Jonathan Blocksom's Weblog

Today I went to a concert by Jim Riggs, the organist at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, CA. He was performing at a local private residence, the owner has a pretty spectacular Wurlitzer. He played a bunch of duets he's arranged for the organ and player piano, which was pretty neat. Here's a video of him doing something similar, although listening to this with speakers or headphones just can't compare to hearing it in person.

Another great part of the concert was watching the 1927 silent film Fluttering Hearts with Jim Riggs' live music accompanying it. The movie was fairly amusing and the live music really added to it.

One way I know it was a great concert is that I just wanted to go play music when I came home. I've found that hearing great live music always encourages people to want to go make some themselves in a way that recordings never can.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We received a tech support message from our online support request form yesterday with the following text (edited for privacy):

----
realname: Linda ******
email: *****@yahoo.com
subject: E-Mail
body: I need to send a news letter 8 pages out to folks 
on our list for a rabbit show. How do I do this?
----

This of course had nothing to do with our children's 3D modeling software. And our software has nothing to do with rabbits, in fact until this post that word never even appeared on our web site. I wasn't sure what to do and I was really curious about where this lady came from.

So I did some digging and found that she found our site by searching for "sending email tech support" on yahoo.com. We're currently the eighth result, don't ask me how. I can't say why she chose us over the other top 7, maybe she just liked our name.

I haven't responded to the email yet, in the past with random requests like this I've sometimes responded but I just don't know what to say. Though if anybody's interested in going to a rabbit show, I can probably hook you up with about 8 pages of information.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 11:59 PM | Permalink

I just discovered NodeBox, a really neat graphics programming tool for the Mac. It's based on Python and lets you easily write programs to generate 2D graphics. You can create PDFs or animate them and create QuickTime movies.

Tools like this are a great way to get kids interested in programming. The immediate feedback and visual rewards really let kids get into the programming aspect of it, incrementally increasing their program complexity to make more and more elaborate visuals. I could see tons of uses for this tool in math and science curriculums as well; for example, you could simulate an experiment, measure a real experiment, and then render the two results on top of each other.

Here's a screenshot of a program I was playing with, follow the link below to see it in action.

# NodeBox script to draw letters of a message in a sinusoid

import math

message = "NodeBox is neat"
period = 20

def setup():
    global frame
    frame = 0

def draw():
    global frame, message
    for i in range(len(message)):
        x = 100 + 20*i
        y = 150.0 + (i+1)*6.0*math.sin((i+frame)*3.14159/10)
        text(message[i], x, y)
    frame += 1

speed(10)

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 12:22 AM | Permalink