Last year, I posted here about an animation control framework called 'Friz' that works within the JUCE Application Framework.

There are a few events coming up in the next few weeks where A+L will have people in attendance. If you're going to be there or nearby, please get in touch and we'll meet up.

As is often the case, I found myself working on a personal project and had some UI elements that really wanted to have some life to them on the screen.

Interesting to see a theme emerge in my Pinboard account this week -- lots of stuff about the idea of 'programming language'. I've spent the last few weeks preparing to dive back into a personal interactive music project that I've been working on sporadically since I was in graduate school. I had recently realized that the conceptual roadblock I hit before my last hiatus was something that I'd need to address by adding some sort of little programming language into the system. After following Martin Fowler's many blog posts over the years discussing domain specific languages, I finally broke down and bought his book on the topic. It's too early yet for me to have much concrete to say about the book, but I remember getting enough out of those blog posts to be confident that it will be worth the money and time to read.

Last week, I took a vacation day to attend one day of workshops at NYU as part of ImproTech 2012 Paris-New York That website descibes the event as:

My usual pre-work routine is to walk the dog (working at home, this is my counterpart to a commute), pour my first cup of coffee, and then curl up for a little while with Google Reader. I don't know if it's because I've selected feeds that are too closely aligned with my values and personal agenda, but it's really rare that I'll read a post that is just so wrong that it makes me angry. Jeff Atwood wrote a post like that: Please Don't Learn To Code

I started college right about the time when the first CD players were coming onto the market -- there weren't many available, and they were all obscenely expensive. At the time, my dad was dong a lot of traveling to Japan for business, and he was able to bring me a really nice Yamaha CD player back from a shop in Akihabara for about 1/4th of what a similar unit would have cost me here in the US.