Ago Ame #8 – 17.01.2011:

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Here are some companies:

http://www.etymotic.com/ – they sell in-ears plus you can get custom molds to go with them – wide range of products/prices

http://www.shure.com/americas/products/earphones-headphones/se-models/index.htm – they also sell in-ears and have a partnership with custom mold makers Sensaphonics

http://www.acscustom.com/au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30&Itemid=45 – high end

http://www.earmonitorsaustralia.com/index.htm – they will do molds for other in-ears and also sell complete units

Hearing is a critically under-appreciated sense. At least until you start to lose it. Another thing that I have been thinking about lately is how ambient noise in the everyday environment is quite damaging to productivity, sanity and well being. There is a lot of research coming out now about this.

Here are a few fascinating videos about this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_shh_sound_health_in_8_steps.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

I’ve been training with a personal trainer for the last 6 months, not super fit yet but I do feel a bit like superman compared to where I was, not a comment on how fit I am now, just how unfit I was then.

On Monday I attempted what he called the Spartacus 600. Which in short consists of doing 100 each of the following exercises:

• Squat (body weight only)
• Pushups
• Box Jumps (20” or so, didn’t measure – I think six of those plastic risers)
• Chin ups  (wide grip)
• Dips
• Burpees ( full – including jump at end)

So the idea was to do 20 of each per set rest one minute between sets and do 5 sets!! Ha!

This is how I did:

• Squat: 4 sets of 20 = 80
• Pushups: 4 sets totalling 70
• Box Jumps: 4 sets of 20 = 80
• Chin ups: 4 sets totalling 22 (I knew there was no way I was doing 20 per set)
• Dips: 4 sets totalling 26 (this was a bit of a surprise but there are lot of pushups in there)
• Burpees: 3 sets of 10 = 30

So I did more of a Spartacus 308, which took 28 minutes including about 6-8 minutes of rest as the 1 min rest was not enough.

I plan to continue working this into the routine and see if I can one day finish it! This was a brutal test of fitness which I don’t entirely feel that I failed, maybe a D grade.

Download jquery tools, you can choose just the components you need: For an overlay with a mask you need overlay and expose…http://flowplayer.org/tools/download/index.html

Put the js in the appropriate place.

Then on the page that needs the overlay you only need a container with an id for the content of the overlay to live in:

<div class="for_styling" id="someId">
    The content of the overlay goes here...
</div>

To initialize the overlay:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function () {
        $('#someId').overlay({
            top: 'x',
            mask: {
                color: '#333',
                opacity: 0.6,
                loadSpeed: 200 //ms
            },
            closeOnClick: false, // to make it modal if you need to
            load: true // to make it load on page load
        });
        // to open the overlay at any time
        $('#someId').data('overlay').load();
        // to close the overlay at any time
        $('#someId').data('overlay').close();
    });
</script>

That’s pretty much it. There will be an element created with a class of “close”  that you can style as needed. This has a close function automatically attached.

There are events to attach functions to…

onBeforeLoad
before the overlay is displayed. The overlay has already been positioned at the location from where it will start animating.

onLoad
when the overlay has completely been displayed

onBeforeClose
before the overlay is closed

onClose
when the overlay is closed

…and there are methods for getting the trigger (if there is one, we didn’t look at that here), or the overlay, checking to see if it is open, etc…

I really think this is the way to go from now on, rather than using Thickbox, etc…

I have made no attempt yet at UI design or even any kind of prettiness, just getting the functionality squared away. This borrows heavily from a blog post by Steven Wittens for how to create and manipulate the audio samples.

I had been separately working on a little processing.js app that was going to make use of soundmanager2. I decided to change it to use html5 (although that is now also supported by sm2).

I am writing the audio directly to the <audio> tags as base64-encoded data URIs (audio samples wrapped in a wave file header), so I can generate them on the client side taking into consideration user choices about frequency, panning, volume, filter sweep to a second frequency, duration, and adsr envelope. There is also a waveform display, using the <canvas> element, that allows you to zoom in and out. As I am about to teach Introduction to Audio at COFA in a week, I had been thinking of this as an educational tool that is easily accessible to anyone on the web. I’m hoping it can be optimized to work on mobile browsers as well. Of course, by the time that happens this will probably be out and make this obsolete before it sees much light of day.

You can name the samples you create, and play them back, yay…boring unless you’re a synth geek! So you can also choose a sound from a dropdown and then click in the dark grey box and create a ball that plays back your sound when it hits something. You can make as many sounds as you want, and attach them to different balls. The balls also absorb other balls and their sound (when I get it working properly) when they collide with smaller ones.

This is all very rough at this point, the UI is god-awful, but will be worked and prettified soon.

Until then have fun.

Note: there is definite bugginess still, let’s say this is alpha stage.

While I was looking around last night, I came across Pulsate, which would have been very inspiring had I seen it before I got this far. I had played with Tonematrix previously. Everything Andre does is pretty sweet (even if it is Flash )

Cheers,

Andre

Actually you probably thought to yourself that you might want a couple different versions of Firefox: you can do that with the Firefox portable versions and by following the directions here to modify firefox to allow multiple instances. For Safari and Opera on PC you can look at Browserseal.BrowserPack. On MAC you can check Michel Fortin’s site where he has packaged different versions of Safari and documented the process. IE8 allows you to switch between IE8 rendering and IE7, but not IE6. BrowserPack allows you to install all three versions of IE, but they are not native. I prefer to use a Windows XP mode Virtual PC with IE6 on my Windows 7 (64-bit) machine. This is well documented elsewhere (including how to get it to run on Win 7 Home).

Now you may or may not be aware that the web server built in to Visual Studio will not allow you to connect to it from another machine (which it considers the Virtual PC to be). So we have to configure a different server to test our project on. We could use IIS (which I found to be ridiculously finicky to set up, although I did get it working), but there is an easier, free way: Cassini Web Server.

It couldn’t be much simpler. Give your site a name, generate an ID for it with the button, and enter the physical path to the project files. Click save and you are done. Now this can be accessed by the virtual machine (or any machine that has access to yours) by the machine name: and the port assigned by Cassini or you.

There is one caveat and that is that if you’re project is strictly a 32-bit application Cassini (when installed on a 64-bit machine) will return an error. But if you go to this forum post on the Cassini website and ask for the 32-bit .exe (you will have to log-in) they will not only gladly email them to you, but also give you code samples on how to programmatically switch between the two different .exes as required by your project. I am only doing front-end development so I have chosen to change them manually for now.

I hope that helps someone.

Cheers,
Andre

Cheers,
Andre

The one I found worked well but it selected everyone, even those who were already members, so I altered it so it would only select friends who needed the invite. Follow the steps below to create the bookmarklet that makes this work. The instructions are for Firefox, but should be similar for other browsers.

How to create a Firefox Bookmarklet The best way to do it would be to add this as a browser bookmarklet. So in FireFox:

1. Right click next to your other bookmarklets and select New Bookmark.
2. In the Name field type: FaceBook Select All (or whatever you want)
3. In the Location field copy and paste the code you see below in the code box exactly as it is. You can leave the KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION field blank. They aren’t necessary.

   javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object' && elms[fid].className != 'disabled'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

4. Hit Add.

You can also just drag this link to your bookmark toolbar: FB Select All

Now wherever you are adding friends to an event or group using the Facebook friend selector you can click the bookmarklet and it will select everyone who is not already a member.

Enjoy.

Cheers,
Andre

There was one section of the class however that featured an improv based on the four elements (earth, air, fire and water). So for that part I layered some ambient musical sounds with sounds of…earth, air, fire and water.

So here is a bit of playing around with this patch to create a rainstorm (no music here). There are no samples used, it is all generated in real time and manipulated by me. The sounds are all created by the filtering and other mangling of white noise generators.

This patch borrows heavily from Andy Farnell’s tutorials on those sounds. Here is the patch.