jkndrkn

Loren wanted to perform an audio/visual piece at UF's Art Bash this year. His concept: create a set of visuals that dictated the parameters of a live performance on synthesizers. We settled on splitting the visuals into two zones, one per performer. An animated bar dictates both the note value and the note's octave position on the keyboard. We used the keyboard's black keys for simplicity ;]

I wrote mashed-together the visuals using HTML, CSS, and jQuery*.
View them here.

I combined some audio excerpts from the 2 hour and 45 minute performance into one continuous piece.
Listen to it here.

* Did you notice the bug in this code? Can you fix it for me? ;]

A bit of downtime at work combined has given me a chance to finally test out git's Subversion interoperability features. The following resources were really helpful:

http://www.viget.com/extend/effectively-using-git-with-subversion/
http://www.viget.com/extend/a-gaggle-of-git-tips/

And the Stack Overflow community proved essential in helping me figure out how properly craft the git-svn clone command:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1795214/git-svn-clone-errors-using-git-1-5-1-and-1-6-5-and-subversion-1-4-2

http://jkndrkn.com/songs/mekajo-baby-time.mp3

^_^ ^_^ ^_^

I failed to write about this earlier, I think. A few weeks back, Carrot scored some tix to the Guarneri Quartet literally the day before and asked if I wanted to go. This sorts of activities normally fill me with anxiety since I do tend to be a bit of a pre-planner and rut-follower. I decided to surrender to Carrot's spontaneous ways, even though the drive would exceed two hours each way.

I'm glad I went. It turns out the quartet was not just any quartet and was both historically significant and highly musical. It also turns out that that night's performance was to be their final. The termination of a band or small musical group is difficult and painful. I've felt this pain even after having only rehearsed regularly and performed shows with various groups for only a few months or years at a time. It's difficult to imagine the sort of emotions that must have permeated the minds of the performers on knowing that that night was going to end a 40 year relationship.

The drive was very nice, even though we became lost and had to ask for directions four or five times. It was dark and we were zooming around unlit streets conversing solidly for hours. We ran in the rain and then made it to the show just one minute before the first down bow. We ended up having to sit up in the balcony of this small chapel and were probably part of only four or five young (as in pre-retirement age) people in the entire audience. Up in the balcony, the bass frequencies of the double cellos from the their opening cello quintet tended to resonate and grow huge and coppery and broad, with the tones of the violins dancing golden, above.

Oh, and Carrot <3

Drone Metal

Personnel: guitarist, bassist, keyboards/samples, vocalist

guitar rig: les paul with P90 pickups and fernandes sustainer, extra heavy gauge strings, drop-E tuning
guitar - tuner - bass fuzz - looping pedal - splitter a/b
a - reverb pedal - high-wattage all-tube one-channel guitar amp - 412 guitar cabinet with high-wattage PA speakers
b - reverb pedal - high-wattage all-tube one-channel guitar amp - 412 guitar cabinet with high-wattage PA speakers

bass rig: gibson thunderbird with extra heavy gauge strings drop-E tuning
bass - tuner - looping pedal - splitter a/b
a - bass fuzz - svt - 810 bass cabinet
b - bass driver - 412 bass cabinet

keyboard rig: laptop with soft sampler for choir, brass, piano, keyboard, and other samples
moog taurus - mixer
analog polysynth - mixer
controller - laptop
sampler - mixer
sampler - mixer
effects: roland space echo, looper, digital reverb
mixer out - poweramps - 2 x 215 full-range PA cabinets
mixer out - poweramps - 2 x 118 subwoofers

vocal rig:
mic - house
mic - digital multi fx - house

-ess:

* Festness
* Illness
* Schoolness
* Musicness
* Careerness

-Festness: was nice. Small change-up in personnel. A Krispy was swapped out for a Krispinsky which led to a decrease in entropic qualities in our Festing group, but fortunately resulted in an increased feline sensitivity value. The Philadelphian also stopped by. Highlights included the acoustic sets at Flaco's, my first experiences with inebriation, acoustic sets at the CMC, Obfusion's performance at Infested, Saturday afternoon performances at The Atlantic, encounters with an ambulatory oceanic manifestation, my first experiences with hot boiled peanuts, a surprisingly rough and exciting Halloween-themed wagon ride, climbing and falling off of tall structures made of packed hay, and conversations with 50hz, Phæderyc, Little House, The Philadelphian, and others. The weather was really too warm for the first day or so but finally decided to cool toward the end. Additional highlights: very short line during registration, sitting around talkin' and experiencing the occasional cool band sound with Our Bear.

-Illness: was likely contracted during Festness. I had to endure an infection of the feverish, stuffy, and mucosal variety. Not enjoyable in the least. One of the worst parts of this particular affliction is when it gradually seeps its way down into the respiratory tract and triggers coughing. I find myself having to choke back coughing fits and leave the room late at night so as not to disturb the hibernation periods of a certain large carnivore. I need cough drops with a higher menthol content.

-Schoolness: has continued to prove uninspiring. I really do need to buckle down and work hard on my remaining classes so that the time I've invested so far in my MS does not go to waste and so that I can completely finish that degree prior to my upcoming move and change in jobs.

-Musicness: goes well. Still practicing the Oud often and making tangible progress with regards to playing mechanics and intonation. I don't remember having to spend quite so much time working on picking mechanics when learning guitar and bass. Interesting how the instrument's low string action and doubled-string courses complicates this relatively simple motion. The Mike's Ouds forum has been an invaluable source of information and should be the first stopping point for any individual interested in the instrument. Have also learned a bit about three other interesting-looking instruments recently: Erhu, Nyckelharpa, Cümbüş. Were I to learn another instrument next, I would probably choose the tenor Ukele or Mandola for their versatility and compact size. I've given serious thought to some day picking up the upright bass, but this will have to wait until I have a larger vehicle and a dedicated practice space ;] I might perform on December 12th with Hydrogen Arm and am hoping to play with Queen Anne's Lace at least once later this month.

-Careerness: is something I should be thinking about. I'm trying to commit myself to expanding my visibility online with respect to my programming interests and abilities. I've created a Stack Overflow account with this end in mind. I'm enjoying the site so far, though I've observed that a fair bit of the questions that are submitted are of the type that the submitter could easily learn a great deal about on their own by performing Google searches. There is a tendency for some users to use the site in a conversational near-real-time fashion in a way similar to how social networking sites are used. This causes the site to be flooded by lots of information that more skilled programmers will be less interested about. Tough and tricky questions are buried amidst the flurry of questions about C# and PHP basics. I'll be facing a tough job market when it comes to make my move, so my options will be limited. I'm hoping to be able to transition either into working with more interesting web technologies, or working in some other completely new domain.

Wishlist:

• To play electric bass guitar and bass synth in a danceable live music group
• To work a job that combines in-office design and implementation with field work
• To build up the motivation to investigate if my persistent problems with lack of concentration and energy are a treatable health issue
• To build up motivation, in general
• To have spent this afternoon working on my end-of-semester SimpleScalar project instead of puttering around online :[
• To work myself out of an inward-looking and pessimistic slump and make myself more available to others
• To finally own that inhabitable large-scale model of my sinus cavities that I've always wanted. It's walls would be made of translucent red-orange glass and its chambers would be navigated via large, black, wrought-iron stairs and ladders.
• To figure out some way to "reset" myself so that the next and final semester is not somehow less inspiring and more draining than this one. Some kind of vacation is in order.

After struggling on and off for a few weeks to try to get the official SimpleScalar 3.0 tools to build using various compilers and tutorials, we were able to get the experimental versions of SimpleScalar 4.0 ARM architecture tools to build using gcc 3.2.2. Be sure to follow the instructions in this guide if you are interested in building these tools yourself.

Looks like I'll be learning the ARM architecture this semester ;]

I was invited to perform on the cello in an improvisational instrumental ensemble. Below are a couple YouTube videos of this performance. It was great fun and hope to be able to perform with this group again. With a louder amp next time! ;]

Part 1:



Part 2:



More information here.

Well, I was unable to find someone in my Fault-Tolerant Computer Architecture course interested in playing with Erlang. (Computer engineers? Shying away from a language that is not C? Surprise surprise!)

So I joined a fellow that wants to add a fault-injection mechanism to SimpleScalar. I thought I would install SimpleScalar and play around with it this weekend, but after a few hours I realized that the tool is just not in a stable and usable form right now and that it is up to end-users to find and fix coding errors in the official sources! I've heard of open-source projects being a bit hard to get built at first, but have never experienced this first-hand. I'm especially surprised considering that a sizable chunk of computer architecture researchers use SimpleScalar for practically all of their research. I guess they just struggle with the tools for a few weeks to get them to compile and then fail to contact the project maintainers? Maybe the project maintainers are too busy with other things to fix up their sources?

In any case, I'll keep working on this issue. I've so far tried to build SimpleScalar on my Intel Ubuntu system and will try building it on a system with older gcc compilers and on a different architecture, maybe.

Here are some of the resources that I've used that have helped me build at least part of the sources:

http://harryscode.blogspot.com/2008/10/installing-simplescalar.html

http://www.student.tue.nl/s/z.ye/links/simplescalar-3.0/local_copy/simplescalar_install_notes.pdf

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~bhagiweb/cs211/SimpleScalar/simplescalar-linux-install.txt

Good show last night. Small crowd and plenty of pre-show nerves and stress, but a nice vibe permeated the evening. The audience was almost entirely close friends and family. My playing felt fine and I received the usual number of compliments any half-decent cellist is sure to always get due to the "cello factor", but I could tell that my intonation was off a bit. I feel that, even though mechanically, my playing is not what it was when I was younger, my ear and sense of phrasing has improved. I can tell when I under or over-played a passage now more readily. I remember playing feeling more effortless and easy, but perhaps that is simply because  I was less perceptive. What I could pull off with ease and agility before could very likely have come from a showy or selfish place rather than a musical place. Now if only I were to practice more and let my playing skill grow to fill in my increased musicianship ;]

The past few weeks have been difficult. It's painful to be reminded that you are not entirely suited to a particular path you have decided for yourself. Computers and software are part of my identity now. An undergraduate curriculum, years of full-time work, and now most of master's degree have made their mark on my job skills, my thinking process, and my body. I've always been aware that my academic strengths lie in memorization and correlation of bodies of knowledge, learning through reading, and organizing thought in written form. Math, however, has always required a special effort for me to grasp. I have to sit in lectures. Work examples over and over again, ask questions, and consult text books. If I don't make this effort, I am unable to fully capture an idea. And even if I do make this effort, the low B's and C's in my undergraduate theory- and math-heavy classes attest to the fact that I am simply not ideally suited to this kind of thinking. Fortunately, the kinds of programming that require math as opposed to a general sense of literate architectural and aesthetic awareness are rarer thanks to the propensity for modern programming to use libraries of pre-packaged algorithms to do the really heavy numeric and data structure manipulation. Unfortunately, this means that after every single theory or math class, it's only a matter of months before my skills degenerate to uselessness. My course in fault-tolerant computer architecture served, again, as a reminder that fluency in math is just beyond me. I ended up over-preparing to solve the Markov model problems using Laplace transforms, solving systems of linear equations and using partial fractions and neglecting what I perceived as the easier-to-understand CRC encoding schemes. I just barely hung on with a grade of a 70 and ended up burning myself out for a few days.

Not all is lost. I know that, from personal experience and from reading the excellent Coders at Work, that raw analytical ability is only one part of a software project. I'll never be able to take on a whole algorithm-heavy project on my own, but I'll continue to be an effective team member on such a project and/or an effective solo programmer on small to medium-size applications.