The TVisionarium Sydney Festival banner:

“This is a list of tallest structures in the world, past and present of any type. Most of the tallest structures are television broadcasting masts, followed by a mix of the taller tower-type structures (like the CN Tower) and the taller high rise buildings (like the Sears Tower). Scattered among these are other structures including oil platforms, electrical towers, bridge towers, etc.”

Of particular interest to me was the Warsaw radio mast, which was the world’s tallest structure at 646.38 meters and collapsed in 1991 due to an error when carrying out maintenance on its guy ropes.

At the moment I am taking two distance education courses (Convex Optimisation and Statistical Machine Learning) which include video delivery through a Polycom video conferencing system. I assumed it used an ISDN link as we had to dial a phone number to connect to the remote site. However it turns out that in fact the Internet is being used (when I pulled up the advanced connection details today). The incoming H.263 video stream’s bandwidth is only 768kbps, which is simply not enough to read the contents of a normal whiteboard at the other end. I could not reconcile the dropped packets and low bitrate with an ISDN link, which would guarantee 2Mbit/s and no such loss in quality - turns out I was right. There are SmartBoards installed, but these haven’t been brought online yet. Apparently the software to make that happen cost the organisers $100,000! That’s unbelievable! Surely there must be cheaper alternatives. And if not, I’ll write one myself (soon)!

For reference, these are some good sites to learn about Pd and download loads of goodies to extend its functionality:

• The community-run Pd portal
  
• py/pyext: Python script objects (for MSP too)
• GridFlow A Multidimensional dataflow processing library for PureData and Ruby, designed for interactive multimedia (non-Win32 at the moment)
• Hans’ site
• The Webring
• The Graphical Interface for Pure Data allows one to create a front end to a Pd patch

I am in the process of creating a Visual Studio 2005 VC project/solution to supersede the antiquated command-line based Makefile compilation process. I hope this will draw more people to extending Pd and creating new/contributing to existing externals in a friendlier development environment!

1. If it is overcast outside, this will definitively confirm the possibility of rain.
2. If it is not overcast outside, you can witness the impending downpour before it arrives at your door. (This can be especially useful if you need to ride home by bicycle - like me!)

For Sydney, see:

• 128 km latest image
• or 4 image loop
• 256 km latest image
• or 4 image loop

An unusual example as I write this post:

I have said in the past:

“Since [the interface and therefore stub code] can change often in an experimental setting, re-generating/losing changes/etc can become a major pain.
Personally I’ve favoured lower level data handling since it’s more flexible. But then again, ICE, etc, throw in a hell of a lot of stuff (pre-built classes, servers, connection establishment routines, …) that can make creating a larger distributed system less of a frustrating task. I suppose if you can really nail down the interfaces and be sure that integrating their system [ICE] into one’s own, in the midst of other entities (eg: a 3D engine, …), will be at the very least possible (and hopefully a happy affair), it’s all good. Then again, there might be problems where such a ’server’ requires that it run/be called/cycled in such a way that is incompatible with something else’s structure/run loop, unless you hack up ICE, which may in the end require more effort.”

And is there really no way to avoid using Object Adapters?!