Mushroom and Gadgets’ Neighborhood

In order to give everyone a tate of what the Lifehouse method can do we've opened "The Gallery" which currently features five portraits selected by Lawrence Ball
http://www.lifehouse-method.com/gallery.html

E.L. Wisty who also has a vox blog is one of the featured sitters.

Eventually, when we have the community features on-line everyone will be able to share their portraits if they want to.

In my last post I mentioned adding community oriented features to lifehouse-method.com

I thought I would be good to get some feedback on what the lifehouse community should be like. I'm thinking of a system loosely modelled on flickr.com in terms of the sort of community features but is there anyone else I should definitely do or not do?

If you have any thoughts please feel free to share them by posting comments. I can't guarantee to address everything but I will read all the comments and implement as much as I can.

Apart from the obvious candidates like flickr and myspace are there any sites which you feel are particularly good at fostering a community? If so what makes them so good in your opinion?

thanks

Dave

And now for something completely different...

I just stumbled upon this page by Peter Terren. He seems have been having lots of fun with tesla coils, lasers, rail guns and just about anything that seems to involve high-voltages. He has made some spectacular photos such as this one  and this as well as quite a fun video of a spoof car (lo-res version on you tube).

I've been meaning to post here for many weeks. Although, nothing might appear to be happening in fact I have been busy working on changes to lifehouse-method.com although they are not visible on the website yet. These changes are mostly to make the private administration parts of the site better and add better diagnostic tools to find out why things went wrong when they do. So although there probably won't be any noticeable changes in the site in the next week or so these changes should allow us to provide a better service and fix bugs more rapidly.

Tune007327

Dave Burraston (AKA Dave Noyze) sent me this link about ULAMIZER2  a system he's developed to produce music using cellular automata.

Wolfram Tones also uses a cellular automata approach although it's designed to work over the web whereas ULAMIZER is more like a musical instrument / synthesizer.

lifehouse-method.com uses a completely different approach to the generation of music based around Lawrence Ball's concept of "harmonic mathematics" (also called "differential dynamcs" by John Whitney) but it's really cool to see what other people are doing.

I like statcounter.com! I was checking out the site this evening and thought that it seemed unusually busy. A quick visit to statcounter.com showed me that a whole bunch of people were visiting the site after reading this article on Arstechnica.

The author doesn't like the The Method, but then you can't please everyone and we have been getting a lot of positive feedback from people who have used the site so I don't see a reason to worry too much.

On the other hand watching the site handle so many people at once was a little nerve wracking. Thankfully the software held-up to it's first real test of heavy usage.

Dave

PS Yes, I do realise that I didn't need statcounter.com and that I could have just checked the server logs but sometimes the ability to click a couple of links and see some nicely presented stats is still pretty useful especially when the server in question is getting *hammered* and doesn't have a lot of cycles left for anything but running the site.

At 1am BST today lifehouse-method.com opened to the public.

Two years of work and now everyone can try it.

There is still a lot of work I'd like to do to improve the site, but it seems to be doing it's main thing - composing unique pieces of music for people - quite nicely.

I'll post some more music soon.

There are several people blogging about the Lifehouse Method that I know of, here's the ones I know about:

• Mushroom and Gadgets
• Alan Weinkrantz