way that the whole thing is entirely self-consistent and wiki-d as deep as you care to go, it is the same wiki that I loved all those years ago.

And so I'm now using Google Sites to produce a few of those web projects that I had always promised to do 'when I get a spare moment', but where that moment never quite seemed to arrive. Getting back to using something that I'm still convinced is a harbinger (an 'early echo', a precursor...) for the way that web sites should and I'm sure, will be made in the future, is great fun, and wikis are a great enabler for web-sites that would be very hard to put together in plain HTML, which is how my main eponymous site is done.

So I'm now evangelising on behalf of all of those wikis that haven't been produced because others were waiting for spare moments: the time is now! Get wiki-ing!

Advertising time

I'm not going to waste words on the six monthly question about why we put clocks backwards and forwards in a world where time is what watches and clocks say it is, and where many people regard the position of the sun in the sky as irrelevant. But, instead, I'm going to think about something else - how we hear about time.

Today was one of those days when time moves around: the clocks went back an hour, and so for several days, my internal clock will think that it is later than it is. Eventually I will get back in sync, but it always jarrs for a while. But today was rather more jarring than usual. I'm sure that I'm not unusual in that I use 'The Speaking Clock' very infrequently - three times a year, actually. Every time the clock moves backwards or forwards, just to check I've got the direction correct, and on the 31st of December, as midnight approaches, for the often overlooked reason that digital TV is not live, but is delayed by several seconds, and so the New Year actually starts before digital television says it has.

But today was a simple 'confirm the direction you've moved the clocks' check, and was mere routine. At least, that's how it started. But the voice was wrong, and it said something different, and I had to stop and listen several times before I realised that TIM, the UK's Speaking Clock, the subject of careful choice of voice for all of my lifetime, and long before that, had been replaced with the voice of an American accented girl who joyfully told me that she was 'Tinkerbell', and then told me the time. Somehow the handset and my hand stayed in contact with each other, but my jaw fell a long way.

After a little research, it seems that the UK's Speaking Clock is now sponsored by Disney for three months as advertising for a new film. I have to say that I'm more than a little intrigued. From what I remember of the book, isn't the fairy in question a malicious, jealous, spiteful, (and fictional!) trouble-maker, who is prone to using colourful language? I think there's more than a little 'spin' going on here...

(I note that this news has provoked many comments in the online world, which is strange given that online users probably need to hear the time spoken out to them as little as, or even less than, myself!)

Label sprawl

I have it bad. Really bad. And I'm not the only one.

This blog suffers from "Label Sprawl': a distressing and delibilitating malady that affects just about anything that can be labeled, tagged, marked up, assigned, or named with metadata - that stuff that means 'information about this item'. The evidence is incontrovertible (which I always think of as being like a car that has a roof that can be folded away, except that in this case, it can't be folded away...) and is off the the right, physically rather than politically. in the 'Labels' section, there are too many labels. Note that I don't say lots of labels. Too many labels.

Labels seem like a good idea. They allow you to find things that are related, just so long as they have the same label. If they don't have the same label, then they may not be related. Of course, it could just be the labeling that is faulty. So perhaps if you can't find something then it is just 'poor quality labelling' that is the problem.

But sprawl is different. It isn't that the items are poorly labelled: in fact, high quality labelling seems to make it worse, because the more labels you add, and the more precise and detailed you are with the labels, the more there are, and the worse the sprawl becomes. This blog is a good example: plenty of carefully thought-out labels, hand-picked by trained acolytes, polished and placed in just the right place with accuracy and precision, but with just one problem. There are too many of them. They obscure the information in a plethora of detail.

Information overload = Label sprawl?

I'll admit, I was expecting that at this point, the blog software would suddenly pop up and say: 'You seem to have a problem with Label Sprawl. Do you want to do nothing about it, but to waste lots of time in the process?' But maybe that's a different expectation to do with paper clips... Or else, there aren't quite enough labels yet, and all that I need to do to activate the automatic label organiser is just to add a few more labels...

The blind beta

It's so very strange, trying to come to terms with having a different world view from other people. You get so used to seeing things through your own eyes that it is hard, so disorientingly hard, to try and see it from another viewpoint. It happened to me, today.

For some time, I've been a beta tester for a truly superb piece of software: one of the really clever ones that you know is going to make a difference. I stumbled across it (not in the Internet way!) when surfing, and was so impressed that I wrote a rather gushy email that had some suggestions about how to improve it. Back came an email invite to the beta programme. Since then I've trodden a treadmill where betas are released to the testers, and then made public before I've had a chance to test and do any feedback. Time differences can be cruel, and it seems that I'm in just the wrong location to make it almost impossible to make a meaningful contribution. Which is incredibly frustrating for a determined contributor like myself.

Even worse, I'd forgotten to pass on the recommendation to others. I'd been sitting there, using it, but hadn't told anyone else.

But this afternoon, an opportunity arose to correct this, at least in part, and so I went into full 'entropy reversal mode' and showed some potential users just what a wonderful piece of software they were missing. None of them had heard of it before, and so I did make a difference. It became a good day, and it is about to get better still.

If you've read this far, then I have two choices:

• I can decide not to say what the software in question is, and trust me, there's nothing to question about it because it is very clever, very neat, and not at all because it seems that today's word is 'very', and you may not read this blog again;

• or I can do a big reveal, wax lyrically, and you will be very happy.

I'm going to go for...

...the latter, of course!

I'm still finding it hard to throw off the name by which I first knew it: 'PicLens', but you will find it much more easily if you look for 'Cooliris', or if you follow this link here:


What Cooliris does is turn searching through large numbers of images or videos in a web browser from a slow, tedious chore, into a fast, intuitive and productive experience. In the process, it changes your expectations about how a user interface should work, and you will find it hard to go back to scroll-bars with thumbs, next page/previous page buttons etc. You are about to be spoiled rotten. I'm honestly convinced that this is a glimpse into how the user interfaces of the future will be. It is that good. Just try it and prepare to be amazed.


And, of course, there's a blog to read: http://blog.cooliris.com/

My rating: I give it 5 stars! *****



(The screenshots used here are from the Cooliris Media Kit)

Third Edition (SS&SIII)

After a long gestation, the third edition of my book, Sound Synthesis and Sampling, is now out. A lot has changed behind the scenes of this edition, although a quick flick through will reveal that many of the diagrams are the same - so don't use that as your acid test for change. In fact, the organisation of chapters, their contents, and especially the words, have all changed.

There have been casualties too. In a moment that feels almost like part of an episode of my favourite TV show of the moment, Desperate Housewives, the Glossary has moved out. Currently I'm putting the finishing touches to an entirely new glossary that will be the same and very different, as well as improved. Watch out here for more news as it happens. There are also a few other surprises that I'm working on.

(If you look closely at the photo, which I'm sure you won't, you will see that I've left the shrink-wrap covers on five of the six 'author' copies. Just for the moment, I'm keeping them pristine...)

With each new edition, I worry about the acceleration that seems to be happening. After the first edition in 1996, we managed 8 years before enough had changed to prompt the second edition. But the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century has not been kind to authors of books on electronic music, and the vast changes resulted in this third edition after only 4 years. This is a majorly worrying trend for me as an author, because it suggests that either the time between each book is decreasing at 4 years per edition, in which case I need to be writing the next edition now, or else it means that the time between each book halves each time, in which case I need to be writing the next edition pretty soon.

Actually, I'm inclined to think that the major disruption of the changeover from physical to virtual, from hardware to software, has now happened, and so we may have a period of relative stability for maybe 4 years. Of course, this may just be wishful thinking, in which case I may be getting busy again very soon. 'Fourth edition' does sound very imposing, though. Posh suit for the author photo for that one, perhaps?

The web-page at Elsevier / Focal Press does give away something else I have been working on recently. I've been very occupied being the Technology Evangelist for a startup company called Real Time Content. Spun out from research that I led at BT, this new company does amazing things with video. Feel free to take a look...

Audio blogs = Podcasts

Not exactly a great revelation there, but for me there's a big difference in how I consume them...

Blogs are something that I'll visit because I follow them (usually because the blogger writes interestingly on relevant subjects) or because I find them from a search for something specific, in which case a really good one might end up as one I will read...

Podcasts are different (Mr Completely Obvious, the not-very-superhero, returns for a brief visit!) because I listen to them as I walk to work. So they are part of the transition from home to work. This is something which was drummed into me many years ago as the key to life, the universe, and quite a lot of other things too: separate home and work, and find something that marks that transition. So in my case, listening to a variety of podcasts does this, and it has worked very well for me.

Just as the books in a bookcase, or the CDs by the CD-player, reveal a lot about their owner (Mr Completely Obvious appears and vanishes again, rapidly...), so do podcasts. To make the link between blogs and podcasts complete, here are the main podcasts to which I subscribe:

• Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews

The 'Good Doctor' and his DJ companion travel through the internet as digitised audio, in a film review programme that has opinion, rants, and humour throughout - but no connection to any other programme that might sound superficially similar to my opening phrase.

• Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS

Admittedly there's not enough of them but what few there are are wonderful, qunintessential Fry. Of course, there's no way you could ever have enough! (Cough from Mr Completely Obvious here, of course)

• Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American

SciAm is definitely my preference over the UK's 'New Scientist'.

• Skeptic - the official podcast of Skeptic magazine

Swoopy and Derek explore the sceptical side of science.

• The Sound On Sound podcast

I used to write regularly for Sound On Sound magazine, so this is a way of listening in to them remotely. I still subscribe to the magazine as well, of course!

There's one other, but it is a video podcast, and so can't be safely viewed whilst walking! (Rustles can be heard in the background from an almost-superhero...)

• GeekBrief.tv video podcast
  

The amazingly full-of-life Cali Lewis breathlessly entertains, enthuses and informs! A sort of geekier and less motor-sport-oriented US version of UK Gadget Show presenter Suzi Perry, perhaps?

(Other podcasts are available, as the disclaimer goes... )

(Of course, my Mr Completely Obvious has no connection with any other super heroes called Mr Obvious, Captain Obvious, Mr Readily Apparent, and so on...)

So there you go. You've now looked at my innermost books and CDs, and I hope it has been useful!

Obscure Wipeout HD Locations Number 3

Okay, if you've been following this one, then here's the third of this occasional series. If you haven't been following, then here's a screenshot of a location somewhere on one of the tracks in the excellent PS3 game Wipeout HD.

Where is this?

All (!) that you have to do is to try and figure out where this screenshot was taken from (location and track). So far the locations have varied in difficulty, and this is no exception!

There's a very specific mind-set required to take screenshots like these (plus some pretty nimble fingers to be able to get screenshots whilst also flying the ships!). The ordinary and conventional is not the right approach. You have to want to go beyond the edges, and to explore places that the game designers did not want you go to... I play a similar 'game beyond the game' with MotorStorm, where I try to get off the allowable playing area in what is probably my second favourite launch game (You'll have to wait until another time for my favourite...).

As always, this is not a competition, and no prize is offered. There is not even a 'no prize' for anyone with a memory that long or obscure ('Marvel Comics' is your clue).

Past unexpected

A chance comment today set me thinking about time travel. Long a staple of science fiction, time travel is one of those things that is so unlikely to be encountered in real life that most people just accept whatever is presented to them.

But I'm not so easy to persuade. The well-worn and obvious cliches about time travel are either meeting yourself, or altering the past so that you no longer exist in the future. There's already plenty of words been expended on those, so I'll explore the more mundane...

First off, there's the 'Universal Translator' problem. Now whilst Captain Kirk and Doctor Who can just glibly explain that they have one, and so can communicate with any alien races that they encounter, the unfortunate truth about time travel is that you go back even a few hundred years and things have changed in ways that make you stand out like, well, like a time traveller.

For example, changes in the pronounciation of English are always ignored in films, except for certain cliches. It appears that going back in time quickly renders your speech so different that you may be unable to communicate (between 1200 and 1600 the way that vowels were pronounced in English changed markedly - this is one of the differences betwixt Middle English and Modern English). Worse, your eating preferences would also mark you out as an outsider (coffee, tea, potatoes and more are all comparatively modern), as would your behaviour to others and especially those higher in rank, and would your clothes, and your smell, or lack of it. Before shampoo, keeping hair clean and 'manageable' was very difficult, and so your hair might give you away, as would your watch, your shoes, your jeans, t-shirt, glasses, underwear, iPod, contact lenses, and your fillings in your mouth. Then there's germs, where your carefully constructed defences against the diseases of your own time are probably laughably ineffective against those of ancient times.

So, actual time travel is tricky for a whole set of reasons that have nothing to do with the technology, and anyone foolhardy enough to try it would almost certainly be unable to conceal their strangeness from the locals. In fact, one suspects that there isn't really a need for Temporal Policemen to stop people killing their grandparents or posting themselves stock market summaries, because trying to survive in a world as totally alien as the past, seems to be almost impossibly difficult,and potentially very life-threatening.

As with many interesting and exciting things, the simple truth is that the mundane nature of the real world makes them far less appealing and extremely unlikely.

Today's graphics breakthrough!

One of the bits of software that I play around with as a background task is Apple's truly astonishing 'Quartz Composer'. Dismissed as a toy by many people, it repays careful study many times over.

My main area of research using Quartz Composer is music visualisation: turning audio into moving pictures. This can be considered as two separate problems:

• analysing the music to get useful parameters representing meaningful aspects of the music
  
  
• converting the extracted parameters into moving graphics that look impressive and that convey the character of the music to the viewer

Neither of these is easy, and just to make it that teensy bit harder for myself, I'm determined to do them in real time. I've been busy doing this for a couple of years now, and progress has been slow and jerky, but it has been progress. But one thing has always been a major problem: making the graphics look like they are 'organic' rather than computer-generated. Up until today, I had made some progress towards this goal, but the results were simple and lacked the complexity of things in the real world.






Just as with 3D, the problem is one of trying to represent the detail and diversity of the real world, but with very limited resources. Today I had an idea, and I've spent rather more time than I should have getting it working. The results are some of my most pleasing visualisations so far. Showing them is tricky, because they are generated at 1680 x 1050 pixels at 60 frames per second, and so capturing them is not easy, and produces very large files. I'm working on way to do the capture properly too...






So when you look at these screenshots, remember that they are stills from a moving animated graphics display, running in real time.


( The other thing to remember is that you can't use tables inside this blog application because it leaves large amounts of white space, and so formatting multiple pictures isn't easy. So I'll apologise now for the poor layout, which is mostly beyond my control. )

Drive-thru billboards...

I pre-ordered Criterion Games' 'Burnout Paradise' for the PS3 on the strength of previous versions of the game, plus the excellent down-loadable demo. Since then I've enjoyed many a happy hour driving extremely badly around a gorgeously detailed, non-existent place, bumping into other virtual cars, doing stunts that in reality I'd never attempt, and generally messing about in cars (and on motorbikes) in ways that you only normally see at the movies. Enormous fun!

You might have detected from my blog posts that I'm a bit of a completist, a perfectionist, a collector... Now those smart people at Criterion cater for many tastes in their video games, and they have got me sussed very well. Amongst several other 'collect these' challenges, is one where you have to drive through advertising billboards, or hoardings, as they are called in the UK. Note here that Burnout's Americanization is so complete that I now call them billboards, and that 'ization' crept in too. Not bad for a team of programmers from Guildford in Surrey in the UK: a county town more normally regarded as one place where stockbrokers live when they aren't working in the City of London.

There are 120 billboards to drive thru, and they vary from obvious, in plain sight, and easy to demolish, through to deviously hidden and virtually (!) impossible to reach. But I've managed to find them all and driven thru every one of them. I hasten to add that in the real world I've never done this, nor have I ever felt any need to do this, and I'm definitely not encouraging anyone to do it.

So you've got a game where people cruise around a city and its surrounding environs, looking for billboards... Sounds like a cue for adverts to me. And this is indeed true, because there are adverts for a number of well-known brands in the game. This is not that unusual these days, and I had more or less dismissed it as a way of making the virtual environment look more like the real world without descending to the fake adverts that you sometimes see that are funny at first, but soon start to pale.

So I was more than a little intrigued when I read that one of the contenders in the US presidential election had bought advertising space inside Burnout Paradise on the X-Box 360 in specific states in the US. In a delicious twist, you have something that shows very eloquently just how clever some people can be:

In a game where you drive around looking for billboards to drive through (thru), you don't/can't ignore the billboards!

Luckily for symbolism, the advertising billboards in Burnout aren't the same as the ones you can drive thru, but this doesn't change the brilliance of the concept. In most games with in-game advertising, you ignore the adverts in just the same way you ignore banner ads on web pages. But in Burnout Paradise, the game-play itself forces you to look at them. If I was speaking, I'd be lost for words in awe at this point, but luckily, I'm only typing.

I'm now wondering just where this leads next. Just how many ways can you weave adverts into the actual fabric of the game-play of the video game itself?

Strait talking...

Why is it a strait-jacket? Why not a straight-jacket - you know, something to keep you on the straight and narrow?

Pause here whilst you contemplate for a moment.

It turns out that it might be a straitjacket, presumably because you might dash away, or perhaps the hyphen could aid you in escaping from its confines... Which kind of gives away the 'strait' - it comes from 'restricted' or 'narrow' or 'tight', as in the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia, or between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, depending on your point of view...

So is it strait-talking, as in confining your discourse to a narrow (an arrow?) range of subjects, particularly the truth?

Pause here whilst you contemplate for a moment.

Nope, turns out it is straight-talking, as in talking directly to someone and not getting distracted by either homophones or words that sound the same but have different meanings.

And as for strait and narrow, that is obviously a tautology, and so can be rejected strait away.

Downgrades as upgrades: Cartons

Over the last few years, I've grown accustomed to a strange phenomenon that has afflicted a once functional and pleasant land - the 'Downgrade as Upgrade'. I've watched in dismay as things that are supposedly new, improved, better, etc, have actually been impaired/restricted/reduced in features or performance. QuickTime has gradually lost the ability to convert between many formats like it used to, and seems increasingly to be just a player for the latest formats. Windows Media Player has lost just about all functionality beyond playing videos and adverts, and it has lost all its menus and usability in the process, but it has certainly gained the ability to stop me playing content that it thinks I shouldn't.

Just about every time I 'upgrade' a piece of software, I know with a heavy heart that this means that DRM will reduce my ability to use it, will further restrict what I can do, that features will vanish never to re-appear, that useful aspects will be twisted so they no longer delight me, and more. Much more. Trying to buy a monitor for my PS3 turned into a long, drawn-out battle trying to find out if an apparently suitable DVI-equipped monitor actually supported HDCP with the right version number. When LCD manufacturers seem determined to not tell you the specifications for their products so that you can check if the PS3 will allow itself to output a picture to the monitor, then I know the world has lost the plot (and any other idiom or euphemism). So how do you put something as big as the Earth in a strait-jacket?

And it isn't just software and hardware. The creeping malaise has spread much wider. Just recently, I've been trying to find a way to pour milk out of milk cartons without it going everywhere. Ten years ago, I remember that milk cartons came with a top not unlike a pitched roof, where you peeled apart the sides, and squeezed, then pulled one of the sides down to make a spout. Quick and simple, and it poured beautifully. Years of advances in science and technology later, and I'm faced with flat-top cartons equipped with tiny plastic widgets on top, where you flick open the tiny cover, peel away a foil cover, and then pour, and the milk proceeds to dribble down the side of the carton. In fact, it flatly refuses to pour properly.

I've asked around. No-one that I've talked to knows how to make them pour properly. Lots of milk gets wasted because you can't pour them properly. If this is such a great invention that it is on all cartons then why doesn't it work?

Why are we stuck with 'Downgrades as upgrades'? If I was cynical I might even suggest that politicians suffer from the same effect...

Hmmm. I seem to have written an article in a style that some people might associate with 'The Register'!

Hitting the Intellectual Wall

Athletes have their 'Wall': a psychological and physiological barrier that requires considerable effort to break through. Not being a particularly sporty type, I had not really thought that it might apply to other endeavours. But the recent emergence of a pattern (I'm definitely an 'emerging pattern' type of person - which is an interesting subject all to itself!) that I'd sort of glossed over made me realise that the concept might apply to a much wider scope than I'd thought.

The trigger was something I dabble with in rare idle moments: Sudoku. I was first introduced to it at a Wedding reception where they handed out sheets of brain teasers to occupy the guests whilst all the wedding reception stuff was being prepared, and there were two Sudoku taken from a broadsheet newspaper. Never having seen them before I solved them and thought that they were quite diverting. Since then I've got one of those electronic ones (naturally), and another one that has possibly the worst cursor-moving device ever perpetrated on human-kind, and several computer, iPod and iPhone versions.

The problem is, there's a sub-set of Sudoku problems that I can't solve. I reach a position where all of the remaining squares can be filled by one of a pair of numbers, and I can't figure out a way of proceeding past this block. I've reached my own 'Wall'. I've spent quite a while analysing the ones that I can't do to try and see if there's something I'm missing, but I haven't found it yet. Here's one:


Whilst I was racking my brain trying to solve it, I remembered a past situation with a close resonance to this one: when I tried to learn the 'Lisp' programming language. Now every other programming language I've learnt involved an initial feeling of being overwhelmed by the arcane difference between the newcomer and what I already knew, but eventually this was replaced with a moment of inspiration where 'I got it' and then things went as smoothly as learning a new language ever goes. This was how it was for Fortan, Basic, C, 68000 assembler, Pascal, HTML and Prolog...

But Lisp was different. Big Time different. 'You aren't going to like this' different. I unexpectedly hit the Wall and could not get past. And did I try! There was something there that just didn't compute. Just like this sub-set of Sudoku problems. Now I'm not saying that this isn't solvable, merely that I can't figure it out. Quite humbling, really.

So in my case, my own personal Wall is very tangible. Maybe I just need to keep metaphorically running, but it is certainly fascinating to see one close up and personal.

Value for money?

Many years ago, a very wise person said to me that in order to appreciate the true value of anything, you needed to compare it to something very tangible: a cheese sandwich, for example.

So when I recently bought a spare computer mouse to use when I'm presented with a laptop (I'm totally inept with a track-pad) I was intrigued to discover that it was cheaper than a cheese sandwich. Of course, other mice are available, and I'm sure that the same applies to cheese sandwiches too, but I didn't choose the cheapest mouse and the most expensive cheese sandwich I could find - merely representative ones from my bulk CD-R supplier and my local supermarket.

I'm not sure if the mouse or the cheese sandwich represents the best value for money...

This Japanese snack is good value for money - you get two rice crackers, one of which has a hole in it, plus the filling, all wrapped up in an individual wrapper. The real thing isn't quite so over-exposed of course, but it does serve to emphasize that this might be a trap for the unwary.

Actually this is a savoury snack, and despite the bright green wrapping for the complete pack containing about twenty of these, plus the writing which starts with the reassuring word 'chizu' (cheese or map in Japanese), the predominant flavour is actually mustard. Actually, they are delicious, and make a refreshing change from cheese sandwiches!

But I have no idea what the exchange rate of these for mice is!

Musically useful!

Every so often, I surf the internet looking for interesting music-related software. The things that I find vary from freeware with a wide range of qualities, through shareware which tends to be as good if not better than many more overtly commercial versions, to commercial software, where my rule of thumb is that the smaller and more dedicated the programming team is, the more worthwhile the software will be.

Some freeware is a by-product of academic research, and there are sometimes gems to be found here. It is all to easy to be put off by sparse documentation, or worse, documentation which points to a conference paper containing formal methods mathematics. But perseverance can reap huge dividends when you find something that is clever and useful, or maybe amazing and a stroke of genius.

One such marvel is ixiQuarks, which is 'hidden in plain view' here on the Apple.com download site. There's no need to feel guilty if you passed it by, by the way.

At this point I have to comment about an interesting use of words by the UK television channel called 'Channel 4', who responded to my query about why I could not view their TV programme online catch-up service on my Mac with a comment about them looking at ways of providing the service to 'non-Windows' computers - I had never, ever, thought of having a Mac or a Linux box as owning a 'non-Windows' computer! To try and balance this rather biased view of computing, I have to report that this software does not work on 'non-Macintosh' computers.


ixiQuarks is freeware from ixi audio, who describe themselves as: "an experimental project concerned with the creation of digital musical instruments and environments for generative music." This sounds rather like a music-oriented version of the very broadly-based 'arts and technology' collective that I'm a founder member of: the Curiosity Collective.

ixiQuarks, as the name suggests, contains a number of separate units of musical generation, processing, or utility. The first thing to do is to read the documentation, which means going to the bottom of the help file, and reading the section called 'Getting started: few studies'. This explains the importance of loading files into the 'BufferPool' utility, and provides help with setting up audio inputs and outputs. For me, it all went smoothly, and I was soon trying out the very neat user interface to the Karplus-strong algorithm generated sounds in the 'Quanoon' (presumably a clever play on words for the Latin phrase 'sine qua non' which means 'without which not' and which is interpreted as meaning 'an essential requirement', which is pretty accurate if you want a versatile plucked-sound controller.) instrument, and using 'SoundScratcher' to smear audio files using granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can provide a daunting array of controls, and so something that makes times-smearing simple and mouse controlled is exactly what I've been looking for - think of it as a bit like the Smudge brush in a bitmap paint program, but for audio.

But the highlight for me was rather played down in the documentation: 'ScaleSynth'. The user interface looks deceptively straight-forward: the screen fills with pale green rectangles. But moving the mouse around the grid and clicking (or holding the mouse button down) rapidly reveals the purpose as the rectangles go increasingly orange in hue: horizontal and vertical movements control pitch using a menu-controllable scale. It gives a marvelously simple and intuitive interface to controlling pitch, and I'm now wondering why more electronic music software does not use this type of front end. This is probably my best 'find' for this year, although Puremagnetik's Vector is a close second.

Deep waves

One of the hardest problems in designing something is deciding where the 'sweet spot' is - just enough facilities to provide lots of possibilities, but not too much because that wastes money. Some current Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) provide lots of dedicated plug-ins for a variety of synthesis techniques, whilst others go for more novel approaches.

Abelton Live is one of the latter, with only a few dedicated virtual synthesis plug-ins. But by combining the simple sampler playback (via the brilliantly named 'Simpler') with the built-in MIDI and audio effects processing, and the general purpose 'Rack' that lets you build up your own special-purpose 'super-plug-in', you can do some amazing things.

This was highlighted for me with two recent purchases. I bought 'Lumen' for my Apple iPhone 3G, and 'Vector' from Puremagnetik.com for my Ableton Live 7 rig. Lumen is a puzzle game where you solve the problem of passing a beam of correctly coloured light through a series of checkpoints, using just a single light source, some coloured filters, and some mirrors. Rather like the Honda 'Cog' advert, both are variations on what is known as a Heath Robinson machine in the UK, or a Rube Goldberg machine in the USA, and they go by other names elsewhere. The machines build complex operations from simple parts, although practicality is not always high on the agenda.

The 'Vector' instrument rack produces sounds reminiscent of one of my favourite pieces of hardware: a Korg Wavestation. The Wavestation uses two distinctly different but related types of synthesis technique: vector synthesis and wave-sequencing.

• Vector synthesis was first introduced in the Sequential (Circuits) Prophet VS, and enabled a dynamic mix of up to four separate ROM sample-playback sounds either using a joystick controller, or stored as a 2D controller timeline.
  
  
• Wave-sequencing takes ROM-playback of samples, and allows the samples to be cross-faded together in a time sequence. This provides sounds with varying timbre, or a rhythmic character.

The 'Vector' instrument rack does not use a dedicated synthesiser, instead it uses the Simpler sample replay instruments, and puts them into time-sequences by using a series of built-in 'Note Length' MIDI processors to produce the timed note triggers, and it uses the ability to map parameters deep inside an instrument rack to be controlled from a simple top-level set of controllers. Having spent many a happy hour creating wave sequences, I was intrigued to discover that the process is very similar in the original hardware and this modern virtual form.

In fact, the virtual form might even be faster for making sequences, and it has the added bonus that the wave sequencing is not fixed, and can be edited with all of the MIDI and audio processing, plus all the instrument rack features like zones, velocity switching etc., plus the samples are no longer locked in a Korg ROM!

Being able to make and edit a synthesis technique by bolting together simple processors and instruments is a wonderful thing! For me, it is more satifying than solving a puzzle like the thousands inside Lumen... but it takes rather more time, and so far, isn't as portable!

Obscure Wipeout HD Locations Number 2

I've always thought that the interesting stuff is at the edges and the limits. When programming synthesizers, I explore extreme scalings, huge transpositions, rapid envelopes, tiny granules of waves and anything else that is a direct consequence of the necessary constraints. Sometimes you get really amazing sounds, whilst at other times you merely find out why the limits were set at that point!

For video games, the scope for moving outside of the expected path has increased as the complexity of games has increased. A game like Noughts and Crosses has only a few possible moves (and optimum playing leads to a draw...). Pacman has more moves, but has no unexplored corners - the world is tightly controlled. Modern games, where 3D models move according to physics engines on 3D surfaces, use imperfect collision algorithms to try and make sure that the models do not fall through the surface. And they do fail. I've experienced the alarmingly disconcerting experience of having Lara Croft fall through an edge - and she continued to fall, down and down into nothing, until I reset the console.

Finding these hidden 'exploits', the places where it is possible to get outside of the playing space, is rather like an extra facet of the game. In the future, I would not be surprised at all to find that game designers will increasingly build in support for these 'not the game we intended' activities - Criterion Games' Burnout Paradise is one notable example of a game where player inventiveness has influenced the ongoing development of new gameplay modes. After all, picking up the ball and running with it is against the rules in soccer/football, but is fine in Rugby football!

And so to the second 'Where was this screenshot taken?' challenge (Here's the first!). As before, the screenshot is from the current PS3 Wipeout HD game, and all that the reader has to do is identify the track and the location around the track.

Where is this Wipeout HD screenshot taken from?

As always, there is no prize for solving this 'not a competition at all'. Other than a certain amount of satisfaction, that is!

Adjectives and inventions

The fame from being the first to do something drives many people to great achievements. History and hindsight are increasingly the tools that are needed in order to understand the often complex web of incremental inventions that lead to a major new technology. The internet is a good example of something which was the result of the effort of a number of people over many years, each working on different parts: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's definition of the 'Internet Protocol', or Tim Berners-Lee's 'World Wide Web, are just two of these parts. The idea of putting data into packets, and then switching these packets around a network so that they could utilise different routes through the network, and so avoid congestion, is another of these parts, but not many people know the name behind this. To find out, visit this page.

I'm also fascinated by what I think of as the 'adjective explosion' that accompanies inventions. For example, the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled, photographed flight seems to have been made by the Wright Brothers in 1903. The adjectives used: 'manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled and photographed' are significant here, because it seems that others had flown first, but with less adjectives. For example, in 1890 Clément Ader reportedly flew for 50 m in a bat-winged monoplane that he designed and built - in the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Note that 'control' and 'photographs' are not mentioned. There are also photographs of Otto Lilienthal's flights in the 1890s, but he used gliders, and so lacked the 'powered' adjective.

It seems that the more you try to discover the reality behind the simple lists of inventors or 'firsts', then the more you uncover uncertainty. For example, it seems that Alexander Graham Bell was the first person to 'patent' the telephone, although even the story of the obtaining of the patent is far from straight-forward - and certainly not the stuff of a 'TV Quiz show' answer. The electric light bulb seems to have been independently invented more or less simultaneously by two people in two different places, and I'm sure there are long sequences of adjectives to describe those inventions too!

A Question of Sides...

Yesterday's thinking about preconceptions of 3D reminded me of something that I was shown as a child, and which I now know to be a classic puzzle. But armed with 3D thinking, then there's a couple of wrinkles that I'd like to add to the canon...

The premise is simple enough. There are three houses, and three utility suppliers: Electricity, Gas and Water. All you have to do is connect the three houses to each of the utilities, with the one constraint being that you cannot have any of the utility supplies crossing over another - some obscure local bye-law or something is usually part of the patter at this point. The diagram that accompanies the problem is straight-forward:

The start position

People often try connecting one utility to all three houses, and then the second utility, and then the third, two of which are normally easy, but the third is blocked by a previous connection. Back-tracking and re-routing only results in the same blocking, and persistence or ingenuity are no help in finding a solution.

Only the water connection to the middle house to go...

Actually, there isn't a solution, and the mathematics behind it is very well understood, and was neatly captured by Euler in a formula that describes the properties of 'planar graphs' and 'non-planar graphs', of which this is an example. It actually boils down to a planar graph being a collection of points and lines connecting them that can be drawn on a surface without any cross-overs, whilst a non-planar graph is one where you can't. The three houses problem is non-planar, and so can't be solved on a flat surface. Of course, now that you know that you can try to solve it on other surfaces, and a doughnut-shape (or, more formally, a torus) is one example of a surface on which you can solve it.

But one surface which most people forget about is the other side of the piece of paper on which this problem is normally drawn. By using the other side of the piece of paper, it is also possible to solve it. However, one of the consequences of technology is that we have new ways of representing things, and if you draw the diagram on a screen, then an interesting thing happens - you can't use the other side, because:

'Unlike paper, screens don't have an 'other' side.'

Which made me sit down and think hard, because I'd never thought about it before. Screens are single sided, rather like a möebius strip.

If you want to know more about the history and the maths behind this puzzle, then there's an excellent web-page here.

3D or 2D?

I've been using a popular example of slide presentation software for many years, and I've learned many ways to use it efficiently to get quick diagrams that convey ideas to people. But today I learned something that removed some of my confidence.

It all happened innocently enough. A colleague asked me if I could help with an urgent task by producing a diagram. Please note that this was because of my mere competence rather than any amazing talent that I have. The description of what was need went along the lines of: '...and you have a series of choices, and can take any choice at each stage...' and I was doing what my head does automatically at this point: visualising it.

But here's the problem - I was thinking about it in 3D, and the diagram I had in my head was perfect for expressing the concept, except that when I tried to draw it using the 2D slide presentation software I quickly realised that I couldn't re-produce what was in my head on the screen - at least not in a reasonable time-scale, and not without enormous efforts to do the 3D transforms manually by drawing line segments by hand.

It suddenly struck me that the 2D software was perfectly okay for just about all everyday diagram tasks, except those where I came up with a 3D mental picture, and couldn't find a 2D alternative. At a pivotal moment like this bloggers are supposed to have a neat analogy immediately to hand, something like: 'It is like the climactic space-ship fight sequence between Khan and Kirk in The Wrath of Khan, where Kirk and crew realize that Khan is thinking in 2D instead of 3D, and that this gives them an advantage because they aren't tied to the idea that there is any direction called 'up' in space.' Oh, I seem to have found a suitable quote!

To illustrate just how hard it is to avoid thinking in 3D, look at the picture below:


Did you see two shapes: a square and a strange four-sided kite shape? Or did you see a square, and another square, turned and twisted around in 3D space, and with the top left corner closest to you? Be honest! Now that I've told you you will see a kite, although trying to draw this in 2D is hard, and I cheated by using 3D transforms!

I'm now waiting/looking for a neat presentation slide software that lets me work in 3D. Something very different from a 3D modelling or rendering tool: a 3D diagram maker. I've never seen one. have you?

Synthesizer cycles

History repeats itself - but with variations. Long ago, the first analogue monosynth was constructed. Soon there were others, and then many others. Then the analogue polysynth arrived and soon there were lots of them too (and almost all of them were ever so slightly out of tune!). Then MIDI ushered in the digital age and with it came FM, and soon there were lots of digital synths, and many FM synths too. Some digital synthesizers acquired a sequencer and became workstations, and soon there were many of them, all the same but all slightly different. (and if they were out of tune, it was now deliberate!)

Then the sequencer swallowed the mixer, the effects unit, and even the synthesizer and the Digital Audio Workstation was born: 'DAW', as Homer Simpson seems to be always saying, although his pioneering work in electronic music has never featured in any of the episodes that I've seen. DAWs had little bits of flexibility called plug-ins, and soon, there were lots of them too, and they did lots of things, and one of them was synthesis...

The result of this 'history of synthesis in about 100 words' is that we have a hi-tech world where there are many software synthesizer plug-ins: some are recreations of classic noteworthy instruments, some are improved variations on ideas that didn't work very well in an analogue world, and some are relatively new and reasonably novel. Whenever there are many examples of something, things seem to conspire to remove them, and this seems to be happening now. Some manufacturers/programmers are now making 'players' that combine several synthesis techniques together so that instead of selling you several different synthesizers, they sell you just one player that can use any of the techniques, thus gaining flexibility AND locking you into their player for playing their sound sets.

History says that this approach will work for a while, but them someone will have the idea of making a player that has several synthesis techniques built in, and which can read the sound sets from several manufacturers. Someone may even produce a standard that formalizes this inter-working, and we jump back to a single player but lots of sound sets. And so on, saw-toothing our way from one to some to many and back to one, over and over again.

But whereas people tend not to learn the lessons of history, hi-tech seems to be different. One thing which has marked out all of the digital generations of synthesizers has been that the previous generations have been included, which is why, for example, virtual analogue is now used in many non-analogue purist applications, or why FM keeps coming back into fashion. So the future would seem to be one where the classic sounds will not fade away because the instruments that made them no longer exist, but instead, they will keep being re-incorporated into the latest technology. So here's my prediction:

"The equipment may falter, but the sounds will live on."

Remember me in 30 years time and see if this is still true.

James May's Big Ideas

You know those really good programmes that you only find out about when they have finished, and it is too late to use the online catchup services? (which vary from 7 days to a month or more, depending on the broadcaster, and which may be the subject of a future blog entry)

Well, there's another one currently 'happening', where I'm using the word 'happening' in that 'super special event' mode that comes from the 1960s. What's even more amazing, it is the second such series, so if you missed the first one, then you have twice as much catching up to do!

The series is, of course (which is the obligatory 'put down' that just has to be used in this type of sentence), 'James May's Big Ideas', where the third member of the Top Gear presenter team goes out and gets hands-on with technology. This all-too-short series of one-hour programmes is thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in hi-tech.

The first programme in this vein that caught my attention was 'James May's 20th Century', which was shown as several two half-hour programmes back-to-back on BBC2, and which was immediately followed by a repeat of the whole series. TV scheduling as an art-form is completely beyond me, I'm afraid...

But back to the plot of 'Big Ideas', although there isn't much plot to it! Basically James just shows you all manner of obscure and unusual hi-tech machines and gadgets but whenever possible, gets involved in driving, piloting, controlling, flying, or some other action verb associated with the machine, gadget, etc. Power geekery on steroids, if you will.

And I will! Sunday nights are now marked big and bold in my calendar.

Simpsonized!

The camera never lies (ho ho!), which is why there isn't a photo of me gracing this page. Instead I've used a service which provides a representation which can be edited and enhanced in ways that would require considerable skill in Photoshop, The Gimp, or any of those other wannabe photo editing software packages.

All I did was visit Simpsonizeme.com, uploaded a photo of me for it to work on, refined the results and saved them to my Mac, and then I added a graduated background and sepia conversion in a well-known photo editing software package. Since I'm never likely to appear in a real episode of The Simpsons, this is probably my perihelion.

If you don't already know, then you might like to ponder on who the sponsor company might be for the SimpsonizeMe website before visiting it.

Exploring deeper...

Since I routinely mis-use things, I also took a picture of Homer Simpson and let that be Simpsonized too. I then took the result and Simpsonized that, and...


The results of all these iterations are quite striking: the first generation has completely un-Homer'ed him, and then it seems to settle down into a kind of 'Alternative Universe' Homer (with glasses) for several generations (Number 4 reminds me of...), But just as you think it is locked into it, the sixth generation goes off at a completely new tangent.

Obscure Wipeout HD Locations Number 1

Video games usually have two ways of playing them. The way you are supposed to play them, and the way that the developers and programmers never thought of... Okay, so sometimes they do anticipate people going berserker (Star Wars: Phantom Menace on the Sony Playstation 1 is a classic example) but most times they go out of their way to make sure that you do it 'right'.

Deliberate mis-use of most hi-tech equipment is one of my standard operating practices. I've messed about with DIY lava lamps, e-bows, cornflour anti-thixotropicity, warping plastic in microwave ovens and more - none of which activities are in any way condoned or encouraged by me, of course.

But video games are one area where I am happy to promote the creative use of deliberate exploration beyond the designed limits (the same applies to programming synthesizers, but that's another story). So when my very local 16-year old games expert showed me his 'Guess where this Wipeout HD screenshot is from?' picture collection, then it just screamed to be shared with a wider audience.

Where is this Harimau going?

Which is the cue for the screenshot and your eyeballs. The rest is simple:

• Which track is the screen shot from, and whereabouts on that track (landmarks will do)?

There's no prize for this 'not really a competition at all', but solving this puzzle should have huge kudos value for PS3 Wipeout HD addicts! Happy searching, and the answer will be in a future post.

Buying MP3 music tracks

I buy lots of music online. My normal practice has long been to buy CDs so that I get a physical object with linear PCM audio, and I then convert that to MP3 (OK: pedantically AAC) format to play on my iPods as I move around. I have bought a lot of CDs: high three figures, and maybe four.

But recently things have begun to change. I've discovered that some music is not available on CD, and that the only way to purchase it is to download it. And this is only the start. So here's the story of a not untypical purchase and where it leads.

I love anime. In the days before browsers, I used to 'surf' ftp sites using command line ftp, and joined the small and select band of insiders who knew about Japanese animation. In the early 1990s this was seriously obscure undergound stuff, and the rise of anime to the mainstream has been fascinating, from both an artistic and a technological viewpoint. So I've been a visitor to anime music video (AMV) sites like animemusicvideos.org for many years, and I'm continually astonished by the amazing talent that is displayed there - arguably some of the best music video editing on the planet.

Recently, I was moved to tears by a compelling piece of work called 'Auriga' by Nostromo_vx (aka Xavier Guinchard). Currently in the top 10 of AMVs on amv.org (see above), this uses a superbly-chosen range of anime clips and a brilliant dance music track. In fact, the trance track was so good that I decided to buy it - and anyone who says that no-one ever buys music because they heard it online has never met me. The detailed information for the video said that the provenance was:

• DJ Spoke: Watch Them Fall Down (Montano Dub)
• DJ Spoke: Watch Them Fall Down (Original Mix)

So I set about finding these tracks: as CDs or downloads...

eMusic.com didn't come up with anything useful. The more specialist Dancetracksdigital.com isn't normally very strong on Trance, and this was no exception. But Beatport.com came up with the download goods, as did Amazon.com, and so did that increasingly diverse source iTunes! My frequent UK supplier, Amazon.co.uk, had some tracks on CDs, but not the right ones, and pseudo-helpfully asked if I meant 'DJ Spore'?

Prices and format options varied enormously. Amazon.com offered MP3 downloads for $0.88 (but not to a UK IP address, and there's another story), iTunes offered AAC downloads for £0.79, and Beatport.com offered MP3, MP4 and WAV, with prices going from £1.48 up to £2.63 for that coveted linear format. In the end I paid lots of money for two 320 kbps high rate MP3 tracks because more than three times the cost of a normal iTunes download seemed like too high a price to pay, whilst 1.48 per track seemed to be the middle ground. So a viewing of a video led directly to the sale of two tracks, and I quite like DJ Spoke's style, so he's now on my list of 'artists to watch'.

The best bit about all of this is the ending. As it happens, the best remix of this track is the one from the AMV. Xavier's version has the end of the Montana dub as the beginning, uses the bass from the middle eight, and chops between the two versions, to create the best version by far. A version which, as far as I know, isn't available. Now if I was DJ Spoke, or his label, I'd be looking to add this version to the other remixes...

Russlings returns!

After more years than I dare to think about, my punningly-named column from the early 1990s editions of the enduringly wonderful hi-tech music magazine Sound On Sound has re-appeared - here. The name has changed slightly, because there's now a zoo-oriented blog called 'Russlings', but the brain behind this re-appearance is the same old me, albeit slightly older. (and hopefully wiser...)

Actually, to be honest, what I really mean to say is that after an embarrassingly long period of time, I've finally got around to setting up my own blog to accompany my eponymous web-site.

What I'm intending to do here is provide comment and analysis on today's hi-tech world: to reflect on its diversity, novelty, and even on what appears to be an ever-increasingly commodity: its insanity. Note that this is my intent - the reality will probably be not as frequent or as informed as I would like it to be. I have some particularly useful talents for this: deadlines nearly missed; an inate inability to stop using dashes to join what should really be two sentences; a total block regarding learning from copy editing; and a sense of humour that defies understanding. "A 'raised Spock's eyebrow' sort of humour," is how one colleague put it - rather generously, I thought.