Using app from Jon Udell to annotate web audio

I linked to a Jon Udell post on Sunday where he describes his recent experiments on annotating audio files available on the Web. It looked so good that I had to try it to annotate a podcast!

His app is at http://jonudell.net/av/audio.html. I then needed to find a URL to a MP3 file, which took a little bit of searching, since a lot of podcast play pages are not a direct link. Finally, I settled on an extended cut episode of Side Hustle School.  I hovered over  the “Listen Here” link for episode 12 and saw that it was a link to a MP3 file. I copied the link address and pasted it into the url text box in the Jon Udell app. Next, I entered a start time and stop time for the clip (from 1:00 to 2:00) in the selection boxes on the app page, then clicked the button “Play clip”. The app then started at 1 minute in and played for 1 minute – excellent! Finally, I clicked on the link at the bottom where it says “link to av editor with these settings” to get a URL for my clip. Now you can listen to it as well!

Thanks Jon!

How to get started (in programming)

I linked to an article on Linux Journal Saturday discussing how to get started in programming. I think this is a good article for several reasons, one of which is picking a skill to learn and getting started. For me, picking a small thing to create or learn, getting some success and getting that working, helps me to get enthusiastic. I am then ready to pick up a new thing. This is the process I am using to learn the Tone.js Javascript music library. I worked through some of the code examples, then came up with a small project, broke it down into a set of steps, and I am working through them one at a time. Success!

Links for January 3, 2017

IEEE Computer (PDF): In a February 1995 article, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal and Modula-2) laments the size growth in software applications, and calls out time pressure and lack of good design as possible reasons for this growth. In the second half of the article, he discusses his own solution for this problem (Project Oberon) which comprises an operating system, a compiler and a computer. To me, this was a good approach to take from an academic standpoint, but I do not think this had any effect on the mainstream practice of software development (similar in nature to Donald Knuth’s concept of literate programming). A second version of Oberon was released in 2013 (see link below).

Project Oberon – Website linking to Oberon book PDFs and other artifacts

Niklaus Wirth – Home page

Links for January 2, 2018

Some Javascript file handling links:

Writing files:

Eli Grey: Article describing his library FileSave.js

Demo 1: FileSaver.js demo of saving text from a HTML text area

Demo 2: FileSaver.js demo of saving a string in a blob

Github: Source for FileSaver.js

Reading the contents of files:

Treehouse: Several examples of opening files and displaying the contents in a web page

HTML5 Rocks: Multiple examples of opening files

NCZOnline: Code-only examples, no live demos

 

Links for January 1, 2018

Cooperative Software Development: An online book by Dr. Andrew Ko at the University of Washington, this work focuses on “the human aspects of software engineering for students interested in becoming software engineers.” (from the home page). The book covers a number of topics within the software engineering realm (requirements, process, even debugging). Each of the chapters contain footnotes for further reading. I thought it was a good view into a number of areas, based on his academic lectures and his own experience as a CTO for a startup (AnswerDash).

Software Engineering Daily: A podcast on software engineering topics, the past episode list looks interesting, will add this to my subscription list in PocketCasts.

Starting again in 2018

I am starting again to get into the blogging habit – wish me luck! I am going to start with sharing commentary on links, but also hope to post on some development projects as well. I look forward to the new year!