Category Archives: Computers & Technology

Whitney Music Box

I’m always interested in discovering new ways of manipulating sound, not to mention examples of the ways music and math converge, and this is one of the coolest I’ve seen in a long time: Whitney Music Box.

The spinning dots move at speeds governed by various predefined ratios, resulting in cool swirling patterns that converge in different ways over time. Each dot is also assigned to a tone, and when the dot crosses the horizontal line, its tone is produced.

There’s even a variation where you can control the motion with a hand crank. Very cool!

(This is what we call “good Flash.”)

Wow… Ask.com just became a serious contender (again?)

It’s been around for years, but frankly I’ve never given Ask.com much serious attention. There never really seemed to be anything wrong with it; it just wasn’t anything special. So I used Yahoo!… then Hotbot (remember that one?)… then AltaVista (known today only for its notorious offshoot, Babelfish)… then Google. Ah yes, Google… the end all be all of search engines.

Well… maybe.

Check out Ask.com. Not only is it glossed up with Web 2.0 goodness, it actually has some really cool features. Of course the search box has AJAX-based auto-complete. But it’s the results page that’s really impressive. I did a search on John Coltrane (of course… but not solely out of narcissism) and here are the results.

Everything fades in nicely as the results come back. The main column is your typical search results list. The left column gives a bunch of suggestions for narrowing or expanding your search, as well as searching on similar or related topics. The right column is what’s really cool though: different sections feature images, audio, an encyclopedia (well, Wikipedia) entry, and YouTube videos.

Sure, all of that stuff on the right side reeks of “synergistic” partnerships between Ask.com and the source sites. But whether they’re all throwing money at each other or not, the sources are well-chosen, and the overall effect is very cool.

Big thumbs up to Ask.com for their efforts on this. The big question, of course, is how good are the results? I am going to make this my primary search engine for a while, and put it through its paces.

Wow, I’m a reference in an O’Reilly code sample!

That’s not Bill O’Reilly, thank you very much, but O’Reilly, the much-lauded publisher of technology reference books.

Doing a bit of narcissistic “googling,” I discovered that my site appears in the sample code in an article O’Reilly published on their xml.com website on the topic of hacking iTunes. Cool!

On a less random (and ultimately more satisfying note), I also discovered that my Coltrane thesis was cited in an academic book called Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. Wow!

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

I am certainly accustomed to encountering PHP parser errors, but I was not expecting to see this: T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

And apparently I’m not alone. Even with an explanation (it’s Hebrew for “double colons”… and I leave for you to discover on your own why PHP constants might be named in transliterated Hebrew), it’s still a bit confusing, as the expected character should have been a dollar sign, not a double colon. Still awaiting an answer on that one…

Good source for wallpapers (or as we call them in the Mac world, desktop images)

As is usually the case, I’m probably the last sentient being in the known universe to discover this, but anyway… I was in the mood to find some new wallpapers today. (I’m running OSXplanet on my Mac desktop but I needed something new for when I’m running Windows… and the ones that come with XP leave a lot to be desired, such as the proper resolution for my widescreen laptop display.)

So I googled “1280×800 desktop images” and this is what I found…