It's been a long time since I've been able to work on the core of Umbraco version 4 as it's been extremely busy here. I've been meaning to post this document up for some time but just never got around it. Some umbracians were asking about trees in version 4:

http://forum.umbraco.org/yaf_postst5259_Fun-with-Trees--New-patch-released.aspx

I've attached the file that describes the version 4 tree api. This was an initial document created for the Umbraco core team. It is probably close to 100% accurate but i know there's been some minor changes to the tree api since i wrote this.

Hope this helps some of you!

Umbraco_Trees_v1.doc (246.00 kb)

A customisable keyboard - wouldn't this be good to have in the office. It's still at concept stage but the Optimus Maximus model goes for a modest $1877 USD. Learn more about it here

There's alot of other cool stuff on Art Lebedev Studio's website including credit card sized turntable scratch cards!

We recently decided we'd try something new and look at a fresh new way to manage the Data Context object in LINQ.

I've posted an entire article on it at Code Project: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/LinqAndUnity.aspx

Basically this is using Dependency Injection to manage the LINQ Data Context object between business logic classes. I think its a pretty cool idea but all feedback is much appreciated as there could be way cooler ways to use these two technologies together! 

I've posted another Umbraco patch here:

http://www.codeplex.com/umbraco/SourceControl/PatchList.aspx

The forum post is here:

http://forum.umbraco.org/yaf_postsm25747_Fun-with-Trees--New-patch-released.aspx 

A breif overview of what new features this adds:

• Allow users to “Browse” nodes without being able to view/edit them so they can edit child nodes of that node. This is set by permissions. Browse will now be the minimum permission that must be set for a node to show up in the content tree.
• Allow developers to put any ITree in any application including their own application. This is done by modifying the umbracoAppTree and umbracoApp table data. Previous to this patch, you could not add trees to the content, media or user applications.
  
• If an application contains only one ITree the system will not encapsulate it with a parent tree.
• Allow any user to have the “Send To Publish” capability
• Allow developers to extend any of the Tree’s which will allow them to modify it’s context menu, amongst other things
• Allow developers to easily create Trees using BaseTree (see example files)
• Increased performance with less overhead when loading ITrees, IActions, IActionHanders, etc… when using reflection.
  
• Increased performance when referencing the built in IActions as they are now all Singletons.
• Removed a lot of hard coded values (the other Trees apart from loadContent still need some updating)
• Ability to put the Recycle Bin for the content node anywhere you want.
  
• Fixed up some of the missing language terms for the English language file

This morning I did a quick presentation about "Live Coding", and more so about Live Coding in regards to music. Its a very cool concept whereas the coder creates music in real time. For example, you could create a small loop that simply plays a kick drum every 600 milliseconds and compile it. While it's compiled and playing you could modify that same loop to play a hi-hat every 300 milliseconds, then compile that on-the-fly which would replace the currently running process on the correct timeframe. (This is a VERY basic example).

So far as I've seen there's not many people trying this and from those that i have seen, there's not many people that are good at it either. Theres a few platforms that are out there to get started:

• ChucK
• SuperCollider
• Impromptu
• Fluxus
• Quoth

I haven't tried them all (only ChucK and SuperCollider) but ChucK is heaps of fun to play around with. Quite a huge learning curve but i think i'll stick with it and see if i can come up with something worthwhile.

Here's some links and examples:

• http://cobb.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/071116/071116-cs547-300.wmv
• http://livecode.access-space.org/
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2295676135942462117
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA
• ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTt8r3LhCFM

  A tiny bit of research into rendering cylinders in actionscript (using a displacement filter) has resulted in this example.

 For the sake of anyone out there who is interested in building a renderer for PV3D (or any of the AS3 3D engines) I have included the class code (it won't compile without our supporting libraries, but it will give you an idea how it's done).

Both Anthony and Myseft went to Remix yesterday. There was quite a few very interesting things the guys from Microsoft had to show off. The main focus of the event was on Silverlight. I was quite impressed with the functionality of Silverlight and how all of the files relate to each other. Definitely will make the workflow between developers and designers easier. On the other hand however, I think we might see a whole bunch of really ugly sites being thrown up on the web when more people start adopting Silverlight. It's a great system to build applications in but i think in the hands of a bunch of developers who think they can design but actually can't, this could become an ugly beast.

The other really cool part of Remix was that all of the presentations were done with a new technology called Deep Zoom. I thought it was great for presentations!

Suppose i'll have to buckle down and start building some apps in Silverlight!

I created a patch for Umbraco that allows for browse-only viewing of content tree nodes so that admins can give other user's access to edit child nodes.  A few other features were added to this patch as well which includes the ability for any user (not just a reader) to have "publish to" permissions and the ability to customise the content tree context menu.

This is the initial bug posted

Here's the entry in the forum about this patch

You can download the patch here

There's more stuff to come!

I often talk (the verb), but it is a rare thing that I would do a talk (the noun). Thankfully, my talk was sufficiently underwhelming for me to be completely dissuaded from ever preparing one again.

Here were some of the items I spoke about:

http://www1.zkm.de/~wvdc/ascii/java/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OytHzZ72Y

http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=81

http://nervo.tv/index.html?sect=5&proj=foxmovies

Somewhat interesting pieces using interesting inputs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/champsdozone/

http://rhizome.org/artbase/2398/fear/

http://www.virtualart.at/common/viewWork.do?id=394