UPC Sun Campus Ambassador: braindumping my SCA experience :)

I was thinking on posting my recent findings on the field of java music, in particular I've been playing with these two java joys:

My major surpise was seeing these two projects being demonstrated on this year's JavaOne ! Have a look at the awesome JavaOne 2k8 schedule and seek out for TS-5263:

Would you like to create Java™ technology-based programs that play or create music but don’t know where to begin? JFugue is an open-source API that enables you to program music and musical tools without worrying about the details of MIDI. It opens the door to more-advanced music programming and exploration. JFrets, an open-source project that builds on top of JFugue, is an application that can be used to interactively teach guitar by displaying note names and finger positions, playing music in real time, and producing guitar tabs.

This session starts with JFugue, explaining the motivations behind the API and illustrating just how easy it makes music programming. It then delves deeper into JFugue, introducing a variety of code and examples that demonstrate microtonal music, rhythm creation, reading from and writing to external musical devices, graphical front ends, and more.

The session then takes a look at JFrets, describing how it uses JFugue as the groundwork for a more advanced application, followed by technical details about some of JFrets’ music-oriented features, such as the implementation of pull-offs and hammer-ons and the interactive fretboard.

With plenty of code samples and generated music, this session promises to rock!

I'm thinking about reproducing some points of this techtalk on UPC... anyone interested ? :)

Since the Sun SPOT kit fell in my hands, I got an idea that I'm sure that many people had before, but I have not seen any posts on it:

Extend the sound expressiveness of an electric guitar attaching SunSPOTs to it

As one image is worth 1000 words and I don't want to bore you with a lengthy explanation, here is the idea, one SunSPOT on the headstock of the guitar:

And the other one on the body, on a zone that does not disturb the player while he is performing.

This idea has been closed on the back of my head on the past months when quite recently, I had the pleasure to see something closely related by a MIT research group under the name of "HyperInstruments", thanks to Duke Listens! blog.

Apart from the astounding brain music demo, Tod Machover team did amazing hacks to improve traditional instruments, and I bet that they use some kind of accelerometers in their hyperinstruments

So here it is, using SunSPOTs with an instrument, you can add some interesting extras to your musical instrument:

1. GuitarSPOT gestures: Interact with computer using gestures. Some examples are:
1. Using quick movements to instruct the computer that you wish to replay some part of the song you're working on (practice mode)
2. Increase volume or any setting you can think of without leaving your guitar aside
3. Interact with lights on a scene as you move: the guitar player becomes a lightJ too
4. Link your movements to a 3D virtual representation: live guitarist avatar ?
2. GuitarSPOT effects: Changing the way your guitar sounds as you move it
1. Elaborated movements that modify the sound as you're playing with several effects (like a pedal does but with your body)
2. Vibrato emulation
3. Tremolo emulation
3. GuitarSPOT collaborative: Interact with third party guitar players via 802.15.4 radio on SPOTs: Guitarists mesh network, redefining the "play along" concept with many guitars

It is a well known fact that every guitarist has its own so-called signature licks. But what about GuitarSPOT signatures ? Let's see if we can see this happen in the future...

So you feel attracted by the idea ? Do you want to join to GuitarSPOT project ? No guitar experience needed ! By now it's in brainstorming phase, you're welcome to post your comments ;)

This time I did the techtalk on a non-conventional place: on the lunch room... I used doodle to let people vote on the best schedule for them. Turned out that the most voted hour was lunch time :)

So I bought pizzas and since the lunchroom requires no formal permission to bring food, I decided to give the techtalk in it... btw this unusual place to give talks was really convenient to attract people's attention: sure, there were about 10 people, but almost 20 around were seeing us, in fact, some of them approached to ask what was all about :) Felt like googlish (pearhaps sunish too?) work environment: fun, food and tech together :)

Here you can see a proud owner of a new Sun T-shirt :)

Jokes aside, most of the audience was aware about virtualization idea but few of them tried out XEN nor xVM. I stressed the fact that xVM is not just a XEN fork or port, it's much more thanks to other solaris technologies around it: ZFS, for instance, and DTrace xpv::: provider being one of the most interesting teches around xVM.

Regarding Zones, some basics were explained while I encouraged people to try out Indiana as it comes out soon, or give it a try to RC2 for the impatients (or those who want to hunt and report bugs) :)

Just to summarize on the first sentence of this post:

I'm happy with today's NetBeans 6 tech talk :)

This nearly 1h talk was quite rewarding, people were interested on the NetBeans features for their current work (they're undergoing a programming project this semester: PROP).

I happen to have done this same project on the past course, so I managed to mix the demonstration about NetBeans features with my own past experience on the subject: suggesting ways to work using Developer Collaboration, VCS's, Swing GUI builder, etc...

I found really surprising the fact that there's still lots of students that do not use a VCS for their programming projects... IMHO, it's crucial to use it to be productive in a collaborative project, isn't it ?

At the end I asked how many of them were gonna make the switch from Eclipse or others to NetBeans and there were lots of raised hands there :)

In addition, I submitted a poll on the faculty forum asking about the preferred IDE to work with. They're still many people using Eclipse (more than NetBeans):

*UPDATE*: Here are the slides

IDE	usage percent	votes
NetBeans	14%	[ 12 ]
Eclipse	32%	[ 27 ]
Emacs	1%	[ 1 ]
Vim	18%	[ 15 ]
UltraEdit, ed, jedit, notepad, textmate... (others)	35%	[ 29 ]

Totals votes : 84

Fiberparty is a computer party organised by people on our faculty on a yearly basis.

As there are several talks on this I proposed a couple of them: (see ZFS and SunSPOTs listed there).

I used the slides from Eric Kustarz which were very useful. I also explained some personal experiences as a UNIX sysadmin regarding filesystems (LVM+RAID) while introducing the ease and convenience of ZFS operation. People were specially interested and asked a few questions about snapshots and clones.

The few ones who attended to sun spot technology techtalk were really interested on this tech, they were specially curious about the accelerometer integrated on the eDEMO board.

At the end I gave them sun T-shirts for the best SunSPOT ideas (I did a little brainstorming session), and the winner was:

"Using SunSPOTs for fluid dynamics study"

Just imagine the following scenario: several SunSPOTs enclosed on a hermetic enclosures transmitting seawave parameters via 802.15.4 integrated radio, which means: realtime sea status, cool, isn't it ? :)

Last but not least, the organization (fiberparty crew) did their best to announce the event broadcasting it on the event's radio (ART radio), kudos to you people !

My first techtalk as a SCA, I chose DTrace because I felt really intrigued by its features. Being a highly technical subject I targeted my talk to a potentially interested audience: PhD students, teachers and sysadmins on DAC.

The (semi-catalan) slides I used to present DTrace were heavily based on public resources such as the official BigAdmin page about DTrace and the interesting talk titled "DTrace review" by Bryan Cantrill:

There were nearly 15 people PhD HPC people, really interested on DTrace features for their day to day work, for instance, there were some people from BSC, they seemed to enjoy the talk and were very participative.

In fact, there were people that were interested about specific DTrace topics such as the DTrace FreeBSD port status as well as the polemic Apple DTrace implementation issues.