BradFuller

The idea of the FLEX Machine and a visit to Seymour Papert in the late 60’s encouraged Alan Kay to create “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.”  I don’t know how the name “Dynabook” came about, but it described an electronic book that could dynamically change. As the introduction says, the name was also about “the relationship of people to computers will itself also change.”

Come see Alan speak about the ideas of the Dynabook at the “40th Anniversary of the Dynabook“, on Nov 5th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I’ll be there!

Panelists:
- Alan Kay
- Charles Thacker
- Mary Lou Jepsen

alan kay, computer history museum, dynabook, personal computer, smalltalk, squeak

I was shocked to find out the Professor Allen Strange passed away in February of this year. I studied with Allen for a couple of years at SJSU and privately at his home when he lived here in Los Gatos, CA. He was a wonderful composer who explored the limits of electronic music and taught me to do the same. I’m sorry I was not able to see him at his recent concert here in San Jose. I talked to him on the phone about it, but was unable to make the concert.

He was much too young to pass and he will be clearly missed by all of us.

List of Works (pdf)
MatrixSynth
Wikipedia
Obituary

Environment variables in gentoo

Wanted to pass along a problem and solution encountered today with setting OPCODEDIR environment variable in gentoo (just in case other gentoo users search for a solution.)

I was receiving the warning:

WARNING: OPCODEDIR IS NOT SET

when envoking csound. Even though I set the variable in ~/.bashrc (confirmed by typing “set” in a terminal if using bash) it didn’t take. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. Apparently, Ubuntu has the same issue and I found that setting the variable in the file:
/etc/environment

did the trick.

How to install csound on gentoo

comzeradd has a quick recipe for installing csound on gentoo at csounds.com

computer music, csound, environment variable, gentoo

ARM announced at their developer’s conference a collaboration called the Linux Mobile Platform to enable development of portable computing devices for browsing, multimedia, wire/wireless Ethernet connectivity and better battery life. Since one of the six partners is Mozilla, focus on the Firefox web browser is a given. The integration of GStreamer for the multimedia framework is targeted for multimedia. But, since the platform is Linux and is open, anything is game.

This is great news for me because it provides the world another potentially capable hardware platform to support Squeak mobile computing. It may also provide the computing power for the software being developed at Viewpoints Research in their quest to create a new personal computing model.

If ARM and partners follow through, with the Viewpoints’ new software paradigm the journey to a truly portable Dynabook may be measurably closer.

The six partners are: Marvell, MontaVista, Mozilla, Movial, Samsung, Texas Instruments

Other Links:

• Squeak already runs on Linux, RiscOS and many other platforms: Download Squeak here
• ARM-Linux Developer Wiki
• Connected Mobile Computing at ARM
• TI and MontaVista pair up on Linux mobile computing

ARM, CMC, connected mobile device, dynabook, linux, linux mobile platform, mobile computing, personal computing, squeak, viewpoints research

Following up a previous scientific study (see my short blog) from Tom’s Hardware, Shelton compares the PC cooling capabilities of three international beers: Coors Light, Guinness and Franziskan.

Interesting. (no corrosion tests!)