Category Archives: Software Engineering

A mobile software lab to study software

This week, I went on another data walk in Coventry with some of our students in Digital Sociology. This meant that updating the Unheard City app in breaks while teaching another course. The app needed an update as the target software development kit (SDK) was an old one that also meant an update to most […]

Weeknotes: Tapestry, Robots, and Data

Started teaching this week and the world still moves. Having had conversations with the other staff (that will be ongoing), I sketched out some ways of donating data from the Unheard City project and using phones around it. It is a challenge. No doubt the work will change and move, but it raises some interesting […]

Weeknotes: Models and Mentors

I have been having a break recently so not much done. I did start some work on looking at the Maestro dataset metadata for a paper abstract. I have been querying it for the authors and mean times of the tracks (based on MIDI according to the website) as well as working on extracting some […]

Automating documentation using Python

One of the tasks for this week was cleaning up after an infrastructure move and then updating all the documentation. Given that there are many forms of documentation, it was a bit of a task. I ended up putting together a spreadsheet of the main details so that there is a canonical reference. The first […]

Weeknote: SDRs, Workshops, and tiny tools

Less weeknote and more occasional update … I celebrated passing my Viva without corrections by putting in a workshop proposal. I heard last night that it was accepted. Now to organise it. While I was working on the proposal and a paper, I wrote a prototype sonification plugin for Gephi. Now that the workshop exists, […]

Weeknotes: It’s raining sensors

Well, prototypes of sensors. I have been playing around with the piezo sensor to measure the pressure on a surface. I have been using a milk bottle as a testing environment to act as a surrogate for a plastic surface to test the code. This goes with the rain gauge, using the HC-SR04 distance sensor. […]

OpenAI codex

I was sent the link to the OpenAI Codex coding demo on YouTube, which was a lot of fun and interesting. It makes me think of the no code movement. At one level, I really enjoyed it and I like the fluency of the API that is being used. What worries me slightly is that […]

MediaStreams and Media Methods

I have been digging into Web Audio a little more deeply to scratch some itches and came across the Media Streams API. I have been thinking about how it can be used to get the browser to interact with streams and how JavaScript can be used to delve into them at a programmatic level. This […]

A testing time…

Recently, I have had to begin patching a project that I was using. Having found and downloaded the source code from its version control, I looked for the documentation. Not finding any, I started a Jupyter notebook to work out what the methods were and to make notes on the progress. Although that let me […]

Notes on Transmediale (Saturday)

These are my notes from the Saturday sessions. The Friday notes are here. The morning started with “Deplatformization and the Ethics of Exclusion”. Eva Marie Giraud began the session talking about food and its communal politics. From this, she raised the questions about how boundaries materialise and the came back to the point that, as […]