O'Reilly News & Commentary

Prognosticating the Future of Mobile Audio

By Peter Drescher
November 27, 2011

Seven years ago, at Project BBQ, I predicted a "convergent technology" device that would be a phone, a camera, an iPod, and a web browser -- two and a half years before the first iPhone was released.

Four short links: 3 November 2011 - Getting Feedback, Colour Design, Discovering Musicians, Weather Prediction App

By Nat Torkington
November 3, 2011

Feedback Without Frustration (YouTube) -- Scott Berkun at the HIVE conference talks about how feedback fails, and how to get it successfully. He is so good. Americhrome -- history of the official palette of the United States of America. Discovering Talented Musicians with Musical Analysis (Google Research blgo) -- very clever, they do acoustical analysis and then train up...

Four short links: 31 October 2011 - Solitude and Leadership, Data Repository, Copyright History, and Open Source Audio

By Nat Torkington
October 31, 2011

Solitude and Leadership -- an amazing essay on the value of managing one's information diet. Far more than yet another Carr/Morozov "the Internet is making us dumb!!" hate on short-form content, this is an eloquent exposition of the need for long-form thoughts. I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is...

FMOD for Android

By Peter Drescher
June 19, 2011

FMOD for Android is like peanut butter and strawberry jam, together for the first time!

Four short links: 12 April 2011 - Email Game, Faster B Trees, RFID+Projectors, and Airport Express Broken

By Nat Torkington
April 12, 2011

The Email Game -- game mechanics to get you answering email more efficiently. Can't wait to hear that conversation with corporate IT. "You want us to install what on the Exchange server?" (via Demo Day Wrapup) Stratified B-trees and versioning dictionaries -- A classic versioned data structure in storage and computer science is the copy-on-write (CoW) B-tree -- it...

Generating Audio UI for Android

By Peter Drescher
February 24, 2011

I just want reality to sound a bit more like science fiction ...

Never Give a Client Three Choices

By Spencer Critchley
November 24, 2010

In most design fields it's conventional wisdom that you should give a client three versions or "comps" of an idea, so they can choose their favorite, or maybe combine what they like best about two or all three of them....

Four short links: 27 September 2010 - Google Acquisitions, Good Ideas, Data Taxonomy, and Jukebox Firmware

By Nat Torkington
September 27, 2010

Google Acquisition Spending Spree (Venturebeat) -- Google is now on track to acquire a new company every two weeks this year. (via azaaza on Twitter) Where Good Ideas Come From (YouTube) -- this perfectly describes Foo. A Taxonomy of Data Science -- great first post on a new blog by data practitioners. Rockbox -- open source (GPL) firmware for...

Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 - Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

By Nat Torkington
September 3, 2010

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Four short links: 30 August 2010 - H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

By Nat Torkington
August 30, 2010

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

Four short links: 27 August 2010 - Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail

By Nat Torkington
August 27, 2010

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...

My Credo

By Peter Drescher
June 19, 2010

"I Promise Never To Program A Computer To Play Something I Can't"

Game Audio In The Cloud - Part 3 (Conclusion)

By Peter Drescher
June 3, 2010

Gameplay parameters are sent up to the server, the application running in the Cloud mixes the appropriate beeps and booms into the audio output buffer, which then streams the game soundtrack to your device. The data being transmitted up is small, the server has all the CPU power, memory storage, and data bandwidth you could ask for, and the download stream is like listening to a digital radio station.

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