Scripting Pure Data Graphical programming languages like PD are great for high level tweaking and live modding of programs, but they all seem to suffer from the problem where things get tedious when building some simple low-level constructs like loops or building data structures. Pure Data has always been extensible by creating your own externals in C, but there is…

BASH shell navigation hacks I love the shell for the most part. Modern systems ship with the fantastic (for the most part) BASH shell, which includes tab completion, sophisticated line editing modes and many nice usability features (try using a shell without history or line editing support and see what a difference this makes). There are still some places where…

The Zen of Pure Data I have been mulling over the idea of writing a guide for Pure Data aimed at developers proficient in at least one other more mainstream programming language. Pure Data is so different than many other programming environments, yet its utility is such that I keep coming back to it despite the difficulties in managing code…

Goodbye Posterous – a migration story Many of you know (or should know, if you have anything still on Posterous!) that Posterous is shutting its doors following its acquisition by Twitter. I was one of the first Posterous users in 2008, and they even gave me many more blogs than were usually allowed on the service at the time. Heady…

Input paradigms for wearable computing I’ve been tracking various input methods over the course of this blog, providing commentary on tablets, the death (and possible rebirth) of the stylus, touch computing and now with the Google Glass – wearable computing. I hesitate to call the Glass a wearable computing device, putting it in the company of the clunky hardware of…

Inner sourcing to open sourcing Ahmet Alp Balkan wrote an interesting piece on what you should open source at your company recently. I like his assertion that anything you’d likely need at another job should be open sourced. Some other influential programmers have asserted more aggressive stances on this, but I think Ahmet’s idea is a good start. You should…

Migrating between Linux virtual hosting services I’ve been shuffling my sites around lately, canceling some virtual machines that I don’t use much and consolidating sites that get less traffic onto cheaper hosting. I’m mostly using Apache and MySql on these sites along with Node.js. I’m looking at moving to Nginx in front of the Node.js sites though. Anyway, most of…

Google Glass – enabling new layers of context If you’ve followed me for a while on this blog you know I’ve written about some different UI/UX paradigms in the past, mostly focusing on the rise of tablets and touch computing and the passing of the stylus into niche areas and near obscurity. The scary and exciting thing about all of…

Hacking on local Ruby gems I’m playing around with some ideas posed by a friend of mine lately in Ruby. I’ve done some Rails hacking in the past but I don’t usually get far off the beaten path in Ruby. Well, except for that time that I hacked up a version of Mongrel to try to make it a streaming…

Working with Jekyll static blog generator on Mac A while ago I started moving a bunch of my WordPress and Posterous blogs to Octopress. Octopress is a static website generator that uses Jekyll under the hood. On Linux this was pretty easy to get working, but on Mac I had to figure out a bunch of things related to ruby…