chip the glasses

Harry’s son nodded.
Three columns and two arches.
GLORY MAY NOT LAST.

I just uploaded a chrom{e,ium} extension to google’s extension repository. It adds tab-completion to twitter; when you type an @ symbol into your status box an autocomplete menu pops up with all of your friends’ screen names in it.

tabtweet screenshot

The project is open source. Here is the code (as well as an issue tracker, if you need to submit a bug report).

Technically speaking it’s an interesting project. It is a combination of:

• the Chrom{e,ium} extensions framework / API
• the Twitter API
• the OAuth specification
• HTML5 (local storage)

and is the first open source javascript OAuth application I’ve come across. It uses code from this project (albiet with a small patch) to successfully implement the 7-step OAuth flow using AJAX. This was a pretty tremendous struggle as the internet doesn’t think you should do that.

The extension is in the Google chrome extensions directory. Try it out!

Although the cargo was taken out,
  it was after it had been in the water
  more than one half months.
Updated editions will replace the previous one–
  the old editions will be renamed.
The soldiers were ordered not to
  allow him to place on the vessel
  either bed, food, or drink.

You had charge of the funeral arrangements.
Gabriel, why did you set your heart on me?”
“Hes mostly there this time o day.”
“Its my lungs Im worried about,” Mary said.
The bodily heat falls very rapidly.
“Hes mostly there this time o day.”
There was no tribute but their tears.
You had charge of the funeral arrangements.
[Sidenote: Result of the contest.]
He did not want to let Renovales go.
But the contest irritated the king.
That husky young boy was her son.
“Did they tell you, Mariano?
She must stay at home and work for others.

“In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition.”
– alfred north whitehead, process and reality

I have completed my senior thesis project at earlham college.

It is stored in its entirety (code+paper) at github; although if you’d prefer a PDF over tex source there’s that too.

Here’s the video of my presentation (accompanying slides):

I’ll be graduating college in December (thesis willing) and, as if retiring, have a growing list of things I want to ‘get to.’

1. FreeBSD on Lovecraft (sticking with linux)
2. Better music streaming on Lovecraft
3. Upgrade Kafka to Karmic/KDE4.3
4. roll my own Ubuntu for my eee901 (used karmic alt-installer)
5. make a webcomic
6. take piano lessons
7. start a hacker house (scheduled for this month)
8. wake up at 7a every day
9. learn Haskell
10. learn OCaml
11. Revisit Scheme
12. Design a functional language that is a proper subset of Perl perhaps I should actually become a better functional programmer first

I have a monstrous preference for darcs over any other kind of version control. I love its interface, the theory behind it, and the fact that it’s written in Haskell.

However, I’ve fallen in love with github. It’s one of the slickest, most useful web interfaces I’ve ever used. It alone has made me start to learn and use git (albiet begrudgingly).

I’m in my final semester of my time at earlham college, which means it’s senior capstone time. We were encouraged to look over other computer science major’s past projects and work logs, stored in the departmental wiki and student webpages, respectively. I noticed that most students, when expected to regularly update an .html file in the midst of classwork and general procrastination, updated 3 or 4 times and then never touched their log again.

I had considered using this blog for my worklog (just using some tag to group it together) but decided that as long as that manual need was there I would be lax in updating. It occurred to me that I had been planning from the beginning of the semester to use github to store my code; while sitting in class the other day I realized I could just tell my professor to look at my commit log.

I then realized that, if all the students in my class were using github, our professor could just subscribe to the feed of all of our commit logs and immediately assess all of our performance.

So, thus, we have all been mandated to put our papers and coding projects in git repositories for the world to see. I will blog about it again at the end of the semester to report on the efficacy of such an endeavor. In the meantime, check out my evolving thesis at github.

I’ve been a longtime fan of ampache. As a way to centralize and broadcast your music library, it’s fantastic–easy setup, hardly any configuration, friendly web interface. My one annoyance was that, as long as I had my music in Ampache, I couldn’t really use it with my preferred media player Amarok. I could export playlists into Amarok (this is back in 1.4.x) but that was it; I manually had to go to Ampache, craft a playlist, export it, listen, repeat. Very tiresome.

Amarok 2 has finally filled the gap with its built-in Ampache plugin. Now, once configured, your Ampache collection can look and behave just like your local collection (sans tag editing features, but c’est la vie). Even album art is pulled.

There’s not much to it; one pitfall is that in my haste to make this work I installed Ampache from the Ubuntu repos; don’t do this. The version you get is 3.4.x which doesn’t work with Amarok 2’s plugin. Download 3.5.x from Ampache’s website and you’ll be good to go.

I just followed the directions here and was going in no time.

Now, I keep my music on an external hard drive attached to my eee server, Lovecraft, and access it from my work thinkpad / home thinkpad / on the go eee901 / where ever.

Also: it works with Amarok 2’s built-in last.fm support.

Hooray.

A friend had the idea to start up a game of musical telephone. The details of it are still somewhat foggy to me but, basically, I make one or more tracks, give them to someone else, and get tracks in return. I do what I want to what I get and trade those in. after some N number of trades, a song appears.

I took this as an opportunity to practice with some new stuff. First, I ran my pdrss program through the great jack rack for two minutes, recording into Rosegarden. Next, I just programmed some oscillators in pure data, put them through jack rack, and recorded another two minutes.

It’s late, and since someone else is going to be hacking these up anyway, I didn’t strive for perfection. I only did two or three takes for each track. They don’t match up all that great and their sluggish changes represent my still-neophyte computer music skillz (computer mice are different than mixer knobs).

I had a lot of fun, and since these tracks are for collaboration (and fairly large…nay, extremely large) I put them up here instead of gmailing them.

Enjoy, and please, take them and destroy them.

twittertalk
oscs