Posts by Tags

Sonic Pi

Writing a C extension for Ruby in 2016

10 minute read

Published:

Now that Ruby has crested the hype cycle, settled down and taken out a mortgage, you’d expect the posts around the community to be more about big business concerns. Whilst that might be true, I’d like to row against the tide by telling you about the fun I had figuring out how to write my first C extension - fast_osc - and how I made Sonic Pi 10x faster in the process.

Neutron Accelerators and Drum Machines with Sonic Pi

8 minute read

Published:

Working with Sonic Pi one of the exciting things about being able to code music is the potential for using algorithms. For the non-technical reader, I like to think of algorithms like following a recipe. You might start with the same ingredients but the order in which you do things can affect to outcome.

archive

Getting data from PDFs with JRuby

2 minute read

Published:

There are many solutions for getting data from pdfs. I’m going to describe how to use the excellent Java library PDFTextStream by Chas Emerick (of Clojure fame) to get data out of tricky pdfs.

hardware

heroku

Compiling packages from source on Heroku using buildpacks

3 minute read

Published:

(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)

Using OpenVPN from a Heroku dyno

1 minute read

Published:

(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)

jazz

10,000 hours - as told by jazz musicians

4 minute read

Published:

In a 1993 paper by Anders Ericsson, he was one of the first to make the claim that mastery of a skill took around 10 years (about 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice.

roland

ruby

Writing a C extension for Ruby in 2016

10 minute read

Published:

Now that Ruby has crested the hype cycle, settled down and taken out a mortgage, you’d expect the posts around the community to be more about big business concerns. Whilst that might be true, I’d like to row against the tide by telling you about the fun I had figuring out how to write my first C extension - fast_osc - and how I made Sonic Pi 10x faster in the process.

Getting data from PDFs with JRuby

2 minute read

Published:

There are many solutions for getting data from pdfs. I’m going to describe how to use the excellent Java library PDFTextStream by Chas Emerick (of Clojure fame) to get data out of tricky pdfs.

vs880