Continuing the PEAL-related hackpact hacking, today saw the realization of the OSC protocol that the installation will use to communicate with the Processing visualization. As a testbed, this also entailed a Python script (making use of ixi's great simpleosc) to emulate the behaviour of the installation when it's in place - generating events such as clock ticks, bell chimes and aleatoric changes.

Coming from recent work in C++ and perl, it's continually surprising how things in python seem to just work - and moreover, how readable and maintainable the resulting code is. I saw a comment by somebody recently describing Perl as a "read only" language, which can be pretty on the money...

I'm out in the country for the next few days, mostly away from technology, so the next few hackpact entries will be manual hacks, broadcast via iPhone twitpics/twitvids - if signal reception permits.

My iPhone Developer License materialized this morning. After a final resentful mutter about the inherent unpleasantness of being asked to pay to develop for a third-party platform, I starting hacking up the #hackpact day 1 OpenFrameworks code to communicate over OSC with SuperCollider - creating a bouncing, throwable and tippable particle system which remotely generates sound effects as particles collide. Latency is low, render rate is high, and it kind of feels like the ADC price tag is already justified. Principles, shminciples.

tech notes: as mentioned in the openframeworks forums, it's necessary to download the oscpack source and replace the headers+library in the openFrameworks distribution with a fresh code tree, which is then compiled afresh for the iPhone ARM architecture. A couple of lines relating to the 'Nil' constant also need commenting out.

It's rare for me to envy Windows users, but I have a long-harboured jealousy of the unofficial Python API for Ableton Live that's been available for the past year or so -- as I'm sure the reader would agree, there's little in life that could rival programmatical access to arguably the world's greatest DAW. So, it was to my joy that I discovered that an OS X version of this API was quietly announced just a few days ago, coinciding with me delving back into Python for an ongoing project.

Expect some monstrous hacks as soon as I have a free moment...