WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Going over highlighted projects for an updated CV, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this old hypertext project of mine is still alive and functioning on the From the Gut server.   A child of a physical, choose-your-own-reading path, intertextual collaboration between myself and 2 friends, this simple database driven hypertext explores the idea of retaining context as you navigate through a web of fragments.

Link Here:  http://www.fromthegut.org/matt/etm4/

I’m looking for one of the beautiful ‘map’ drawings we had to put with this post, stay tuned.

As part of a trade for work on the website for EdibleWOW managazine ( http://www.ediblecommunities.com/wow ) I was given credit for a quarter page ad in their print magazine.  I’ve never considered advertising for WinterRoot before, but I thought this was an intriguing opportunity to share my ideas about technology.  A notion of a ‘holisitic’ approach to technology has always been of interest to me, but only in recent years has my theory of how this might function begun to build out.  This graphic present some ideas pushing in that direction, and presents the additional elements I am slowly adding to WinterRoot’s capabilities.  I am actively seeking and exploring projects that bring together Information Systems, Alternative Energy, and Permaculture as long term goals - there will be a lot of additional information here on these  pursuits as things progress.

As part of the completion of my undergraduate degree in 2001, I elected to engage my own ideas about Media Theory and Semiotics on the World Wide Web.  The product of this work was my manuscript Idea Spaces.  Advised by Richard Candidas Smith and subtlety but deeply influenced by John Holland’s work in Complex Adaptive Systems, my basic premise is that understanding in a subjective network is characterized by the degree of exploration of a parameter space.  In this sense, the WWW sensualizes an a classic human experience: the exploration of ’spaces’ of ideas.  Evaluations of authority take place within spaces, while stepping outside of the boundaries of a space can completely change the meaning of conclusions.  This is the meaning of context.  The paper closes by suggesting that productive experiences are those in which boundaries can be repeatedly expanded and new explorations can be made.  This is contrasted with consumptive experiences, where a highly structured space is supplied to a navigator without unexpected connections to spaces that challenge it’s authority.

The dark flecks on this scoby are yeast colonies.  Once the yeast really get established you are on the way to having delicious and healthful kombucha.  We also found that putting the fermented tea through a secondary ferment is really the way to go.  Removing the scoby and bottling the tea after its reached the approapriate acidity allow the pro-biotic to go into a anaerobic ferment (the normal fermentation is aerobic) which uses up excess sugar in the tea without increasing the acidity and also produces the CO2 which causes the tea to become effervescent.  Doing the secondary ferment with ginger really makes a superior beverage.

One of my long standing clients, I have been heavily involved in the online side of this organization since the very beginning, and continue on a maintenance and consulting retainer to this day.  The MPHTC started around 2001 with the goal of making high quality, continuing education courses more available to the public.  The website thus began as a content portal for reaching the public audience.  Later, MPHTC would combine forces with MiCPHP (Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness) where we heavily extended the site to support online learning management.  As the organization has evolved WinterRoot’s challenge has been to create systems with the flexibility to change over time.  Notable work on this project has included full online certificate generation and management, increased portal usability, and ongoing management of the support team for a 3 site system including MPHTC, MiCPHP, and OPHP.  The site has currently about 7000 users.

One of the more annoying features of doing web development is tracking changes made to the database alongside revisions to the code that runs the site. I’ve been getting into subversion post-commit hooks lately, and my currently solution to this problem is to create a hook which dumps the database structure and commits it to a git repository, with a comment which can be used to link that database structure to the revision in subversion it corresponds to. You can then use git to generate patch files that are easy to follow for making updates to database structure.

my post commit hook looks like this

#!/bin/sh 
mysqldump --defaults-extra-file=/home/deepwinter/svn/newframework/hooks/db.cnf -d -h dev2.madeofpeople.org -u madeofpeople11 newframework > /home/deepwinter/sites_sql/newframework/dump.sql 
cd /home/deepwinter/sites_sql/newframework/ 
MESSAGE="SQL committed for build revision $2 in $1" 
git commit -a -m"$MESSAGE"

post-commit itself, the file called by subversion looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

/home/deepwinter/svn/newframework/hooks/sqldump.sh "$REPOS" "$REV"

A good further development of this will be a way for patches to generate database structure update code automatically off a patch.

The solar panel workshop was a success.  We were able to construct a functioning array out of discarded fragments, generating the correct voltage to charge our battery.  Each fragment was wired separately, giving participants the opportunity for some hands on work with solar cells, and then after inserting the wires through holes in a board they were connected in series into two long circuits.  Measuring the wattage output of the panel is a little more difficult and we haven’t gotten a reliable measure yet, but the battery does collect charge and we hypothesize that the panel collects enough energy to at least run a small light.  The construction of this first effort is pretty experimental - we’ve identifier several issues that would be resolved differently on a next version.  Perf board is definately the way to go for wiring the panels through wood, not the drilled out ply used here.  Bits of broken panel also could be wired better by lining up the the large lines and connecting them in lines the same way commercial panels are - obviously since they are broken this will still yeild a jagged, oddly shaped strip, but it doesn’t necessitate as many holds in the board and is generally more manageable.  Of course, for a art/reuse look the random arrange we executed is quite beautiful.   We hope to do another workshop and continue to explode feasibility of this kind of  reuse.  Thanks to all who participated!

Another oldie-but-goodie, and possibly useful to the rs7000 users out there with a technical mind.  Around 2006 I was able to reverse engineer the pattern file format of the rs7000 music production hardware and this enabled me to unlock several hidden features that the Roland Motif has but simply have no interface on the rs7000.  Somehow just staring at the HEX code it all clicked into place.  The most notably discovery was the presence of multi-mapping (samples being able to be mapped across different ranges of the same patch).
The code for reading and writing the files is included at the following link.

http://programming.fromthegut.org/hacking/rs7000/

For a long time, I have used the Yamaha rs7000 to make a lot of my music and to play live. One big problem though, is that it doesn’t have enough storage capacity. You can purchase a hard drive, but it’s big and clunky and pain to carry around with you. A while ago I decided to simply put it inside the rs7000 case. A few years have passed and I’ve never had a problem. Read below for more pictures of various stages in the process of modding the gear. It should also be possible run the hard drive off of the internal power supply instead of putting another one inside the case, but I haven’t found the right adapters yet to do so.

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