http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/ 2011-05-22T15:03:21-04:00 http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/ http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2011-05-21T14:47:04-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/comparing_c_0x_lambdas_with_scheme_an_object_with_mutable_state_no_classes_involved text/html 2011-02-19T18:48:15-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/libmapper_is_the_unix_utilities_of_mapping libmapper is the unix utilities of mapping I've been trying to put into more concrete terms why I think libmapper is a useful development. After all, there are plenty of systems that allow connecting boxes to each other and describing how data should flow and be transformed, which effectively is what libmapper provides. text/html 2010-12-15T11:16:04-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/liquid_simulator_ported_to_canvas I ported to JavaScript/Canvas the Flash version of this liquid simulator that has popped up on Reddit lately. The original Java version can be found here. My JavaScript source can be found here. text/html 2010-12-15T11:12:56-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/the_clay_programming_language_seems_pretty_nice Always after doing a certain amount of C programming I get the itch that it would be great if only it were a little nicer. I'm actually pretty comfortable with pointers and strings and nulls, and all the dangers that come with this stuff. But what I'd really like are more ways to take advantage of strong typing, and ways to avoid code duplication without resorting the void*, i.e., losing all typing just to do some generic programming. Due to the need for void*, generic programming in C tends … text/html 2010-03-29T13:00:23-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/using_markdown_for_beamer_presentations I've recently had to make another presentation, and since I'm now fully into a LaTeX-oriented workflow when it comes to documents, Beamer is my choice. However, one thing I hate is the verbosity of the markup. Fortunately there are a bunch of “minimalized” markup languages that can help resolve this problem. One is the well-known Markdown. I actually think it's one of the less powerful textual markup languages, but it's somehow one of the most popular. text/html 2010-03-14T21:21:57-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/caprica_is_actually_pretty_awesome * Warning: Don't read this if you haven't watched the finale of Battlestar. I'd also recommend watching at least the pilot of Caprica before reading. So I finally decided to sit down and check out Caprica. I had put it off because I fall into the camp of those who were a little disapointed by the finale of Battlestar Galactica and didn't particularly want to give the writers another chance. text/html 2009-12-08T00:20:13-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/calling_haskell_from_a_pure_data_external [Screenshot of the Pd external object featuring Haskell function calls. ] I've been playing lately with an idea for a Pure Data external that involves a certain amount of structured data manipulation, and started to wonder if it might be easier to use a higher level language than C. I don't really want to make this a massive external with huge crazy dependencies though, so I started looking at very small Lisps that I could embed or that compile to C. I had a certain amount of success with Gam… text/html 2009-10-19T16:37:37-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/the_rules_of_programming I just wanted to share what I thought was a very insightful comment from reddit (user munificient). He was talking about why young programmers tend to take best-practises guidelines as the rule of law instead of thinking more clearly about design decisions: text/html 2009-10-07T17:06:12-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/double-buffered_state_as_a_clojure-style_approach_to_parallelism_for_simulation Clojure is a Lisp dialect that has effectively solved the problem of programming applications involving a high degree of paralellism. It's of course bold to claim that this is “solved”, but I strongly believe that Clojure's approach to identity as described by Hickey is the right approach to this issue. Not only does it make parallelism easier, but the functional approach makes for better and more modular software design than object oriented approaches. I won't argue this in depth here, but f… text/html 2009-09-16T15:11:55-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/hapstick_haptic_billiards Not new, but I just came across this. I've thought of doing something similar using off-the-shelf hardware (Phantom, Freedom 6S, etc.). but I sure am glad someone took the time to implement this for real. :) Here's a link to the HapStick project homepage. text/html 2009-09-10T01:22:34-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/a_functional_game_loop_for_glut_in_scheme_using_continuations Lately I have decided to learn more about functional programming. I've become very attracted to the elegance of ideas about lazy evaluation and immutability and expression of a program in terms of pure functions. In particular I am drawn to the idea of describing a program in terms of streams, also called lazy lists. I think about simulation problems a lot---game loops, if you want---and I wanted to see how I might write “time step”-oriented programs in a functional language. I really like th… text/html 2009-04-13T19:19:32-04:00 Stephen Sinclair http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/legality_of_unsolicited_but_open_wifi_access Legality of unsolicited but open WiFi access I don't usually write about legal issues, but last night I had a conversation where someone mentioned that “someone had told them” that it's illegal in Canada to connect to someone's open WiFi without their permission. I was surprised by this pronouncement since I had understood that it was still a very unsettled and widely debated issue, and furthermore I hadn't heard anything about specific cases in Canada. Well, I hate to see legal knowledge be…