This Week’s Program: Nov 30 - Dec 4

It seems silly that we call a day “Cyber Monday.” Truly, all of our days are Cyber. I’ve picked up some new subscribers (Welcome) and I thought it’d be nice to remind everyone (including myself) what this newsletter is about.

This newsletter is about Living a Cyber Life™. Not so long ago I started a practice of writing and committing code every weekday. This newsletter is both a forcing function to make sure I keep on doing that and a means to compose and articulate my thoughts and goals for a given project. Every Friday, I recap what I’ve done and what I’ve learned. And heck who says we can’t have fun, too? Also, I compose this email in Emacs and with a git pre-push hook, publish it through TinyLetter. Drafting and publishing this email counts toward my code streak. Any accusations that I’m cheating will result in me feeling bad about myself more than I already do so please just don’t.

The focus of my attention for the past several weeks has been a repository called sonic-sketches, where I’m getting more familiar with Clojure development through the lens of Overtone, the audio environment and client for the SuperCollider synthesis engine.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving, but it’s over now and it’s time to shop and computer. This is going to be a long one. Put on your favorite Christmas music and let’s talk live coding for audio synthesis.

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The tentpole commit this week was all about getting away from that sleep-esque after-delay function. Last week, I mentioned a bit of a breakthrough with CIDER and nREPL. My REPL for sonic-sketches is now connected at all times in Emacs, and I’m getting much more comfortable with exploring the Overtone API and experimenting there (with headphones on). Now that I’m feeling more empowered with Clojure’s tools, I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding Overtone.

The fundamental atom of Overtone (and SuperCollider) is the Unit Generator, or UGen concept. UGens are the basic building blocks of synths and Overtone is all about using the composition capabilities of Lisp to construct large graphs of ugens. There’s a lot of ugens. It is overwhelming. I encourage you to watch Sam Aaron’s video that I linked, it’s a great introduction to all these concepts.

I’ve also begun some preliminary research into other audio programming environments. Extempore is an Open Source continuation of the Impromptu environment that uses a Scheme-like language for, um, “cyberphysical programming”. It makes sounds. Rad.

The flexibility about what is possibile with this kind of environment is maddening.

For now, I’m punting on committing really interesting sounds (I save that for REPL sessions) and focusing on the lifecycle of synths and the ability to programmatically start and stop them. This week I dug into Overtone’s event model. You can monitor events as they’re generated. In this commit, I’ve modified my play function from one that takes a duration to one that takes two fns: one that signals a synth and a callback for when Overtone destroys that synth (which appears to happen in this case when the synth has completed playing). I record to a wav file and when the destroyed event for the synth has completed, I stop the recording and call the fn.

Next week I want to explore the metronome tools of Overtone to construct bars, and explore event lifecycles in that context. I have a hunch I’ll be using this as an excuse to try core.async soon enough.

Let’s Encrypt!

This Thursday, Let’s Encrypt entered Public Beta. I want to encrypt! Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated Certificate Authority. It’s great stuff and I thought I’d give it a try since I do not understand SSL/TLS/any acronym that ends in “S”.

The first thing I did was follow the instructions. When I tried to run the letsencrypt client on my Mac I got all kinds of dangerous-looking warnings but went ahead anyway. The client runs on Python and has a huge amount of dependencies (and ncurses). My belief is, if you’re trying to make a widely-deployed utility for a variety of hosts, you should build your command line tools in something like Golang and statically link everything. There’s too many vectors for dissapointment the more dynamic a runtime is. So I decided to abandon that path and use Docker to run the client. Running Docker on a Mac is its own form of self-flagellation, but now the tools have gotten much better.

I decided to serve the website for Abstract Factory, the podcast hosted by myself and Casey Kolderup, with HTTPS. AbstractFactory.tv is a Jekyll site deployed to Amazon S3. In order to get my letsencrypt cert I had to configure AWS Cloudfront to front the S3 bucket. It was kind of an ordeal. Luckily, a fellow named Nathan Perry wrote up how he executed this and I followed his instructions with only a few total disasters along the way.

None of this requires me committing code, just futzing on the command line. All that changes is you put a little “s” after the “http” and hey look at that little 🔒. Now I just have to do another song and dance when the cert expires in 90 days.

A good week for computering. I would love your feedback and thoughts, and don’t forget to tell your friends and followers to subscribe.

Thank you for reading!
⚡ Mark