[chuck] Call for Developers

[Ge Wang]

Hi Matthew!

> What areas are most in need of help? I don't have any strong
> desire to work in any specific area yet.

It's great to have you with us.  There are many "disaster zones" (ha) - it
would be good for you to join the developer list:

    https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-dev


> In the quickstart tutorial, the section that begins "Now, let's try
> changing the frequency randomly every 100ms" contains the code:
> ~    400.0 * ( std.rand() + 1.0 ) => s.freq;
> but std.rand() returns an integer, so the code wouldn't compile for > me
until I changed it to:
> ~    400.0 * ( (float)std.rand() * 1.0 ) => s.freq;

Ah, this was changed online but not in the QUICKSTART.
This will be fixed in the next release to match the online:
  OLD: 400.0 * ( std.rand() + 1.0 ) => s.freq;
  NEW: std.rand2f( 30.0, 800.0 ) => s.freq;

> When a command is sent to an existing chuck process, the program
> sends you back to the command prompt, and then prints the output
> saying it did it. This is the reverse of most programs, I don't
> know if it's intentional or not.

We thought about this, and have decided to keep it as it is for now -
in this mode, you can background the looping ChucK VM, and then run
the commands in the same shell, which works out (Perry uses this mode
often).  Another option, of course, is to have two shells visible when doing
on-the-fly ChucKing...  In the future, there will most likely be a command
line flag to choose where/how to output messages.

> Using the gain ugen in any way seems to cause segmentation faults. > (This
includes the gain parameter built into other ugens).

We tried this on both OS X (.2/.3), and ALSA under Redhat 9, but couldn't
reproduce the crash (we don't have a machine running Gentoo).  can you send
me (gewang at cs.princeton.edu) the offending code (or post to chuck-dev)?
This would be a good thing to figure out on the developer list.

> Trying to using sndbuf gives me this error message:
> *** Fatal error : sizeof (off_t) != sizeof (sf_count_t)
> *** This means that libsndfile was not configured correctly.

Aha, we are on it!

Best,
Ge!