[Gridflow-dev] irc meeting on monday

[Alexandre Castonguay]

On Saturday 30 April 2005 12:50, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> > 2 - How can we dovetail with the rest of the puredata documentation
> > project?

> A) wait for the PDDP to decide how to organise itself,
>
> B) take part of the organisation of PDDP so as to accelerate the process
> of getting to a consensus on doc formatting and structure,
>
> C) or just ignore PDDP for now.

I would choose option 'B'.  There is a lot of work to be done anyhow as 
reference.html, help patches, and patches in pd_examples are not up to date 
nor complete.  

Even though it might be preferable to only format the work once, I imagine 
that we would be able to reformat patches and comments to conform to PDDP 
(the PureData Documentation Project) fairly easily.  But I need to do some 
reading up on where the discussion is at with PDDP. 

> Did I infect you with that UfO joke? ;-) [For the rest of the readers,
> that's UofO standing for "University of Ottawa."]

I think it was wip who used it for the first time but I have been writing UofO 
for a while so I like it.  I think I will call it the mothership.

> > 4- I'd like us to form a list of the top 10 requests of students/artists
> > wanting to work with pd/gf?

> I think you'll get more than 10, or else you better fish for more than
> just 10 requests. But I agree it's good to sort them (in three ways: more
> requested, most important, and easiest to concretise).

Good ranking categories. One more consideration : we will have a few examples 
dealing with sensors or controlling motors.  We will need to find a way to 
incorporate short videos / schematics / parts lists / in the docs.

> > 1)La programmation (meme avec un environnement de programmation
> > graphique) n'est pas familiere aux artistes.  Ceci peut conduire a un
> > decouragement hatif.
>
> To add to the problem, most programmers aren't familiar with the PureData
> way of programming (I mean visual dataflow programming), so for example,
> if an artist has taken a course in Java or C++ or even VisualBasic, then
> that's almost completely lost because it's almost completely unrelated, in
> terms of problem-solving techniques. PureData/Max/jMax don't have much to
> do with most other visual programming environments.

Sure, but even a basic 'lexique' of terms would help.  Also, some way to 
demonstrate what are the datatypes in pd and gridflow.  For an absolute 
beginner this will feel like a programming language.

> > 4)L'installation du logiciel et la configuration de l'environnement de
> > production n'est pas facile.
>
> I don't have funding for working on making GridFlow easier to install.
> PureData is better at this thing on OSX and Windows, but the Linux-based
> ones may be lagging behind.

Right, we might need to set that aside for a bit.  I know Normand wanted to 
help with packages at some point.


> > 6)Les concepts et la terminologie des langages de programmation sont le
> > plus souvent accessibles en anglais seulement.
>
> About translating to French, you should contact Thomas "Outlet" Fredericks
> about it. I mean the one who presented the P5-Glove and his
> http://data-art.uqam.ca/ website, at the ninth meeting of the
> PureData-Montréal club, a month ago.

Yes I made a note of that and I will follow up right now with him. One thing 
is sure, the cmf we'll use will enable us to share the content through RSS in 
order to avoid create yet another lonely patch depot. We need to be able to 
publish patches + docs locally (for a number of human and institutional 
reasons) and share them globally.

> The ImpureData project is getting a grant from UQÀM (Université du Québec
> à Montréal). You could supplement that if you want (or make Artengine
> supplement it).
>
> Also, I have two brains preparing to work on this project with me, that
> is, Carmen Rocco (from Providence, RI) and Chun Lee (from UK). Carmen has
> been working on ImpureData with me last year, and Chun Lee is making it a
> project for his masters degree and is currently learning Tcl/Tk for the
> purpose of writing user interface code for ImpureData.

That is really great news, it's about time your getting some Pentagram 
funding.  I'll ask about it at artengine, maybe if there is funding it could 
go to better workshop / examples?

> > Since we have the flashserver already I suggest using flash for this.
>
> We have discussed the Flashserver before, and I don't know how having
> students use it will help them learn how to use PureData, instead of just
> learning how to use your Flash interface. Could you please shed some light
> on this?

Sure, it is going to be a test to build a simple patch over the web.  Along 
with little animations as in a Dreamweaver tutorial. You don't need to 
concern yourself with it.

Seems like the meeting has already started :-).  Did you have any other points 
for the discussion?

Cheers,

Alexandre