Cockroaches

You know, cockroaches are going to be soooo pissed-off with us when they take over the world.

Bloody hell! You want to know where the next generation of improvised hi-tech weapons are coming from? Look at what hackers are doing in war-zones!

Johnny Chung Lee :

Now, I could simply make a kurmudgenly claim that the quality of professional/research/academic work has gone down. But, I actually don't think that's true. In my opinion, what is happening is that the quality of independent projects are getting better.... fast. Which, I think resonates with this observation of a "DIY Revolution".

I love Hackney, London : A place that can contain everything from London Hackspace to The Last Tuesday Society.

This evening I took a look at the official Gbloink! page, and realized it was, er, pants.

Now I've got a video on YouTube and a couple of sets of gbloink!tunes up on SoundCloud, there was a danger that Gbloink! could look and sound quite respectable.

But the site itself was an embarrassment. (Count that as a BIG failure for GeekWeaver and for my sad lack of CSS skills. OK, my general resistance to web-design and CSS naivity is a large part of it; but if I'd had a working copy of GW, then I'd have been more tempted to tinker and try to improve matters.)

So I figured : I'm paying for hosting on Webfaction. I can have as many Wordpress blogs as I like. Why not put one to some use? I quickly discovered that Wordpress is formidably good these days. Very simple to set up on Webfaction. With a huge ecology of plugins that install themselves (I didn't know that!) And great templates.

It didn't take long to find a template I liked, pull the video from YouTube, install a SoundCloud plugin, and generally make a whole new-look for the old Gbloink! material.

So, I present: the new http://www.gbloink.com.

The controversial thing I've added is the Facebook "Like" button. I'm pretty conflicted about this. On the one hand, the purist in me doesn't like to give a company as evil as Facebook more power over the web, and my online existence. On the other, there is so clearly a wave of new infrastructure being constructed by Facebook and the other internet playas, and it's at least necessary to understand what's going on. And, anyway, playing with Wordpress plugins to engage the new web trends gives me an exhilarating sense of ... keeping up. :-P

A couple of questions you may be asking :

1) OK. But Gbloink! was written 13 years ago? What's with that? When are you going to get on and either a) write a new version or b) do something else of musical interest?

2) Hmmm ... thinking of moving *all* your blogs to WP, then, are you?

To which the answers are :

1) God knows! Last night I checked out London's mind-blowing OpenLabs' OpenNight which left me wildly inspired and a little bit overawed. These are hardcore open-source, experimental music geeks who do livecoding in Scheme, hack their own electronic instruments and even sing their explanations about using Bézier curves to model sound-waves. The previous time I went, one guy was DJing with mind-control!

Like I say, a bit overwhelming. I definitely want to get in with this, and maybe do a performance at some point; but not sure if I have anything awesome enough yet.

Still ... I'm starting to think :-)

2) Well, my immediate thought is OPTIMAES. The Ning site got flooded with spam. And now Ning plan to charge. Meanwhile it looks as if Wordpress have social network plugins. It's possible I can have most of what Ning gave me, in a space I have more control over, and am *already* paying for. So, it's likely that I'll experiment with migrating OPTIMAES there.

Keep you posted ...

A couple of posts ago I started wishing for a way to pull together songs from LastFM and Radio 3 etc. Today I find LastFM has an API and there's a HackDay on Sunday.

Probably too late to get into at this point. But London is awesome.