procrastination diagram

I'm at debconf 10 this week. The most interesting part of the experience seems to be that when I pay my own way to a conference my sense of responsibility is much altered; The fact that I don't have to report back to anyone makes me much more willing to go and get some pizza when it's convenient. Also, it means that fewer people look at my travel plans; I accidentally arrived and am leaving a day early (I think I looked at a calendar for August 2009 at some point in the process and confused myself).

The accommodation, which is in Columbia dorms, seems pretty nice. (At least in Furnald, which I gather has been renovated more recently than Carman). I sort of find myself wishing I'd brought more bedding, though, but having travelled down by bus, that might have been a little impractical. I do appreciate the fact that there is air conditioning strong enough that I prefer to leave it off while I'm actually present (also, the weather's been pretty nice). It's also nice that we get publicly-routable IP addresses from the campus network, although I'm kind of boggled that there's no Wifi in the dorms. (wires? how twentieth-century.)

I seem to have have less of a social circle at this conference than I have at previous conferences I've gone to. (This will presumably change; the conference is young.)

I also just want say that I really love the New York subway system. From the perspective of someone who lives on Boston, it's terrifyingly complicated, but the complexities seem to produce resilience, and a There's More Than One Way To Get There sort of approach. (What? We're going Express past the place I was planning to change trains? Okay, I can hope on this other train for a stop and end up on the line I wanted to...) I can see where people fall in and turn it into a hobby.

So, as predicted, debconf got more fun as t increased, and I ran into some people that I knew who knew other people, etc. (Although there was one fellow iron blogger who was also at the conference who I only ran into literally as I was heading for the train. There was a group photo.

Of the things of external interest that stood out, I think the informal BOF on ways to make Debian's reputation as a project less toxic to the outside world spawned by the Making Debian Rule Again talk might produce the most interesting results, despite it several times exhibiting many of the the problems (people talking past each other and repeating themselves) of a long discussion on debian-devel.

The talk that I am the saddest for missing (because I left early) was Handling Debian bugs with SD by the same fellow Iron Blogger alluded to above, Christine Spang. It especially intrigues me because I really hate interacting with things via mailservers, and would love a better interface to debbugs for anything more interesting than sending a comment to a bug or closing it with a package upload.

Getting home was something of an experience. I took the Acela Express home first class, and I am pretty clearly going to be really disappointed with the next plane flight I take. Wifi¹, a meal on actual porcelain with actual utensils and not an undersized plastic caricature of a spork, but an actual set made of actual metal. Actual! Oh, and more legroom than I could conceive of needing, and no decompression or recycled airplane air. It was about as enjoyable an experience as four hours of solo travel could be.

That said, the total experience was a little surreal, as I essentially went underground just outside of Columbia, and then popped out of the ground six or so hours later in Central Square. I was technically aboveground for most of the Acela trip, but it was all at a remove through the windows of the train. Also, the red line train from South Station to Central Square was seemed somehow subtly wrong; I'd gotten used to the MTA's slightly different approach, and frankly there being more people on the trains.

I've mostly been hacking on my blogging software this week, adding ReStructured Text support and a story management interface (less clunky than typing SQL at the database) but none of this will be visible to you, and it's not deployed yet. I want to do a redesign and at post-tagging support, but I haven't gotten to that yet. So, here are some pictures from my trip back from New York:

Treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

A startling amount of information in one shot:

An overly clever self-portrait:

I'm halfway through too many things to blog about them, so it's time to inflict the random tabs of randomness:

Brownian Noise

Pure Data is visual language for music, sound creation, and signal processing. In addition to its documentation (above), there is a "PdPedia". There is a tutorial on extending it, including writing signal-processing external

Pioneer One is a amateur on-the-net science fiction television production. I have downloaded but not gotten around to watching the pilot.

A clock that runs Linux and has an ntp server.

Several distributed bug trackers: SD, Ditz, and Bugs Everywhere.

Doctor Krank: Glitchy & Scratchy vs. Crendore - laser bass / Squincy Jones - nintendub has some interesting mixes; I got there by googling for "What is laser bass".

This bug has a workaround (disabling 802.11n) that seems to make the wireless in my laptop work better on campus.

If you're working on North American passenger models and live there, Mercedes-Benz has made the parts fiche available on line for free.

If you have a HTC Dream a.k.a. T-Mobile G1 and want to upgrade it past what is officially offered, here is a "full update guide" from the CyanogenMod people..

It may say something about the way my mind works (or doesn't) that I never seem to have anything in a state worth posting about on Sunday night. The fact that it's all too often on Sunday night when I'm worrying about this is perhaps another warning sign. So...

I've mentioned Ableton Live before, possibly just as something one would want. It has some nice features making it arguably more than just a sequencer/recorder/digital audio workstation but something you can perform with, using "clips" (consisting of either note value for controlling an instrument, or actual audio information) that you can "launch" in sync (typically on a bar boundary).

It has some odd limitations: for instance, you can only look at the details of one "clip" at a time, which is annoying when you want to look at the differences between musical phrasing or suchlike. (I believe there are other such things, but that's what comes to mind at the moment.)

And of course, it's very not free software ($549), only runs on commercial operating systems (although I'm told it runs reasonably with wine these days), and you don't get the source code so you can't work on its limitations without reverse engineering it.

Now, there are python APIs for MIDI, and time stretching and various audio APIs. And I keep pondering the performance side of Live as an instrument, and wondering at how much integration you really need with your final recording software.

And, of course, thinking about how to write the code, which I really shouldn't, because I have three other projects that I can't make myself write about that I should be working on first.

(And I suspect writing code for music is a trap.)