Utah Open Source Planet

I wrote this brief little Byrd’s parody for my friend who’s doing a Summer internship in Texas.  Perhaps you’ll recognize the tune:

To every task turn, intern.
There is a reason. (Turn, intern!)
There’s an intern for every purpose under heaven.

An intern to type, an intern to clean,
an intern for food, an intern for drinks,
an intern for calls, an intern for blame,
Intern, the men’s room TP will soon need replacing.

I was once annoyed with how small the default bash shell history was and how small the available history was, back when I didn't know they were two different concepts in bash-think. I now know much better. In fact, I know so well that I flatter myself you will gratefully appreciate the following clever mods to bash history behavior.

First, I decided that I wanted the shell to remember every command I entered for about the past 5 years. Your limit may be higher or lower depending on your bash needs.

export HISTFILESIZE=65536

export HISTSIZE=4096

$ egrep "^command.*arg" ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq

#!/bin/bash
grep --color=yes "$@" ~/.bash_history | sort -u

if [[ $- != *i* ] ; then
  return
fi

shopt -s checkwinsize
shopt -s histappend
case ${TERM} in
  xterm*|rxvt*|Eterm|aterm|kterm|gnome*)
    PROMPT_COMMAND=‘echo -ne “\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}:${PWD/$HOME/~}\007”’
    ;;
  screen)
    PROMPT_COMMAND=‘echo -ne “\033_${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}:${PWD/$HOME/~}\033\\”’
    ;;
esac

use_color=false
safe_term=${TERM//[^[:alnum:]/?}
match_lhs=””
[[ -f ~/.dir_colors   ] && match_lhs=”${match_lhs}$(<~/.dir_colors)”
[[ -f /etc/DIR_COLORS ] && match_lhs=”${match_lhs}$(</etc/DIR_COLORS)"
[[ -z ${match_lhs}    ] \
  && match_lhs=$(dircolors --print-database)
[[ $'\n'${match_lhs} == *$'\n'"TERM "${safe_term}* ] && use_color=true

if ${use_color} ; then
  if [[ -f ~/.dir_colors ] ; then
    eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dir_colors)
  elif [[ -f /etc/DIR_COLORS ] ; then
    eval $(dircolors -b /etc/DIR_COLORS)
  fi

  if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ] ; then
    PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] '
  else
    PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \$\[\033[00m\] '
  fi

  alias ls='ls --color=auto'
  alias grep='grep --colour=auto'
  alias less='less -R'
  alias tree='tree -C'
else
  if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ] ; then
    PS1='\u@\h \W \$ '
  else
    PS1='\u@\h \w \$ '
  fi
fi

unset use_color safe_term match_lhs

alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'
alias cgrep="grep --color=yes"
alias xterm="xterm -geometry 100x40"
alias gnome-terminal="gnome-terminal --geometry 100x40 --hide-menubar"

export EDITOR="vim"
export HISTFILESIZE=65536
export HISTSIZE=4096

if [[ -f ~/.bash_local ] ; then
  source ~/.bash_local
fi

Well, now that I've got all my networking arranged into something of a stable format again I figured I owed it to the world to start blogging about all of the cool things I think about and all of the intrepid adventures I undertake at the drop of a fedora. Such sanguine adventures continued unabated today when my roomate invited me to a recital at BYU by a girl called Yasuko Melissa Jensen. Man, wow. What a voice. That girl has great talent. She seemed really young yet her voice was so mature sounding and beautiful.

There's really no dearth of culture at a large university. There's always something 'cultural' going on. Universities are not only scions of high education but of high culture as well. Those are always things worth promoting in any society.

Sibelius' Night Ride and Sunrise tone poem opened the concert giving the strings a frightfully large amount of rapid dotted rhythms although they stayed together admirably, only losing ensemble unity slightly in the more difficult transition passages.

After sunrise dawned on the landscape of Sibelius' unique, alien sound world, a cold spring was then featured in his violin concerto, for Sibelius once remarked that his violin concerto ostensibly remained cold and clear as water while other composers were busy concocting draughts of all hues and colors.

Attired in the conventional feminine violin virtuoso getup, flamboyant and fashionable, Hilary Hahn walked out to the cheers of a sellout, hip crowd. Most of the time during the concerto Hilary observed the conductor in almost an Ida Haendel style. Often the plain cold water of the concerto ran along unforgivingly perhaps in part because of Hilary's deliberate treatment of stoic expository passages. And perhaps it needs a master Sibelius interpreter like Herbert von Karajan to realize the ent draught virtue of his pure, cold water-style of composition, who can sustain very fine control over pacing, dynamics, and timbrel nuances.

Hilary's personality matches her smart looks, and although chic and having significant pop-appeal there is power and finesse in her playing. Her execution and intonation were flawless and her talent and musicianship were wonderfully matched with one of the finest violins I've ever had the privilege of hearing live and that includes two Strads, although I'm probably a better judge now than I ever was before. With the slightest brush of the bow d�tach�, spiccato, leggero, martel�--they all responded beautifully on such an instrument in brilliant fortissimo or withdrawn pianissimo as the case required. Whether sul G or in the highest register, the instrument sounded with brilliant, full, clear tone.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of the tone poem and big name soloist on the concerto the symphony was overall well played. The horns could have been much clearer and the subito dynamics of the third movement observed more scrupulously. The pacing of the symphony fluctuated to a depressing degree, generally gravitating towards slowness with the instrumental melodic passages tending it towards a more sprightly tempo--a tempo which I think is more natural for Sibelius' 5th symphony, but I was not disappointed overall.

Sunday night I rode Trax up to UU in full tux (the other kind of tux) gear, viola case in hand for Gardner Hall. The ceiling was amazing. Evidently you can achieve no parallel faces in a multifaceted surface without hanging a couple of F-117s upside down. As opposed to the dark, depressing, Scera theater where you could hear all the strange notes from the choir and all of the worst sounds possible from a small orchestra with decent clarity, the light, airy concert hall they have at UU only enhanced the best out of choir and orchestra. I could hear myself as clearly as if I were the only player in the room yet hear the rest of the orchestra with as much transparency. It is as if the hall itself were an instrument. I had goosebumps during the whole of the Halleluiah chorus. Life is meant for moments like that.

For my musical notation needs, I use LilyPond.

LilyPond is to music as LaTeX is to writing. I prefer to edit LilyPond files in Vim and compile them with lilypond at the command line. However, on OS X LilyPond.app is a front end to the compiler. An IDE of sorts. Not a spectacular one, in my opinion, but it does have one thing going for it: when you click on a note in the PDF preview, it takes you that note in your LilyPond source file in the IDE.

On Leopard, LilyPond is severely broken. The IDE will "start", but there is no menu. Further, if you are on Intel, when you try to run it at the command line, it just keels over and does nothing. It so happens that the workaround to this problem and using LilyPond without the IDE are almost identical solutions, so I'll describe them as one and the same.

First, and this is the only difference between Leopard brokenness and just wanting to run on the command-line, you want the powerpc version of LilyPond.app, not the Intel version. So go over to the download page and get the ppc version (the one that says it's for G3, G4, G5 Macs).

lilypond and its friends are in Lilypond.app/Contents/Resources/bin. You could add this to your PATH, but some of the binaries in there are things that I have installed elsewhere (e.g. with MacPorts), and I don't want them overriding my PATH. Likewise, I want lilypond to be able to find the binaries it expects, and since they're taking up disk space anyway let's help it along. So I wrote a script. A LilyPond launcher if you will. I call it ly and put it in my path, and then I call e.g. ly lilypond foo.ly. Here's the code:

#! /bin/sh
APP=/Applications/LilyPond.app
PATH=$APP/Contents/Resources/bin:$PATH
exec "$@"

Customize APP to point wherever you want to keep LilyPond.app. This will load up the environment that will give lilypond the best chance of success. You can run any of the binaries in that directory with ly, but the most common case is to run lilypond. So I recommend putting this in your .bashrc:

alias lilypond='ly lilypond'

The first time you run the ppc version of LilyPond, or anything else, on an Intel machine, it will seem to take forever while Rosetta fires up. Be patient. Subsequent invocations are quick enough.

Once upon a time I was on a quest to get Ogg Vorbis working on a Mac. I tried the QuickTime Components project and it worked for awhile. Then it broke with QuickTime 7. Truth be known, it never worked all that great before, though it did decode the music. Then I found VLC and never looked back.

Today I learned that somewhere in the interim Xiph.org filled the gap. Now you can download XiphQT, stick XiphQT.component in /Library/Components, and you're off and running. This is precisely how the issue should have been addressed in the first place, and I'm glad it finally was, whenever it was. I'm also happy to have been ignorant of the fact for so long, since I despise iTunes for other reasons, and this tells me I've lived without regular iTunes abuse for a long hapy time.

For my musical notation needs, I use LilyPond.

LilyPond is to music as LaTeX is to writing. I prefer to edit LilyPond files in Vim and compile them with lilypond at the command line. However, on OS X LilyPond.app is a front end to the compiler. An IDE of sorts. Not a spectacular one, in my opinion, but it does have one thing going for it: when you click on a note in the PDF preview, it takes you that note in your LilyPond source file in the IDE.

On Leopard, LilyPond is severely broken. The IDE will "start", but there is no menu. Further, if you are on Intel, when you try to run it at the command line, it just keels over and does nothing. It so happens that the workaround to this problem and using LilyPond without the IDE are almost identical solutions, so I'll describe them as one and the same.

First, and this is the only difference between Leopard brokenness and just wanting to run on the command-line, you want the powerpc version of LilyPond.app, not the Intel version. So go over to the download page and get the ppc version (the one that says it's for G3, G4, G5 Macs).

lilypond and its friends are in Lilypond.app/Contents/Resources/bin. You could add this to your PATH, but some of the binaries in there are things that I have installed elsewhere (e.g. with MacPorts), and I don't want them overriding my PATH. Likewise, I want lilypond to be able to find the binaries it expects, and since they're taking up disk space anyway let's help it along. So I wrote a script. A LilyPond launcher if you will. I call it ly and put it in my path, and then I call e.g. ly lilypond foo.ly. Here's the code:

#! /bin/sh
APP=/Applications/LilyPond.app
PATH=$APP/Contents/Resources/bin:$PATH
exec "$@"

Customize APP to point wherever you want to keep LilyPond.app. This will load up the environment that will give lilypond the best chance of success. You can run any of the binaries in that directory with ly, but the most common case is to run lilypond. So I recommend putting this in your .bashrc:

alias lilypond='ly lilypond'

The first time you run the ppc version of LilyPond, or anything else, on an Intel machine, it will seem to take forever while Rosetta fires up. Be patient. Subsequent invocations are quick enough.

Once upon a time I was on a quest to get Ogg Vorbis working on a Mac. I tried the QuickTime Components project and it worked for awhile. Then it broke with QuickTime 7. Truth be known, it never worked all that great before, though it did decode the music. Then I found VLC and never looked back.

Today I learned that somewhere in the interim Xiph.org filled the gap. Now you can download XiphQT, stick XiphQT.component in /Library/Components, and you're off and running. This is precisely how the issue should have been addressed in the first place, and I'm glad it finally was, whenever it was. I'm also happy to have been ignorant of the fact for so long, since I despise iTunes for other reasons, and this tells me I've lived without regular iTunes abuse for a long hapy time.

My wife and I saw a Kyrgyz musical folklore group called “Kūt” perform live at the Orem Library on Friday. I was really impressed at their musicianship and even bought a CD.

From the CD insert: “The family plays all traditional instruments [of Kyrgykstan] including various string instruments, flutes and drums –the komus, kyl kyiak, temir and jygach ooz komuz, choor, dobulbas, sybyzgy and the chogoino choor.”

Needless to say there were some pretty exotic sounds. If you like world music, contact Vista 360 and tell them you’d like to check these guys out.

Thanks to Vista 360 for putting this on, and thanks to my former entrepreneurship professor Dr. Kent Millington for providing the photo.

So with yesterday's post on my top three, there are a number of albums that still deserve some praise for being good choices to listen to.

Arcade Fire, Neon Bible. Arcade Fire's sophomore release, and my first experience with them. "Keep The Car Running" still dominates as my favorite single track but usually I just listen to the whole album in bulk. The album flows well together, and makes for excellent music to listen to while coding.

Jimmy Eat World, Chase This Light. This was not what I expected from Jimmy Eat World. The style found in Futures or Stay On My Side Tonight is only found in "Gotta Be Somebody's Blues." The rest of the album tends towards strong, clear, upbeat rock sounds. The lyrics aren't all upbeat though, and the contrast of music to lyrics is delicious. If you've listened to a lot of Jimmy Eat World, you'll find that songs like "Chase This Light," and "Firefight" will remind you of songs from Clarity. Overall I felt like this shift in style has a lot of what they did in Futures, but I kept being reminded of Static Prevails and Clarity.

Guster, Satellite. This EP only has "Satellite" from Ganging Up On The Sun. Most of these are B-sides from the recording sessions for Ganging Up On The Sun and have the same style. Particular enjoyment for concert goers who have heard Brian sing it, the EP has "Total Eclipse Of The Heart." Overall an excellent choice for good music. Guster continues to be my longest running favorite band, and I look forward to the next album, hopefully in 2008.

Maps, We Can Create. Electronic rock is how I'd try to describe Maps. The review on Pitchfork does an excellent job summarizing the album. While it doesn't have a wide range, it is very well done. The consistency of the album makes for wonderful coding music. That feature may have hurt it in the Pitchfork review, but when I'm coding the less jarring transitions the better. My biggest problem is I can't often remember specific songs.

Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank. Some people say that this album was too "pop" and it was a bad move. As things go, this is the album I like the most by them. The songs have a wide (almost too wide) range of mood, which can make listening to the album feel a bit choppy. My favorite part: The latter half of "Parting of the Sensory," reminding us that our carbon will be stolen. A close second is the random "shake shake shake shake shake" in "Missed the Boat." Finally, you need to watch the "Dashboard" music video.

WIth the end of the year here in a few days, I thought I'd spend some time reflecting on things from the past year. We'll start with music.

This year has been good for me and finding new music. My roommate over the summer, Adam has a wide taste in music and introduced me to a number of bands. Some of these aren't represented in the following list because their albums did not come out during the past year. My top three albums are all new artists to my collection.

Number One: The National, Boxer. I thought it was good the first time I heard it, but after seeing them live in San Fransisco there was no doubt. This band is amazing. Boxer contains a great range of wonderful songs. From the laid back songs like "Brainy," "Green Gloves," or "Start a War" where the vocals and music just blend beautifully; to the more upbeat like "Mistaken for Strangers," and "Apartment Story" which quickly get you tapping to the beat. "Fake Empire" is the opening track and gives you a great idea of the album. I recommend watching it performed on Letterman to get an idea.

Number Two: Radiohead, In Rainbows. Enough people have raved. I'll just say that this was my first Radiohead purchase, and I quickly went out and bought Ok Computer that evening. You really should get it just to understand all the people you keep talking about it. Also to understand why Last.fm's chart has looked like this since the release.

Number Three: The Honorary Title, Scream and Light Up The Sky. I think I found this band through a Last.fm recommendation. This is their sophomore offering and does not disappoint. The album as a whole flows nicely. Key tracks are "Thin Layer," "Stuck At Sea," "Along the Way," and "The City's Summer" (which contains the album's title lyric). If you like bands like The Format, Guster, and Death Cab for Cutie you should check out this album.

More thoughts to come, including other notable, but less awesome, albums of 2007.

It looks like the monster might finally start to lay itself to rest. After almost 2 years, one of the most basic feature requests for Banshee looks like it will finally be fulfilled. I’m talking about playlist syncing to iPods. While there have been a plethora of patches in varying states of readiness always floating around, it just never got into trunk. I am very pleased to have checked in a working (and building at the moment) patch which enables the management of iPod playlists though banshee.

I know that the patch has been in better shape, there were a dozen different times that a commit might have made sense, but in the end, ipod-sharp is a moving target, and trying to hit it and Banshee with stable API’s at the same time (without a freeze ) has proven to be quite difficult (no hard feelings to the Banshee dev’s they keep new features coming, and fast). Anyways, there are a few known bugs with this patch, most of which (in my super-limited testing) stem from ipod-sharp being in the middle of an API shift, and trunk isn’t working.

Anyways, I wanted to make a list of Features and Bugs, namely so the 2 don’t get confused, since a big part of this patch was trying to determine exactly what ‘expected behavior’ was, theres a lot of room to grow.

Known Bugs

• Major Performance Issues - This just needed to eventually go in, and maybe the new ipod-sharp api will have a better solution, but I started working on this, everything (meaning the entire music library) must be iterated over to find a corresponding track. Some preliminary work was done to get more content sorted/hashed, but theres still a lot of work to do here.
• Double Tracks on IPod - Depending on your version of ipod-sharp, and what random steps you take to get things building against your version, there is a common issue where a Playlist Dragged from the Library onto an iPod will result in duplicates of every song in the playlist on the iPod. This should be easy enough to track down if someone just has the time and patience.
• New ipod-sharp API - As there will eventually be a new ipod-sharp API, someone needs to migrate the current logic to the new API, should be mostly the same except for the device detection logic.

Behavior Issues/Features

• A Playlist from the Library to the iPod with the same name will result in the iPod version being overwritten.
• Dragging a track from the library to a iPod playlist will result in that track being copied to the iPod again
• Click and Drag support for playlist’s on iPod, its recommended that you drag songs from the iPod’s library
• Rename of iPod playlists
• Does not synchronize all library playlists to iPod automatically, only those which are placed onto the iPod

I think thats most of it, once iPod support in Banshee has leveled out a little bit, I plan on adding support for On-The-Go playlists and Smart Playlists. Anyways, I know that its far from a perfect commit, but after porting this patch through so many API changes, design shifts, and general bitrot, I really just wanted to get it out of Bugzilla.

The obligatory screenshot:

Note: I’ve tested this with the latest iPod Firmware, if you run the Hash tool as you normally would, it should work fine.

Moby posts on his blog about the band James….it’s funny that I have been on a James kick for the past week.

And this:

Back in 1995, I started working for a mobile DJ company in Denver & Colorado Springs, Colorado. We used 3 MiniDisc decks with each set of equipment for all our music.

MiniDisc is an awesome technology. It holds just as much music as a CD on a 2-inch recordable magneto-optical disk in a thin, sturdy plastic casing. The audio quality is quite good.

I’ve had a MiniDisc deck for many years, but haven’t had it hooked up for the past 3 years or so. Last night, I came across my stack of discs while looking for (and finding) some LS-120 floppies. So I decided to dust off (literally) the deck and plug into my home workstation for playback. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an audio cable to go from stereo RCA connectors to the line-in jack typical of compter sound cards. This afternoon, it occured to where I could look for the cables I kew that I had and, sure enough, I found them. Since then, I’ve been enjoying listening to my MiniDiscs.

The first deck that I had could do both component audio and fiber optic audio for both input and output. That deck went out and I got it replaced with this current model, but the new one does not have fiber optic input for recording.

It’s been nice to research some links for this article as I’ve learned a lot about newer developments in MiniDisc technology and available devices that have come out over the past couple of years. I think I’m going to have to pick up some of the new Hi-MD (my birthday is in May, in case you were wondering) disks and units. It’s also been fun to reminisce about the two years (from 1995-1997) that I was at that mobile DJ company. Good times.

Looking for some music to include in a multimedia project, or maybe on a telephone system? These tracks are high quality and royalty-free. The author requires Attribution under a Creative Commons license, and accepts donations.

I enjoyed the African and Celtic tracks - here's one example.

Many who read the Fozzolog know I've become a fan of Porcupine Tree -- a progressive rock band based out of England. They've been releasing music steadily since the early 1990s.

I saw them perform live last year in San Francisco and had the time of my life. Performing on stage with them was guitarist and singer John Wesley, an American who has accompanied the band on the road since their In Absentia album tour in 2002.

"Wes" is also featured on the band's most recent album Fear Of A Blank Planet.

Anyway, my buddy Thom alerted me today that Wes posted a blog entry to his MySpace site a couple days ago which contained some rather shocking news. Here it is:

This is really cool news and it makes perfect sense. Wes is in a good situation to do something like this -- he's fairly independent and not encumbered by the iron fist of a record company.

I say this is common sense because of my experience with Porcupine Tree. I was introduced to the band by word of mouth and was then prompted to download some of their music from (evil, illegal) music sharing sites/networks on the Internet. Some of the stuff I downloaded is out of print or very difficult to get your hands on otherwise.

Someone (perhaps, someone from the RIAA) might say I'm a bad, bad person for doing this, but consider the outcome: I ended up traveling to San Francisco and attending a concert I otherwise would not have. I bought the band's live DVD Arriving Somewhere (which is excellent, BTW), a DTS DVD-Audio version of Deadwing, and the CDs: Fear Of A Blank Planet and Stars Die - The Delerium Years.

Word-of-mouth and, more importantly, music (illegitimately) obtained from online sources results in money in the bank for artists who make good product.

So, if you're inclined to like progressive or alternative rock, you can do as I will also do: download Wes's stuff. See if you like it. If you do, consider purchasing a CD or two or, better yet, hit that "Demand It" button on his site to indicate that you would likely pay for a ticket to a concert in your area if John Wesley were to perform.

Some (crappy) pictures from the Rush show I went to.

We were only 7 or 8 rows from the stage. I went with my buddy Thom.

I was completely blown away with the technology of the show. I counted over 110 intelligent moving head lamps, 8-10 X-Y scanners, two ~8-port green laser units with mirrors placed around the stage, and 10 manned followspots (6 in the rig above the stage and 4 front-of-house). Lots of use of controlled LED technology. There was plenty of lovely fog and several displays of pyrotechnics.

And here's the second part of that Sons Of Nothing concert I uploaded to Google Video. See previous entry for the others. This is Sons Of Nothing in Spokane, WA July 2006.

• (11) Shine On You Crazy Diamond
• (12) Run Like Hell
• (13) Pigs (3 Different Ones)
• (14) Not Now John
• (15) The Great Gig In The Sky
• (16) Visiting Mussolini
• (17) Set The Controls / Astronomy Dominé
• (18) Brain Damage / Eclipse
• (19) Another Brick (Parts 1-3)
• (20) Comfortably Numb
• (21) Childhood's End

I went on a video-uploading rampage last night and uploaded a whole DVD's worth of video from a Sons Of Nothing show from last summer. We played at The Big Easy in Spokane, Washington. It was one of the nicest venues we ever played at and the whole experience was great fun. I really regret we didn't have two or three cameras capturing the event for posterity.

The audio comes off the soundboard and sounds great.

So, sit back. relax, slip yourself something if that's your thing. Envelope yourself in the music of Sons Of Nothing as they pay tribute to Pink Floyd (and play a couple of their own tunes.)

• 1 - Speak To Me/Breathe
• 2 - On The Run
• 3 - Time
• 4 - In The Flesh
• 5 - What Do You Want From Me
• 6 - Welcome To The Machine
• 7 - Mother
• 8 - Mr. Serious
• 9 - Wish You Were Here
• 10 - Echoes

That's the first set from the show. I'll put putting up the second set as well in the next day or so.