I showed my daughter how to make a flash animation tonight. It was a pretty quick and superficial introduction, but I thought it might whet the appetite.

She disapeared into her room, and an hour or so later came out with this:

Sometimes people are just naturally good at things!

I'm playing with ideas for a Solar System game, check it out here. Here's a screenshot:

Awesome web comics you should be reading...

http://angryflower.com - If you don't keep up with Bob The Angry Flower, why are you even alive?

http://xkcd.com - Excellent geeky, netty humor (is netty even a word?)

http://explosm.net/comics - Always gross, not usually suitable for the kiddies or work, funny!

http://russellsteapot.com/comics - One I just discovered, looks promising.

xkcd.com is my favourite webcomic at the moment. 5 star geek content there, inciteful and intelligent (except for all the perl and python crap, but nobody's perfect). My favourite comic from it is this wonderful map of the online world:

I'm sure it'll date quickly, but a lot of thought has been put into it. Excellent! Note the compass rose that explains that north <-> south is practical <-> intellectual, and west <-> east is real life <-> web.

Personally, I'm trying to emigrate to SourceForge at the moment.

I had a performance (with my darling wife Jodie) on 1 December 2007, at the CD launch for SASSY. Amongst other things, I did two covers, "With or Without You" by U2, and "As the years go passing by" by Gary Moore. Well, that's not so interesting, I hear you thinking in the future...

However, what is interesting is the technique I used. I used a microphone, a laptop, and an audio module called a Mobile Pre, plus Ableton Live 6, to allow me to perform these songs solo. The general technique was to build a full sound (many tracks) by layering up loops of sound one after the other.

With or Without You is a song based on a repeated 4-chord pattern. I was able to create the four chords by successive loops, or layers, of single vocal lines, each doing a "voice" (in the technical musical sense) of the harmony. In fact, some of these were doubled up, I ended up doing 7 seperate vocal lines to make up the chord, starting from the lowest in pitch, and rising to the highest.

As the Years Go Passing By is a blues number, which I orchestrated with a simple "drum" track, "bass guitar", "lead guitar", and lead vocal. All these instruments were actually my voice, with real time effects applied, which I layered up one line at a time. I started with pre-recorded "drums" (need the timing to be there beforehand), then sang in the bass, then the guitar, then started the main vocal from there.

I've recorded the actual live performances of both songs, have a listen. There are tuning issues and whatnot (this was the first live performance, a proof of concept, not super polished), but if you can listen through those, see if you can hear how I've built these songs up one line at a time.

With or Without You: http://www.emlynoregan.com/Music.aspx?code=24540553

As The Years Go Passing By: http://www.emlynoregan.com/Music.aspx?code=50829551

As The Years Go Passing By:

 

I've recorded something new. Yay! I got some groovy new equipment (mainly new software, amazing), and this popped out.

The interesting thing is, although it sounds like it uses a bunch of instruments, it's all my voice, with effects on it.

The song is my usual miserable fare... check it out: Requiem for Hopelessness

My darling daughter drew me a beautiful dragon:

Click the thumbnail for the larger version. Not bad for an eleven year old, ey? Better than I can do, by a long way!

Fair Use Worth More to Economy Than Copyright, CCIA Says

"Fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws account for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the Computer and Communications Industry Association. "
...
"Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion. "

Intellectual property continues to irritate me as a concept, and findings like the above are no surprise. The great commons of publicly available knowledge in the West is built, brick upon brick, by relying on what has gone before, and supports all endeavour, be it freely available or not. To take great body of knowledge, add your own miniscule contribution, then lock up the result, even preventing others from trying a similar path (via patents)... how can you feel anything but miserably mean about that?

I'm surprised I haven't seen anything about this before... I just
stumbled across it because they used it in the search for Steve
Fossett:

Amazon Mechanical Turk (Amazon MTurk) - Beta

"Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human
intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to
programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand
workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human
intelligence directly into their applications."

I've written more about the Amazon Web Services here.

I built a little web app to decode automatically generated .net assembly version numbers into the date+time of compilation of the assembly. I think C# developers (and other .net folks) may find this useful from time to time, when they are looking at a version of their code wondering "when exactly did I build this?". Using this tool, you can find the date+time, and thus retrieve the correct source code from your source control system.

If you don't understand any of this, that's entirely normal, don't lose any sleep over it...

There's an easter egg in Google Earth, a hidden flight simulator. On a windows machine, hit Ctrl-Alt-A to kick it off.

Read more about it here.

This is my first post on my front page blog.