Recent blog entries for jtauber

London Python Meetup and FOWA

I'm in London this week and next for personal reasons but I'm taking the opportunity to attend FOWA tomorrow and Friday.

I'm also delighted to have a last minute gig talking about Pinax at the London Python Meetup tonight.

If you're going to be at the Python Meetup and/or FOWA, I look forward to catching up with you!

Syndicated 2008-10-08 10:25:36 (Updated 2008-10-08 10:25:38) from James Tauber

Photo Meme

I'm late to this meme because I haven't been on my laptop (with camera) for ages. But now that I'm traveling, here I am:

This is at Logan airport on my way to London.

Syndicated 2008-10-05 15:45:32 (Updated 2008-10-05 15:45:31) from James Tauber

Programming Languages I've Learned In Order

• BASIC (TRS-80 Model I)
• BASIC (TRS-80 Color Computer)
• 6809 Assembly
• AppleSoft BASIC
• 6502 Assembly
• BASIC (BBC Micro)
• Prolog
• Pascal
• Turbo Pascal (with OO extensions)
• C++
• C (yes, I did C++ before straight C)
• LISP
• Perl 4 (dabbled in 5)
• QBasic
• Scheme
• Java
• VisualBasic
• Python
• x86 Assembly
• Javascript

Those in bold are the ones I've worked with recently.

(note I haven't included XSLT or TeX although they are Turing complete. Nor things like dBase II and SQL)

(idea via Dougal Matthews)

UPDATE: I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I forgot javascript the first time around :-)

UPDATE: Added a couple more BASIC dialects and made current languages bold. You're wondering what I'm using Pascal for, right?

Syndicated 2008-09-28 11:52:55 (Updated 2008-09-29 08:52:40) from James Tauber

A Man's Gotta Do

For those of you who've been asking for A Man's Gotta Do (What A Man's Gotta Do) from Dr Horrible:

• A Man's Gotta Do 0.1 (With Vocal Lines)
• A Man's Gotta Do 0.1 (Backing)

Previous songs available at More Dr Horrible.

Syndicated 2008-09-27 16:54:06 (Updated 2008-09-27 16:54:07) from James Tauber

Why 13th Chords

As the background to my music theory is more classical in nature, it used to puzzle me when I saw jazz chords like C9, Bb11 or F13. I mean, I knew what a 9th, 11th and 13th note were but I wondered why you'd call a note a 9th rather than a 2nd, or a 13th rather than a 6th and so on.

After all, when you talk about chord, you're normally talking about notes independent of octave. If you describe something as a C7 chord, you're not saying anything about whether the E and Bb are in the same octave or not.

I can't remember when, but the breakthrough came when I realised that a 9th chord isn't just a major triad with the 2nd added, but one with the 2nd and 7th added, an 11th chord is one with the 4th and 7th added.

(just as an aside: the fact 2+7=9 and 4+7=11 here is an unrelated coincidence. An 11th is 4th+octave but due to the 1-based indexing used, you add 7 not 8)

Now yes, I've seen the theory books where they show a C9 as C+E+G+Bb+D and a C11 as C+E+G+Bb+D+F and a C13 as C+E+G+Bb+D+F+A but that really didn't help emphasize that it's the existence of the 7th that makes the the chord sound like (and be described as) a C9, C11 or C13 respectively instead of, say a Csus2, Csus4 or C6.

The 3rd and 7th are really the defining notes of a chord in Jazz, particularly comping on piano where you expect the bass to provide the root. So the final light went off when I saw the closing Jazz riff of Ben Folds Five's Underground notated. There were a bunch of triads that were marked as 13th chords. So, for example, the voicing Eb+A+D was marked as F13.

Note that that voicing has just the 3rd, 7th and 13th. The 13th is also a 6th but by calling the chord F13, it's making it clear the 7th is there as well which gives the chord a very different direction it wants to go. The 7th makes the whole chord want to resolve to a C, which gives the 13th/6th (the D) more of a suspended feel it doesn't have in an F6 chord.

I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too.

I know this is Jazz 101 but it was a breakthrough moment for me, anyway :-)

Syndicated 2008-09-23 06:45:58 (Updated 2008-09-23 06:46:00) from James Tauber

My Talk on Pinax at DjangoCon

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Including the famous Cloud27 live launch and what James Bennett described as the worst pun ever.

Syndicated 2008-09-16 10:18:26 (Updated 2008-09-16 10:18:29) from James Tauber

DjangoCon, Pinax and Cloud27

This weekend just gone was DjangoCon, quite possibly the best conference I've been to (and I've been to a lot). It is certainly the only one where I've attended a talk in every single session.

Congratulations to Rob Lofthouse for a tremendous job organizing it. And kudos too to Leslie Hawthorn and the rest of the Google team for being such excellent hosts. The A/V and the WiFi were (perhaps expectedly) the best I've ever seen at a conference.

It was wonderful hanging out with so many people from the Django community, both people I'd met before at PyCon and others I knew from email, blogs, IRC or twitter. It was particularly fun to meet Russ Keith-Magee after what must be 10-15 years (Russ went to highschool with my sister)

I presented a talk on the history and vision behind Pinax which ended with the (hopefully) surprise launch of Cloud27. The talk seemed well received and people seemed to especially like the live launch :-)

My favourite twitter response to my talk was: "Pinax is every idea I've ever had." Everyone but James Bennett laughed at my Dr Horrible reference. After giving the old line "When all you have is a hammer, all you see is nails", I added "the hammer is my Pinax". (Worse pun ever, Mr Bennett claims)

Clint Ecker wrote a wonderful article about my talk at Ars Technica Ars at DjangoCon: Build your own social network with Pinax although it's a bad photo of me :-)

Judging from the response and the people that talked to be afterwards, I'm very excited about Pinax in the future.

Huge thanks to the Pinax team and especially Greg Newman for putting work in to get Cloud27 ready for launch at the conference.

Syndicated 2008-09-08 14:33:33 (Updated 2008-09-08 14:33:34) from James Tauber

Back to Blogging

Longest blogging drought ever I think :-)

Was back in Australia, then back for just a few days in Boston before heading to Mountain View for DjangoCon. More in the next post on that...

Syndicated 2008-09-08 11:31:58 (Updated 2008-09-08 11:32:00) from James Tauber

n.b., etc.

Last week one of my colleagues asked me if I knew what "n.b." meant. "Of course, " I said. "It's short for nota bene, Latin for note well."

It had been used in a document from someone in the UK. Apparently n.b. isn't very common in the US. I asked my colleague if he knew what i.e. and e.g. meant. Of course he did.

So then I decided to do an experiment. I wrote up the following on my whiteboard:

• e.g.
• i.e.
• n.b.
• cf.
• q.v.
• viz.

They were six Latinate abbreviations I could think of off the top of my head, roughly in order of how likely I thought it was that my colleagues would (1) have ever seen them; (2) know the meaning of them; (3) use them themselves. (Yes, there are others like etc. and ibid. but the above were the six I thought of at the time)

Anyway, it turns out the people I asked in the office were familiar with and used i.e. and e.g. but none were familiar with n.b., cf., q.v. or viz.

Feel free to comment below on which of the six you (1) have seen; (2) know the meaning of; (3) would use.

UPDATE: Professor Conrad pointed out that c.f. should be cf. which I've corrected above.

Syndicated 2008-08-10 23:25:55 (Updated 2008-08-11 11:31:55) from James Tauber

Dr Horrible Ringtones

Thanks to James Bennett, I learnt how to make ringtones out of my MP3s.

So here is the Dr Horrible Main Title and the Bad Horse Phone Call as .m4r files which you load in to iTunes and sync with your iPhone.

• Bad Horse Phone Call Ringtone
• Dr Horrible Main Title Ringtone

(you may need to right click to download them)

Other songs I've done are available as MP3s from my post

More Dr Horrible

but they are too long to make into ringtones (they won't sync with the iPhone) so I have to pick which 30 second extract in each case to use. That page also has versions without vocal lines for use in Dr Horrible karaoke!

Enjoy! And go buy Dr Horrible from iTunes while you're at it :-)

UPDATE: Made the link to my existing MP3s clearer as at least one commenter missed it.

Syndicated 2008-08-06 20:21:37 (Updated 2008-08-07 00:57:09) from James Tauber