mono

Spent most of yesterday reinventing the wheel for XnaTouch (an awesome, awesome API on top of MonoTouch that makes this stuff way easier than maybe it should be), but it was worth it.

I'm not particularly interested in Objective-C for its own sake, but I want to be just like everyone else and make TEN BEELION DOLLARS on the back of the iPhone. I've been trying to play around with MonoTouch--which is, to borrow a technical term, really really cool--but it seems to require enough foreknowledge of Objective-C and Cocoa that I have to learn that first.

And I have a question. Well, two questions.

Question the first: How drunk were they when they came up with this insane language?

Question the second: What made the XCode developers decide they hated other people and wanted to punish them?

I had a guest article published today on Boycott "Boycott Novell!". Cue shameless self-promotion.

Also, somewhat unrelated: life is a lot nicer when you don't read Slashdot.

Soyeah. This is in part just to knock that picture of Richard Stallman out of the top spot on my page; I am instituting a "no scaring children" policy on my blog and shall sink that picture post-haste. But it's still a cool project, which is why I'm throwing it out there right now.

Anyway. Senior project for college is coming around, and after a couple of abortive attempts (like what the Drupal AppBar guy did between me getting turned down for my Google Summer of Code project and getting back to work on it for school--agh!), I've settled on a project: a remote music collaboration system that, for now, I'm calling WebSession. WebSession is intended to bolt into digital audio workstations like Ableton Live or Adobe Audition and more easily allow musicians to do their thing over the interwebs.

Originally found here, and re-captioned:

OK, so while I love Linux as a server environment, it gives me the creeping horrors on the desktop and I stick to Windows there. This means I need a terminal emulator, and a good one would be nice. I've used the old stand-by, PuTTY, for approximately two centuries. (Or about ten years, but who's counting?) It's very functional software: does pretty much anything you need. No complaints about that, and I'm grateful to Simon Tatham and company for making such handy software. But it's always had some very un-Windows behaviors, and they're a real pain. Some are understandable, although could be worked around (for example, Ctrl-C is used as an abort command on the terminal side of things, but if you're highlighting text, it's not exactly rocket science that you want to copy that text when you hit Ctrl-C) with a little thinking. Some are not, and after having eight different PuTTY windows on my toolbar¹ today, I had enough of this crap.

I dig a lot of electronic music, and I'm interested in the guts of the technology used to make it. I was looking around the interwebs a few minutes ago for a copy of the Virtual Studio Technology specification for audio plugins (used by Ableton Live, my digital audio workstation of choice) and stumbled upon something way cool: VST.NET, an implementation of the specification for use with .NET applications. Ihaven't checked out Mono for VSTs on Mac OS X, but I'm curious.