07.25.07

snake byte and hack

Posted in pythonic noodlings at 11:11 am by admin

Since building a surround sound panner using FlashMidi some years ago, I’ve been looking for an app to let me use midi hardware from swf files compiled with ming - a fruitless search. - FlashMidi needs compiling with mx04 and as far as i can tell, only lets you use one midi device at a time. VFlight.control is a nice idea using sockets to read midi-input, but only lets you use one midi device at a time. I did come accross NthEvent, but have had no luck using it, so, no midi for ming compiled swf files then … until …

… I recently installed Python (again) and got hold of PyPortMidi, which is excellent, and just the job - after a couple of days hacking around with some example files, I now have a running (if buggy) piece of middle-ware that translates from midi hardware to xml sockets, and the other way aswell, meaning that I can finally start to access all midi inputs and outputs on the locahost, at the same time - with reasonable accuracy.

So what?

Okay, so using http for midi messages is a little inefficient and udp packets would be much slicker, but the net result of this fiddling means I can now build a swf representation of a virtual midi device using ming, and actually have it interact with my midi hardware - custom midi controllers here we come (the surround panner used a pen/tablet as mouse, and swf as environment controlling mixer software via midi resulting in a 8 speaker surround mix where each channel could be positioned in space by dragging the pen, for example)

maybe eventually, I’ll release a exe for this, but thats a whole other adventure

[update : it speaks too !!]

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07.04.07

a damp squib …

Posted in really? how exciting at 12:43 am by daz

laptop gone pfht along with a lot data

it started with freezes, out of nowhere, which progressed into an unknown missing file (as far as xp was concerned) which turned into a failure to boot altogether, which leads me to believe that the harddisk well, erm … died. no smoke, or sparks, or anything remotely spectacular (for a change), just 2 flashing leds to indicate some error code or other. logic would dictate however that I now have loads of options to explore - what to do with my newly broken resource - repair it ? re-use some of it ? burn it ? oh I’m so excited.

[update] after sorting out a new (old) desktop to use as a replacement machine (thanks julie) and opening up the laptop to have a play, I discovered that one of the memory slots doesn’t behave like it ought to. The machine is happy with memory in slot 2, but when sticking any in slot 1 (regardless of slot 2) it won’t play ball. both memory sticks are fine though, so, I have a 256mb laptop now … quite slow, but at least it can be upgraded back to its 512mm former glory …

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