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Comment Graph of web site third party dependencies (Score 4, Interesting) 98

I built a script to generate a graph of third-party resources a web page loads, which often represent advertising and tracking (sample output for Spiegel Online, a German newspaper).

I also wrote a blog post about how advertising and tracking make sites slow (in German) that contains even more graphs from when I ran the script in January 2013.

Comment Re:Oops, forgot the C compiler part. (Score 1) 38

This page asserts that "Xcode 4 is a free download for all members of the iOS and Mac Developer Programs.", continuing "Sign in to your account to begin the download." and according to Apple, an account costs 99$/year.

Maybe I am missing something big here, for example "free" meaning "free" as in "free beer if you buy a subscription", but I have since suggested installing Debian. Proper package management makes it vastly easier to install and develop software.

Comment Re:libglitch and making music a with C compiler (Score 1) 38

The glitter.py script is your friend; it just outputs the audio bitstream. You can pipe that into sox but I wouldnt know how to capture the output of this in Windows *SCNR*.

Working example that outputs 16 seconds of the track "sidekick" (128000 = 8000 * 16): ./glitter.py `cat tracks/sidekick.glitch` | head -c128000 | sox -c 1 -r 8000 -t u8 - sidekick.wav

Comment Oops, forgot the C compiler part. (Score 2) 38

Before IBNIZ, viznut was using a C compiler to, well, discover minimal music. You should read his paper regarding algorithmic composition using small programs. und check out my repository of formulas for C programs that generate sound.

People without easy access to compilers (I met a gal a few days ago who had old OS X and no 99$ to spare for a dev account) should still check out a track from the repository as wave file to get an impression of the style.

I also wrote a program generating a crude chiptunes version of the IT crowd melody (of course, the melody is not algorithmically generated, but rather encoded in the source, feel free to consider that cheating).

Comment libglitch and making music a with C compiler (Score 4, Interesting) 38

I wrote something similar to IBNIZ, yet vastly simpler, a composing software called glitched (needs pygame 1.9.1). The forth variant I use has no subroutines or recursion and is not even turing complete and the stack has only 256 fields. However, it is compatible with that of several other implementations (see README). Like IBNIZ, it has live editing and stack visualisation.

It is important to note that sound made with this kind of tools is not limited to chiptunes. There is a video of an older version of glitched, doing Karplus-Strong-string synthesis.

(Apologies in advance to the users of a totally unrelated glitch library, which is also written in python. I have met one of it's developers last night and we agreed insane troll logic dictates a merger of our two projects to rectify the namespace collision. I may have to bring that up again when he is sober.)

Comment Re:Rewrite in C/C++ (Score 1) 142

There is a project called Minetest-c55. It is not as featureful as Minecraft, but written in C++ (using Irrlicht) and licensed under the GPL2 (or – as I remember – at your option, any later version). You can check it out on Bitbucket.

Disclaimer: I maintain a fork called Minetest (Minetest Delta) with some added features (new block types etc.), which can be found on GitHub. Look at the screenshots.

Comment Re:Limitations of Dead Tree (Score 1) 198

Used to love XKCD.

Me too, I think the noise ratio is going up for at least a year. But then he is not at NASA anymore, so he probably does less math stuff. I think another problem is that honest criticism is not taken into account -- actually I asked Randall on IRC and he said that he fears getting obsessed with quality and prefers not worrying. While I see that this might be enjoyable, I think a little more thought couldn't be that damaging; just compare his approach to the Debian/OpenSSL disaster to my one to see what I mean.

Censorship

Submission + - The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany

erlehmann writes: "This week, the two big German parties ruling Germany in a coalition have had the final talks on their proposed internet censorship scheme: Under the disguise of fighting child pornography, DNS queries for sites on a list shall be given fake-answers that lead to a site with a stop sign. The list itself is maintaned by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt).

German Blog Netzpolitik (literally "net politics"), details the history of the censorship plan and the protest movement that has formed over the course of several month. Over 128k citizens have signed a petition protesting the law, yet to no avail."

Comment IRC is obsolete (Score 1) 360

Unless you are looking for massive scalability (as in: 500 users in a single chat room), Jabber / XMPP can handle everything better than IRC. There are things like automagic contact lists (have everyone in your department on the list, centrally administrated), working encryption, publish-subscribe ... and of course the XMPP standard is easy to extend, as it's XML based.

Comment Re:Pidgin (Score 2, Informative) 360

considering that its been around for 5 years, the answer may not surprise you - or anyone for that matter: yes it is. i know only of one reliable way to crash it and that was a problem with the xmpp specification and has since been fixed. even running svn - which i do - does not necessarily mean there will be any instabilities.

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