2007

Wed, Feb 28

<14:48 EEST> Switched hoo back to the old IDE/ATA drivers. The libata drivers had some fuzzy slowdown and door-locking problems with the DVD drive, and I got tired of modprobing and sdparming every time I wanted to get things done.

Speaking of DVDs, I found this odd SF movie at the town library: Lies Inc. Weird enough that MPlayer couldn't show it, so I installed Ogle. Xine turns out a much better DVD player for these picky discs and in case you need menus. Which BTW annoy the hell out of me; I just want to see the movie right away, but I guess the Windows generation wants to click through a few menus just for the heck of it ;) Anyway, Lies Inc. had a nice cyberpunk plot obviously derived from Philip K. Dick's stories, 1984, and the like. The production was amateurish, but somehow it made sense in the artificial-reality context.

Sun, Feb 18

<22:04 EEST> I happened upon the blog of Nigel Cunningham, of Suspend 2 fame, and it turns out he is an active Christian. This comes as a kind of synchronistic shock, as I recently saw Richard Dawkins's documentary The Root of All Evil? on the problems of religion. For some reason I find it a little surprising how a kernel hacker, which to me means some kind of a genius, would have such faith.

Dawkins's documentary evokes mixed feelings in me. For starters, I strongly agree with all of the points he makes about the problems of organized religion. But as I consider myself spiritually inclined, I'm quite sympathetic to other forms of spirituality including theistic religions. Thus I find the overall tone of the documentary unnecessarily harsh at times.

In fact, it highlights my arguably pessimistic experiences on interfaith debate; arguing one way or the other feels like hitting a brick wall, and it seems that people of different faith are living in different universes. So I tend to avoid such debates. Dawkins seems to argue that organized religion is such a strong oppression that it needs to be faced with a certain harshness; however, in the worst case atheists may end up being equally oppressive in their quest.

Thu, Feb 15

<01:07 EEST> Are you going to Dorian mode? Parsley, sage, and Talvisuru.

In the past few days, as I still have a couple of songs left to compose for Helges Leben, I've recalled the hauntingly minimalist music of the DOS adventure game Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I'm trying to recreate a somewhat similar atmosphere, albeit more positive and romantic, for a certain scene. I happened to remember one of the Elvira pieces so well that it opened some further doors in the musical memory.

It turns out, as far as I trust my memory, that all of the songs are in the same mode, namely the minor one that evokes an ancient feeling. It's funny how it seems so obvious in retrospect; a score should naturally have overall themes and connections, even if the pieces are superficially different. Funny because that sort of a feeling can be understood even if you don't know about musical modes.

Sun, Feb 11

<23:09 EEST> Spent last night in Tampere in a collegial excursion to the student theatre, watching the Suo performance and mingling with the scene. Among other highlights there is a collective urge to point out the following very important facts:

• The folks at TaYT have a total of 10 keys to their building, while we only have about 2 to ours. Bugger.
• We saw Kari Väänänen at Kivi, a theatre cafe, while intensely discussing and debating the current state of affairs of our noble trade.

The Suo performance was enjoyable overall, but I was somewhat disappointed with the folk-electro music. It was complicated to the point of being messy to my tastes, but I'm probably just biased with my more minimal style ;) Probably the best scene was the swamp football, where the music was also at its best with drum and bass and fiddle.

Back at /home, while waiting for Suspend 2 to release a stable patch for Linux 2.6.20, I'm experimenting with the in-kernel version of hibernation. So far it's working just as well, with X11 accelerations and all. I guess the hibernate script provided by Suspend 2 helps a lot compared to some of my previous failed attempts with the in-kernel suspend. Moreover, I surmise you might see more drastic differences with more RAM, for example due to the speed improvements and space savings of image compression.

As for recent hardware hacks, I put together a simple CDROM to SPDIF adapter. I'm experimenting with a friend's M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 which also records via SPDIF, so I wanted to try that out. It's been interesting to notice that the CDROM output is not a bitwise copy of the CD. There is probably an analogue stage in between, since the volume control of a CDROM drive also affects the digital output.

Fri, Feb 9

<12:52 EEST> The production of Helges Leben is well underway, and I noticed I've written most of the necessary songs already. There are a couple more to do, but I feel pretty accomplished with the whole already, as the director has given thumbs up so far :) In addition the play features a couple of songs by pre-existing bands; for instance, a famous 1980s pop-rock piece was written into the script, so there was not much we could do besides using the original.

For some reason, I've been thinking about the DOS game Blockout recently. Yesterday I downloaded a copy and there was much rejoicing :D I remember Blockout as one of the coolest DOS games, and it still stands out with its smooth 3D graphics and PC-speaker sounds. This makes me want to analyze the main coolness points a little:

• Wireframe is the probably the best 3D graphics you could do with an i286 or so. But even with today's hardware, the game requires you to see through the active block and maintain clear lines, so you can't do much better.
• Scrolling and rotation smoothness is similarly at its theoretical peak. I think the smoothness of movements is pretty essential for the ease of 3D manipulation... which brings to mind the arguments for animation on windowing user interfaces. I guess they are useful if you think of the system in terms of 3D block manipulation, but I think that's a somewhat limiting view.
• A genuinely 3D Tetris entails this subtle balance: 3D alone makes the system hugely complicated and difficult compared to 2D Tetris, while the ability to rotate the active block through all axes makes it much easier to fill the holes.

I guess the only way to finish this disjoint entry of music and retro games is with a link to a collection of live Super Mario Bros music.

Tue, Feb 6

<00:17 EEST> Tonight's highlight of irony is that I can't think of a way to start this entry due to the TV noise exuding from the neighbour's apartment through walls that make me think of ancient Japan. I would like to mention a nice Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron I was pointed to in a Slashdot discussion on music listening. We were discussing how musicians value silence, and another /.er pointed out how constant access to entertainment is detrimental to thinking in general.

My loathing for entertainment and consumerism is particularly high after I noticed a link to my site on Blogilista. Terms like 'blog' and 'podcasting' annoy the hell out of me, since they seem to add nothing to the existing concepts of web diaries and news sites. Online diaries had existed for a long time, until some genius coined the term 'blog' and they suddenly became somehow cool to have. I didn't know the term when I started this diary in September 1999, though it had apparently been coined a few months earlier.

Anyway, the first thing I did with the Blogilista entry was to fix the link. It was pointing to the copy on Sigmatrix which gives a really nice impression of the site when the laptop happens to be offline. I've considered deleting the entry altogether, since I have a slight problem with being associated with 'the blogosphere', but it might also be used to make some kind of a statement about the problem. Plus, of course, I don't mind random people coming to find my music and other stuff ;)

Mon, Feb 5

<17:45 EEST> Yet another pair of Porta Pros spotted. As a friend pointed out, this phenomenon probably has to do with a number of cell phone providers bundling the Koss with their 3G phones. Which is kind of ironic, as my impression of phones that can play MP3s among a bazillion different things puts them at the very low end of audio equipment. Having quality headphones at the end of the reproduction chain won't fix it all.

Speaking of flash players, I actually bought a 2-GB Zen V Plus, but returned it the next day after a number of little disappointments. I even got it to talk to Linux using gnomad2 and libmtp, but in the end it was too much of an expensive toy. I figured it would be much less useful than, for example, the USB sound card of similar monetary worth that gets heavy daily use with my musical endeavours.

Libmtp is an interesting case, since the core of MTP is an open standard. The opensource library has even been supported by Microsoft in the form of a free Zune player to one developer :) Sounds good, but I don't see it doing anything useful besides accessing a flash drive. Indeed many sensible players behave as standard USB storage. The Zen V Plus can configure a part of the flash for use as USB storage, but it won't be visible to the MTP side and vice versa. How dumb is that?

So I've kind of backed away from the appliance viewpoint, as it seems that players are intentionally crippled by software, which is why I need something hackable. For example an iPod with Linux would actually let you use the hardware for full quality recording. On the contrary, the Zen V Plus could only record line-in as 160 kbps WMA and microphone as 8-kHz, 8-bit ADPCM WAV. It's probably great if you only record speech and support evil corporations, but it's seriously limiting the hardware capabilities. On one of the few plus sides, it did play 24-bit WAVs, though obviously not at the full resolution. I think I'll lug my portable studio from now on, as it actually works like I want.

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Risto A. Paju