Ruby for Tinkerers and Artists

Ruby is my swiss army chainsaw since I retired my Perl-Fu in 2006. Since I also dabble a bit in the field of music and other artsy and tinkery stuff, there’s a whole bootload of small projects in my githubs that process MIDI events, assemble and process videos, interface homegrown hardware and do other crazy shit.

This talk will be a whirlwind tour of some of the more interesting projects I’ve done (and seen) over the years. There will be blinkenlights, there will be music (or something closely resembling music, at least) and there will be some surprising usecases for the shown techniques.

It will be code heavy and entertaining.

Topics will most probably include:

• Interfacing ancient hardware (MIDI, serial port, etc.)
• Making Music with Ruby
• The blinkenlights are on, or driving the Novation Launchpad from ruby
• Processing videos with ruby, ffmpeg and imagemagick
• The magic of OSC (Open Sound Control) and some cool usecases.

The talk wil require some kind of PA capable of distributing my MBP’s sound.

You can find most of my projects at http://github.com/halfbyte