After about 4 hours of repeated head-to-wall collisions, I finally managed to get mod_python running with Apache 2.2.14 on my Snow Leopard machine.  Here’s what I had to do:

1. Use the MacPorts Apache instead of MAMP.  I absolutely could not get this to work for MAMP, which might be because MAMP uses version 2.062 of Apache.  All the following instructions are for MacPorts installs.  Once you install MacPorts, you can install Apache by doing

   sudo port install apache

2. Now you need mod_python, which is a module for Apache that allows the HTTP server to use the python interpreter “inside” the server.  With MacPorts, just do

   sudo port install mod_python

   If for some reason this doesn’t work, I’ve packaged it up along with the mod_python python package described next.  Put it in

   /opt/local/apache2/modules

3. Make sure you have the mod_python Python package (yeah, it’s got the exact same name as the Apache module but is a completely different thing).  Get into your Python interpreter and try

   import mod_python

   If it works, rejoice.  If not, I’ve included mine in a zip because I could not for the life of me figure out where to get it from, but I had it in one of my other Python installs. It goes here:

   /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages

4. Edit your httpd.conf file by adding the following:

   LoadModule python_module modules/mod_python.so
   
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler mod_python.publisher
   PythonDebug On

   This first tells Apache to load the module, which is a shared object file (.so).  Technical note for the curious: A shared object is a binary that contains compiled functions that can be directly addressed in memory, so you can call functions in it given a header file.  It’s similar to a Windows .dll.

   Anyway, the rest tells Apache to use mod_python’s VERY handy “publisher” function, described here.  This is a REALLY fast and easy way to start writing Python programs for the web.  Follow the examples there and you should be good to go!  Enjoy!

• Turn off or delete all unused or irrelevant layers.
• Merge all adjustment layers or masks into regular layers.  Masked layers or groups cannot be used!
• Layer effects are OK!  However, if you turn one off and don’t plan on using it at all, make sure you remove the effect by dragging it onto the trash icon in the Layers palette.
• Vector graphics are always preferred!  If you are using Illustrator to design any assets, please provide the Illustrator file too, as Flash cannot import Smart Vector Objects.
• Vector graphics are especially preferred for layers intended to be animated.  Imported bitmaps will often look shoddy and low-resolution when moving around and rotating.
• If an Illustrator file can’t be provided, rasterize any Smart Vector Objects or other non-standard layers.
• Keep groups and layers orderly and named accurately whenever possible

This is really interesting and I’m glad to see a straight-up, public statement about the situation. It is clear that there are (at least) a host of technological issues behind the Flash absence. Pundit rebuttals about Apple not adopting such-and-such for business reasons have never made any sense—it would only behoove Apple to extend their market further and further, except at the cost of the UX and performance. It never ceases to amaze me that all the Flash-haters suddenly started bitching about Flash’s absence on iStuff just because they hate Apple more. Hypocrites.

Anyway, the third-party development thing is still foggy, I think. First of all, having gotten deep into the iPhone APIs and objective-c this semester, it is clear beyond any doubt that apple’s SDK cares foremost about consistent, effective UI and high performance. Anyone who disputes this simply does not know what they are talking about.

Jobs says:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.

Defining “third party layer” can be tricky, but ok, sure, nobody wants sub-standard apps (meaning worse performance than it could have had otherwise).

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

In general I’m inclined to agree here but then, the same argument could be made about a developer choosing to adopt changes in the native APIs in the first place. What he (and others) seems be saying here is that third-party dev platforms (again, not sure exactly what this includes and excludes) encourage laziness and are less likely to perform as well as native APIs. Maybe, at best.

Regarding cross-platform dev:

Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features.

Maybe, though there’s no reason the platform couldn’t offer device-specific options that do follow up on new API developments.

It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps.

Now that I definitely concur with. I can tell you from my own painful experience that the majority of Flash developers are total hacks who wouldn’t know a bit from a byte and couldn’t manage memory to save their lives. But who could blame them, since they’re encouraged to program that way? Indeed, the whole premise of Flash started out as, “Oh noes, programming is scary!! Help me to not have to learn!”

I can’t help but think this dances around a development ideology issue: cross-compiled, garbage-collecting, “lazy” development that is not geared towards optimizing for its device, and old-fashioned tweak-the-shit-out-of-this-app-until-it-can’t-possibly-get-any-faster. Yes, the latter is hard than the former. My question is, why the antagonism towards the latter?

Curious to hear some other thoughts on this.

1. Connect the RSSI pin (pin 6) to a digital pin on your microcontroller.
2. Use this line of code in your Arduino loop:

   rssiDur = pulseIn(digitalPin, LOW, 200);

pulseIn returns the duration of a pulse (specified HIGH or LOW) in microseconds (µs).  The 200 is a timeout value in µs—it waits this long to see if there’s going to be a pulse.  Since the XBee’s RSSI PWM period is 200µs, we want to wait at most that long to see if there’s a pulse at all.

Since this function gives you a duration, it’s up to you to map that to a value relevant to your program.  Since the maximum duration of the pulse would be 200µs, you could map that to your logical maximum.

What I find interesting about this is that this, like Wikipædia, is the logical conclusion (or progression at least) of the death of the concept of authority.  When Wikipedia came along, a lot of the auld school angrily assumed that this Could Never Work because it’s not backed by an authority that carefully examines a subject and adheres to strict guidelines regarding some particular ideology or ethics, i.e. Not Lying.  Since the intent of the *pedia is to accurately convey True Information, “Not Lying” would seem to be an advantageous strategy.We have pretty much the exact same situation with journalism and the publication and dissemination of news.  Accuracy is the whole point, but we can now finally (re)acknowledge the idea that a story’s accuracy is only as good as the amount of corroboration available.The cool thing is that now we have more new means for corroborating information than ever, or at least new information—for instance, last summer’s Iranian election protests, in which hundreds of individuals acting on their own could post photos of real events as they transpired.  In other words, we no longer have to trust a particular news outlet, as we can corroborate any particular claim with the claims of many other sources.  In more other words, the Information Bottleneck has been drastically widened in at least some cases.

Now there is in fact Wikinews, which I hadn’t heard of until I just tried googling for it, and Indymedia et al., but what I’d like to see is a kind of rating system of corroboration; something that tallies how many people concur with the information in question.  (But yes, I am aware of the millions of practical problems that would present, but in theory it would be interesting).

This process happens between people all the time as it is; it is how trust and reputation works.  I suppose the obvious drawbacks to the death of traditional Authoritative Media is the availability of resources and drawbacks like language barriers.  The NYT has the resources to send a journalist to some far away part of the world and trusts her to report back honestly about what she sees, in English.  Someone living there could theoretically publish their own observations, in another language, and we would not have the benefit of inheriting trust from the already well-established medium.

And here it is!  Download the python script (v. 1.0)(rename it to .py…thanks for nothing, WordPress), or clone it from the git repo.  If you have python installed (OS X and Unix users already do), just jump into a shell and type

python eros.py

…in the directory you downloaded the script and enjoy!  Otherwise… install python I will try to find a way to implement the script interactively in a web browser.

I discovered much to my delight that a rudimentary text-adventure parser could be accomplished in one class and only a few dozen lines of code!  This script should be an excellent learning example of an object-oriented approach and is very easily extensible.  Feel free to modify away, but try to credit my writing!

A room-based text adventure like this one has some interesting mathematical properties, since the network of rooms is essentially an acyclic directed graph.  The poem/game is in sonnet form: three quatrains and a couplet.  Each quatrain contains two pairs of rhymes, and the couplet rhymes.  This form is clear in the network diagram.

Traditionally, entering a room in a text-adventure game would display a prose description of the room.  Here, each room is a line of the poem.  Ideally each line in the poem would only be read once, but there’s no simple way to achieve this with the spatial, room-oriented metaphor of the adventure game.  It would have to involve some kind of key object game mechanic, such as requiring the two keys before being able to proceed past a locked door, but then you’d still be repeating lines if you have to backtrack.  A better, but less interactive (and probably less interesting) approach would be to have doors magically lock and unlock so as to constrain exactly the procession of the lines of the poem.  But I’m not very concerned about that, I very much like the idea of literally exploring the poem and playing and replaying the game until one finds “just the right” order they like.

I consider the game experience as a whole the actual poem.  For reference, however, here are the lines in an arbitrary (but still constrained to the game graph) order:

rooms[0].line  = "When we had opened all the doors"
rooms[1].line  = "When we had broken every window"
rooms[2].line  = "The vesper-bells had rattled like the floors"
rooms[3].line  = "And the dust had settled on the lintel"
rooms[4].line  = "When we first met the image of the other"
rooms[5].line  = "And the mirrors danced so brightly"
rooms[6].line  = "The crows had fled the gables nightly"
rooms[7].line  = "And the love between the seedling was the mother of the moon"
rooms[8].line  = "The house had crumbled from the rust"
rooms[9].line  = "And the silence grew in anger"
rooms[10].line = "As the host redoubled with a clangor"
rooms[11].line = "And our trust had all the force of a typhoon"
rooms[12].line = "And in the Labyrinth of Eros, a time became a turning"
rooms[13].line = "For the blankness in the sky was a fire, and a yearning"

A principal concern while writing the poem, of course, was that it would be a good and interesting poem in any of the possible constrained patterns.  I’ll leave that to you to decide.

There’s also a little easter egg—see here for more details

Here we find the critical separation between the act and its imprint, between the cause and the effect.  Dance is a medium of causes that crucially leaves no mark except that of the phenomenological mark in the mind (brain) of the reader (observer).

When viewing a dance, under casual circumstances, we may not bother to attempt to fix in our imaginations the curvature that a body traces in the air, but rather leave it as a more holistic impression, an abstraction characterized by high-level features (degrees of activity, changes in energy-level, recognizable gestural signs, etc.).  The contours of a moving body supplement the contours of the body itself, extending it into another measurable dimension.  Visualizing these lines is not necessarily the goal, but rather building an awareness of them that shapes the perception of the entire dance.

Traditionally, and in general, dances do not leave marks in the sense that drawings do.  Dance does not visibly or permanently alter the intrinsic medium of its performance (spacetime).  A drawing does, however, transform a medium, additively or subtractively, with the aid of an extrinsic influence or medium (a pencil, a brush, an eraser, pigmented oil and water).  A dance’s extrinsic medium is the dancers that make it up, and its mark is like that of a poem read aloud—accomplished over time, with only the audience’s senses and memory available to contemplate the artwork.  A dance-poem leaves no residue upon its own medium.

Intentional usage of music is another story, but again, for most it is an automatic act, a habituation that arises over years of learned associations and tendencies.  Here and there our choice to listen and choice of music will have a more conscious intent; a jogger chooses something commensurate to the intensity of their run, or a DJ will seek a style and mood to reflect her audience.

In my own experience, one of the only conscious, self-aware objectives I have for music selection is that to which to sleep.  I have long been fascinated, occasionally obsessively, by ambient music–music with no rhythm*, that lulls and that evolves over long periods of time, challenging the individual’s perceptual capacity to detect change.

Much of this music has a soporific character or effect, which is often, in fact, intentional.  Consider Robert Rich‘s sleep concerts: performances designed specifically and explicitly for an audience to sleep to.  Playing ambient music while falling asleep never emerged for me as a remedy or cure, but rather as an enhancement to the enigmatic twilight state that precedes sleep, a time in which the shadows cast by moonlight take on an even more lustrous character, where poetry abounds in the edges and interstices of consciousness.  I have vivid and affective childhood memories of planetaria in which music like this was played: soft, mysterious tones and drones that hinted of vast silver fields at night and, of course, their accompanying myriad and sundry constellations.

Ambient artists so far within my purview include Steve Roach, Stars of the Lid, Brian Eno, Lustmord, Lull, Coil, Bass Communion, Tim Hecker, Zoviet*France: and the aforementioned Robert Rich, and are but an inkling of the many more that are out there.

For merely one example of these kinds of textures, I offer “You Were Alive,” a piece I recorded last year:

* Examples of ambient music with rhythm are plentiful, the most well-known doubtless being Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works volumes, but I cannot generally sleep to them.  These works may perhaps be more accurately classified as “ambient techno.”

Igor on imagination vs. invention:

“We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 53

“Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.  For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find.  What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actual being worked out.
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 53

Stravinsky’s opinion closely mirrors my own regarding the prototyping abilities of the imagination: it is the fastest method we have, but also the most prone to misjudgment, and the least able to develop an idea.

But it is these quotes, which inspired quite a bit of controversy in Visual Music a few weeks ago, that I am truly interested in and inspired by:

“From the moment song assumes as its calling the expression of the meaning of discourse, it leaves the realm of music and has nothing more in common with it.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, pp. 42-43

“Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings, to translate dramatic situations, even to imitate nature?”
—Ibid., p. 77

“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”
—Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1935, Calder and Boyars ed., 1975, p.53

It’s rare that I see this sentiment voiced (if you are aware of examples please let me know).  Expression is a form of communication, and communication requires a semiotic code for sent signs to be reliably interpreted by a receiving party.  Codes are arrived at by convention, or sometimes, consensus.  Music has never had, as far as I know, conventional semiotic codes of the linguistic kind, but nonetheless evokes many things to many people.  In this situation, communication has been fallaciously conflated with evocation. The former attempts to transmit the intent of the sender, while the latter is only the result of the receiver’s observation.  The reaction of the receiver to a perceived musical input pattern may be psychological and/or physiological.  A physiological reaction, such as dissonance, can be thought of itself as a sign which then leads to normal psychological reactions; the association of one pattern with another, in the vast chain-reaction that is the living mind/brain.

For some more quotes along similar lines, check out Stravinsky on expression in music and Stravinsky on the purpose of music on Theory of Music.  I also stumbled upon this very fascinating BBC Puzzles piece on musical scores as ciphertexts.