Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Visualization, 1969 (2011) from Yanni Loukissas on Vimeo.

MIT Laboratory for Automation, Robotics, and Society
Directed by David Mindell

Visualization Design: Yanni Loukissas
Research Assistant: Francisco Alonso

The Apollo 11 visualization draws together social and technical data from the 1969 moon landing in a dynamic 2D graphic. The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline. The vertical axis is divided into several sections, each corresponding to a data […] Specific events are labeled, such as computer program changes and program alarms. During a real-time playback, the white line moves across the horizontal axis as audio plays, and the crew’s specific utterances are spelled out to the right. In sync with the human dialog, the AGC and DSKY display values and modes. In these dynamics, one can trace the trading of workload and authority during the critical final phases of landing, and how that workload was offloaded from the LEM to Houston in response to the program alarms.

In 2011 I started my adventures in the perilous lands of bigdata, so I’ve begun harvesting literature on the subject. Extremely interesting and relatively young field. I have an almost finished review of “Data Analysis with Open Source Tools” which I hope to publish soon.

Novels

My first encounter with Douglas Coupland. I particularly liked Microserfs, that somehow seemed to be speaking directly to me. Perhaps not for everybody.

Five minutes after Games of Thrones s01e01 I realized I couldn’t wait an entire week to know the rest of the story. Still entertaining, after ~3000 pages and already in the fourth book.

I’m a hardcore Neal Stephenson fan. I also have Anathem in my stack, but I decided to read Reamde first, because it seemed less dense. It was, and also more fast-paced than usual.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo. This has been brought to my attention recently, in the London.pm mailing list.

This particular hackathon is growing with a very fast rhythm. Consider what follows, for example: my very first MHD was Barcelona in October 2010, and from that moment I had the opportunity to partecipate in three other editions (New York, San Francisco, and another time in Barcelona) and to be among the public during the Cannes’ edition. That, and I also managed to skip another twos. After less than three years since the entire initiative started, it has demonstrated a relentless pace in proposing new events and building a community of music hackers (more on that later).

Spotify App Store, and MXM’s hack

I think one of the main themes during this MHD was the recently announced Spotify App Store. Most appropriately, a group of Spotify developers was present at the conference, which proved to be an inestimable source of help and encouragement during the 24H sprint.

Despite some minor glitches and random problems with the development environment, I have to say that writing software that has to be deployed into the Spotify client is a pleasure. It all boils down to write one or more web pages, using Javascript to make it live, via Spotify’s API and maybe another third party service to do something interesting.

In fact – after all, I’m a musixmatcher – we spent the weekend working on a lyrics app. I think the aim of such a project is obvious, anyway here a screenshot.

Next?

I’m not sure where next MHD will be. There will be a new “proof of concept” during Midem early in 2012, and I heard about another full-fledged edition in Amsterdam soon. I have the feeling, also, that Dave Haynes, our über-organizer, is almost flooded with cities offering to host next MHDs. That’s good news.

I think the majority of the attendants are employed in companies operating in the digital music ecosystem, but I also met many “solo” developers simply attracted by the coolness of the event. More importantly, I can’t help but seeing people helping each other and collaborating even if they’re not coworkers or members of the same masterplan to conquer the music industry. In other words, a true community is growing.

I’m not sure what’s the best way to keep nourishing this community: certainly there’s no shortage of opportunities to meet, but I think more can be done on the online part. Food for thought.

Related articles

• My Music Hack Day London hack (musicmachinery.com)
• Spotify, Kinect and more: The best hacks from Music Hack Day London (thenextweb.com)
• Spotify Apps Dominate London’s Music Hack Day (wired.com)
• Music Hack Day London 2011: a developer’s view (guardian.co.uk)
• Building a Spotify App (musicmachinery.com)

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I guess it could actually have some uses, who knows?, but I wrote it mostly because I wanted to see how fast repos are growing, and R is the obvious tool to tinker with the results.

I’m less than a beginner with R, and I have to admit plotting data from a multi-column CSV file is less straitghforward than I expected: I had to use xyplot from the lattice package, like this:

Here the result, with data provided analysing the Dancer github repository (branch devel).

Our office is distributed between Barcelona and Bologna, with occasional incursions by traveler colleagues who happen to be in some random coffee house around the world.

One of the key elements for this setup to be practical and effective is Skype, which I don’t particularly like but I have to admit works pretty well in this scenario. In our headquarters in Bologna there’s an USB microphone/speaker, which my colleagues connect in shifts to their laptops, or to a spare Android tablet. On my side, I use the Macbook Pro internal mic and headphones.

The Skype audio chat is always on, meaning that it’s almost like being there: I only miss lunch and coffee breaks.

Actually, it seems it’s even more vivid than the real thing. It’s not unusual some of them shout “MUTE!” in my direction: the internal microphone on my parts takes in too much consideration the tik-ke-ti-tak of the keyboard, which in Bologna becomes an unsolicited, thunderous and rather unpleasant proof I’m really at my desk.

Of course I could use the handy HUD window with all the Skype controls, but that requires 1) finding its position on the screen, 2) moving my hands from keyboard to trackpad, 3) click the mute button. I’m lazy, and I wanted something less cumbersome. Something like a keyboard trigger to toggle the mute status of the current Skype call. Triggers? Quicksilver to the rescue.

I knew Quicksilver permits to assign arbitrary actions to hotkeys, and those actions can be anything you can do with Quicksilver: for example, running an Applescript program. Unfortunately, a quick inspection in the Skype’s Applescript dictionary revealed there was no direct and simple access to the Mute toggle. Here the first program I wrote to solve the problem:

This is largely based on a piece of code by Jacob Rus I found in a hold post on Macworld. It accepts a single parameters (“Mute” or “Unmute“) and it will work only if you use the English Skype localization. I don’t think there’s something particularly interesting in this program, except the useful code I borrowed from Jacob, the trick with frontmost application to re-activate the application which had the focus before switching to Skype and, yes!, the fact is remarkably long to perform such a simple task. Also, I’m not set with only this script: I’d need to create two different hotkeys for muting and un-muting, and assign them to two different ways of calling the script itself.

There must be a shorter path.

To a closer inspection (silly me!), I noticed the menu item I’m using keeps the same hotkey (I mean hotkey from Skype’s standpoint): no matter what the current mic status is, it’s always ⇧⌘M. Let’s try to shorten the program.

No need to differentiate the mechanism, and there is so much less code!