2009 October » Borasky Research Journal

The geese are migrating, and so have I

Oct 202009

As someone wiser than I once said, “It’s fall – time to roast footballs and play touch marshmallow.” Or something like that. It’s the time of the year when geese migrate. From somewhere to somewhere else..Somewhere south of where they started. I think. In the Northern hemisphere, that is. Are there even geese at all in the Southern hemisphere?

Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the … er … blogger. So I have migrated – in a big way. First of all, I have moved my domains from one of those nameless, faceless places that have no support and no local presence to a Portland-based hosting service with outstanding support, Network Redux. Second, I have migrated all of my sites from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal did way more than I needed, and required extra plugin modules to create search-engine-friendly URLs.

There are a few other changes coming in the not-to-distant future. While the blog posts will still be publicly-visible, most of the content pages will be visible to subscribers only. And for spam-prevention and other legal reasons, only subscribers will be able to post comments. Over the summer, I was deluged with spam on one of my blogs, and it was one where there was also a fair amount of legitimate and quite interesting discussion on a topic very near and dear to my heart, social media analytics.

It was a tough choice, but in the end, I was spending way too much time pushing the “spam” button. On that site, WordPress recorded 127 comments. 116 of those 127 comments were spam! That sucks. You can’t feed that to a goose. In either hemisphere!

First Impressions of openSUSE 11.2

Project Kipling 2 Responses »

Oct 182009

I’ve been testing openSUSE 11.2 for the past couple of months. Now that Release Candidate 1 is available, with the final feature set and look and feel, I’ll share my impressions.

Look and Feel

The thing I like most about openSUSE is that the developers have gone to great lengths to enhance the Linux desktop experience. Whether you use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE or IceWM, you’ll find more or less familiar color schemes, generally in restful shades of green and grey. If you think this doesn’t matter, try looking for eight hours at the bright blue Fedora default desktop, or the default brown Ubuntu desktop with its jangling orange highlights. Pretty much every Linux distro I’ve used over the years has required extensive desktop customization except this one.

And you’ll also find a layout mostly familiar to Windows users. The major desktops all have a “Panel” at the bottom, and a “Start” menu is in the lower left corner on all of them. With 11.2, openSUSE has declared that KDE 4.3.2 is the default desktop. This has been somewhat controversial, but I haven’t found it to be an issue. Finally, all of the major desktop applications have been updated, and openSUSE 11.2 has Novell enhancements to some of them. Firefox is at 3.5.3, Open Office is at 3.1.1 and Evolution is at 2.28.0.

System Administration

YaST just keeps getting better! The two things I like most about openSUSE when compared to all the other community distros are the look and feel of the desktops and the ease of system administration with YaST. I haven’t looked at Fedora or Ubuntu in the current round of testing, but in the testing I did a year ago, YaST was significantly easier to use than either Fedora or Ubuntu.

The most noticeable improvement in YaST for 11.2 is the preview of a web-based interface. While I’m sure some server administrators enjoy the power of the command line, I personally don’t like having to remember or look up all that stuff, which, of course, varies from distro to distro. Nor do I want to install a VNC server just for a GUI system administration tool. So a web-based YaST is a big win for me.

Rough Spots

The main rough spots on any Linux distro are going to be graphic cards, audio and wireless. Audio worked out of the box on both my laptop and workstation with 11.2 RC1. Wireless mostly works, although you still have to go outside the distro repositories to get some drivers, and there are some minor setup glitches with the KDE Network Manager applet on a WEP network. I have so far only tested the default open source drivers for my graphics cards.

Other rough spots: VMware Workstation requires some extra attention to install, but it does work once you’ve done that. I found some dependency issues installing the Rosegarden sequencer. That’s about it for rough spots now.

Performance

Stay tuned! I haven’t run through any of my detailed performance tests yet, and I don’t typically compare distros, just versions of openSUSE and various tuning parameter options. Performance tests I am planning to run are

iozone, comparing 11.1/ EXT3, 11.2 / EXT3 and 11.2 / EXT4 with default settings,
iozone, comparing Xen and KVM virtualization on 11.2 with EXT4, and
Memory requirements of all the major desktops.

What's Happening, Man?

Project Kipling 1 Response »

Oct 142009

There is quite a bit of activity on the AlgoCompSynth front. As you may know, I’m a SUSE Studio subscriber, and I’m building openSUSE 11.1-based appliances there. One of them is dedicated to AlgoCompSynth, and I expect to make a release in the very near future, as soon as I get the license details on some packages I want to include.

The target bill of materials includes openSUSE 11.1, CSound, Pure Data (pd) and gem, ChucK, Audacity, Rosegarden and Lilypond, and, of course, the Jack Audio Connection Kit and other low-level audio packages. There are also going to be some things that one normally doesn’t associate with music – the R programming language, for example. And the whole development chain – “gcc”, “gfortran”, “git”, kernel source, etc. will also be there.

If the licenses are compatible, it will also include athenaCL and Impro-Visor. I haven’t picked a desktop yet, but I am leaning towards .including KDE4, Gnome and XFCE, with “kdm” as the display manager. It will probably also have both Firefox and Seamonkey browsers; I really don’t want to carry either Evolution or Thunderbird but I do want an email client.

One final note: I have been doing quite a bit of testing with openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8. So far, everything I have tested works fine, but I don’t know when openSUSE 11.2 packages will be in the SUSE Studio repositories, so for the time being, I am sticking with 11.1.

When Harry Met Iannis (2009)

AlgoCompSynth 7 Responses »

Oct 102009

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The story behind “When Harry Met Iannis”

Iannis Xenakis passed away on February 4, 2001. When he arrived in Heaven, he sought out his mentor, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen said, “Iannis, there’s someone here I want you to meet.” The two walked over to a small sidewalk cafe, and there sat Harry Partch. And so from this fanciful meeting in Heaven, “When Harry Met Iannis” was born. From Partch, the piece inherits the 43-tone just scale, tuned to G = 392 Hz. Also from Partch, the piece inherits the need to build instruments to play in the Partch scale. The harmonies in “When Harry Met Iannis” are derived from the Tonality Diamond. Now we have the harmonic structure – the Tonality Diamond. This is where Xenakis comes in. Xenakis was a pioneer in stochastic music – music composed algorithmically by using chance elements. The Perl script that composed “When Harry Met Iannis” was given an initial state – a chord on the Tonality Diamond – and a duration for the piece. All the other elements of the score are derived stochastically by a random walk. The duration for each note is chosen at random. Whether the note is sounded or silent is chosen at random. And the progression of chords around the Tonality Diamond is chosen at random. At each transition, one of four chord transformations is chosen at random:

The tonality can change from an Otonality to the corresponding Utonality or vice versa.
The chord structure can stay the same but be shifted up or down an octave.
A new Numerary Nexus can be chosen for the chord, with the rest of the structure remaining the same.
An Odentity or Udentity can be added or deleted, with the rest of the structure remaining the same.

Because some of these transitions can take the piece out of a practical performance range, if the piece goes out of range, the operation is reversed. For example, if the chosen transformation is to go up an octave and the resulting chord would be pitched too high, the next chord is instead chosen by going down one octave. If removing an Odentity or Udentity would leave an empty chord, one is added instead. Once the score has been computed, the piece is rendered. For this piece, I used a little-known digital synthesizer called sfront. Sfront is similar in principle to the much-better-known CSound digital synthesizer, but sfront code is vastly easier to read than CSound code. The synthesis consists of sung vowels with reverberation, and the position of the chord from left to right between the two stereo channels is chosen at random.