Soldering and Prototyping Tutorial

This is somewhat of a test to see how iPaper works. I've posted a useful little tutorial I've given for those new to Arduino and to soldering and a handy little planning sheet for laying out your perfboard components. If you're interested in learning some more about the Arduino, Physical Computing, and or just about Interactive Media in general, I'll hopefully be presenting a talk at Irish Open Source Technology conference.

Read this doc on Scribd: Soldering and Prototyping Tutorial

Original PDF.

Read this doc on Scribd: Prototyping Stripboard Planning / Layout Sheet

Original PDF.

Politics.ie (pro Libertas?) site in alleged indirect government censorship attempt

There seems to be some rather interesting happens at Politics.ie as elaborated upon by JC Skinner.

Useful stripboarding template

In addition to the existing strip-boarding templates from Tim Surtell, I've put up a single page pdf template (here) which is slightly bigger and only has the strip-board lines on it.

In other news - check out Ahern's solicitors try to silence online debate regarding the whole Politics.ie takedown, move to the States and various rumours around the whole thing.

Arduino Lectures and Tutorial Roundup

Here's the collection of slides and notes from the set of lectures I've given on Physical Computing and the Arduino platform.

Lecture 1: Introduction (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Lecture 2: Electronics, LEDs, Communications, and Datasheets (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Lecture 3: Motors and AVR programming (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Here's the link for Tutorial 1 - Soldering: An introduction to stripboarding and to making a shield for an Arduino - PDF handout. This just keeps everything in one nice handy post.

Random Friday Lunch Linkage

The most useful article I've come across on the internet in ages is ``How to refill a disposable Brita brand water pitcher filter with activated carbon'' as I use a Brita and the filters are damn expensive.

Two of my favourite authors, Ken Macleod and Greg Egan who have Hugh nominated stories this year have put them online for free. "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken Macleod and "Glory" by Greg Egan.

Worldchanging has two nice articles on "RFID and art" and on the Billboard Liberation Front.

Closer to home Elaine wrote a fantastic opinion piece for yesterday's Irish Times, why to go! It's titled "Unwavering loyalty admired and rewarded in politics" (Subscription required). I think it was very pointed and hit the spot exactly with fresh calls from the cabinet about Mr Ahern's finances to be clarified.

A closer runner up for best article this week was from Dan who provides a great deal of clarity on that particular issue that some people in the Irish blog world will find of great interest. It's called "28 days later" and it clearly spells out the happenings and facts for all to read in clear, precise English.

CS4026 - Arduino Intro Lecture and Soldering Notes

Here are the links to the lecture and tutorial notes for last week's `Introduction to the Arduino' lecture and for the workshop on soldering. There are no lectures next week as it is not a teaching week but there may be another chance for all those who missed the soldering workshop to catch up.

Lecture 1 - Introducing the Arduino - PDF Slides

Tutorial 1 - Soldering: An introduction to stripboarding and to making a shield for an Arduino - PDF handout

Happy St. Patrick's Day - Muppet Style

With thanks to Mikael passing along the link!

Witches, Warlocks, and Sci-fi

Its the Burning time. I'm no fan of witch hunts or its various stages but it is rather sad to see mobs are still the rule rather than the exception for the blog sphere. If only the good examples of the like of the Tribunals such as the Mahon was taken to heart by people. Tribunals use documents or evidence of relevance to base their decisions. Maybe its time to sit back and ask is it in the spirit of a tribunal or of a mob that matters are addressed.

On a lighter note, I must say that io9 keeps getting better and better in my book. Especially when they start to include sci-fi sound design, cool artwork, and highlight impressive new architecture.

Journalistic Bloggers - opinionated potpourri or vigourous public debaters

I don't often start a flame war but today a couple of blog posts came across my rss feed and forced me to ask the question are Irish Bloggers offering simply opinionated potpourri or has it lead to a vigour debate and conversation. The unfortunate truth is that potpourri is edging up those who would participate in debate and a growing herd mentality by a small influential group of bloggers is having leading to a net negative effect for Irish bloggers.

The posts that sparked this opinion from me are due to a spat between Dan Sullivan and Damien Mulley, who were arguing over the use of low english words in blog posts. As my blog is somewhat professional oriented blog and also holds material that I direct students to, it means that I have to maintain a swear free blog if possible. This incident has started me thinking about journalists in general and those bloggers who are aiming low rather than high in their use of the English langauge as well as the whole immediate gang-ish nature of Irish bloggers who seem to run to defend any blogger who is questioned about anything. Whilst defending victims is a noble endeavour, simply flocking to the defence at the drop of the hat without a considered reaction to the situation is the worse type of behaviour. The Irish blogosphere seems to be retreating rather than advancing as the `old guard' bloggers / nouveau commentariat are intent on retaining their opinions without opening conversations or constructive dialogues. Those who air considered alternative opinions are barracked, one only needs to refer to one post in this category by Karlin Lillington to see the typical behaviour of the commentariat mob. The end result is that active contributors are only valued until they rock the boat at which point they're ostracised to the furthest corners of the ether. This behaviour and the inherent attitudes of bloggers with this mentality is having a negative net effect for Irish bloggers, who unless incredibly thick skinned often simply let their blogs go fallow rather than have the horde raze their homestead on the Internet again.

The best arguments in the wider websphere on this topic come from two opposing articles, `All the noise that fits' and `The journalism that bloggers actually do'. An important from an excellent article on `Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site' is that a news site should allow readers to connect and converse with each other. It is high time that Irish bloggers remember their roots and allow the conversation to continue so that we end up with vigourous debate rather than the opinionated potpourri it has begun creeping towards.

The third decade - here I come!

Well I'm older, maybe wiser - then again maybe not but as they say the thirties are new twenties. Thanks to Mark and Conal for a lovely lunch and surprise in the Wild Onion today. Now if I can only survive the slagging for the rest of the day ....

Monday and a local focus

Well seems somebody reads my ramblings and rants as I've made it onto the Limerick Leader's in their local blogs section. I reckon there must be one or two readers of IrishElection.com that made the connection or else from the LimerickBlogs.com page, either way its great and thanks to all the nice people at the Limerick Leader for throwing my blog in the section. As always and ever, I'm proud and happy to be a Limerick man. Hat tip to Dan for pointing this out to me.

Mad weekend but some craic

Just had a short weekender in Dublin and got to meet up with some of the lads. We did the whole shopping thing and even the nice dinner too! I'd have to recommend the City Bar and Grill on Kildare St as a very nice spot.



Not much else to report at the moment, work on IMS Arcs is progressing with the next fortnight seeing some real usability testing beginning on some of service ideas. There'll be some kind of paper probably coming out of this early next year. I'd given a lecture last week to the IMedia Masters on Flash and Streaming but had forgotten to put up the link (here it is!).

A few bits and pieces that have caught my eye were a pre-print draft circulated from the Auditory List on ``The potential of the Internet for music perception research'', hacking a Chumby, the bunnie studio blog - in particular this note on SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen, how the Linux Kernel actually works, the EnergyJoule for tracking your electricity usage, Worldchaning also has a nice summary article on ``Computers As Green Tools''. I've mentioned Concrete Crickets before, the full code has been made available by Michael Dory (Thanks Mike!) and he's also got a great post on hacking MP3 players.

Upcoming talks

Three for your diary in the next week or so.

Firstly we have David McWilliams, commentator and economist, who will deliver a lecture on the outlook for the economy or a sales pitch for his new book ``The Generation Game'', depending on your perspective. It is on in the University Concert Hall on Thursday November 15th from 14:30 to 15:30 and if you're a mad fan, there'll be a book signing afterwards in the Foundation. I'm going to be off at Stephen's wedding but I'd love to hear what this most insightful gentleman has to say.

Next up is a talk on Friday morning a talk by the Crash Ensemble from 10:00 to 11:00 in the CS (I think) which will be followed that evening by a concert by the Crash Ensemble at 19:30 in the Performing Arts Centre in the Foundation Building (more details).

Lastly and most definitely not the least, we have two great characters, John Bowers and Sten-Olof Hellström who are presenting the PTBYBO 3 workshop. This workshop will cover circuit bending and live coding (where, respectively, hardware and software are hacked before your very eyes and ears) to explore live sound/image relations in an improvised performance.

The workshop will feature the Irish debuts of Ohm-My-God (an environment in which random electronic circuits are constructed) and My Little Dreamachine (a miniaturization of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s hallucinogenic Dreamachine, the behaviour of which is variously sonified and visually transformed and projected). Generally, lights will flash and circuits will blip with an uncommon intensity as Hellström and Bowers work feverishly to transport all our bodies, minds and souls from the beginning of the end. A Performance To Blow Your Brains Out, surely.

A seminar discussing the techniques in PTBYBO 3 and relating them to larger issues in interaction design and the construction of new instruments for musical expression will be given by Hellström and Bowers in Kilmurry Hall, University of Limerick, the 21st of November 14:00-17:00. I've previously had the pleasure of working with these characters whilst on SOB and they are really really smart guys who also know how to have fun. I expect this workshop to be the best of the year.

Web Links:

• http://schhh.se/
• http://www.onoma.co.uk/
• http://suborderly.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

Whether and what, some thoughts and links

As ever its been a hectic week, with a visit to the TSSG for a catchup on IMS ARCS and some planning. I also had a quick demo and visit to Catch.fm. The TSSG is always a great place to visit, it really is a hive of activity. I'm a little behind on thesis progress as I've found it difficult to schedule people for listening tests this week, hopefully it'll be better next week.

There have been a few bits of interest like how the lovely FG lady of DSE, Lucinda Creighton got hacked. There is a flurry of activity from Google's OpenSocial project which has produced a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites (see also the project's blog). Unfortunately a sharp commentary by Tim O'Reilly pointed out that the two critical points of a new 2.0 web app are 1) the data and 2) small parts which are loosely connected (think mashups) have been missed in this new set of APIs. Whatever the case there is a nice starting point for Ruby on Rails people on the Bamboo Blog. Speaking of Ruby and Rails, there is a nice plugin for RESTful OpenID Authentication, a new gem for using Amazon's flexible payments, and a nice presentation on Rspec from James Deville. On another note for us techno-nomadic people, Gar has a great post and suggestion for setting up your own mailserver - cheers Gar!

If you want to waste some time and find what the latest buzz picturewise is on the web, checkout Picurls. Another useful article is how to stop using crutch words for public speaking. Keep track of noel hidalgo's journey which is documenting free culture, social innovators and global change across the world.

Useful OS X tools links:

• SoundSource, really control the audio input / output on your Mac.


• JungleDisk, take the plunge and get your backups under control by supplementing local backups with remote backups and Amazon's S3.


• Doodim, black out your background for presentations, etc.


• zfone, keep your Skype and other VOIP conversations secure.

SEO specialists in Ireland - Cead Mile Caimiléireacht

Well I was very amused today when I took a break and caught up on some of the latest happenings on the web. I've always belived that SEO's and companies offering only these services were just a step above Dell boy and Co. Its the kind of service that your web development team or company should throw in for your business website. I've read quotes from these cowboys before for websites and for friends looking for advice on their services, thankfully I hope I saved at least some of them, both money and grief. The story of the month has to be the Ace Internet Marketing antics with regard to Damien Mulley. Bock has a lovely piece on Ace's evident plagiarism of content. There is also coverage over at PoetBloggs.net and at Daithi's blog. This kind of carry on is just what the web development / web design sector in Ireland needs to show that, yes it is still full of untrained chancers who are willing to masquede content as their own. It leads to the question, if they couldn't manage the rather simple context, ``Could they manage the necessary and rather more advanced skills they were trying to peddle ?''

Catch up on a bit

Its been a hectic couple of weeks. I was over in Paris for COST SID for a meeting which was very productive both at the MC level and in my working group which is concentrating on sonification. Here's a nice short example of a simple sonification of global earthquake data using Csound and Python.

You can see my full set or take a look at Frauke's set.

There are bits and pieces of news with Dan talking about the provisional driver debacle and his petition. I've going to be collaborating with Jurgen on a piece for the Two Places exhibition in the Ormeau Baths, Belfast and in UL. More to follow on this concurrent sonic installation later.

On the wider front there is a piece on MTV's ``Darfur Is Dying'' campaign, take a read. Use solar power to ensure a self sufficient arduino. The latest R News Volume 7/2, October 2007 is out. There's a nice article on the problems and limitations of using server logs for usability analysis. If you insist on logs, this article offers some advice on handling them.

O'Reilly have a nice article on ``DIY Surround Sound DVDs'', so its not the recording studio in the CSIS building but it might help! Scott Wilson has some nice software online including some gems like interleaving mono audio files into a multichannel file and SuperCollider VBAP classes.

A reminder to all that from 31st October you can register your own personal .ie domain (more details), forenamesurname.ie or similar, without any of the silly numbers or crap that the IEDR used to insist upon. I'd recommend Blacknight but I'm biased towards high levels of competency with competitive pricing. I suppose supporting UL Alumni isn't bad either.

Bits and Pieces of Interesting

A project and a blog I have been following for the last couple of weeks is Michael Dory's ITP blog which is documentating some of the interesting pieces he's doing for the ITP program in NYU. In particular, I've been keeping an eye to his Concrete Crickets (NPR radio interview details) as I'd like to do something similiar. I've been mulling around doing a similiar guerillia installation with some of Mikael's new Thermin boards, a couple of arduinos or just AVRs and the new Living bridge at UL. This has left me off and reading the likes of ''Rough Notes on Programming AVR Microcontrollers in C'' and ''Anatomy of a C program for AVR''. Fellow mac users are directed to ``Programming AVR with a MacBook'' (see this tutorial also) and the OSX-AVR toolchain installer.

To keep track of some of the happenings at ITP, take a look at their Blog Blender.

Another couple of items caught my attention, firstly it was FeedJournal which takes RSS feeds, PDFs them put its angle is that it'll give you something like a newspaper broadsheet format to read them in. I've been using xfruits.com for RSS 2 PDF on my blog for ages and I actually prefer their cleaner and simpler format, plus its free! I can think of another alternative company which is doing equally innovative things in the sphere of dynamic publishing. Alternatively, you may want a simple digest email and you could try RssFwd.

A mad week, SID WG 4 Paper and Betting Exchanges in Ireland

After a mad week that somehow saw things done, we've gotten in our paper on ``Sonification for Sonic Interaction Design'' for the Sonic Interaction Design: Sound, Information and Experience workshop which runs as part of CHI 2008, the paper was authored by Thomas Hermann, John Williamson, Yon Visell, myself and Roderick Murray-Smith. It actually took a fair bit to get some of it into shape but we've got a couple nice ideas including one that Yon and I worked at a bit which was the idea of a Sonic Interaction Atlas for designers. More on this to follow at a later date.

I was busy too on the IMS Arcs front as we're trying to discover the exact legal situation for Betting Exchanges. With a good deal of help from Richard Bruton (Mega Thanks are due to him), I got him to ask a question in the Dail last week which was as follows:

DÁIL QUESTION NO 167

To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance his plans to regulate or license betting exchanges to ensure that users are being treated fairly and that operators are suitable persons to operate in the market place; and if he will make a statement on the matter.

It was marked as a written answer on Tuesday, 2nd October, 2007 and it got the following reply from the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance ( Mr Cowen ) :

Under current betting legislation, betting exchanges are not deemed bookmakers. They differ from bookmakers in that they facilitate the matching of bets between outside parties unlike a bookmaker who takes the bet and the associated risk involved. Consequently betting exchanges are treated, for tax purposes, as normal companies, and as such are subject to corporation tax on their profits, which in the case of betting exchanges, comes from commissions charged on transactions. The question of regulating the services of such companies does not arise in tax law.

Above and Beyond, the Right Stuff

It's not often that I genuinely get to sing someone's praises and today I received an email that absolutely deserved it.

I've been know to dabble in the production of conference or workshop proceedings and I've even given some guidelines on how to do it. This is simply paled in comparison to the latest work of Vincent Verfaille who has simply gone above and beyond this by producing a fantastic LaTeX package for proceeding editors.

The confproc package is a new LaTeX document-class for conference proceedings. It derives form LaTeX scripts written for the DAFx-06 conference proceedings, mainly based on the pdfpages package for including the proceedings papers and the hyperref package for creating proper table of contents, bookmarks and general bibliography back-references. It also uses many other packages for fine tuning of table of contents, bibliography and index of authors. The added value of this class resides in its time-saving aspects when designing conference proceedings.

He has written a short technical report on his experiences for DAFx06 and on using LaTeX to produce proceedings. Congratulations and thanks to Vincent for this most excellent resource.

UPDATE 1: I was emailing Vincent and congratulating him as well as suggesting he should submit to the PracTex Journal, he'd already beaten me to the punch and it looks like there will be a nice article in the PracTeX Journal for the November 15th issue.

Flu and down time

Seems I couldn't avoid it any longer and I've been down with a bit of a Flu. Still trying between sneezes to get some writing done.

I'll admit to having gone off on a binge to cheer myself up and I've ordered Triple Axis Accelerometer Breakout and some super bright LEDS as well as some shiny triple RGB LEDS. I know I'm going to be doing some workshops next semester on Physical Computing using AVRs and Arduinos and I was reading a nice paper ``Fabric PCBs, electronic sequins, and socket buttons: techniques for e-textile craft'' so I decided it might be nice to have a little show and tell.

Dealing with ``too many unprocessed floats'' LaTeX errors

After scratching my head for a few minutes and attempting a number of solutions to the problem of ``too many unprocessed floats'' which was cropping up in my LaTeX generation process. I googled and came across this little gem from Marc Mengel.

The gist is that I've been throwing a goodly number of figures at LaTeX and it has throw a wobbler as it has simply run out of buffer space to deal with them. In the context of what I'm writing, my thesis in this case, I need the figures to hand so I can't simply space them out. The answer is to use either the \clearpage or the \cleardoublepage commands, which neatly sorted the problem.

Presence Display Mark II

I've been re-designing and re-implementing my arduino - ruby - skype - growl auditory display (see ICAD 2007 paper) and I've ended up starting almost from scratch on a lot of it. However, I've just about gotten a Rails-Skype display working as some form of RESTful Read-Only Resource service but I spent ages having serious fun with BackgrounDRb (see this intro) but it just wouldn't do what I wanted so I've ended up with a looping ruby program with some funny headers. This runs in tandem with a standard Rails app which is the more Restful bit.

require 'rubygems'
require 'rb-skypemac'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'active_record'
require 'YAML'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript

I never thought I'd been starting and querying Skype based on configuration data and then also using this to update a database! The code is still being debugged and cleaned up so once its finished I'll stick it online but at the moment, even after yesterday's head banging, Rails and Ruby are still the best full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications that I've come across and has saved ages in development time. I used use vanilla PHP with some PEAR extensions but they are not half as sweet as Rails.

The first iteration of the second version looks a bit like this.

Meez

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