Monthly Archives: December 2010

The BigBoxoCo Disco Party: Why Segmentation is Good

As the fresh­ly brewed cof­fee enters my mouth, I expe­ri­ence my first glimpse of con­scious­ness for the day. “Where am I?” I mut­ter, in bro­ken English. The gray walls around me slow­ly come into focus, lit by the flick­er­ing of a long-in-the-tooth flu­o­res­cent bulb. The top half of a man’s face appears over the top […]

New Song — Spelunkatronis

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this track, oth­er than that it is one of my first songs that actu­al­ly feels some­what fin­ished. I had a lot of fun mak­ing this one. In par­tic­u­lar, I fell in love with Ableton Live’s Collision instru­ment and the infi­nite vari­ety of bell-like sounds that it […]

C++ Streams & Typedefs: Be Charful

The C++ type­def key­word is indis­pens­able in many sit­u­a­tions, espe­cial­ly for writ­ing portable low-lev­­el code. However, in some cir­cum­stances it can cause trou­ble, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to func­tion over­load­ing. Consider the fol­low­ing C++ tem­plate class: tem­plate <type­name T> struct foo­bar {     foo­bar( con­st T foo ) : foo_( foo ) {} […]

New Song — Tecate Plus

This song is a lit­tle bit new­er; I made it some­time in ear­ly 2010. I can’t cite any spe­cif­ic inspi­ra­tion in its mak­ing, but as the title might sug­gest, alco­hol had some­thing to do with it. Really, I think that this song was just the result of my recent acqui­si­tion of a legit­i­mate copy of […]

New Song — Arabesque

I made this song a cou­ple years back, most­ly due to inspi­ra­tion from the demoscene. I was also lis­ten­ing to a lot of Commodore 64 music at the time (both clas­sics and mod­ern orig­i­nals com­posed for the SID chip). The MOS Technology SID chips used for audio syn­the­sis in the C64 were extreme­ly advanced, and […]

The Terror of the Long Comment

A code com­ment can be a won­der­ful thing. It can offer a gem of con­text around a quirky bit of code that will make the read­er’s life eas­i­er for years to come: // Fields c and d are inten­tion­al­ly switched in ver­sion 3 of the // pro­to­col; see RFC 2324 S 12. fields.push_back( a ); fields.push_back( […]