Music Patterns

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As I believe I have mentioned before I find that some of the ideas I have encountered in software engineering can be helpful in my music journey. On my music blog I talk about applying the concept of design patterns to the music creation process i.e. from composition, arrangement to mixing , mastering and publishing. Soup to nuts.

I specifically write about a way of doing an intro to a tune that permeates an idea across the tune all the way to the end. Some of this is based on stuff that I know I have listened to , some of it is I’m sure on stuff that I have listened to but not consciously aware of , is anything really new ?

This pattern has helped me with one of my major issues and that being having a sense for the entire tune.

Here is the link:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2007/01/music-patterns.html

Some of you all may relate, or at least find it interesting.

Discussion of applying patterns to music I expect hopefully will carry on here.

Music Exec pirate offspring

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In case James didn’t see this one, caught it on my lawyer’s blog , bloged about here on my music blog:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2006/12/its-okay-if-your-dad-is-music-exec.html

sorry for the run around , music stuff I put on that blog but since at least James covers the RIAA pretty decently I thought it was relevant to point it out.

For those Smalltalkers out there that are music obscessed like me I think this post may be interesing:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2006/12/land-of-free-vsts.html

I started covering the world of free VST (Virtual Studio Technology). Great time to be doing recording from podcasting to full music production. There are ton of real high quality signal processing plugins out there which can be integrated into your audio recording software which btw includes Audacity. For Audacity you will need the VST enabler plugin as a pre-requisite.

I plan to specifically cover those VST plugins I use in my album project. The article does provide a link to a number of plugins.

Enjoy.

Podcasting the NYC Smalltalk meetings.

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Recently I was asked by Joe Backansas, and Joe forgive me if I have slaughtered your name, if I would consider podcasting the NYC Smalltalk meetings. In his words that “would really be cool”. Then a few weeks later James Robertson , which you all know very well, inquired as well.

Well, I’m swamped but with regards to this, things were just falling in place. I recently purchased a new PC to do be able to handle professional level hard disk recording. My hard disk recording software Adobe Audition recently won an award at a Podcaster’s conference. I have been listening to a podcast on how to podcast using Adobe Audition and I certainly could use exercising my sound engineering chops.

So I will be giving this a shot.

In my music blog I talk about some of the obstacles involved and how I expect those will be conquered.

I will report back and hopefully have a podcast to share fairly soon. Our next NYC Smalltalk meeting is actually tonite.

-Charles

http://www.monteirosfusion.com

Presentation: More is better baby

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Give me more classes is what Andres Valloud says. He will shows us how more classes can in some cases equate to better Smalltalk performance.

Andres will be providing us with an encore presentation of his recent OOPSLA presentation.

The next meeting will be Wednesday November 29th, 2006. It will be the last for this year since we will be taking a break for the holidays.

Same place except its on the 11th Floor and our regular same time.

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 11. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangents that come up.

—————————————————————————————————————————-

The Presentation

The abstract:

This presentation shows how to substantially increase the performance
of Smalltalk programs by creating more classes to take advantage of
polymorphism. An improved implementation of the well-known message
match:, using this and other techniques, can run up to twice as fast
as the current inlined implementation VisualWorks Smalltalk includes.
In this particular case, creating more classes is shown to be so
powerful as to become preferable to heavy use of identity checks on
immediate objects by a margin of up to 20% on average. In addition,
non-inlined implementations compare quite well to the existing inlined
implementation of match:. While they can run faster in some cases,
their overall performance falls behind by no more than a factor of 2.

This is a quick summary of chapter 3 from my book currently being
written. It is due to be published in 2007.

The bio:
Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding Contest, and
he was a presenter at OOPSLA 2006 as well. Presently, he works as a
consultant at JP Morgan.

—————————————————————————————————————————

See you all there.

Charles

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MonteirosFusion

NYCST – Wednesday’s presentation postponed till next week

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due to the upcoming heavy rains on Wednesday, the fact that a lot of
our members drive including our presenter which is coming from deep
Jersey, the fact that the 18th also happens to be one of our regular’s
birthday which he will be spending with his immediate family, we shall
be postponing our presentation till next Wednesday the 25th which will
be in direct conflict with OOPSLA

we apologize for any inconveniences

BTW, anybody else that has a shrink wrapped Smalltalk application that they would like demo please send me email.

thanks

the management
NYC Smalltalk

Debut in iTunes

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Jonraney2No its not another Smalltalk tutorial series although it would be good to see more of those spring up but rather I’m plugging my friend and composition teacher Jon Raney. Jon is collaborating on a my project i.e. my music project. Its not all that Jazz, more like World Fusion but probably more like Monteiro’s fusion . I have ordered an intense PC to do the hard disk recording and sound engineering. That’s coming next week.

If you all like Jazz or even if you think you don’t but like piano music check out Jon’s CD. Its got a bit of everything there from ballads, to blues to Samba infusions.

-Charles

Dimeola in Gotham

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I went to the Al DiMeola concert in Manhattan last nite. DiMeola has a new album and its great. Its called Consequence of Chaos and its available certainly at Amazon’s but also at Telearc the publisher.

I blogged about my experience at the show here.

Building a successful shrink-wrap application using Smalltalk

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Mark Pirogovsky, a frequent visitor to NYC Smalltalk , will provide us with a presentation on his experiences building shrink wrapped Smalltalk applications. He has actually worked on three large shrink wrapped ST apps.

He will specifically be using his current application as an example.

Check out: http://www.aggflow.com

For bio and background checkout:

http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/Mark+Pirogovsky
http://profiles.yahoo.com/mpirogovsky

Date:

Wednesday , October 18th, 2006

6:30 pm Open house

7:00 pm – Presentation

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 8. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .

The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangets that come up.

See you ALL there.

-Charles

Presentation: and the Winner is

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Hi all. Andres Vallound , one of our members here at NYC Smalltalk and the recent winner of the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 coding contest will be presenting. He plans on showing us what it took to win the contest. Should be fun. As always we will also meet after the presentation for some beers and etc and continue the discussions there at La Vigna, the restaurant right inside of the New Yorker hotel around the corner from the presentation.

Some details here:

Date & Time

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

Open house — 6:30 PM

Presentation — 7:00 PM – approx 8 PM

Drinks and Food — after at La Vigna

Directions can be found on our web site.

Abstract

This presentation describes an approach to the coding
contest at Smalltalk Solutions 2006. Many deep abstraction techniques
are put to use to deliver a framework of expression that is extremely
easy to change and maintain. Part playing video games and part
introspective, this strategy was awarded first place in Toronto.

Bio

Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He recently won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding
Contest, and has been accepted as a presenter at OOPSLA 2006.
Presently, he works as a Smalltalk consultant at JP Morgan.

A great past season

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I think of our seasons here at NYC Smalltalk to run from September to June. July and August have proven to difficult to meet and we do take a break in December though sometimes our schedules get pushed so that we still end up presenting during the first week of December.

We had a great 2005 – 2006 season, we had everything from Sunit testing to a Ruby/Smalltalk presentation. We also met 9 times i.e. we had a full schedule and not once did I have to present We had good vendor support, and support from individuals like Carl Gundel that made the trip from Boston to present.

A rundown of this past season can checked out here:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ocit/blogView?searchCategory=community

This season should be as interesting. We have two new presenters right off the gates. Andres Valloud who will present on his experiences in winning the Smalltalk coding contest at Smalltalk Solutions 2006 and Mark Pirogovsky who will be presenting a demo of a engineering application written in Smalltalk. More details soon on those. We also may have an old friend to NYC Smalltalk come and visit us again, that being Eric Clayberg of Instantiations whom I cornered at Smalltalk Solutions this past April in Toronto. We have a decent number of VAST developers and customers that would like to hear the skinny on Instantiations effectively taking over the VAST line. Synchrony Systems also expressed interest in presenting. I also tried to recruit a known Squeaker, this guy lives in Boston so its do-able as Carl has proven but sure its a hike. He kind of said , “I’ll call you” and so I wait. Eric lives in Boston as well but he is a vendor so I have less pity. We shall see. Back to Squeak, I sort of feel bad that we under represent Squeak here. I welcome any Squeaker that wants to present to let me know.

Recently, an old Smalltaker friend of mine that had surely moved to the dark side dropped me a note remarking that it was good to see me still involved with Smalltalk and NYC Smalltalk. Well, I personally certainly have had my stints with Java but luckily really never stopped working with Smalltalk and I am happily fully employed in Smalltalk for a decent while. As far as the group well it has been around certainly since at least 94 and we have never stopped meeting. Sure some years were leaner than others but things are looking pretty good for Smalltalk from where I see it. VisualWorks for one is soooo much better, awesome really. The VW community is the most active I have ever seen it. Cincom is doing well. Squeakers are working on all sorts of nifty things.

What was particularly nice this past season was to see so many new faces to the group. Maybe this year we can get to see some of the old, old faces we have not seen in a while.

To keep abreast of our schedule folks can subscribe to our newsfeed. I will also post to comp.lang.smalltalk and to the VWNC list. Finally, we have a Yahoo group registering there also provides the advantage of having access to presentations that been made available to us by the presenters.

Here’s our newfeed:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/ocit-rss.xml

Joining our Yahoo groups happens here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nycsmalltalk/

Our next presentation is in September, date to be announced most probably the 13th and full details of Andres presentation will be made as soon as I can confirm the availability of the venue.

See you all soon.

-Charles