tech

For some context, see the Wikipedia article on the turbo-encabulator.

BoingBoing, fount of all things wonderful and strange on the interweb, alerted me to this great short story set in the context of a Wikipedia sort of discussion, but involving a future scenario where time travel is possible. Hilarity ensues.

And changed the theme too, as the old one wasn't available yet for drupal. I think it looks nice though, what about you?

More reason not to join social networking sites: How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free.

This article doesn't even get to the core of the badness in my paranoid brain though: What are the possible implications of allowing a site or any number of sites access to a coordinated list of your friends and associates? What are the privacy implications, and what happens if a more fascistic government takes control and demands the records of one of these companies? What if the company goes under and the sleazy execs sells the data to even sleazier execs who then mine the data for all it's worth to sell you stuff and sell your data to other companies? I'm sure I'm not even touching the surface, frankly.

My recommendation, and what I'm trying to implement myself: control your own data. Use client-side applications as much of the time as possible (i.e. read your mail with Thunderbird on your own machine with mail hosted by a smaller ISP vs. logging into a web site to do so...still problematic but there are also good hosts out there who are into these political/economic issues too), sign up for as few memberships as possible online (check out http://www.bugmenot.com/), don't sign into any Google services when you are searching, don't sign up for any social networking sites, chatting on major services is problematic...don't trust big corporations (or small ones) to do the right thing with your data. They don't love you, they just want money.

I'm not so great at putting my own advice into practice yet, and it's counter to the trend in the biz, but I'm realizing it's where we need to go. Please give it some thought. I'm not just being a luddite here; I've been working as a web developer and sysadmin for almost a decade and I know how incompetent and unscrupulous people can be.

• I wonder which member(s) of Radiohead are the Max/MSP programmers? I'm going to guess it's Thom Yorke, 'cause he's so hot for the electronic shizzle, and Jonny Greenwood, who's got the fancy-pants multi-instrumentalist credentials and classical training...but what do I know.
• I managed to catch pianist Vijay Iyer perform with his trio last night at The Stone (a small venue far over in the East Village, run by avant-improv hero John Zorn). It was challenging for me, both because I have a hard time with that sort of virtuosic jazz for philosophical reasons, but also because, well, it was just sort of hard to listen to after a while: it was pretty "out" in terms of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure.
• On the other hand, I missed hearing Harry Partch's music performed at the Japan Society last week. It's a shame, because his iconoclastic micro-tonal music is rarely performed, both because of its difficulty and because of the logistical challenge of dealing with the improbable, unique instruments he designed and built for his work. Ah well, such is the glory and tragedy of living in NYC: always too much to do.

I'm one of a number of people performing Terry Riley's "In C" tonight at Galapagos in Williamsburg. The performance is tonight's DARMSTADT "Classics of the Avant Garde," a regular event hosted by Zach Layton and Nick Hallett.

I'm performing the piece using SuperCollider 3, the fantastic code-based sound manipulation software tool. Here is my sclang source code. It's fairly simple as SC3 coding goes: I've coded all of the fragments into individual instances of Pbind (basically a sequence of note durations, pitch values, and what sound to play the notes with), and I'll be triggering each Pbind manually as we move through the piece. It's sort of a half-assed version of live-coding. Also, I will be tweaking amplitude multipliers (per a few different Sine wave UGens) simply via mouse movement, to add a bit more control and variation in the sound. I've tried to find a good balance between sequencing the entire thing completely automatically and having a good amount of control over the execution, so I can actually perform rather than just "push play".

I'm excited to be a part of the event! I've always been a big fan of "In C." Here is a link so you can find out more about Terry Riley, and I found a copy of the score here if you want to take a look.

So, I'm just completely tired of having to filter out the endless "viagra cialis levitra cialis buy viagra..." comment spam, and also, it frustrates me that people can't leave comments without me approving them, so then people don't end up leaving comments, methinks.

Therefore I've done two things: I've turned off administrator comment approval, and installed the reCAPTCHA Drupal module. reCAPTCHA is pretty cool—I didn't know about it until a few weeks ago, but I'd heard others talking about it. What it is, basically, is a way to digitize scanned texts through distributed human processing. It's kind of the inverse of distributed computing; it uses human brains to produce output meaningful to computers. Well, technically speaking, a scanned text is just fine and dandy to a computer, it doesn't really care what the hell it is, it's all bits...but I digress.

The reason this is awesome is because OCR has a crap ability to make sense out of scanned in text compared to humans reading the text. So, having a bunch of humans doing a word here and a word here ends up being a much higher rate of success for accuracy than making a computer do it. Make sense? If not, here is a more thorough explanation of how reCAPTCHA works.

In any case, this is set up to allow you to submit comments on my posts now without needing my approval, and hopefully it'll keep all the annoying spam bots from posting crap as well. Let me know what you think.

Create Digital Music recently completed their Circuit Bending Challenge. Alas, I did not participate. However, after having seen the winners, I'm not sure I would have been able to compete—certainly not on the basis of who can make the most awesome facial expressions when they are performing using their circuit-bent toys. Behold:

You probably don't need to watch "El Colin" past about the halfway mark, but boy he sure is entertaining up until that point. Not to dismiss the other two winners, I found both of their projects to be awesome and funny as well. Check 'em out.

My MySpace profile is an absurd joke. It's barely worth looking at, frankly. So the sort of spam-bot that does screen-scraping of profiles in order to send "personalized" messages just produces ridiculous results. Case in point:

Hey Drat

How's it goin? I am new to this Myspace thing.. I was just browsing my local area and I found your profile. I think you're cute and I like your style (my style...hahahahahahahaha) ;). I just moved to around the Rggggghsdnn area for work about 2 weeks ago. That's why I'm on the web cuz I dunno anyone around here lol.

My name is Kristy 21/F.. lookin for a guy I can be comfortable around so I'm kinda into older men (sweet!). I just signed up not too long ago so my profile on here sux.. I know..lol. I have pics and a bio on my homepage blog at - UmmExcuseYou.com (hey babe, nice dye job in the first picture on the bottom row...or is that a different person?).

Talk to ya soon,
Kristy

p.s. I also wrote you a personal message on my homepage blog ;)

I wonder what sort of message a lusty young lady from Rggggghsdnn would put for little ole' me on her homepage blog? I can't wait to see.

I've been skimming the ixi SC3 Tutorials from ixi audio. The authors have done a great job introducing digital synthesis concepts like additive, subtractive, am/rm/fm, granular and physical modeling synthesis, as well as going over SC3 concepts such as patterns, buses, and GUIs using sclang. Also FFTs. Also buffers & sampling. Etc. It's awesome, and just where I am right now in terms of my SC3 skillz. Thanks to ixi folks! You rock.