Let me introduce myself and tell you why I am excited about Pd.

Lately I have been interested in computer music and my home studio. I have been reading "The Computer Music Tutorial" by Curtis Roads. So I was very excited to learn about Pd through Jim Aikin's article in April's Electronic Musician. Since I got it downloaded and up and running I have been enjoying it. I have a BS degree in CS and most of my experience has been internet and Windows programming. Also I worked doing LabView programming, which is a graphical programming environment used for testing, measurement etc. developed and sold by National Instruments. I am running Pd on a Windows XP machine. I hope to have a Linux machine going in the near future. I live in Northern California. My primary instrument is guitar.

Of course I have lots of questions. Here are a few of my first questions:

1. Besides Dr. Miller Puckette who else is developing Pd? Are his graduate students involved? Some of the people on this board?

2. Does anyone mind, including Dr. Puckette, if someone else modifies Pd and distributes the modified version? Are there popular modified versions? Does Dr. Puckette ever check out modifications for inclusion into his software?

3. How come I can't access http://www.pure-data.org/ Are these pages down? Any recomendations for other good links?

For whatever reasons my programming skills have become a bit rusty. I see Pd as a good opportunity to get my feet wet again and have some fun doing it. Even make some art using my programming skills! The C source for Pd I have looked at so far seems very clean and well written. As do some of the examples written in Pd.

Thanks for any help and I look foward to participating on this board.