Monthly Archives: January 2010

Giving the parser a B-

By david.humphrey | Published: January 29, 2010
Today I finished-up my work writing automated tests for the Processing.js parser and a full unit test infrastructure.  It has been an interesting bit of work, and resulted in a lot of good info.  Today I imported Ben and Casey’s sample code from their Processing books, and it was interesting to watch things pass and [...]
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On the joys of the test harness

By david.humphrey | Published: January 25, 2010
This is the story of my favourite kind of programming.  The kind of programming where you have a handful of existing tools, a bunch of data, and you need to make it all fit together somehow.  There’s no neat-shrink-wrapped-sofware-download-it-from-the-web way to do it (none of this stuff was meant to go together), so you start [...]
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San Francisco goes Open Source

By david.humphrey | Published: January 22, 2010
There’s a great post over at Mashable by San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, on the city’s new open source policy.  In it he discusses the democratic, fiscal, and technical advantages of open source.  He writes: One of the greatest technology changes of our times is the rise of open source software…Open source software is created [...]
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Experiments with audio, part VIII

By david.humphrey | Published: January 20, 2010
I’m working with an ever growing group of web and Mozilla developers, along with some talented audiophiles, on a project to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Today we bring out the demo reel. Last time I wrote about our success getting the browser to make dynamically generated sound.  Since [...]
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Committed to memory

By david.humphrey | Published: January 13, 2010
I heard an interesting interview today with a woman who was talking about the importance of transit poetry programs.  At one point she made the comment that she memorizes a poem every day, which took she and the host off on a tangent about memory and the value of having poetry kept in one’s mind–he’d [...]
Posted in Idea Factory, family | Comments closed

Experiments with audio, part VII

By david.humphrey | Published: January 11, 2010
I’m working with a group of web and Mozilla developers, along with some talented audiophiles, on a project to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Today we teach the browser how to sing. Our experiments to expose audio data to JavaScript have really started to get exciting.  Since I [...]
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Snow Buntings

By david.humphrey | Published: January 10, 2010
This has been one of the worst winters for birding I can remember.  A few weeks ago I was sure the issue must be related to my feeders being low.  I went out to fill them and found that they were all full, and waiting patiently in the cold for visitors. Perhaps this lack of many [...]
Posted in Nature, family | Comments closed

The Web vs. Canada

By david.humphrey | Published: January 7, 2010
the most annoying thing about Canada: “Sorry, this product is not available in your country” –David Ascher I’m not going to let myself get all mad here by thinking or writing more about this issue.  Let’s just say I couldn’t agree with David more, and it drives me crazy.  I will, however, share a perfect moment [...]
Posted in Come on!, Digital Swag | Comments closed

Experiments with audio, part VI

By david.humphrey | Published: January 4, 2010
For the past month I’ve been working with some audiophile friends on a project to try and expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio element.  Today I finally have something more than raw numbers to show off. When I last wrote about our experiments with the <audio> element in part V, I had successfully [...]
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A room of one’s own

By david.humphrey | Published: January 2, 2010
Some day I need to write a long piece about snow.  Living here in the Canadian snow belt, I’m endlessly fascinated by it.  Most of the people I know give little or no thought to the weather; but out here, one needs to pay close attention to it, as it dictates your comings and goings, [...]
Posted in Idea Factory, Introversion, family | Comments closed