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I've just uploaded my notes on how we ran the SuperCollider Symposium 2012 (10-page PDF). sc2012 was a great event and it was a privilege to work with so many great people in putting it together. I hope these notes are useful to future organisers, providing some detailed facts and figures to give you some idea of how we did it.
The document includes details of the timing of things, the budgeting, promotional aspects. I also include some notes about outreach, which I think is important to keep in mind. It's important for community-driven projects to bring existing people together, and to attract new people - and for something like SuperCollider which doesn't have any institution funding it and pushing it forwards, these international gatherings of users are 100% vital both for the existing users angle and the new users angle. Happily, both of these aims can be achieved by putting on diverse shows featuring some of the best SuperCollider artists in the world :)
Shout outs to all the other organisers, who put loads of their own time and enthusiasm in (see the "credits" page), and hi to everyone else I met at the symposium.
(If you weren't there, see also Steve's great photos of sc2012.)
What should you strive for?
Why? Three reasons, of which the third is the most important:
OpenStreetMap is a nice community-edited map of everything - and you can grab their data at any time. So in theory it should be the ideal thing to choose when you want to make a little map for an open-source conference or something like that.
For our event this year I made these nice map handouts. It took a while! Quite tricky for a first-timer. But they're nice pretty vector PDF maps, with my own custom fonts, colour choices etc.
For anyone who fancies having a go, here's what I did:
I started a new map project based on the example. I wanted to tweak it a bit - they use a CSS-like stylesheet language ("MSS") to specify what maps are supposed to look like, and it's nice that you can edit the stylesheets and see the changes immediately. However, I found it tricky to work out what to edit to have the effect I wanted. Here's what I managed to do:
I wanted to direct people to specific buildings, but the default style doesn't show building names. However, I noticed that it does show names for cemeteries... in labels.mss on line 306 there was
#area_label[type='cemetery'][zoom>=10] {
and I can add buildings to that:
#area_label[type='building'][zoom>=10],
#area_label[type='cemetery'][zoom>=10] {
The underground train line was being painted on top of the buildings, which looks confusing and silly. To fix this I had to rearrange the layers listed in the Layers panel - drag the "buildings" layer higher up the list, above the "roads" ones.
I'm implementing the GM-PHD filter. (The what? The Gaussian mixture Probability Hypothesis Density filter, which is for tracking multiple objects.) Implementing it in python, which is nice, but I'm not completely clear if it's working as intended yet.
Here's a screenshot of progress so far. Look at the first four plots in this picture, which are:
So what do you think? Good results?
Not sure. It's clearly got rid of lots of the clutter - good. In fact yes it's got rid of the majority of the noise, hooray hooray. But the clutter right close to the the targets is still there, seems a bit mucky, in a kind of way that suggests it's not going to be easy to clear that up.
And there's also a significant "cold start" problem - it takes up to about 20 frames for the filter to be convinced that there's anything there at all. That's no real surprise, since there's an underlying "birth" model which says that a trail could spring into being at any point, but there's no model for "pre-existing" targets. There's nothing in the PHD and GMPHD papers which I've read which even mentions this, let alone accounts for it - I'm pretty sure that we'll either need to initialise the state to account for this, or always do some kind of "warmup" before getting any results out of the filter. That's not great, especially when we might be tracking things that only have a short lifespan themselves.
One thing: this is a one-dimensional problem I'm testing it on. PHD filters are usually used for 2D or 3D problems - and maybe there needs to be enough entropy in the representation for clutter to be distinguished more clearly from signals. That would be a shame, since I'd like to use it on 1D things like spectrogram frames.
More tests needed. Any thoughts gratefully received too
Just back from a fab All Tomorrow's Parties, this one curated by Jeff Mangum. As well as the bands, he curated quite an educational TV channel throughout the event - we got to learn about Chomsky, Zizek, the Bali islanders, oh and Monty Python on endless loop.
Some of the things I saw:
That was all on the first day, fantastically enough. The best things about day two were:
Musically there wasn't much I planned to see on the second day. Two bands that are pretty new to me but I was looking forward to were Demdike Stare and Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. Both of them were a little bit underwhelming - Demdike Stare is atmospheric and has good video, but not sure it built up to much. Yamantaka were pretty good, especially their song "Queens", and they had some great costumery, with one of the singers looking like some big hair-creature out of a Studio Ghlibli film.
Sunday we had a lovely beef roast, though I cocked up the gravy so we had none. Then music. The Magic Band were a massive disappointment, not a credit to Beefheart's legacy IMHO, just some noodley noodle. However, they were bad enough that we went next door for Olivia Tremor Control who were fantastic. Their mixture of straight indie-pop and "musique concrete"-like sonic experimentation is just brill, neither of the two components losing out to the other.
Sun Ra Arkestra were also great fun, some great jazz ing. A bit more straightforward jazz than I might have expected, but with a notable appearance of a lovely electrical wind instrument, a buzzy little device played really well by the lead sax bloke.
Later on we joined a queue that had already been queueing for an hour to see Jeff Mangum. It was quite a pleasant queue and the ale people were delivering ale, so we didn't mind queueing for another three quarters of an hour (while Jeff played inside) and eventually went in to catch the last three tracks of his set, including "Two-headed boy" for which most of the crowd sang along. Lovely atmosphere in there. Though apparently the real closing event was a secret gig later that night where Jeff plus Elephant 6 crew, Sun Ra Arkestra and assorted others had a big old jam session...
I have switched my browser's search engine from Google to Bing. I never thought it would come to this!
Years ago I migrated away from Microsoft, disliking what they were doing with their dominance. It feels odd to be deliberately turning to Microsoft now, for a very similar reason.
Google has unified what it does with your personal data, meaning that your emails, video views, web searches etc can all be smulged together for analytic/advertising purposes. I always resented Google's move into the "social" web - the best things that they make are NONsocial, tools that I use as tools - the web search being the main example. Google Scholar was a very important tool in my PhD thesis. Gmail is the best email interface I've used.
I don't want these tools mixed up with the social sharey web, and it made me uncomfortable when google "+1" buttons appeared in all the search results. This change in what they do with my personal data makes it even worse. My distaste is not really worries about what they'll do - but it's a growing problem to rely on just one company for many essential tools, definitely unhealthy, and I just want some of my web activity to be completely asocial and not built into the personal profile Google is building of me.
If you've not used Bing search before (I hadn't really), you might find it a bit funny how many of the Google search options are closely mirrored in the Bing interface - kinda comedy, but hopefully it'll make the transition easier. So far, the two things I really miss in Bing search are recent search results (e.g. in the past week) and scholar search. There's this thing called Microsoft Academic Search but it doesn't have as much content (I searched for "beatboxing" and most of my own research ain't in there - bah!).
But if I want to reduce my dependence on Google, I can't get rid of Youtube - that's where all the videos are - nor Gmail - that would be a massive wrench, changing email address. And I can't stop people giving me Google Maps links. So, even though search is what made Google what it is, weirdly it's the one thing of theirs I can cut out.
The nice thing about my having deliberately dropped Microsoft is that I don't depend on them for any service or system, and they don't have any data about me. So their Bing search can be exactly what I want it to be - a neutral, unpersonalised web search tool.
I'm writing a simple PHP web application. Normally it outputs HTML, but for linked data purposes I'd also like to be able to output RDF in Turtle format, from the SAME URL. This is achieved using something called content negotiation.
Often you can configure your webserver to do the right thing, but in this case I don't have access to the Apache config. I haven't been able to find a simple bit of PHP code for the content negotiation (or at least, not one that behaves correctly) so here's my attempt.
Note that this is NOT a complete flexible content negotiation. It only handles the case where I can output HTML or TTL and nothing else:
// Content-negotiation, here only choosing if we can output HTML or TTL
preg_match_all('|([\w+*]+/[\w+*]+)(;q=([\d.]+))?|', $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], $acceptables, PREG_SET_ORDER);
$accept_html = 0;
$accept_ttl = 0;
foreach($acceptables as $accarray){
$acclev = isset($accarray[3]) ? $accarray[3] : 1;
switch($accarray[1]){
case 'text/html':
case 'html/xml':
$accept_html = max($accept_html, $acclev);
break;
case 'text/rdf+n3':
case 'application/turtle':
case 'application/rdf+n3':
case 'text/turtle':
$accept_ttl = max($accept_ttl , $acclev);
break;
case '*/*':
$accept_html = max($accept_html, $acclev);
$accept_ttl = max($accept_ttl , $acclev);
break;
}
}
$negotiatesttl = $accept_ttl > $accept_html; // only output ttl if it's higher-requested than html
if($negotiatesttl){
// output ttl
}else{
// output html
}
Here's hoping it works.
Chicken thighs - this recipe makes them lovely and sticky and with a great accompaniment. It's rare that I cook chicken thighs in a way that I like, so I'm particularly impressed by this one - we liked it a lot. Takes 1 hour, serves 2.
3 chicken thighs 1/2 cup white wine or pink wine rice 1 lemon 2x2x2cm coconut block (approx) 3 spring onions 2 large tomatoes 1 red chilli
Preheat the oven to 220 C. Put a tablespoon or two of oil in a roasting tin, and rub the chicken thighs in the oil to get it all over, then leave the chicken thighs skin-up. Put this in the oven. Cook it for 45 minutes, turning the temperature down to 190 after the first 15 minutes and pouring the wine over them. Baste the chicken occasionally with the juices in the pan. After the full 45 minutes just turn the oven off and leave the chicken inside to rest.
Meanwhile, prepare the rice. Put the rice in a pan which has a tight-fitting lid, add the zest of 1/2 the lemon. Chop the coconut block finely and add it to the pan too. Put the pan on the heat, add just enough boiling water to cover plus a bit more, and put the lid on. Bring it all to the boil, stir, and then turn the heat right down to its lowest setting, to sit gently cooking with the lid on for 30 minutes. You can probably even turn the heat off, in the second half, to prevent burning/sticking.
Once the rice is underway, make the salsa. Rinse the spring onions, tomatoes and chilli. Chop the spring onions and tomatoes into small dice. Remove the seeds from the chilli, and chop the flesh finely. Put all of this into a bowl, and juice the lemon, then add the lemon juice to the bowl and stir all around. Let this sit and soak while the other things cook, so the lemon juice has a chance to soften things.