Last week I went to Monkeytown, a restaurant / performance venue in Williamsburg, New York. One of the acts was Loud Objects, a performance project that features live soldering of pre-programmed sound generating chips. Working on an overhead so that the audience could enjoy the action, the performers soldered connections between the various chips, creating a semi-controlled soundscape of scrapes and glitches.

I just uploaded a short video to YouTube, not all that informative but it gives an idea. Supposedly this kind of thing is more common in Japan, but I’ve never seen it before. Definitely an interesting twist on physical computing…

Following up on my post a few days ago about online storage: I just rechecked the Box.net web site only to discover that they have increased their prices rather than drop them. 5 GB is now $7.95/month or $79.95/year. 15 GB is $19.95/month or $199.95 per year. I might be willing to pay that - if we were talking about 100 GB of storage.

I’ve looked around at other solutions, but haven’t found any that seem really appealing. I’d be happy to hear suggestions or any feedback about your own experiences.

I generally try to avoid tinkering too much with the insides of Wordpress, but if I did I would read Devlounges How to Write a Wordpress Plugin first. It’s even available as a nicely downloadable PDF.

Yesterday I needed to delve into Arne Brachhold’s Del.icio.us plugin to figure out how to add proper titles for links from main or archive pages. It was a dirty hack, but I got it working somehow. If you need to know, it involved hacking his Javascript and I’d be happy to share if you ask.

The idea of storing data online is sexy. It means easy sharing of files, pseudo-backup and access-everywhere all rolled into one. I’ve been using Box.net for a year now, with mostly good experiences. It’s got a well-designed dynamic interface, it makes sharing extremely easy and the service is very stable. I do have a few complaints though:

• The space you get is small. 5 GB for $5/month is not a lot. They have a bigger plan at 15 GB at $15/month (== $180/year), which hardly seems like a bargain.
• The interface looks great, but is sometimes a little tricky for complex file operations such as moving lots of files around. It’s got a great search function though.
• Most importantly: Uploading can sometimes be painful, requiring the use of either a popup applet or a built-in Flash tool. Navigating the file structure from these tools seems like it’s harder than it should be, with slow GUI response times.

Essentially, I’ve been wanting a file browser-like interface for uploading, with immediate folder navigation. Box.net has promised for a long time that they would release an uploading app that works outside the web browser, but has not delivered so far. I like their service and I’m not looking to switch, but I just wish it’d be easier to use…

To the rescue: Fire Uploader, a Firefox extension that supports FTP-style uploading to Box.net, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube. Browsing my Box.net account, creating a new folder and uploading a bunch of images was a snap. It supports downloading as well, but unfortunately not moving files.

It remains to be seen how stable Fire Uploader is in dealing with huge files and broken uploads, but so far it’s looking really good. Upcoming versions might add site-specific functions such as setting permissions, as well as new services to upload to. If it supported moving files it could almost be a complete Box.net GUI replacement.

For Flickr uploading, Fireflix is useful, but a little clunky. For FTP transfers, I like FireFTP, another great Firefox extension. It allowed me to finally do away with clunky FTP software, and do it all inside the browser. I love that that the browser becomes an environment for getting things done.

As mentioned previously, I’ve been working on developing a visual piece for a Nokia phone. After trying Mobile Processing, I came to the conclusion I’d be better off going the old school way: Pure J2ME development in Eclipse. It makes me appreciate just how easy developing in Processing really is compared to going back to the bare bones.

Seeing as my target is a Nokia phone, I figured using Nokia’s own Carbide.j tool for J2ME development. Now it looks like that was a mistake. Nokia has just announced that they’re discontinuing development of Carbide.j. Instead, they suggest two Open Source alternatives, Eclipse with the EclipseME plugin or NetBeans IDE with the NetBeans Mobility Pack.

I found out about the announcement while trying to repair my apparently broken install of Carbide.j, so I’ve now made the jump to EclipseME and dumped Carbide.j altogether. EclipseME feels much better integrated with the IDE, running a MIDLet in a given emulator is as easy as running a regular app. Carbide.j forced you to use a series of clumsy steps just to get the emulator up and running.

Right now everything’s running flawlessly except when I try to use Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition (FP 1) emulator. It barfs at the step of creating the JAR file for some reason. I guess I’ll just stick to Sun's WT5 2.5 emulator and forget about using any fancy Nokia-specific stuff like transparency. The upside is that my final app will theoretically run on any MIDP 2.0 phone.

Update: When trying to install my MIDP application generated with EclipseME on the Nokia phone I kept getting “Invalid JAR” errors. According to a post on eclipseme-users, this is due to EclipseME not including a vital piece of information in the JAD file. To fix it, simply open the generated JAD file with a text editor and add the following:

MIDlet-1: Classname,,packagename.Classname

“Classname” should be the name of your MIDlet class, “packagename” should be the name of the package it’s in. After I added this line to the JAD it installed just fine.