Hi there! I’m just back from the amazing Majella mountain in Abruzzo, Italy. Camping with two small kids is really hard but in the end we really enjoyed the stay.
Lately I’ve been working to an iOS app targeted to musicians (as I am a guitarist myself). It’s a hybrid of metronome and a sequencer. It makes creating click tracks a snap, so you can practice, rehearse with the band and play live with it. It’s named ClickTracks, check out the project page for details.
Let me know what you think about the app and spread the word to your fellow musicians!
Coniuga helps you with the conjugation of both regular and irregular Italian verbs. Just type a verb in the search field. You can enter the infinitive form (e.g. Coniugare) or any other mood and tense, e.g. Coniugheresti, Ebbi coniugato, etc. This version requires an active Internet connection. If there is enough interest and positive comments I’ll develop an offline version.
Coniuga is also available for the stunning Nokia N9, get it from the Ovi Store.
Emanuele Rampichini di Appunti Digitali mi ha intervistato sulla (in)sostenibilità economica dei miei progettini Free Software.
I’m starting a new ambitious Free Software project. Yes, that’s it, Yet Another Music Player™. I’ve got a few innovative UI concepts in mind that I hope will justify the incredible duplication of effort already present in this area. But the real reason I’m doing this is that my living room lacks a decent music player. You read it right. The gazillion Linux players around are all unusable, for a reason or another. I used to be an enthusiastic Amarok 1.x user a few years ago, then came KDE4 and Amarok2. I guess all good things must come to an end… Mac people are in an even worse position.
After the positive Minitube experience and since the new player will inherit part of its codebase, I’d like to call the new player Minitunes (hope I don’t get sued because of the last 5 letters). In the picture, a detail of the Collection view, showing the artists in my collection… Get ready for the brand new iTunes killer. No less. -.-
There is something deeply wrong to the way people in the IT field conceive the software development process. I wish all the people I worked with read this insightful article. Beware! If you’re a project manager or any “high level” software architect/designer/academic this article may change your life for good.
The major problem with this is that ALL of software is design. 100% of software is design from the high level architect-like design to the low-level design of a for-loop. The implementers of software are not human! I knew you suspected as much given how odd many programmers are. No, the implementers of software are actually ‘perfect’ machines.
Yes, all of software is design. There is no implementation. Pardon me as I stress this over and over. There is only high level and low level design. To mirror other fields of engineering: A civil engineer also has high level design, such as choosing the type and shape of bridge. A civil engineer also has lots of low level design, such as choosing the kind of screws, where they go, where to weld…
Oggi ho rilasciato la prima versione di Minitube, il mio pet project attuale. Si tratta di un player nativo per YouTube. Niente browser, niente HTML, niente Flash. Naturalmente è allo stato embrionale e ci sono una infinità di problemi. Ma tutti sanno che si rilascia presto e spesso. Ancora manca il download per Windows: non ho ancora avuto il coraggio di installare i prerequisiti sul mio Windows inscatolato nel VMware, cioè svariati giga tra DirectX, Visual Studio e Qt.
Minitube è adatto per ascoltare musica da YouTube o per sedersi sul divano o dietro 3 etti di pasta a guardare un po’ di video randomici. Più o meno come si fa quando si guarda la tv. Spero di riuscire a mantenere alta la motivazione per portare Minitube a uno stato funzionante. Buona visione!
Qualche mese fa il guru delle frese cnc e dei termostati ha iniziato a scrivere un sistema in PHP per pubblicare le sue foto. L’idea principale era quella di pubblicare la foto semplicemente uploadando sul proprio spazio web. Niente interfacce web di amministrazione, niente pannelli, niente backend; e niente database. Così è nato Picoplog.
Naturalmente quando ho visto un progetto così carino e potenzialmente utile all’umanità mi sono aggregato subito. E così io e il guru abbiamo iniziato a trasformare uno script “per uso personale” in un prodotto ad uso delle masse (si spera), affrontando gli infiniti problemi problemi di compatilità che presenta il PHP nelle sue diverse configurazioni e abomini tipo i magic quotes. E rilasciandolo sotto una licenza veramente libera, la AGPL.
[Warning: rant ahead] Oltre al divertimento intrinseco sono stato motivato a lavorare a Picoplog dalla tendenza generale a centralizzare il Web in servizi proprietari tipo Flickr. A mio avviso una tendenza dannosa e pericolosa per la libertà e soprattutto lo sviluppo di standard adeguati nel lungo termine. Il Web è pensato per essere distribuito. Ognuno dà il suo contributo (sul suo server) e si fonde con gli altri attraverso formati e protocolli standard. Ok fine della teoria.
Picoplog è ancora in alpha: stiamo definendo il sistema dei temi ed altre API che dovranno essere stabili per (improbabili) sviluppatori esterni prima della beta. Ciò nonostante (wow non credevo di poter scrivere una cosa del genere) Picoplog è già molto usabile, e anche un po’ usato.
Per concludere… Provatelo immantinente!
I wrote a Csound Highlight Definition XML file for Kate. It only supports the CSD format. Just copy the XML file to ~/.kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax/. Kate is a great text editor, if you use Csound on Linux, give it a try.
UPDATE: Added support for ORC and SCO!
sOnar is a media player designed to quickly browse folders and CD-ROMs with thousands of media files. sOnar is the fastest way to listen to your sound libraries and find the sample you are searching for.
Screenshot
Areas of interest
Features
- Scan directory trees and entire drives.
- Supports wave, aiff, mp3, mpeg, quicktime, midi, avi and any other format you have a codec for.
- Manage files and send them to other programs directly from sOnar.
- Shell integration.
Requirements
Download
Csound Editor is an integrated development environment for Csound compilers. Edit Csound files, run Csound, launch utilities and manuals using one program. Csound Editor is designed to focus on the document and not on the user interface, it does not hide csound code from your view.
I wrote this editor a long time ago, but a lot of people still seem to find it useful. I’m not maintaining this program anymore, but if you want to, jusk ask and I’ll send you the (horrible) source files.
If you’re on Linux, try my Csound syntax highlighting for the Kate text editor.
Areas of interest
- Computer music
- Algorithmic composition
- Music teaching
Features
- User-defined presets for Csound command lines and utilities.
- Syntax highlight.
- Integrated sound player.
- Code Outline. A tree view control that displays source code elements.
- Switch between orchestra and score with a click.
- In-context opcode help.
- Related Files panel. Shows the files of a Csound project.
- Pick opcodes from a list.
- Orchestra and score conversion to and from unified file format (csd).
- Store your favorite code fragments and quickly reuse them.
- Quick dialogs to insert orchestra headers, instruments, macro definitions, #include statements, random values.
Requirements
Download
