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Monday, October 29, 2007

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.
eiffeltower.jpg
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.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

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.

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Saturday, October 06, 2007

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.

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