Weblog

Friday September 30, 2005

Yet more musical emulation

I liked the Prophet emulator so much, I bought the same company's Hammond clone too. Now I can pretend to be Jon Lord being harrassed by Ian Gillan about his organ not working...

Tag: MIDI

Thursday September 29, 2005

Another 500 mile month!

Well, probably. I need to do 22 miles tomorrow morning, but that's typically no problem.

(ETA: yup, done.)

Tag: cycling

Wednesday September 28, 2005

Brain-controlled computers

Nature is reporting on their news pages about an electrode-array-bearing cap that a person can wear, which allows them to navigate a virtual environment by visualising walking. Although it takes practice to get used to the system, the breakthrough here is that you don't need to have the electrodes implanted. Just having them held onto your head is good enough. Meanwhile, another group has been using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation to produce an artificial feeling of motion. So that's the start of neural input and output. Maybe I really will live to see cyberpunk technology come true. That would be cool.

Tag: cyberpunk

Tuesday September 27, 2005

Worst episode ever

Smallville, season four. Spell. What were they thinking? Was there some kind of ratings war going on with Buffy? As the title says, and to quote Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons: worst episode ever.

Monday September 26, 2005

Getting the boss into trouble

Paul sent me an email suggesting that I should blog about some ancient piece of history from when we worked together, before we both joined Sun. But that would take research, and I can't be bothered today. Maybe another time. So instead, here's a story from back then that doesn't take any research.

Back in the days of SunOS 3.5, when the hot desktop was a Sun 3/50 diskless client, running at 16 MHz, with 4 megs of RAM, the default windowing system for Sun workstations was called SunTools or SunView. It was unrelated to X11, and at least partially implemented in the kernel. Anyway, we used to call it "ScumTools", not because there was anything wrong with it, but only because derisive nicknames were all the rage in the group at that time. So one time, the boss called up Sun tech support, and just automatically started talking about the problem he was having with "ScumTools". At which, the support person got quite offended, and the boss had to apologize profusely and blame the bad influence of the code monkeys.

I'm such a troublemaker...

Friday September 23, 2005

mmm... curly...

I just won a fund-raiser auction for some guitar-building wood. You can see it here. Tasty! The money is going to help Hurricane Katrina victims. If you're interested in building musical instruments, be sure to check out the MIMF (musical instrument maker's forum), who's sysop arranged this and some other fundraisers.

Tag: luthiery

Thursday September 22, 2005

More computer music fun

When I was a teenager I always wanted a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5. That's a synth keyboard, for those of you not old enough to know. I never got one - it was pro gear at the time, and much too expensive, and these days they seem pretty rare. But thanks to the magic of emulation, I now have the next-best thing — a Pro-53. I got this program today, and it is a hoot. Having never played the real thing, I can't say how realistic it is, but a lot of the preset sounds are surprisingly familiar from those eighties tracks...

Also, the latency problem is apparently not hardware-related, since running this synth as a standalone program and controlling it from my Yamaha piano produces no noticable lag. Excellent.

Tag: MIDI

Wednesday September 21, 2005

The Truth Machine

According to a news report on Nature's news page, some proponents of fMRI are now claiming to be able to reliably detect lies by monitoring brain activity. This seems like it might actually be a plausible "lie detector" — unlike the polygraph, which has been proven time and again to be unreliable. I'm not sure what the implications of this are. Certainly one can imagine situations where being able to demonstrate that you are telling the truth about something would be very useful. But suppose it turns out that you don't need to stick someone's head into a giant magnet to do this. Suppose any random social interaction could be measured for degree of truthfulness by either party, using a small potentially concealed device. That could change our world a bit, I'd think.

Anyway, the article made me think of a novel I read a while ago, called The Truth Machine, by James L. Halperin. If I remembered a darn thing about it, I'd give you a mini-review right here, but I don't. So I'm putting it on the "to read" pile. I'll be interested to see how Halperin thinks society would be changed by such technology. (If I recall correctly, the technology was restricted to judicial uses in his novel.)

Tuesday September 20, 2005

Stupid errors I have made, #1 of several thousand

Today's stupid programming error involves recursive directory handing in C. I was doing this, and wondering why it didn't work:

void
foo(char *path)
{
        /* stuff */
        if(condition) {
               foo(dirname(path));
               /* other stuff */
        }
        /* yet more stuff */
}

Can you see the problem? Yup, that's right, dirname() modifies the string pointed at by its argument, so when you pop up a level, your path is still trimmed. The solution is to strdup(path) before the recursive call, and free() the copy afterwards.

D'oh!

Tag: Bugs

Monday September 19, 2005

Computer-aided music

Today I hooked up the MIDI output of my Yamaha digital piano to a USB MIDI interface attached to my Windows XP computer. My first baby steps towards integrating computers and music. I tried playing some of the soft synths that came free with Cakewalk Sonar. However, they seemed to have an extreme amount of latency between me pressing the key and the sound starting. Since the computer is a dual-core Athlon running at 2.4 GHz and has two gigs of RAM, I suspect that the computation is not the bottle-neck. There are plenty of places the latency could be coming from - the keyboard generates a MIDI note-on message, which propogates over a 30' cable, which gets read in by the USB device, sent down the USB stack, read by the program, a waveform is generated, and sent out the sound card, which propogates up a short cable to my speakers, and finally the sound travels back across the room from the computer to the keyboard. The only parts of this I can quantify the latency for are the electrical propogation of the MIDI message, which should be well under a microsecond, and the propogation of the sound waves back across the room, which should be about 15 ms. No doubt having the speakers closer to the keyboard would help, but I feel like the delay is hundreds of milliseconds total.

From the brief research I've done online, it seems like making sure I have the latest drivers for the USB chipset on the motherboard and the Yamamaha USB interface would be a good first step. The USB stack is quite often found to be the culprit in these situations. I shall investigate further tomorrow.

Tag: MIDI

Friday September 16, 2005

Thank you Garmin tech support

As I mentioned before, the heart rate stopped working on my Forerunner 301. This morning, my replacement strap arrived, as promised by tech support. I just tried it, and it works fine. Result! Of course, it would have been better if it hadn't taken a month to get the replacement, but you can't have everything.

Now I have a broken transmitter I can cut open to see what's inside. Stay tuned...

Tag: GPS

Thursday September 15, 2005

Movie mini-review

Steam Boy (Katsuhiro Otomo)

I give this movie about 7/10. The basic plot is a typical alternative-history Victorian setting sci-fi, involving masses of steam-powered war machines. It is an animated move.

I'll get the moaning over with first. The story is not that strong, and some quite severe suspension of disbelief is required for those of us with real knowlege of heavy engineering. Furthermore, the philosophy espoused by the characters is rather simplistic.

With that out of the way, I have to say I did enjoy the movie, mainly because of the visuals. A mixture of CGI and cel animation was used, and I thought it was stunning. There was only one short scene where I thought the CGI detracted from the look (which was where the mechanical hand was grabbing for Steam Boy as he flew around in the boiler room). I'm not sure if all the backgrounds were CGI, or if some of them were hand-painted. But some of the street scenes were simply stunning, and the details of many of the mechanisms were similarly amazing.

I watched this on pay-per-view TV, and I intend to buy the DVD so that I can geek out over the artwork some more.

Wednesday September 14, 2005

Comets are crumbly

Nature is reporting that analysis of the Deep Impact results has shown that the nucleus of a comet has very little cohesion. Its a very weakly bound aggregate of grains, held together mostly by gravity. So when you think of the "dirty snowball" model, don't think of a ball that's been moulded in your hand, think more of falling snow.

Monday September 12, 2005

My dog's got no nose

I'm anosmic. I really have no sense of smell at all. I can't smell ammonia, or chlorine, or anything. I've been that way since I was born, but some people become anosmic after head injuries or illness. The incidence of congenital anosmia is not not known, and it's not something that often comes up in conversation. It tends not to be too noticable to other people. I just heard from an online friend about a discussion forum for people with congenital anosmia. For those interested, it is here.

Tag: Anosmia

Friday September 09, 2005

Bands I wish I'd seen

Bands I could have seen, but didn't:

• Queen
• Led Zeppelin
• The Who
• Frank Zappa

Bands I couldn't have seen, but still wish I had:

• The Beatles
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• Big Brother & the Holding Company