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Cloud computing, facebook alternatives and plug servers.

May 23rd, 2010

We are moving progressively more into the cloud computing world. That means that our data is more and more in the hand of third parties, usually companies, with interests which are contrary to our own.  With the likes of facebook with already risk our personal data being turned over to advertisers, or just being made public due to the privacy policies of facebook, it’s getting more and more tricky to protect our data if it’s in the cloud somewhere out there.

To change this trend we will need to do cloud computing and social networks in a decentralized way. This could be done by having standard protocols that can be implemented by anyone, much as e-mail has functioned for a long time. If you want to have a mail server, it’s easy just install one on your server machine. It can send and receive mail from any other mail server. The same should be true of social networks or cloud computing. This is the idea behind the facebook substitute wannabe, diaspora.

So basically what is needed is that the user itself has it’s own server running, and inside it there is  the social network service, the bookmarks sync server, the calendar sync service, the contacts sync server, and mp3 and video streaming service.

There are two big difficulties here:

1 – Most people don’t know how to setup a server.

2 – Most people don’t have reliable connections with good enough upload speed and a static ip.

Problem number two could be solved by better internet connetions, and in the future we are surelly going to go in that direction (30Mbps in Europe by 2020 is the goal).

Problem number one could be solved by plugcomputing, tiny boxes that you connect to the power socket and to the network and that just work, configured out of the box. See for example tonidoplug . We could then have this little servers pre-configured and it would be just a  question of entering a couple of informations in a simple web page to get it up and running. It would then sync with all computers and mobile devices that we happen to have. This would guaranty total independence from third parties, would protect our privacy much better and give our digital data the same protection from unwarranted searches that the home already had for a long time. It’s a lot easier for the authorities to just “ask” the kinds of yahoo mail or gmail to give them your e-mails than to bust the door of your house down (they will need a warrant for that)

Now it’s a question of making it happen !

Latex – hyperref without boxes

May 10th, 2010

To have links in your pdf generated by Latex appear without the box around them or without colors, put in the preamble:

\RequirePackage[linktocpage,]{hyperref}

\hypersetup{

 colorlinks=true,
 citecolor=black,
 filecolor=black,
 urlcolor=black,
 linkcolor=black,

}

OSC – iPhone Ipad

April 9th, 2010

What does the killer  OSC app for the iPhone and iPad need to have ?

  • Custom layouts, which can be created both in an interface builder and programmatically, and can be altered on the fly via OSC.
  • Several pages of layouts. Easy ways to change pages.
  • zeroconf, aka, bonjour for easy network configuration.
  • Scripting of UI actions.
  • Physical Modeling.
  • More complex UIs than faders and knobs.
  • Multitouch UI widget with TUIO support.

Low frequency version

April 5th, 2010

Earth 2 – Low frequency version by Earth is an undiscovered treasure of drone rock. For starters it’s actually drone. Waves of shimering sound from the lowest frequencies, but with also some whirlpools of highs coming and going. It’s also a great test to any speaker system or lossless encoding scheme. With this album I could actually listen to mp3 distortion. Btw it’s also doom metal before Sunn O existed ( they know it ) and in my opinion as good or better.

live in Ferrol

February 17th, 2010

Recording from the recent concert in Ferrol, Galiza:

ZLB – live at ateneo ferrolan, FERROL, 13 Jan 2010 by friendlyvirus

SC hint #4

December 28th, 2009

VCAs in SC : a question of summing. VCAs are usefull in order not to spend cpu cycles adjusting levels with a dedicated synth, but still keeping full range on your controlling faders, knobs, etc.

(~vca = 0;
w=FlowView.new;
g = EZSlider(	w,  	// parent
		390@20,	// bounds
		"The VCA ",	// label
		\db.asSpec, 	// controlSpec
		{|ez| ~vca = ez.value;i.value  = ~vca + h.value } // action
).value_(0);
h = EZSlider(	w,  	// parent
		390@20,	// bounds
		"The fader ",	// label
		\db.asSpec, 	// controlSpec
		{|ez| i.value  = ~vca + ez.value} // action
);
i = EZSlider(	w,  	// parent
		390@20,	// bounds
		"Result ",	// label
		\db.asSpec, 	// controlSpec
		{|ez| } // action
);
)

Going in mini-tour this january !! Porto and Galiza and The Hague

December 26th, 2009

FRIENDLY VIRUS MINI TOUR with ÁNGEL FARALDO, ZLB and TIMITIMINONO:
07/01 – Breyner85, PORTO, PT (w/ FILIPE LOPES)
10/01 – Alg-a Lab, VIGO, ES
12/01 – Casa das Atochas, A CORUÑA, ES
13/01 – FERROL, ES
21/01 – Den Haag, NL

SC Hint #3 – Block – Break

December 22nd, 2009

if you need to break from the middle of a iteration, because let’s say you had an error and you shouldn’t continue, then you can use:

block{ |break| 10.do{ |i| if(i==5){ break.value(999) } } }

SC Hint #2 – get the Rect with the size of View

December 18th, 2009

If you have a view and you want to get a Rect with it’s width and height you can do:

Rect(0,0,view.bounds.width,view.bounds.height)

But it’s more compact to do:

view.bounds.extent.asRect

SC Hint #1 – reduce

November 26th, 2009

A great way to apply a binary operator successively  to the elements of an array is to use reduce.

e.g.

[true,false,true].reduce('&&')
["This ","is ","a string."].reduce('++')

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