emergent redux

Welp, I updated the plugins page today, separating the vaporware from the downloadable ware. It's a little more honest about the chances of ever seeing Plark or Animal than it was previously. It also gives some names to some things that were just bouncing around my head. That seems to help a bit.

Hopefully I can find some time in the next few days to work on some of these projects. As always, my attention wanders from one project to another, but since I drag bits of ideas from one to the next I sometimes get some good cross-pollenation going.

Unfortunately, I've run into a bit of a setback. The screen-lid hinge on my laptop busted and it's off to Dell for repairs. Fortunately it's under warranty. I'm not that abusive to the machine, so I don't understand why it broke. My old laptop had a similar failure; the rotating bit somehow seized up so that attempting to open the lid stressed the metal bits until they'd had enough. I love that machine; even though I have 2 other (desktop) machines with comparable CPU performance, it's just so nice to be able to take it downstairs into the cool when it's blazing hot, or sit upstairs in the living room and enjoy the sun when it's mild, or drag it out to the local cafés when I need to avoid the net.distractions for a while.

We're talking about picking up an iMac in the near future, with the idea that I'll start doing some OS-X programming on it. I'm a little ambivalent about the idea — I feel like I don't need to go out of my way to invent more programming projects to split my time among, and I don't want to spend money on big-ticket toys while I'm out of work. On the other hand, I'm getting envious of a lot of the features I see meriko using on her wee iBook (which I'm using at this exact moment). I feel that Win9x/NT/2K were, on the whole, technically better than MacOS 8.x and 9.x, but OSX leapfrogs WinXP. The BSD core means that a lot of things that would be tedious or expensive to set up on a windows box are just there. Like, say, an ftp server as well as client. (But then meriko showed me iChat's Rendezvous-based ad-hoc chat session¹ which includes file transfer capability; who needs ftp?) So, anyway, I'm in favor of having a Mac of some flavor in the house that isn't meriko's primary machine. The 17" G4 iMac seems a reasonable balance of inobtrusiveness and bitchin-ness and portability. About the only thing wrong with it is that the video chipset won't do justice to Doom III when it comes out. I spent a little while looking at the state of cheap VST host software on the Mac, and there isn't much yet which corresponds to Mulch, though Plogue Bidule is supposed to get ported at some point. There are cheap and free minimal VSTi hosts, though not "virtual studios" as far as I can tell. Maybe I should just buy Cubase for OSX? Memo to self: GET A JOB.

That's all for now.

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¹ Einstein is supposed to have explained radio something-like-thusly: "Imagine a telegraph as a very long cat stretching across the country. You pull on the cat's tail in San Francisco and it yowls in New York City. Radio is just the same, only without the cat." iChat-Rendezvous is like using a chat server sans chat, or, rather, avec chat et sans serveur.

Posted by russell at September 3, 2002 04:30 PM