procrastination diagram

stuff, things, et cetera

2010-07-19T02:05:21-04:00

I note without comment that Google image search for "boa" at least for me, gets more pictures of the Korean singer than pictures of a snake.

An analysis of World War II as if it were popular media

A while back I wrote a, uh, thing to test zephyr servers in a bunch of virtual machines. I dusted it off today (taking a break from the other stuff I'm working on), and I just want to reiterate how much I like having automated tests. (It was just a smoke test before; it now tests user session persistence (jargonwise: "subscriptions") through server restarts.

Tabs, I has them

2010-07-12T01:43:34-04:00

But inspiration, I have not.

Lev Grossman, author of the The Magicians, my favoritist book here I wanted to slug the protagonist for most of it (really, it's an excellent book), has a blog.

If you only ever read one piece of Harry Potter fanfic, read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Dubstep is a recent genre of dance music.

MiniMock looks useful for writing test suites in python.

Nine Inch Nails makes multitracks and such of their music available and encourages people to upload remixes.

Tom Limoncelli posted a great "catching up with javascript" linkdump. Like, ages ago.

Andy Ihnatko posted how to disable wake-on-open on a MacBook. Maybe I'll get around to getting one someday, although I'm really wondering whether I want to give up and start doing music stuff on Windows after all.

An attempt at a standard external radio interface for amateur use in the post-parallel port age.

A list of PKCS#11 implementations.

Field Day!

2010-06-28T00:58:55-04:00

I did ARRL Field Day 2010 at the OCRA/DFMA joint field day in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with my parents. The clubs set up a 10-transmitter station, all running at 5W on battery power for the duration of the event.

Sadly these don't give a good sense of the site. Notable innovations are the bucket truck on loan from the power company, and weather balloon; both of which I would describe as solutions to the problem of not having the Green building handy to string antennas from.

courageous split infinitives

2010-06-22T12:48:58-04:00

I was fiddling around with the M3, and ended up with a... tune that I thought sounded pretty neat. The process involved just sitting down at the keyboard, playing the first four notes of what I'll call the lead twice and saying to myself "Huh, that sounds way neater than I expected", then fiddling around for a bit until I had some variety in the lead, and a bassline to go with it.

(There should be a player widget there. It may require flash. It may also require following the link to the actual page on my site in what ever reader thing you're reading this in.)

This consists of

with each bar repeated four times on the right hand, and

repeated on the left hand, played with on a very simple sound I put together for the RADIAS card in my M3. It's basically a bunch of square waves and a bunch of triangle waves slightly detuned and run through some distorting effects so that it doesn't sound too polite.

Now, depending on how responsive you are to musical cues and how much other sorts of media you've consumed, the bassline might be bothering you a bit—it did me. Here's just the bassline sped up a bit:

Here it is sped and transposed up a couple of octaves played with a patch that allegedly sounds like a french horn:

Now, at this point you're likely either looking at me funny or nodding in familiarity. Once I recognized it, I realized that I have a relatively powerful emotional reaction to those four notes, especially when followed...

(Also, I apologize for the pun in the title.)

Also, yes, this was supposed to be last week's post, except that I got bogged down trying to export the musical score fragments into SVG. Images, though inelegant, Just Work.

lame placeholder links

2010-06-14T03:11:59-04:00

Here's a lame post because I'm having too much trouble with SVG embedding right now to get the post I want finished:

The winnnebiko guy (remember him?) is still at it.

They're made of meat.

Lovely example of a synthesizer that was used for the second version of the Doctor Who theme.

what I was working on this weekend

2010-06-07T01:17:13-04:00

I replaced the front brake pads in my car this weekend. Someone (Hi, Mom!) along the way asked why I was doing this, rather than paying someone else to make my problems go away. My glib answer was that labor costs being what they are in Massachusetts, I didn't feel like paying how much it would cost, or spending the time explaining that I didn't want the disks turned, the pistons replaced, or the dooflatchie reframulized.

A better glib answer is that I want to retain my Morlock (Stephenson 1999, Wells 1895) cred, and this leads to a better non-glib answer: by repairing (preventative maintenancing?) the machine that carries me around, I reassert control over my environment, and reassure myself that I can adjust the aspects of my world that most people take for granted.

(The correct answer, of course, is that taking things apart, getting your hands dirty, and putting them back together, is fun.)

a selection of my open tabs

2010-05-31T02:17:27-04:00

A selection of my open tabs, some of which I'm closing because this constitutes a sort of bookmark...

The Stretta Procedure

RFC5868 - Problem Statement on the Cross Realm Operation of Kerberos

Learn the basics of roasting garlic

DJ Tech Tools blog

Echo Nest Remix Blog - Earworm and Capsule

USB Radio Interface

Nord Modular & Micro Modular V3.0.3 tips and tricks

modwsgi Access Control Mechanisms

English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects

wireless FSK transceiver modules RFM12B

JeeNode V4

Anonymous Kerberos

Pkinit configuration

W4RT radio mods and parts

Kerberos domain realm referrals

webfinger protocol draft

Implementing WebFinger

Notmuch -- The mail indexer

more Nord modular stuff

2010-05-10T18:01:09-04:00

Here are a couple of demos of the Micro Modular, which is a scaled down version of the first-generation Modular:

Which led me to the following video:

Which in tern led me to the Metasonix TX-1 Agonizer, which is intriguing if expensive, which leads me to Metasonix, who, although they no longer seem to make the TX-1, do make new vacuum tube-based analog synthesizers, including, oddly, a drum machine made with vacuum tubes, which has to be as far into the cool×odd quadrant as I'm likely to get today.

music stuff

2010-05-10T03:35:00-04:00

Oh look, a Korg M3 wiki.

I have recently become aware of the the Nord Modular and Nord Modulator G2 synthesizers.The basic idea is that you have a DSP on your little black (red) box that you say "emulate this here analog synth", which is relatively old hat at this point. The trick here is that you tell these "emulate this arbitrary giant modular synthesizer", and while you're at it, make it polyphonic if you have the spare CPU. Not only could this make some potentially fiendish noises, but it could the eliminate the desire for much esoteric hardware.

This site has a bewilderingly continuous flow of synthesizer-related links and interestingly relevant e-bay options.

Go see The Gondoliers

2010-05-02T23:36:29-04:00

If you're around Cambridge, go see The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria. Remaining performances Thursday and Friday at 8pm, or Saturday at 2pm, all in Sala.

If you go to the weeknight performances, you'll get to see me drop heavy pieces of the set on myself. The music is interesting and the vocalists are quite talented.

(Yes, this is kind of a copout, but I am hella fried this weekend.)