I have recently been on the job hunt (and come out of it with a new job, thanks for asking). I talked to a number of interesting organisations and answered a proportionally  interesting number of questions. No less interesting is that fact that nearly all of these questions, whilst being ideal interview material, were also the kind of questions that would come up every day as part of the job.

A quick talk, the same content as given at Oxford Geek Nights in November 2012.

Unit Testing in Go at GLUG : handout version

I was scratching my head for a bit over this one. Using Play Framework v 2.1.0 (Scala) in development mode I was defining my global object as per the Scala Global documentation. But it wasn’t triggering (and, I thought, wasn’t being registered).

OxLork, a band of musicians in possession of computers (and, I hope, an increasing knowledge of how to make new things with them) had a gig at the Ashmolean Museum on Friday. Very exciting.

Not brilliant photos, but better than nothing.

Traditional tunes have a particular shape to them. Many, especially northern European, have two parts, each repeated, possibly with first and second time bars. Within this arching structure that spans the tune in a few leaps, there are smaller repeated phrases, callbacks and variations. I remembered a visualisation I saw a long time ago which took a MIDI file and visualised the structure. I wanted to do something for the tunes in FolkTuneFinder.

I am hosting all of the OxLork ChucK lecture code samples here: https://github.com/afandian/oxlork-lecture-code

It seems like everyone’s got their own idea about how to implement a fairly standard commonplace widget. All broadly consistent. With one exception.

(punchline: give up it won’t work but it’s an interesting story)

This is number 4 in my series of lectures in music technology and ChucK to the Oxford Laptop Orchestra. Delivered on the 5th of November 2012 at the Faculty of Music. Give the first three a read before reading this.

The content is complete here (except for a bit about Nyquist) so feel free to read this. But I intend to do a bit of copy-editing, and include sound samples before I declare it complete.

This week we look at low frequency oscillators, using them to modulate other oscillators and in the process how to do more than thing at once._

This is number 3 in my series of lectures in music technology and ChucK to the Oxford Laptop Orchestra. Read the other two first. Sorry this blog post was a couple of weeks late. It’s quite substantial, but conceptually it underpins a lot of material. Persevere, read, ask questions.

This week sees a bit of a philosophical turn as we contemplate what ‘digital’ really means and how we can use it to play Bach on organ without having to build one first.