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Archive 2007-08-05 Ting

2007-08-05 ting

2007-08-05 Ting, 18:00 UTC

Also open the document “2007-09-05_Summary” please and help summarizing already during the ting.

participants


ma: up here is the collab-editor. The chat below doesn’t enter the web-preview and neither the wiki-page. Though we also put the chat on the wiki-page once. I think it should be connected to a real irc chanel. So irc can be read here while tinging and you can answer and pass the url for the web-preview to make the irc crowd see what was written in the collab-editor.

sr: Interesting. I really wonder how people are using these programs like gobby. Like publishers, etc It seems in ting we are using like IRC/Chat

sh: It’s good for preparing documents or translating. We prepared the Mattis’ “What is the WikiNet?” talk in Gobby and Gizmo.

ma: you see Sam? We are three now, imagine it with seven and more participants. It’s then it starts to sing.

sh: The worst problem is that you don’t really know here others are looking at any given moment, and if they did read something you’ve written or not.

ma: no visible cursors in gobby, true. They are working on it, the gobby-folks said, but that’s a while ago. MoonEdit has visible cursors + it has typing sound which is louder the closer the typer’s cursor is to yours. Maybe mutante sets up the MoonEdit standalone server on s23.org again. We had a web-preview for it too (in s23, a Mediawiki). Despite MoonEdit is A) proprietary and B) definitely not for mac and thus unuseable it has some features that are worth taking a look at. Especially the history slider is.

sh: Maybe I should go and pay a visit to Tomasz? ;)

sr: Also, could be interesting for co-creating code.

sh: MoonEdit also had history, you could re-play the whole session. Here, when you delete something, it’s lost forever.

sr: It’s kind of cool to see three people “talking at once”. I’ve read about MoonEdit, but never tried it.

sh: I tried to give a python lesson using gobby already, but it was very disorganised and I’m not very happy about it – I should have been prepared better.

sr: Maybe it takes some pre-instruction for participants?

ma: I have some on the old-ting-wiki (s23).

sr: I can see how this could be really useful for summarizing voice conferences.

ma: no colors in the wiki-export. We use signs (ma: etc.) when writing therefor.

sh: yes, one person leads and two or three persons type the shortcuts and correct errors. Mattis, the wiki saves colors now, do we still need these prefixes?

sr: What is the topic/purpose of this particular ting? (I keep wanting to hit “enter” after typing :))

ma: aha, saves colors. Cool! We wouldn’t need signing (if that’s true). Finally every ting should be a movie anyway, hihi.

sh: Sam, this is one of peculiarities of these tings, most of them doesn’t seem to have a topic, there are some that talk about particularly interesting things, but it usually came up during the discussion. Personally, I think that’s what makes people feel awkward, but I can never really come up with good topics beforehand, especially when I don’t know who will be there.

sr: I see. Makes sense. Well, there does not have to be a topic, of course.

ma: We need to leave a line free below so that others can start before the last has finished, it seems. ;)

sr: Gotcha!

ma: Another another peculiarity is that tings sometimes take hours to unfold.

sh: Until everyone drinks his beer, it seems ;)

ma: We got into writing straight this time, but often it takes a while. On real tings they drank Bilsener, btw.

sr: You usually talk via teamspeak?

sh: I usually don’t talk, feels awkward, we used gobby several times, that’s all for me. Mattis remembers better times.

ma: Teampeak hardly ever got used, despite I liked the push-to-talk. We used skype with Lion and urgen. Very good. More talk, lion summarizing real-time brilliantly.

sr: Mattis, it’d be cool to employ this in any voice conference. Especially if everyone can see.

sh: By the way, I canceled my Second Life account today, after noticing that the tech support somehow turned my membership into a paid one. My guess it’s that they actually had some database corruption, and that they recovered my account and filled in the missing data with defaults.

sr: Argh. SecondLife is fraught with problems

sh: I wonder if they’ll send me a bill… I never gave them any credit card number or anything, but I recently gave my street address to the tech support guy…

sr: Sheep: I don’t think they’ll bill you. If they do, send it back with a big smiley face on it :)

ma: second life voice is a major step forwards, I think. It has push-to-talk too, btw. Apart second life is very popular. We surely need suchbut open source, no question. As fast as possible.

sr: Have not had a chance to try SL Voice. I just tried Open Croquet, and it Croaked on MAc OS X ! Barely works. Probably will work better on Debian. I have high hopes for my friend Reed’s http://interreality.org he’s been working on that since the mid 1990’s.

sh: There are actually very many open source “virtual worlds”, mostly games.

ma: tried croquet a while ago. Seemed like one could work with it, I mean start building something. We don’t need a world full of trees with rotating octopuses and such. A meadow somewhere does the job. Some VoIP can be run parallel. Actually the picture is as useless as it is in Flashmeetings, it doesn’t transport anything really important, it rather distracts actually. But the gathering aspect, the fact of seeing others around shouldn’t be under-evaluated. If people (avatars) gather somewhere, even just four people or so, it attracts others. I’ve seen that many times in second life.

sr: You have a good point about the picture, Mattis. The really cool thing is when you can put up diagrams, or see visualizations of data, stuff like that.

SmallTalk? and Squeak are definitely interesting. I still plan on playing around with Open Croquet and Squeak

sh: Maybe not whole octopi, but several tentacles could come in handy…

sr: Hahaha! (tentacles)

sh: Ever used Jabber’s whiteboard? I think Coccinella has it, and Inkscape can be also compiled with whiteboard support – then you can share an inkscape document with several jabber users.

sr: Sheep, I’ve seen that in Jabber, but never had occasion to use it. Could be part of ting! Visual language ting! Could use gobby plus Coccinella/Inkscape. Is gobby connected via Jabber?

sh: Coccinella should work without any problems on any system that has TclTk. http:thecoccinella.org

sh: No, gobby uses its own XML-based protocol called Obby.

sr: I see.

sh: I guess that since it’s XML, you could easily embed it in jabber…

sr: I was thinking earlier that gobby could be an interesting interface for repository. Like a ZergCreep type of thing, but able to push to many applications. If this is XML, it could be possible to output to many places at once, theoretically, such as blogs, wikis, etc

sh: Collaborative editor would be also a very neat solution to wiki’s edit conflicts. Bpt is devolping a JavaScript/Flash-based collaborative editor called WritingLark?. I think that the Obby protocol only expects one server and multiple clients.

sr: Hmmm…your idea about edit conflicts is very interesting. This would really be a fascinating way to participate in wiki. Text interface for wiki was like this, but pages are saved as html pages.

sh: Imagine the real-time flame wars! ;) Actually, we are being watched: http://ting.sheep.art.pl/live.cgi

sr: neat! I’d really like to get some other people to try this sometime. Especially people who are already co-authoring or conversing on wiki.

sh: I’d like to see gobby at work with some kind of a document or translation or documentation, with several people correcting things and arguing about phrasing and such.

sr: seems like it might get too confusing.

sh: well, you can use the chat at the bottom for arguing :)

sr: ah, that’s true.

sh: oh wow, Cocinella now has VoIP! downloads

ma: I like that. VoIP all over!

sr: Yes, I’ve been looking at the possibility of creating a kind of “wide PBX” with Asterisk. You really need good bandwidth on the server you’re using, though. But it could be a useful solution for people who work together a lot, that are distributed around the globe. You would just have an extension, or could hook your SIP phone into it, like GizmoProject?. Although then again you only really need GizmoProject? for voice conferencing. But, I imagine that many people could hook their Asterisk PBX’s together to create a very large network.

ma: cool. Collab-editors and VoIP are no help for dancing, I guess. Kinda everything else has to be tried out and a lot can benefit from it, I guess. I’d be very interested in language teaching.

sr: What do you do for a living right now, Mattis (if you don’t mind my asking)?

sr: I am still interested in WikiMusic, although I have come to the determination that using wiki engine for this is a bad idea. I am looking at drupal, or http://elgg.org with Amazon S3 storage to try it out with.

ma: jepp music, worked on the world-jam-wiki, getting it up to date. Hardcore is trying out jams in second life voice, surely a sheer latency problem, like jamming from two corners of a 500 meter long hall but wihout the reverb, just late. One has to try. Special acoustic circumstances don’t make music impossible, they change it.

sr: still want to tie “wiki” music in with world-jam-wiki, and try ninjam. Supposedly ninjam has got the latency thing beat, but I’d be surprised if it really works well. I think it would work if you had people start one at a time and sync-up. Probably would be a pain, though.

sh: I wonder if it was possible to make a plugin, for example for MoinMoin, that would allow you to write notes, then display them as an image and allow you to download a midi file when you click on it …

ma: yes, but written music sux. For me at least, cubase had the score thing, never used it. For real composers maybe and Gill Evans and these folks.

sr: one cool thing is if you ever want to involve different musicians in a recording, you can use that scoring tool to transcribe sheet music for you, even though you don’t read music yourself, and then you can hand it off to the instrument player and they can usually quickly learn and play their part.

sh: still better than nothing, and allows you to TALK about music, even if the notes themselves are poor quality – you know, just like the whiteboard allows you to talk about graphics, even when the quality is poor.

sr:There is a neat open source program called “lillypad” that allows you to transcribe sheet music by simple syntax and typing out the notes, time signatures, etc. Our drummer used it to score a cello part for a song. I think the sheep’s idea is actually really cool, especially if you could do the transcribing of music with simple text/syntax. Because, you could download the midi file, and then bring it into a computer and use a synthesizer to add all kinds of instrumentation. Anything that could connect to midi could use the file/transcription.

sh: is that lilypond a command-line application? If so, connecting it to oddmuse should be easy… http://www.frozenreality.co.uk/comic/bunny/index.php?id=946

sr: Oops, it’s called lilypond :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LilyPond http://lilypond.org/web/

I thought I’ve heard that name before somewhere :)

ma: hit enter twice before starting to write down :) Having everything in sheet music will often be useful. But it’s not really important. Well … my playing by sight has always been lousy, maybe that’s why I say so.

sr: acutally, just having a midi file for evrything could be really neat. I never used to really care about music theory, and never even knew how to read music until a few years ago. But, now I find it very useful, saves me a lot of headaches.

ma: I’m not relevant. I have a midi dammage from the eighties. It mostly hindered music back then.

sr: Yes, it can be a distraction. I mostly like it to be used to synch up machines, which I then feed through manual effects, like “air effects” which is an infrared theramin-like thing. Or, to control manually via keybaord. Combining multiple instruments can give you incredibly interesting new sounds.

dn: hello!

sh: Hello dut!

ma: hi dear dut.

sh: Actually, I think that the dot/graphviz plugin for oddmuse could be used directly with very little changes to display sheet music using lilypond…

sr: I couldn’t recall, is that how lilypond displays sheet music engravings? (via graphviz)?

ma: sam, ninjam reports would be interesting. I saw it years ago (two) but never made it to ever join in on any jam. The concept is pretty stiff as your are tied to one bpm number (speed) but that still applies to many types of music. And playing a beat before what you hear, no idea how it feels like. Try it. Let’s try it.

sr: Mattis, ok, we should try sometime over the next couple of weeks, or sometime in August, anyway.

sh: no, graphviz is a set of tools for nicely rendering graphs from their textual descriptions. And there is a plugin for oddmuse (and for MoinMoin too) that uses it. The point is, you can replace dot with lilypond and get the same result, just with notes. I guess midi would be a much more complicated thing.

sr: I think midi would be complicated, though not impossible. I think there are Python modules that can create or somehow work with midi files.

sh: yes, generating the midi would be the easy part, parsing the lilypond input could be trickier.

sr: I noticed squeak has tools for generating midi files, and I think for transcribing music.

ma: remember that MoonEdit has a rudimentary synthesizer that you can trigger by writng together in it.

sr: huh, mattis, that would be interesting re: MoonEdit synth

ma: very basic, but fun, seen people witing hits in it, the glorious early MoonEdit days when all freaked out on it, January 05.

sh: I think you don’t need much to get it started. Hmm, the Lilypond page mentions the Mutopia project: http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ looks a little wikish. It uses Lilypond for displaying the music, but also offers midis for download – maybe all the work has been done already?

sr: I think Lilypond outputs sheet music in TeX?, or maybe LaTeX? No, I am wrong, it outputs into SVG. So, you could put lilypond on a server, then send the lilypond markup to it from a wikipage, then have lilpond output the SVG to the wikipage, maybe?

sh: I think that Lilypond can output the sheets in multiple formats, including normal .png images.

sr: You are probably right. Makes your idea fairly easy, just need to learn lilypad syntax.

sh: Mutopia seems almost what we think about, just without online editing – you have to upload via FTP. I think I’ll contact them and ask if they make the midi files manually or from the lilypond sheets.

sr: Mutopia probably uses lilypond, because lilypond apparently can instantly create the midifiles. Not sure of course though how Mutopia does it exactly. Would be interesting to know.

sr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiTeX this allows editing of lilypond syntax right in wikipages. It is media wiki though (alch! :()

ma: c’mon, Mediwiki’s big!

sr: Media wiki is ok. I just like to hate on them, because of their horrid markup. And, I just get so used to doing things the way they are done in OddMuse, MoinMoin, useMod, etc. MediaWiki is very useful, though, I’ll definitely admit that. They are one of the only Wiki projects to receive real funding for development (not that they funded all of coding, but I think they did fund some of the coding).

ma: no doubt. Wiki is.

sr: hell, gobby would be cool for co-editing lilypond files.

sr: next time we have a recentchanges camp or RoCoCo?, we should also do a ting or two. try to get others to know about it in the wiki communities.

sh: the topiclessness is hard :) but I guess it’s not obligatory. Someone to actually lead the discussion and do proper summarizing would proably help too. There is a summary in the 2007-09-05_Summary document.

ma: “next time we have a recentchanges camp or RoCoCo?, we should also do a ting or two.”, yo, proposed it, to wikimania too, last year - they experimented a bit. This year too: dunno, they ignored it, I guess.

sr: I was imagining that ting could be used more for co-summarizing during these conferences. I already often do this in wikipages when I am on conference calls.

sh: OMG, LilyPond? already DOES generate the midi files! :D

sr: Sheep, yeah, I was reading though their manual and saw that. Could be neat for scoring films, things like that.

sh: I think I’ll try to make an Oddmuse plugin. It even has a --jail option to invoke it from a web server in a relatively safe manner.

sr: That would be pretty darn awesome! Could look at how they are doing it in WikiTex? for ideas. You probably already know most of how they are doing it, though, I would guess.

sh: well, I have some experience with TeX? plugins for various wiki engines. It’s hard to jail TeX? properly, because it’s a full-blown programming language in fact, Turing-complete, so people could do nasty things. But Lilypond is much sumplier and doesn’t seem to contain nasty features.

sr: Does lilypond actually use TeX?? I couldn’t figure that out (yet)?

sr: not to change subject, but it’s kind of cool to sit back on couch and work on computer at 800 X 650 resolution :).

sh: 800x650 not 800x600? Why such a strange resolution?

sr: because 3/4 of my ram is apparently dead, and I can not get Debian to set resolution higher without breaking the xorg file. I need to replace memory. The video chipset I have is some kind of junk that is integrated into mother board. It mostly uses motherboard ram. And there isn’t much of it :/. So, once I replace ram chip (which must’ve been junk to begin with) I won’t have to use low resolution.

ma: less is more. It’s often like that.

sr: :)

sh: 640kB should be enough for everyone

ma: complete global sum of RAM divided by world’s population. + a chart by countries :)
I mean, what is this ting? We (I) had fun these year on tings, sorrow too as nobody joined in, admit. It’s like a practize room for a band. Empty. There are plugs for the amps, light is alright, a loo close by and all the other stuff.

sh: I’m afraid it would be much lower than that, even if you counted all the cellphones and intelligent dishwashers.

sr: gotta run. ting is awesome. I’m sold! I could do this all day.

ma: don’t forget the NSA Ram ;) They have problems with power-suppliance, I read.

sr: talk to you guys soon.

ma: thanks Sam for his delicious ting. (heart)

sh: Thanks guys, good night.

ma: bzz (my pleasure-sound), ‘night.

EditNearLinks: OddMuse SecondLife LaTeX WikiMusic MediaWiki ZergCreep MoinMoin VoIP JavaScript