This year I intend to learn to use Emacs properly. I’ve always liked Emacs in principle but never really been able to remember the arcane command sequences to do anything beyond undo, search/replace, and some basic navigation and file stuff. This is the year to jump down the rabbit hole.

A backup resolution, in case the rabbit hole turns out to stink, is to switch to vi.

I spent most of today messing around with music based on the Fibonacci sequence. The result I’m happiest with has four voices, each using the Fibonacci sequence mod 12 to determine the pitch (in semitones), and using the sequence with other moduli (4, 5, 3 and 2 respectively) to determine the timing.

Fibonacci MIDI (9.8KB)

Fibonacci MP3 (3.0MB)

It could generously be described as “atonal crap”, but it sort of has moments of not-completely-awful-ness. Sort of.

Python code below the fold.

» Continue reading “Fibonacci music”

…is what I’m thinking about now. (Okay, technically, are what I’m thinking about now.)

Don’t have time for a fully explanatory post right now; I just wanted to get something on here so that the new blog doesn’t stagnate before it’s even started. So here’s a bullet-point-form introduction:

• Zendo is a game where players try to guess the Master’s secret rule by probing it with examples.
• Inductive logic is… the same thing, really, except generalised to not necessarily include players, a Master, or… plastic pyramids.
• Doing either of these things algorithmically is, in general, hard. But in an interesting way.

Also: colours!

‘Cause I wasn’t neglecting the old one enough already.

This is a bit of an experiment. Until recently I thought the one-person-with-multiple-blogs-for-different-topics thing was a bad case of over-engineering. But I have a new theory that goes like this: none of you should have to read through my random thoughts on gardening and moustache-growth updates on the slight offchance that I might say something intelligent about computers or whatever. Unless you’re my stalker, in which case you should probably stop doing that.

So this is an attempt to keep the “nonsense that only I care about” stuff separate from the… well, the “nonsense that only I care about but is to do with computing”. It’s also supposed to motivate me to do something about the dozen or so projects I have on the backburner at any given time. (Hey, it could work. You never know.)

Stay tuned for ramblings on all things programming, software, and computer-science-and-engineering-y.