Giles Bowkett

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Options are ...



  --classic-namespace  (-C)

      Put Task and FileTask in the top level namespace

  --describe           (-D)

      Describe the tasks (matching optional PATTERN), then exit.

  --dry-run            (-n)

      Do a dry run without executing actions.

  --help               (-h)

      0

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      Include LIBDIR in the search path for required modules.

  --nosearch           (-N)

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  --prereqs            (-P)

      Display the tasks and dependencies, then exit.

  --quiet              (-q)

      Do not log messages to standard output.

  --rakefile           (-f)

      Use FILE as the rakefile.

  --rakelibdir=RAKELIBDIR (-R)

      Auto-import any .rake files in RAKELIBDIR. (default is 'rakelib')

  --require=MODULE     (-r)

      Require MODULE before executing rakefile.

  --silent             (-s)

      Like --quiet, but also suppresses the 'in directory' announcement.

  --tasks              (-T)

      Display the tasks (matching optional PATTERN) with descriptions, then exit.

  --trace              (-t)

      Turn on invoke/execute tracing, enable full backtrace.

  --verbose            (-v)

      Log message to standard output (default).

  --version            (-V)

      Display the program version.

Due partly to my slowness in handling pull requests, partly to general mad travel-related busy-ness, and mostly due to the awesomeness of GitHub, there are several forks of Archaeopteryx on GitHub: refactoring forks, a fork with better tests and specs, a related project enabling MIDI in, and a context-free grammar fork:

It's a rule based generator, not necessarily just for melodies. drum_example.rb uses a probability matrix to fire off rules. Those rules can call other rules and so on. If a rule is defined more than once, the generator picks randomly from each of them.

So a matrix could call a rule named :snare which is defined several times each time doing something different, varying a velocity, note number, or whatever. Say I want a bit more variation in what the snare is doing, I can make a rule that plays a triplet and hear the results realtime. And when it plays a triplet, maybe I want the last note accented, another rule or two and it's done.

The point is, is that it allows me to develop a rhythm or aleatoric melody and evolve it over time. It's pretty easy to get started with it playing quarter notes, or a scale or whatever, and turn that into something insanely complex as more and more rules are added. Each of the transformations become little toys to experiement with. A programmer/musician can develop what-ifs and hear those live. What if I send all the hi-hat hits back in time a beat or two, what if I shift this part up an octave? What if I play a static melody and shift it from dorian to lydian? What if I create a treble glisando triggered off of the tone of the occasional note of the sub-bass?

I don't know what kind of music this will be good for, but I know from the ContextFree Art community that the concept is a ton of fun (their community gallery at contextfreeart.org has lots of examples). It's interesting to see what I get with that applied to music.

Another concept I've built into this is the Canvas class. All the notes are placed on a grid as hashes. So for example, I could have one rule place a E3 notes on every 16th note. Then have matrix fire off rules that tweak the velocity of the note on E3. Then add in another that tweaks the modulator, etc.

I'm having trouble keeping up with all the interesting things people are doing with my code, but that's a great problem to have.

At least.

From the LA Times.

As far as I can tell, animals spend more time in the cities than they used to. There are coyotes, raccoons, ducks, geese, and skunks in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I'm minutes from downtown. The bobcat story doesn't surprise me at all; just curious how much further this goes.

The Basura Sagrada temple, which, in keeping with Burning Man tradition, burned on Sunday night. Shot during the day on Saturday, just before the whiteout. Soundtrack from Burial, Julee Cruise, and Angelo Badalamenti.

Burners devoted the temple to people who they lost that year - family, friends, and lovers who had passed away. (And one well-missed dog.) Pictures of the departed, their names, messages which would never reach them, and in a few cases clothes they would never wear again, covered most of the structure, along with the names of ex-girlfriends and -boyfriends, random stickers, and written notes ranging from "I wish I had a pen" to "I always feel lonely here." A lone cellist played with an amp and effects.

The wind turned into a dust storm and then a whiteout. During the whiteout I was unable to see the temple, and at times unable to see things less than ten feet away. When I left the temple, the dust obscured so much that the temple had become invisible.

When the Man burned on Saturday, everybody was laughing, cheering, yelling, and talking. When the temple burned, everyone was silent, except for one drunk girl with a megaphone.

Around 11am I released v1.2 of password.

Here's why password exists:

Password-protection on my Twitter account, or Reddit, or del.icio.us, or for the love of God instructables.com - what the hell were they thinking? - does absolutely nada for me personally, and wastes my valuable time every day, because there is always some stupid Web site demanding my password when it doesn't even need it for any useful purpose. This is especially true given that there's plenty of evidence that requiring unnecessary passwords hurts your business.

If you work in a large corporation, you're especially screwed. The password gremlins lurk everywhere, like roaches that can type - they change the network password every week, or the Exchange server password every three and a half hours except on Tuesday, etc., etc. Nobody should have to waste their time on that stuff.

password remains a handy weapon against the password gremlins. The only new feature in version 1.2 is a -? command-line flag, which allows you to grep.

For instance, maybe I don't remember if I stored my facebook password using password. I just do this:

password -? facebook

And if password has a listing for facebook, it simply says:

facebook

The reason it works this way is you may have several passwords matching a given string stored in password. I used to work for the Los Angeles Times, and if I do this:

password -? lat

I see a bunch of different "sites" I have passwords for.

lat_exchange
lat_svn
lat_wifi

It's also handy if you have more than one Facebook account or Myspace page.

public_facebook
friends_only_facebook
gay_sex_with_furries_facebook

I used a delayed post option to post this 12 hours after uploading to RubyForge (because I'm old-school like that), so by now it should have propagated to every server and you should just be able to do:

gem update password

Update:I don't like this syntax, but changing it requires more optparse-fu than I currently possess, and/or using a different library altogether, so instead I'm using this bash shell alias, which I recommend you use also:

alias password?="password -? $1"

Now instead of

password -? facebook

I just write

password? facebook

Some people like the OS X Dock. I am not one of them. Since I bought this computer and it belongs to me, I'd like to throw away the garbage that somebody else loaded onto it by mistake.

It used to be easy to kill the Dock, but Apple made it harder with 10.5, disabling the hidden options that, under Tiger, had made it possible to remove their annoying error.

I love my Mac, but this is a fairly typical Apple shortcoming, a weird control-freak mentality that blocks you from truly owning your own machine.



Currently, this is the closest thing to a Dock-killer I know:

#make dock really really small
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 1

To use it, you also need to set the Dock to auto-hide and turn magnification off.

The results:





Still not perfect, but much better.