Giles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap - indeed, he's one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

In July, Giles attended the RubyFringe conference and gave a talk with the unpronounceable title of "Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator", named after his Archaeopteryx project. This talk has been very well received generally. Pete Forde of Unspace called it "the most important video of 2008", Pete Yandell said it's the "must-watch geek talk of the year" and *** **** said Giles "Ruled The World." It's an awesome talk, even if music and MIDI don't interest you. Giles covers building an ecosystem around your projects very well - if you're feeling uninspired, give it a look.

If you are interested in music and MIDI, however, start digging in to Archaeopteryx right away. It's billed as a "Ruby MIDI generator" but as of this week it now also accepts MIDI in. Awesomeness ensues.

Related links:

• Screencast of Archaeopteryx using GarageBand
• Screencast of Archaeopteryx producing "dynamic techno" from code
• How to create a MIDI file from scratch in Ruby
• The "midilib" library