No Love @ WKNC
A couple weeks ago, WKNC invited my band No Love to play a set in their studio. Much fun was had.In about a week (February 7) we’ll be playing at the Lincoln Theater as part of the Double Barrel...
View ArticleI put some S-expressions in your Ruby
I just rediscovered Rubeque, a set of short problems/koans to solve using Ruby, ranging in difficulty from “What does true equal?” to writing simple AIs and solving logic puzzles. The web UI provides...
View ArticleSusanne
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so here’s another laptop recording from the vault. It’s a cover of one of the best Weezer B-sides, “Susanne.” I recorded it in my dorm room during my last...
View ArticleMaking MIDI Sound Awesome in Your JVM
You might be surprised to learn that your Java Virtual Machine is a capable musician. A MIDI soft synthesizer has actually been built into the JVM for years and years, and starting with Java 7, it’s...
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Vignettes: Vim, Fish Shell, Amethyst
I’ve been exploring all sorts of awesome things lately. I feel compelled to share the magic™ of these things with you, but to be fair, there are already a ton of great blog posts and tutorials out...
View ArticleMaking MIDI Sound Awesome in a Clojure Program
I wrote a couple months ago about MIDI and the JVM. I explained that Gervill has been the JVM’s built-in soft synth since Java 7, and I mentioned that there are two ways that Gervill allows you to load...
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Alda: A Manifesto and Gentle Introduction
What is Alda?Alda’s ambition is to be a powerful and flexible music programming language that can be used to create music in a variety of genres by typing some code into a text editor and running a...
View ArticleSomething Cool That Happened Every Month of My Life: 2010
Quite often, I think about what I was doing exactly 5 or 10 years ago. I think about what bands I was playing in, where I was living, what my interests were then, how I felt, which people I spent the...
View ArticleGetting Your First Programming Job: Not as Hard as You Think
Today marks my one-year anniversary of working at Adzerk, which also means I have now been working professionally as a software developer for one year. I could not be happier to be programming for a...
View ArticleAlda Has a Bunch of New Features
Three months ago, I wrote a blog post introducing the music programming language Alda and walking through the basics of using it to write a musical score.To my amazement and delight, my blog post went...
View ArticleHappy New Year!
I have the day off work, so I figured I’d set up this blog on github. Maybe I don’t really need a blog just yet, but I figure at least I’ll have one at the ready whenever I end up having something...
View Article_why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby in Clojure: Part 1
When I first started learning Ruby, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby was a godsend. From an objective point of view, it’s really not the most detailed or thorough language tutorial, but then again, I...
View Article_why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby in Clojure: Part 2
Part 1 of this series can be found here.In this chapter, we start to see more of _why’s use of Ruby code to do metaphysical things like catch stars and use them to construct star-monkeys. Of course,...
View Article_why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby in Clojure: Part 3
Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here.Okay, is it me, or is Chapter 5 absurdly long compared to the other chapters in this book!? Holy moley. I’m going to have to split this one up...
View Article_why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby in Clojure: Part 4
Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series can be found here, here and here.So here’s where _why starts getting into monkey-patching, which I would consider to be a key feature of Ruby… sure, it’s dangerous in...
View Article4Clojure Problem #178
On a whim today, I decided to take on 4Clojure Problem #178, which gives you as input a collection of 5 strings like "HA" (ace of hearts) or "D2" (2 of diamonds), representing a poker hand, and asks...
View Article4Clojure Problem #178 - Revised
I got some great feedback on my last post and decided to re-work my solution a bit. I think this turned out much nicer.The main things I improved:My first solution involved “predicates” (technically...
View ArticleA novel solution to FizzBuzz
I’ve always been mildly interested in the FizzBuzz problem, which is a fairly simple test of one’s programming ability in a given language; the task is to generate a list of the first 100 “fizz buzz”...
View ArticleSaint-Saëns' "The Swan" on Theremin
Theremin performance at Letters Bookshop from INDY Week on Vimeo.I figured I could use this blog to show off some music stuff that I’ve been doing, too. Why not, right? I’ve already got links to two...
View Article_why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby in Clojure: Part 5
Parts 1 through 4 of this series can be found here, here, here and here.At long last, here is part 5 of my series translating the code examples from w(p)gtr into Clojure! I meant to post this like, 4...
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