My code is being used! *smiles*

As geeks periodically do, I searched google for dbaird and nmt.edu and got some pleasant surprises.

Someone is using my pyalsamidi stuff. I found their code in CVS:

http://cvs.bigasterisk.com/viewcvs/room/lightswitchmidi?rev=1.6&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

Then I searched for lightswitchmidi and got:



http://drewp.quickwitretort.com/2005/07

I am quite satisfied with pyalsamidi, since despite not knowing how alsa midi works or what half the terms mean, I was able to use the example event reader code and get my program listening to midi within a few minutes. I could probably get rid of the sequencer setup and just use raw midi events, given my needs. Also, something is very slow about the XMLRPC communications (it takes 2-3 sec to send 4 light change commands). I'll leave that alone for now since it looks kindof cool to see the lights turn on individually.

pyalsamidi is a couple years old and I've got newer/better stuff that I need to upload.

I'm trying to work on some logical reasoning system to manage my website for me (something like a next-generation wiki)... but I'm not quite ready with that yet. All the RDF/triple store and query systems are a nuissance to setup and use and I haven't yet figured out how reification works in practice. I'm putting my efforts into something called Sesame now.

Things are finally starting to turn around at work. I beat OpenEmbedded into submission. It's pretty cool, albeit obscure, and I've learned a lot from it, which was my main reason for putting up with all the grief that it caused me. We have Python, Ice, and IcePy (cool cross-language/platform OO RPC from ZeroC) running on our robot with lots of other goodies. It only takes 64 MB, but we could trim it down smaller if need be. The entire system, server(s) and robot, is insane. The software consists of Ruby, Rails, Python, C, SQLite, TerraServer, Ice, lots of JavaScript (AJAX), possibly RTAI or RTLinux, and Altera code. Sure we could have done some things better, but hey, it's a great learning experience and a lot of fun. Many thanks to fusion, btw, for introducing me to Ice. If anyone ever has a project for data-mining, and they want to try their hand at robot data, we might have a lot (if the robot actually ever works, that is) ;-)



I was feeling a bit down the last couple weeks, but I'm finally feeling better now :-)