Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 – Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

September 3, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Four short links: 30 August 2010 – H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

August 30, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

Four short links: 27 August 2010 – Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail

August 27, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...

My Credo

June 21, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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"I Promise Never To Program A Computer To Play Something I Can't"

Game Audio In The Cloud – Part 3 (Conclusion)

June 4, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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Gameplay parameters are sent up to the server, the application running in the Cloud mixes the appropriate beeps and booms into the audio output buffer, which then streams the game soundtrack to your device. The data being transmitted up is small, the server has all the CPU power, memory storage, and data bandwidth you could ask for, and the download stream is like listening to a digital radio station.

Game Audio In The Cloud, Part 2

May 10, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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When I talk about The Cloud (Capital T, Capital C), I'm talking about a currently fictional technology. Despite advertising claims and vaporware demonstrations at trade shows, The Cloud (as I envision it) does not yet exist ... but when it does, it will dramatically change the way we do business, listen to music, and play games.

Four short links: 25 March 2010 – Against Open Data, Singalong Selection, Library Release, and Twitter Analysis

May 10, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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Aren't You Being a Little Hasty in Making This Data Free? -- very nice deconstruction of a letter sent by ESRI and competitors to the British Government, alarmed at the announcement that various small- and mid-sized datasets would no longer be charged for. In short, companies that make money reselling datasets hate the idea of free datasets. The arguments...

R.I.P. — Doug Fieger (The Knack) – Honoring my friendship with music legend Doug Fieger

May 10, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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What's calling to me tonight is to honor my friend and colleague Doug Fieger, leader of the rock band The Knack who had a monster commercial hit with "My Sharona" in the late 70s.

Game Audio In The Cloud – Generated in the Cloud and streamed to your mobile headset

March 29, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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In 2002, at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mark "the Red" Harlan, then Chief Evangelist for a scrappy little start-up called Danger, Incorporated, demonstrated an early version of a wireless internet device called the "hiptop" (later known as the T-Mobile Sidekick). He explained that it was a prototype, costing many thousands of dollars to produce, then he navigated to the Notes application, typed in a message, hit enter, and waited a moment while the Note synced to the Danger servers via wireless connection. Then he put the device on the floor, and dropped a bowling ball on it!

Millions of Plastic Guitars Can’t Be Wrong

January 7, 2010 by Michael W. Dean  
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If you make a process easy enough, you can change the world. In 1995, two MIT graduates set out to make music-making easy. Now millions of people play their product, and the inventors are releasing the developer tools for free.

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