The Barnes Family

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design—it’s a community and a conference, held in Monterey each year. Their tag line is “ideas worth spreading”, and they publish videos of many of the short (under 20 minute) talks from the conference each year. This one is about music, and shows some work from MIT’s Media Lab that makes music much more accessible to everyone.

I came across this (thanks, Stephanie!) this afternoon: it’s a group of people who get together to explore home-made musical instruments, many of them combinations of mechanical and electrical or electronic components. Some of them are played in conventional ways, some make music under computer control, and some combine multiple techniques. 

What’s nice about this is that it describes a group of people who get together to share their ideas, and to have a good time together. It’s a long way from a conventional concert, but just as rewarding, and perhaps more so.

There’s a lot going on in electronic music—tonight the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (that’s right) is playing and I’m hoping to go. There’s also a group in the Bay Area that get together regularly to learn about electronics, computing and music. A week ago I went to a talk at UC Santa Cruz that presented some algorithmic music—I’ll try to post separately about that.

As a tool to learn about Django and Python, I spend the last few days building a new site based on a sort of extended blogging model. It covers my consulting interests, and is completely styled in CSS, with its own RSS feed (which you can access directly here). In the past I’ve written about content management and LAMP - there’s a new generation of web frameworks emerging that have taken a lot of the learning of past systems. Django is one of these. It’s built in Python, which provides a huge variety of built-in classes to support almost anything you might want to do, and it interfaces to a range of relational databases. I’m using SQLite, which is an amazingly small and capable database that requires no configuration at all.The total size of the code for this site is about 250 lines combining templates, database models, and the logic that drives the site. Everything else comes courtesy of the Django developers and the power of Python.