I have a decent pre-Alpha version of my audio analysis software running. It displays a real-time FFT plot from any supported audio input source. Pre-Alpha in this case means non-feature complete, but fairly solid, crash and leak free. The pic shows data being displayed on a labelled plot with the settings window up and displaying the current settings. Through the magic of Cocoa, changes to the sliders adjust the plot in real-time allowing easy setup for different sound sources. I have kinda written this software before, but in assembler on a Commodore Amiga. Luckily the Mac OS comes with a built in vector processing lib and though my G4 is hardly a Cray, it does a pretty good job from Objective-C using threads to bury the sound capture, and regular old events to perform data analysis and screen plotting. Any enquiries about this software can be directed to Highland Innovation Centre Limited in Scotland.

Remember the ad … guy goes “I smell a Hemi!” then jumps out of his car to look under the dustsheet covering a dodge on a transporter …

Yeah, you guessed it, I managed to reenact the part of the ad where the dustsheet catches on the windshield of the moving car and the guy can’t see.

Yep, it was a big piece of plastic and I managed to drive right into it at 70 mph on the Houston Beltway driving to work. Sucks. It was really scary because there was a slap of plastic and the entire windshield just went opaque. Slap! Just like that! And it really covered the whole windshield. I swore, panicked for half a second, then wound the window down and drove for a mile with my head out the window. Managed to pull the mess off my windshield at the toll plaza at Westheimer.

Scary!

I reprocessed my Paris vacation pictures to be a bit brighter. Fixed the ‘Made with a Mac’ logo also.

Click on Paris Vacation Pictures to go directly to the new pictures. You might want to hit ‘refresh’ to clear out your cache if you already looked at the previous upload.

p a r i s v a c a t i o n 2 0 0 6

Travel day, and First Day in Paris

Notre Dame Cathedral and Eiffel Tower

Cemetery Pere Lachaise and Musee d’Orsay

Invalides and the Louvre

La Madeleine and St Chapel

Sacre Coeur and Montmartre

Catacombs, St Sulpice and St Germain

All these destinations a photographed at my paris vacation pages on my website.

We visited Invalides and the Louvre. Pictures are up here.

Hope you like them.

The first three days of my Paris Vacation are posted on my web-site. Click on www.jonathanwatmough.com and follow the portfolio link on the lefthand side of the page, then click Paris Vacation.

The remaining pages are in progress.

Finally, I fixed up my old 1990′s era web page into something a bit more contemporary looking. The old page, above, has become the new page below.

Safely back in Houston after a lonnnnggggg, lonnnnngggg 10 hour+ flight from Paris. Had a great time apart from getting sick with a bad cold/cough for the last few days, but still managed to go out despite that. Even though I was generally trashed by the afternoon.

Pictures will be up somewhere, soon. ;-)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Instead of relying on users to browse to the page and look for new content, RSS uses a feed of links, called an RSS Feed to identify when new content has been added to a web-site.

This allows a new breed of slim-line web browser called a News Reader. A great example is shown in the picture. NewsFire is a brilliant little application that allows users to subscribe to RSS Feeds and to continuously track when new stories become available.

For web-sites like Slashdot and Digg, which are used by many people, and have fairly unpredictable posting frequencies, a news reader allows you to read the stories when they appear, rather than fruitlessly rescanning Slashdot every 5 minutes, like some of … errrr, scratch that!!

Here’s a great post about how Google PageRank works.

In summary, the number of pages on a site adds up and gets distributed to the pages that the page links point at. So, I just contributed a small amount of page rank to web workshop. Cool.

Things you can do to improve your page rank, which governs how high your web-site appears in Google results, include planning the way you link carefully, and having plenty of content … the kind of content that other people link to.