Disqus - Latest Comments for jamesbritt

Re: Season 13, Episode 13:

James Britt / Neurogami — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 22:52:36 -0000

" In fact, this whole season was a waste of time and money if these guys were the "top four" of bunch."

The competition is not arranged to find the best; it finds those who managed not to be the worst in any given challenge. It's telling that a designer can get to the final four without ever winning a challenge, even having been in the bottom three more than once.

But the show is no longer about fashion. It's Product Runway, with the focus on products, drama, products, and then fashion.

"The talent pool for up-and-coming designers must be drying up."

Perhaps Mr. Verreos can speak to this, but it's clear that the show does not produce "the next top designer" and talented designers apparently have other, better, ways to advance their careers. (It also seems that contestants are picked for their on-screen chemistry/volatility in addition to their design skills.)

(On a side note, I recommend the film " Eleven Minutes", about Jay McCarroll.)

Re: Neurogami: Using Lua to process MIDI messages in Renoise

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:10:32 -0000

Here's a small change I made since posting this:


 local success, result = pcall(_G[HANDER_PREFIX..m], words ) 

 if not success then
   print( ("There was an error calling %s: %s"):format( HANDER_PREFIX..m, result) )
 end

pcall lets you call a function can trap an errors. If all goes well then success will be true. But if it's false then you can grab the error message from the second value returned.

No special action is taken on the assumption that there will be little to nothing a user can do if a particular call fails.

Re: James Britt - Using Lua to process MIDI messages in Renoise

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:07:06 -0000

Here's a small change I made since posting this:


 local success, result = pcall(_G[HANDER_PREFIX..m], words ) 

 if not success then
   print( ("There was an error calling %s: %s"):format( HANDER_PREFIX..m, result) )
 end

pcall lets you call a function can trap an errors. If all goes well then success will be true. But if it's false then you can grab the error message from the second value returned.

No special action is taken on the assumption that there will be little to nothing a user can do if a particular call fails.

Re: The New Rainbow Particles That Will End Counterfeiting Forever

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 19:00:07 -0000

"QR codes just never made a very good argument for their own existence,
why being taken to a website by scanning a thing with a smart-phone
camera is all that much better than, you know, just going to a website."

Because scanning an image is so much easier than typing in a damn URL?

Re: San Francisco's Anti-Tech Movement Devolves Into Self-Parody

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 15:56:49 -0000

"As valid as the anti-tech contingent's criticisms might be ..."

What exactly is valid about their criticisms?

Re: Class: Time (Ruby 2.1.0)

James Britt / Neurogami — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 18:45:54 -0000

http://www.ruby-doc.org/std...

require "time"

Re: James Britt - AnimataP5 now for Processing v2

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:46:29 -0000

I just tested the library on Windows (64 bit) and it works fine.

I've also added some more features, specifically meant to allow greater control over the skeleton parts and layers.

I added an example that uses OSC. I started with some simple behavior, but decided to add handlers for the OSC messages the original Animata handles.

In order to get that running I had to had code that exposed assorted Bone and Layer properties, and then make sure the library was acting on them.

So now AnimataP5 will allow you to set the transparency on layers, alter bone length, and reposition layers.

Re: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/date/rdoc/DateTime.html

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:26:28 -0000

I can delete them if you like

Re: IT Communities like Hacker News are full of assholes

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:29:01 -0000

"People need to stop being so negative towards others in the community" doesn't jibe with "[t]he IT Community is a joke" and "IT Communities like Hacker News are full of assholes."

Claiming "[HN] is like 4chan for the IT Community" makes you look just as bad as the people you complain about.

Making broad, sweeping statements about large communities of people, the vast majority of whom you've never had any dealings with, makes you sound a little foolish.

People who are jerks should stop being jerks. That there are jerks in some large group of people does not make the whole group jerks, or a joke, or anything really, anymore than a technology coming form this or that vendor is automatically good or bad.

Re: GIF is word of the year

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:13:22 -0000

Ah, quite true. But the copyright has never been the problem, it's the patents that tripped people up, so it's what popped into my mind.

Re: GIF is word of the year

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:58:11 -0000

The copyright has expired. http://www.freesoftwaremaga...

Re: Google's Red Herring Car And The Dark Nature Of Its Business

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 12:39:39 -0000

"However, it does give outsiders a view of the territory that nearly every online business has to deal with on a constant basis -- trying to keep up with algorithm changes that can sink or swim your business, without warning, and often like an act of god, without rhyme or reason."

There's noting to "keep up with" unless you're trying to game the search rankings. Little wonder that an SEO site is unhappy about this. The best way to get good page rank is to have quality, on-topic, original content. Weird, I know.

So sad that this is harder to do than to litter pages with primed words and phrases and be surrounded by link farms.

Me, I'm happy when I no longer see livestrong.com and other spammy content farms filling the first page of my search results.

Re: Building Great TouchOSC DJ Mappings for iOS and Android

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:14:29 -0000

There's a very slick Android app called Control that also does OSC via touch screens but you can design your own layouts and OSC messages using Javascript.

Re: Rumor: Jimmy Fallon to take over The Tonight Show in 2014?

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:25:16 -0000

Oh, c'mon. His work for Capitol One is priceless. Banal shilling for a bank is the soul of comedic genius.

Re: Class: Array (Ruby 1.9.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:30:44 -0000

I have a feeling there's cleaner way to do this, but it eludes me. Maybe someone else has a nicer alternative.

Using that temp array feels ... icky. :)


class Array
  def mapped_replication a
    # Think about what conditions to enforce. 
    raise "Array size mismatch exception!" if self.size > a.size
    res = []
    self.each_with_index do |n, idx|
      n.times { res << a[idx] }
    end
    res
  end
end

name = %w{a b c}
how_many_of_each = [3, 5, 2]

p how_many_of_each.mapped_replication name

Re: Brian Eno Back to Ambient Roots, in iPad App with Peter Chilvers, Upcoming Album

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 12:27:07 -0000

"Developers have limited time. This isn't just an App Store thing - it's a development thing. I just mean, for an app like this, I'm not sure that there's a strong reason to go back and add features."

That's true, but for an artists looking to create something and make it as available as much as possible with the least amount of friction (e.g. without needing the approval of some company) being able to put an app up on your own Web site any time you like is a big win.

Re: Class: Hash (Ruby 1.9.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:44:29 -0000

I just tried the example code and got [nil, nil, 4]. This with ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]

If you do `puts a` it *looks* as though you're getting 4; if you do `p a` you get [nil, nil, 4].

Re: Brian Eno Back to Ambient Roots, in iPad App with Peter Chilvers, Upcoming Album

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:29:01 -0000

Releasing or offering an update to an android an android app is as simple as hosting on your site. Far less hassle then going through the app store.

"Plus, most people doing anything with mobile/tablet music use iPhones/iPads to begin with "

Sounds purely anecdotal.

Re: Brian Eno Back to Ambient Roots, in iPad App with Peter Chilvers, Upcoming Album

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:02:48 -0000

"Unfortunately, there's not much incentive on the App Store to provide ongoing updates"

This also emphasaizes the problem with Eno et al limiting their work to the strange walled-garden that is Apple and the App Store.

There a few interesting audio apps available for Android devices, and Android makes it easier to make and share such apps.

Re: Weird cyberpunk game has pounding electronic soundtrack

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 12:12:16 -0000

"Pounding"? Hardly. Quite catchy, though.

Re: Share stuff from Dropbox in your Facebook Groups!

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:58:14 -0000

I take this as tacit approval of how Facebook handles privacy and generally conducts business. That makes me less comfortable about Dropbox.

Re: "Nurse Chapel with Tribbles," by Barnaby Ward

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:03:38 -0000

Maybe JJ Abrams can work that into the Trek movie

Re: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Module.html

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:30:02 -0000

As of now API docs are generated using the --all switch. Private methods get shown.

Re: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Module.html

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:32:37 -0000

Regarding the display of private methods: http://www.ruby-forum.com/t...

API docs come from running `rdoc` over the source code, so what appears is entirely the result of what the rdoc produces.

They are updated regularly after doing a pull from the source repo. The results will depend on what rdoc directives are in the code at that time.

Re: Class: Array (Ruby 1.9.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:38:57 -0000

Just to add to Leonid's reply, since Array includes the Enumerable module you should look there for additional methods that are not described in the Array docs.