Home on cliffmccarthy.net

2026-02-10

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:12:18 +0000

I used to have a picture of me on the main landing page of this site, because long ago I read the article Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes by Jakob Nielsen, and it said blogs should have a photo of the author. But now I don’t. And the article was on a different site at the time ("alertbox" or “useit” or something) I read it, and we all know Cool URI’s don’t change, but there you go.

Escher's Elevator

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:20:05 -0600

Escher’s Elevator is a project Kurt Kistler and I started in October 2004. We sought a new approach to making music, exploring the world of sound through use of widely varied textures and tone colors. We use a vast array of instruments and equipment, including synthesizers, samplers, guitars, effects, and acoustic percussion, and loops. In 2005, Erich Schriefer joined us with his own vast array of instruments, effects, and gizmos.

We have performed live improvised sets a few times, and have an extensive collection of recordings of our rehearsals.

2025-06-02

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:17:30 +0000

A fresh look at the Hugo file reference structure

This site has been reworked since file-reference-hierarchy was created. This is a fresh attempt to describe how things are connected.

                                                      .-> layouts/_partials/head/css.html --> assets/css/main.css
                                                      |
                     +-> layouts/_partials/head.html -+-> layouts/_partials/head/js.html --> assets/js/main.js
                     |                                |
                     |                                |                                            +-> assets/js/playlist_handler.js
                     |                                '-> layouts/_partials/head/playlist-js.html -+
                     |                                                                             +-> static/jquery-1.11.1.min.js
                     |
layouts/baseof.html -+-> layouts/_partials/header.html --> layouts/_partials/menu.html
                     |
                     +-> layouts/_partials/footer.html

layouts/home.html (Defines "main" with right arrow on links, "relme")

layouts/list.html (Defines "main" with scroll on links)

layouts/single.html --> layouts/_partials/terms.html

layouts/pages/list.html (Defines "main" with page icon on links, list of just titles, no summaries)

content/_index.md

content/pages/_index.md (added after creating theme)

static/favicon.ico
static/jquery-1.11.1.min.js
static/css/wiki.css

layouts/_shortcodes/playlist.html
layouts/_shortcodes/video.html

File Reference Hierarchy

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 04:19:27 +0000

This is the relationship between files in the theme. This site has been de-themed, but some or all of this may still apply.

                                                              .-> layouts/partials/head/css.html --> assets/css/main.css
                              +-> layouts/partials/head.html -+
                              |                               '-> layouts/partials/head/js.html --> assets/js/main.js
                              |
layouts/_default/baseof.html -+-> layouts/partials/header.html --> layouts/partials/menu.html
                              |
                              +-> layouts/partials/footer.html

layouts/_default/home.html (right arrow on links)

layouts/_default/list.html (scroll on links)

layouts/_default/single.html --> layouts/partials/terms.html

layouts/pages/list.html (page icon on links) (added after creating theme)

content/_index.md

content/pages/_index.md (added after creating theme)

static/favicon.ico

GoAT information: https://gohugo.io/content-management/diagrams/

First-class concepts in Hugo

Hugo has built-in knowledge of specific categories of templates:

Base
Single page
Home page (is a Page)
List
Section (is a List)
Taxonomy (is a List)
- ’tags’ and ‘categories’ are auto-configured.
- They can be removed with disableKinds.
- https://gohugo.io/content-management/taxonomies/#add-taxonomies-to-content

“Section” divides its sub-items into groups, each in a single section. “Taxonomy” can have overlapping sub-items, with each appearing in multiple groups. A typical use case for this is tags.

RSS happens automagically?

page kind: A classification of pages, one of home, page, section, taxonomy, or term. Note that there are also RSS, sitemap, robotsTXT, and 404 page kinds, but these are only available during the rendering of each of these respective page’s kind and therefore not available in any of the Pages collections.

Markdown files

This describes how things worked before the site was de-themed.

The pages section gets its index text from local content, that shadows the index defined in the theme.
The posts section gets its index text from local content.

  themes/fromblank/content/_index.md --> public/index.html

[ themes/fromblank/content/pages/_index.md ]
             |
             '---- content/pages/_index.md --> public/pages/index.html

                   content/pages/useful-links/index.md --> public/pages/useful-links/index.html

                   content/posts/_index.md --> public/posts/index.html

2024-01-25 - Hugo notes

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:26:56 +0000

This was created after changing to the blank theme.

Hugo notes

From https://gohugobrasil.netlify.app/themes/creating/ (old?) and https://gohugo.io/hugo-modules/theme-components/

A theme consists of templates and static assets such as javascript and css files.
Themes can also provide archetypes, which are archetypal content types used by the hugo new command to scaffold new content files with preconfigured front matter.
Website content is displayed in two different ways, a single piece of content and a list of content items.
The default single file layout is located at layouts/_default/single.html.
The default list file layout is located at layouts/_default/list.html.
Partials are a special template type that enables the themes end user to be able to overwrite just a small piece of a file or inject code into the theme from their local /layouts.
- https://gohugobrasil.netlify.app/templates/partials/
- Partials are smaller, context-aware components in your list and page templates that can be used economically to keep your templating DRY.
Everything in the static directory will be copied directly into the final site when rendered.
Theme customization in Hugo is a matter of overriding the templates made available to you in a theme.
- This is supposed to provide “flexibility of tweaking a theme to meet your needs while staying current with a theme’s upstream”, ha ha.
Types of template:
- Homepage
- Base
- Section Page
- Taxonomy List
- Taxonomy Terms
- Single Page
- RSS
- Shortcode
Each type of template has its own spec for the template lookup order.
- https://gohugo.io/templates/lookup-order/
Themes can be stacked like inheritance.
- For i18n and data files, Hugo merges deeply using the translation ID and data key inside the files.
- For static, layouts (templates), and archetypes files, the first file found takes precedence.
- When two files have the same path, the file in the project directory takes precedence.

https://gohugo.io/content-management/page-resources/ https://gohugo.io/content-management/image-processing/

Page resources are only accessible from page bundles, those directories with index.md or _index.md files at their root.
A page resource is a file within a page bundle.
Page resources are only available to the page with which they are bundled.
A global resource is a file within the assets directory, or within any directory mounted to the assets directory.
A remote resource is a file on a remote server, accessible via HTTP or HTTPS.
Once you have accessed an image as either a page resource or a global resource, render it in your templates using the Permalink, RelPermalink, Width, and Height properties.
The image resource implements the Process, Resize, Fit, Fill, Crop, Filter, Colors and Exif methods.
Hugo caches processed images in the resources directory. If you include this directory in source control, Hugo will not have to regenerate the images.
If you change image processing methods or options, or if you rename or remove images, the resources directory will contain unused images. To remove the unused images, perform garbage collection with hugo --gc.

https://gohugo.io/content-management/organization/

_index.md has a special role in Hugo. It allows you to add front matter and content to your list templates.
- section templates
- taxonomy templates
- taxonomy terms templates
- homepage template
all _index.md files in a Hugo project are used to add content and front matter to list pages

https://gohugo.io/getting-started/directory-structure/

archetypes: templates for new content
assets: global resources typically passed through an asset pipeline such as images, CSS, Sass, JavaScript, and TypeScript
config: site configuration
content: markup files and page resources
data: data files that augment content, configuration, localization, and navigation
i18n: translation tables for multilingual sites
layouts: templates to transform content, data, and resources
public : he published website
resources : ached output from Hugo’s asset pipelines
static: files that will be copied to the public directory
themes: themes

https://gohugo.io/templates/introduction/

Each Go Template gets a data object. In Hugo, each template is passed a Page.
With the Page being the default scope of a template, the Title element in current scope (. - “the dot”) is accessible simply by the dot-prefix (.Title)

https://gohugo.io/templates/base/

The base and block constructs allow you to define the outer shell of your master templates (i.e., the chrome of the page).
- What?
The block keyword allows you to fill in or override portions as necessary.
- <body>{{ block "main" . }} ... {{ end }} {{ block "footer" . }} ... {{ end }}</body>
- What is the dot after the name for?
This replaces the contents of our “main” block:
- {{ define "main" }} ... {{ end }}
Code that you put outside the block definitions can break your layout.
- So, like, don’t?

Static web ecosystem

Mon, 09 May 2022 01:25:29 +0000

                                 +-----+
                                 | CSS |
                                 +-----+

                   +-------+     +------+
                   | Theme |     | HTML |
                   +-------+     +------+        +---------+
    +--------+                                   |         |
    | Golang |                   .------------.  |         |
    +--------+     +-------+     | JavaScript |  | Browser |
                   | Hugo  |     '------------'  |         |
                   +-------+                     |         |
  .------------.                 .------------.  +---------+
  | Go         |                 | JavaScript |
  | templates  |  +---------+    | libraries  |
  '------------'  | Content |    '------------'
                  +---------+

2022-05-07 - Hugo Theme Links

Sat, 07 May 2022 12:54:42 +0000

Themes

(GitHub stars)

Sorted by stars: https://github.com/lon9/hugo_stars/blob/master/README.md

2014-12-10

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 12:00:00 -0600

Stuff I found useful in transferring VHS video using a Hauppauge USB-Live 2 digitizer with Linux (Lubuntu 14.04, to be precise):

http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/V4l2-ctl
- This tool can be used to set the device to capture NTSC. The command I used was:
  - v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video1 -s ntsc
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/MEncoder
- The advice here to use GStreamer for “unstable sources” worked out. I had been using an mencoder command to capture video because that was the only thing I had successfully made work, before I discovered the right v4l2-ctl command. The problem with mencoder is that when the video signal drops out (as VHS tapes are likely to do), it starts to lose audio/video sync.
- Also, I was only able to make GStreamer work if I didn’t run the mencoder command at all. So, mencoder was leaving the device in some state that I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of, short of rebooting.
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/GStreamer
- Record from a bad analog signal

The trick with GStreamer is figuring out the complicated “pipeline” to handle the signals correctly. Ultimately, I was able to capture audio and video and keep them reasonably synchronized by running:

    gst-launch-0.10 -v \
        --gst-debug-level=3 --gst-debug-no-color \
        avimux name=mux \
        v4l2src device=/dev/video1 do-timestamp=true ! \
            video/x-raw-yuv,width=720,height=480,framerate=\(fraction\)30000/1001 ! \
            videorate ! \
            'video/x-raw-yuv,framerate=(fraction)30000/1001' ! \
            queue ! \
            mux. \
        alsasrc device=hw:1,0 ! \
            'audio/x-raw-int,format=(string)S16LE,rate=(int)48000,channels=(int)2' ! \
            audiorate ! \
            audioresample ! \
            'audio/x-raw-int,rate=(int)48000' ! \
            audioconvert ! \
            'audio/x-raw-int,channels=(int)2' ! \
            queue ! \
            mux. \
        mux. ! \
        filesink location=gstreamer.avi

This is loosely based on the “Record from a bad analog signal” link above.

I converted the resulting file to MP4 with:

    avconv -i gstreamer.avi -c:v libx264 -b:v 4500k -c:a aac -b:a 360k -strict experimental -filter:v yadif=0:-1:0,setsar=8:9 -ss 12 -t 704 gstreamer.mp4

The “12” and “704” mark the starting time and duration to extract from the full raw file. Note the ‘setsar=8:9’, because the NTSC default is 720x480, with non-square pixels. I prefer working with square pixels, but I decided because MP4 has reasonable handling of different pixel aspect ratios, this would be good enough. (And maybe that additional 12.5% of oversampling makes some sort of huge difference in the picture quality. Nah, probably not.)

Update 2015-03-17: To losslessly trim the mp4 file:

    avconv -i gstreamer.mp4 -ss 15 -t 315 -vcodec copy -acodec copy avconv.mp4

Update 2015-07-14: AAC is the recommended audio format for uploading to YouTube, but the above command may not produce the best audio quality. See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC.

Hard Drive Recovery

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 18:09:44 -0500

A while back, I had to recover as much data as possible from a trashed hard drive. Here are some notes I put together about useful tools:

ddrescue: This copies data off the raw device like dd, but handles I/O errors better, so it can be used to make an image of a damaged device, capturing as much as is readable.

TestDisk: This has a slightly annoying UI but can identify files in an NTFS filesystem that have been deleted and recover them. Because it understands the filesystem, I think it can recover files that are fragmented.

PhotoRec: This program scrapes the raw disk image and spits out anything that looks like a file. This can find stuff even if there aren’t pointers to it in the NTFS file index. It will also find tons of junk you don’t want. It can’t deal with files that are fragmented, but operating systems try to write files contiguously as much as possible, so this can do a pretty good job of digging up things that have been lost.

Roland D-50 Battery

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:57:21 -0600

After a while of warning me to check the internal battery, my Roland D-50 synthesizer came up recently with all its internal presets gone, and random garbage for settings. After nearly 25 years of service, that little lithium battery finally gave out.

Replacing the battery is fairly straightforward. It’s a CR2032 button cell. To access it, you first have to remove the five screws across the bottom edge of the back panel, and every screw on the bottom panel (there are lots of them). After you do that and remove the bottom sheet metal cover, this is what you’ll find, minus the big yellow arrow pointing at the battery:

Here’s a closer view of the main board, where the battery resides:

Be sure to note the polarity orientation of the battery.

The only problem at this point is that there isn’t physically enough room to pull the battery out of its holder. There isn’t enough clearance between the holder and the outer shell of the keyboard to remove it. So, you have to remove all the screws holding the main board down. I didn’t find it necessary to disconnect any of the cables from the main board; once the board is loose, there’s enough play in the cables to move the board away from the edge, making room to substitute a fresh battery. Be sure to match the polarity of the old battery, which you noted before you removed it, right?

Once the new battery is installed, just screw everything back together as it was before. The internal settings will be garbage until you reload them, by either loading a MIDI dump, or copying them from a memory card. Also, check your global settings, as things like the master tuning may be randomized as well.

While I had the cover off, I noticed one of the reasons the D-50 has one of the best-feeling keyboards of any synth I’ve ever played:

That’s a strip of felt that the keys rest on when they’re not being pressed, just like the stuff they use on real pianos.

2013-02-09

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Stuff I found useful while upgrading my MythTV DVR from Fedora 12-based 0.22 to Mythbuntu 12.04.01-based 0.25, and replacing the external USB tuner with an HVR-2250:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Database_Backup_and_Restore
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Backend_migration
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-2200#Making_it_Work_Easily ** http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/firmwares/4019072/
Very beneficial notes about setting up a dual tuner, worked for me.
xfce4-volumed intercepts XF86AudioLowerVolume, etc.; these notes explain how to turn it off.
list of stations
station icons
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythfrontend has information about configuring mysql for remote frontend access.

2012-09-09

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 12:00:00 -0600

You can find some very spot-on reviews of Beasts of the Southern Wild by Googling the title of the movie (in quotes) and “nausea”:

Google search

For example:

reelviews.net: “To this day, I have never understood why some directors see value in filming their entire movie using a shaking, hand-held camera. The intent is to create a more gritty image and to enhance intimacy. More likely, however, it is apt to promote nausea and become a distancing factor.”

All in One Boat: “I can’t give it a review here because within 30 minutes I had to leave. Not because of child cruelty but because of intense vertigo induced by shaky camera work and intensely loud music.”

fromtheeditr: “When cameras are on a bumpy ride, out of focus, intentionally nausea-inducing, it is difficult to concentrate on any message the filmmaker might have for me. "

For me, it was like trying to read in a car for 90 minutes.

2012-01-18

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Today, this site participated in the SOPA Strike. Thanks for contacting your representatives in Congress to help keep the Internet free.

Late Night Bands

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:47:18 -0500

I’ve programmed my Linux DVR to record as many bands appearing on late-night shows as possible. It’s a good way to find out about new music. Since it’s easy to forget names and such, I’m keeping notes here about things I like, and maybe things I don’t.

Circa Zero on Kimmel, 2014-04-29: The guitarist reminds me of Andy Summers. Oh, hey, it is.
MGMT on Letterman, 2013-08-22: Another reminder of how MGMT walks both sides of the line between clever and… stupid.
Hiatus Kaiyote on Leno, 2013-07-24: OMG, best thing I’ve heard all year.
Martha Wainwright on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, 2012-12-14: Like. Bonus points for wearing a piece of tape that says “gun control”.
Electric Guest on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, 2012-11-14: Have you got the lyrics written on your hand or something? Whatever, the result is groovy.
Band of Horses on Letterman 2012-09-19: A good hook, but too short and doesn’t come around often enough, with just one chord filling the spaces in between.
Grimes on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, 2012-08-14: I’m not sure if this is brilliant or stupid. Take away the vocals and it’d sound like Klaus Schulze. I couldn’t understand a single word, which is a plus.
Need to Breathe on Jimmy Fallon, 2012-08-13: One bonus point for using a manual typewriter as a percussion instrument. Or would that be a keyboard instrument?
The Gaslight Anthem on Jimmy Fallon, 2012-07-28: Full-on rock and roll.
Red Wanting Blue on Letterman, 2012-07-18: Very 90’s.
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 2012-06-05: I… don’t know what to make of this. Original, at the very least.
Kimbra on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 2012-05-23: Being weird isn’t enough. But it helps.
Casabian on Last Call, 2012-04-25: Hard. Not metal. At times, almost pompous like prog. Except you don’t hear “oh yeah baby” in prog songs.
Young the Giant on Last Call, 2012-04-20: Good energy, solid vocals.
Kiss on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 2012-03-20: Normal speed, doesn’t rock. Time stretch 1.15X, rocks. Smashing your guitar, stupid. Smashing a Flying V, less stupid.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, 2012-03-02: Giant band, one big jam, audience rushes the stage, totally cool.
Heartless Bastards on the Late Show With David Letterman, 2012-02-22: Dirty, in a good way.
Robert Glasper Experiment on Letterman, 2012-02-29: Good instrumental bits, but the rapping over it isn’t the best.
Eric Hutchinson on the Late Show With David Letterman, 2012-02-21: Pretty good & catchy.
Dr. Dog on Last Call With Carson Daly, 2012-02-17: Good sound, catchy.
White Denim on Last Call With Carson Daly, 2012-02-03: Nice dynamics and contrast, slow lumbering heavy.
Atmosphere on Last Call with Carson Daly, 2011-11-11: Rap with a gritty sort of positivity in the lyrics.
The Airborne Toxic Event on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2011-10-08: A good song with lots of good driving energy.
TV on the Radio on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2011-10-07: A band with a dude with windchimes hanging from a Telecaster is certainly worth a listen.
Foster the people on SNL, 2011-10-09: What? No. Well, good hook in the chorus, even if it is about shooting up a school. But still, no.
Jeff the Brotherhood on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, 2011-10-06: Just the right mix of weird, random, silly, serious, good, and a dude eating a sandwich.
Bush on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2011-09-30: I’ve heard this band criticized for being less authentic than the grunge bands that preceded them, but I like their music anyway. This tune wasn’t as heavy as their earlier stuff, but was still pretty good. I could do without the skinny pants, but whatever.
Wye Oak on Last Call With Carson Daly, 2011-09-28: Good vocals and guitar, in a noisy folky kind of way.
Thievery Corporation on Last Call With Carson Daly, 2011-09-24: Would have been better without the vocals, that kind of get in the way of the groove.
Telekenisis on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2011-09: I like the edgy bassline driving the song.
Death Cab for Cutie on Last Call With Carson Daly, 2011-09: Pretty good song; I’ve heard this somewhere before, so it’s not brand new.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2011-09-20: Nasal vocals, say nah.
Goldheart Assembly, on Last Call with Carson Daly, 2011-09-02, “King of Rome”: A pretty catchy tune.
Lady Antebellum, on the Late Show with David Letterman, 2011-09-01: This is that sincere sort of music that must be part of the “post-irony” thing I recently heard mentioned on NPR. Solid, but not my thing.
Neon Trees, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2011-08-26: Pretty much sounds like a Coldplay knock-off to me.
Interpol, on Last Call with Carson Daly, 2011-08-25: These guys are the sort of band that makes me appreciate the time stretch feature on my DVR. Sped up by 1.5X to 2X, they make a pretty good punk / ska band.
Fountains of Wayne, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2011-08-25: Not to be confused with Kings of Leon or any other “(plural) of (dude)” band, this is good, fun, nerdy stuff.
Big Audio Dynamite, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2011-08-24: I’ve been aware of the name for years, but never heard their music. Much more guitar-oritented straight-up rock and roll than I expected. Pretty catchy and good.
Ra Ra Riot, on Last Call with Carson Daly, 2011-07: After hearing a few cuts by these guys, they’re sinking into my consciousness as being pretty good, in a peppy groovy kind of way.
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2011-01-27: One of the sparkliest bands I’ve seen, musically a decent version of what would have been alternative music in the 1980’s, except it wasn’t called that then.
KT Tunstall, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2010-10-13: Not bad, kind of catchy tune. “Choose my weapon…”

Songs2011

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:35:46 -0600

I’m still catching up on my project to write and record a song each month in [[Songs2010|2010]]. For 2011, I’ve also started doing some other recordings that aren’t part of that project; they can be found here. These are likely to be collaborations of various kinds. Stay tuned; even I have no idea what all is going to show up here.

2011-01-23 4:16 Exit 48A - Patrick Gary & Cliff McCarthy

2010-08-10

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Here’s the latest on my musical activities since, whenever:

I played and tweaked Moog synthesizer on “Orderly Universe”, from Opposite Day’s new EP Mandukhai. The whole thing is great – get yourself a copy!
I contributed the “Playground Process Mix” to the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s Tetherball Triumph remix contest. I took something of a Steve Reich approach to it, and used a Perl script and a calculator along the way. At over eight minutes, it was the longest entry. Be sure to listen in stereo, with headphones for maximum effect.
I contributed the “Rods and Cones Mix” to the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s The Sensation of Seeing Light remix contest. This time, I submitted the shortest entry. My goal was to create a “re-composition” of the song, starting out with the feel of a quiet jazz club (think black & white – rods) and building up to a blazing old-school electric Fred sound (think colour – cones). (Unfortunately, as of 2011-10-02, these remixes no longer appear to be available on the JFJO site.)
I’ve written a couple songs so far this year.

Songs2010

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:20:24 -0600

So here’s the plan: to write and record a song each month in 2010. The goal isn’t to make the songs good; it’s to make them at all. They’ll all be just vocals and guitar, played live in the studio, with no edits or overdubs. I’ll post tracks here as I finish them. Listen as often or as little as you like or can stand.

(2010-07-19) 2. 1:54 In the Cab
(2010-03-13) 1. 1:15 The Same

2010-03-13

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

I’m going to try to record a song each month in 2010. I just finished January. The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up. Check it out, and watch this space for more songs when I get around to them.

2010-03-07

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Check out some cool unicycling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbpFawQu3c8

2010-03-04

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Why I liked the 2D version of Avatar better

I first saw Avatar in 2D, and it was beautiful. The visually rich environment of the planet was extraordinary. Many of the scenes seemed to be lifted (unacknowledged) from Roger Dean paintings, but I love Roger Dean paintings, so this was a joy to watch. I enjoyed studying the extensive detail filling many of the shots—the luminous forests and arcane wildlife made every “shot” (to use the term loosely) a feast for the eyes.

I decided I should take advantage of the 3D version while I could, so I went and saw it in one of the highest-quality screenings around. While there were times that the 3D effect was very cool and gave the images a more visceral quality, overall I found the effect distracting and not enjoyable. While objects in the shots did seem to exist in three-space, I found everything to have a sort of transparent flickery quality. By the end, I had a bit of a headache and my eyes felt funny.

Reflecting on the experience, I realized the origin of this feeling might be rooted in a quirk of the way the 3D effect is created. While sending a different image to each eye does create a stereoscopic focal point in space, the optical focal distance is always the actual distance to the screen. When viewing normal objects, these distances are always correlated. However, in a 3D projection like this, the stereoscopic distance and the focal distance are different, forcing the eyes to operate outside their normal parameter space. I suspect this subtle visual anomaly is behind the somewhat weird look of everything and the cause of the discomfort I felt by the end.

There was another factor I found annoying, at a more conscious level—the omnipresent awareness of the “camera”. Even though the 3D image appears “real” in some sense, the frequent cuts and camera motions collide with that sense of reality. But an even greater sense of the “camera” comes from the fact that many of the scenes are rendered with a limited depth of field, as if they had been shot with an actual camera. Thus, for example, when one of the seeds of the tree of life goes floating by in the foreground, it’s a big white blur. You can cross your eyes and look at it, but it’s still blurry. And, there’s still the problem that it’s least blurry when your optical focus is aimed much further away than the apparent distance to the object.

Depth of field is a useful compositional tool, and can be used to great effect to direct the audience’s attention to different parts of a shot. But I still like to study the whole frame and look at things that aren’t the central subject. That to me is part of the point of seeing a film on a big screen—so I can see little incidental details that might be overlooked on a small display. Unfortunately, the 3D presentation of Avatar makes it inconvenient and uncomfortable to let one’s eyes wander around a scene.

I decided to look around and see if anyone else had similar observations, and indeed they did:

2010-01-17

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Bill Maher has written a great article on why you should move your money into a local bank. Check it out.

Sevendeck Poker

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:56:10 -0600

Sevendeck Poker Rules Summary

Sevendeck Poker is played like regular poker, with a few adjustments. First, mere pairs are of no value. Multiples of more than two have value; the pairs contained in them don’t “cancel”. One consequence of this is that there’s no Full House; a hand with three of one value and two of another is just Three of a Kind.

Second, there are no flushes. Instead, there is a “Stretch”, which is five cards with consecutive suits. Suits wrap around, as suggested by the circle of suits on the box. So, for example, Diamond-Violet-Cherry-Fire-Lemon would be a Stretch.

When a hand is both a Stretch and a multiple, the higher hand takes precedence. There is no special hand category for Stretch-multiple combinations. (Pairs in a Stretch do not cancel; they still contribute their suit.) Straight Stretch is still a special hand, like the Straight Flush in regular Poker. For a Straight Stretch, the values and suits do not have to be in the same sequence.

Sevens can be low (zero) in a Straight. (Ones (“aces”) cannot be high.)

The order of the hands, from highest to lowest, is:

Five of a Kind
Straight Stretch
Four of a Kind
Straight
Stretch
Three of a Kind
High Card
Two Pair
Pair

Notice how High Card beats Two Pair and Pair. High Card is always a five-card hand, like a Straight or a Flush. (This might matter if you’re playing a travesty like Guts where hands may be scored with fewer than five cards.)

When breaking ties in Two Pair or Pair, use the non-paired “kickers” first, then move on to the pairs as a last resort.

What follows is a math-geek-y discussion of where the above rules came from.

An Analysis of Poker with a Sevendeck

A Sevendeck is a deck of 49 cards, with seven suits and seven cards in each suit, numbered 1 through 7. Unlike a regular deck of cards, the suits fall into a well-defined sequence, based the number of angles in the symbol as well as the spectrum order of the colours.

One question that this deck raises is how the game of Poker would work on such a deck. The following is an attempt to answer that.

The most direct approach would be to simply use all the standard rules of Poker, unmodified. The odds of being dealt a five-card hand of a specific type are as follows:

|| ‘‘‘Hand’’’ || ‘‘‘Frequency’’’ || ‘‘‘Probability’’’ || || Five of a Kind || 147 || 0.000077 || || Straight Flush || 28 || 0.000015 || || Four of a Kind || 10290 || 0.005396 || || Full House || 30870 || 0.016189 || || Flush || 119 || 0.000062 || || Straight || 67200 || 0.035241 || || Three of a Kind || 180075 || 0.094434 || || Two Pair || 324135 || 0.169981 || || Pair || 1008420 || 0.528831 || || High Card || 285600 || 0.149773 ||

This is sort of like playing a variant of Poker with wild cards, where the probabiltites of different hands are no longer monotonically increasing. We could instead re-order the values of the hands to put them in probability order:

|| ‘‘‘Hand’’’ || ‘‘‘Frequency’’’ || ‘‘‘Probability’’’ || || Straight Flush || 28 || 0.000015 || || Flush || 119 || 0.000062 || || Five of a Kind || 147 || 0.000077 || || Four of a Kind || 10290 || 0.005396 || || Full House || 30870 || 0.016189 || || Straight || 67200 || 0.035241 || || Three of a Kind || 180075 || 0.094434 || || High Card || 285600 || 0.149773 || || Two Pair || 324135 || 0.169981 || || Pair || 1008420 || 0.528831 ||

This has the interesting consequence of making flushes the most valuable types of hands. However, it also makes them so rare that they are nearly irrelevant to game play. This happens because in a Sevendeck, a Flush is just like Five of a Kind, but with suits instead of numbers. The fact that the Straight Flush splits this small set of hands into two smaller subsets means that they are each more rare than Five of a Kind.

Also, notice that pairs are abundant. With only seven different numeric values, there is more than a 50% chance that any set of five will be a Pair. If all hands involving multiples are factored in, there is more than an 81% chance of getting a hand with at least two of a single value. This makes High Card more rare than Two Pair or Pair.

With the Sevendeck’s rich supply of novel suits, it seems like a waste to make the suit-based hands so rare that they have basically no effect on the game. Therefore, we need a new kind of suit-based hand that has a better chance of coming up in a set of five cards.

Unlike in regular Poker, the Sevendeck has a well-defined relationship among its suits. We can use this relationship to define a new type of hand, called a Stretch, which consists of five cards with consecutive suits. The sequence of suits wraps around, as suggested by the circle of suits on the box and the spectral colouring of the suits. So, for example, Diamond-Violet-Cherry-Fire-Lemon would be a Stretch.

Unlike the Flush, a Stretch is relatively easy to obtain in a set of five cards. Also unlike the Flush, a Stretch is not mutually exclusive with a multiple-value hand like Pair or Full House. To facilitate computing odds, we can start with the “raw” frequences of all the possible types of hands:

|| ‘‘‘Hand’’’ || ‘‘‘Frequency’’’ || || Five of a Kind Stretch || 49 || || Five of a Kind || 98 || || Four of a Kind Stretch || 1470 || || Full House Stretch || 2940 || || Straight Stretch || 3360 || || Four of a Kind || 8820 || || Stretch || 14280 || || Three of a Kind Stretch || 14700 || || Two Pair Stretch || 22050 || || Full House || 27930 || || Pair Stretch || 58800 || || Straight || 63868 || || Three of a Kind || 165375 || || High Card || 271439 || || Two Pair || 302085 || || Pair || 949620 ||

One could simply attempt to play the game with these sixteen hands, but the sequence is weird and hard to remember. It would be nice to have a smaller set of distinct hands that have a simpler relationship.

A key aspect of the order of hands in Poker is that any hand that is more constrained than another is worth more. For example, a Full House beats Three of a Kind. The above sequence does not have this property. Stretch beats Three of a Kind Stretch, Two Pair Stretch, and Pair Stretch. As noted in the second “standard Poker” version above, High Card still beats Two Pair and Pair. However, this latter condition is kind of an interesting twist that seems worth keeping. After all, the goal is to produce a game that is similar enough to Poker to still resemble the game, yet different enough to be interesting.

However, the placement of Stretch in this sequence is awkward and calls for improvement. The position of Pair at the bottom of the list suggests a simple fix: “Pairs are worth nothing”. We can further condense the list by declaring that for any hand that has the Stretch property and a multiple value, it acts as the higher valued hand—there is no special category for such a “combination” hand. We’ll keep the Straight Stretch, though, because it parallels standard Poker well. When we condense the list of hands in this manner, we get the following simple sequence:

|| ‘‘‘Hand’’’ || ‘‘‘Frequency’’’ || ‘‘‘Probability’’’ || || Five of a Kind || 147 || 0.000077 || || Straight Stretch || 3360 || 0.001762 || || Four of a Kind || 10290 || 0.005396 || || Straight || 63868 || 0.033493 || || Stretch || 112770 || 0.059138 || || Three of a Kind || 193305 || 0.101372 || || High Card || 271439 || 0.142347 || || Two Pair || 302085 || 0.158418 || || Pair || 949620 || 0.497996 ||

Note how a Stretch is more likely than a Straight, which is the opposite of the relationship between Flush and Straight in regular Poker. This arises because there are more possible starting points for the sequence. With only one card value “wrapping around”, a Straight can only start at four possible values. With total wraparound of suits, a Stretch has seven possible starting points. Therefore, there are more possible Stretch hands, even though a few are absorbed into Four of a Kind and Five of a Kind.

We still have the odd property that the less-constrained High Card hand is rarer than Two Pair or Pair, but this quirk gives the game a nicely different property than Standard Poker. If you like, think of High Card as a hand consisting of five different values which are not sequential.

One more twist to make the game more “Sevendeck-y” is to allow 7 to be low in a straight, instead of allowing 1 (the “Ace”) to be high. This puts the specialness on the Seven, which seems appropriate for a deck built around that number.

An open question is whether Two Pair and Pair should be lumped together into a single group or not. What is clear is that when breaking ties within those two groups, the pairs should take lower precedence. So 2-2-3-3-7 beats 4-4-5-5-6, for example. If the kickers match, then the pairs can be used to break ties.

Games

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:52:13 -0600

I like games. I don’t win a lot, but I like the procedural interaction and the mathematical aspects of them.

I made up some rules for Sevendeck Poker.
Tired of the same old cards? Try a Sevendeck.
Tired of cards? Try a Piecepack.
Lots of rules for card games can be found at http://www.pagat.com/.
Rules for card games can also be found at http://www.usplayingcard.com/.
Arcbat’s Game Cave sells games.

2009-07-08

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0600

Today I got an e-mail informing me that someone I don’t know wants to keep up with me on Twitter. That’s really nice, but I don’t want to keep up with Twitter. At this rate, I can’t keep up with Facebook; the last thing I need is another social networking web site, on top of Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, my college’s alumni web site, and even Barack Obama’s web site.

I’m a completist, and the voluminious feed-based nature of a site like Twitter thoroughly annoys me. There’s probably stuff I care about in that stream of gunk going by, but it takes too much effort to go back through it all to find what has happened since I last looked. I can either spend all my time habitually checking the feed, or ignore it completely. I choose the latter. I’ll be playing my guitar instead. If you want to reach me, look around this site until you find my e-mail address.

And while I’m on a rant, why does the user interface for these supposedly modern tools suck so much? How am I supposed to peruse this garbage? Spin the scroll wheel on my mouse until I get carpal tunnel? Hit reload relentlessly to keep up with updates? Drag the scrollbar quickly to the bottom and give up? In 1991, I used a tool called ’trn’ to read USENET news. Its user interface is still better than the horrible user interfaces on these web sites that people so adore these days.

And hey, what do you know; you can even find that horrible user interface right here on my web site. Enjoy.

SideBar

Thu, 07 May 2009 10:54:36 -0500

2009-04-26

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0600

The following are some good articles about street protests:

2009-04-13

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0600

This time of year, you might be asking yourself, “How should I mail my tax return?”

I’m not a lawyer, an accountant, a financial advisor, or a doctor, but this page at the IRS seems to support the idea that you should send your tax return certified return receipt via the US Post Office:

http://www.irs.gov/irb/2004-43_IRB/ar12.html

I used to always get a certificate of mailing because I once thought I heard that was what the IRS recognized, but the above page seems to suggest that might not be good enough if you need to prove you mailed it.

I found the above link here:

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/597478

Here’s someone who disagrees, in case you’re looking for justification for just dropping it in the mail and not worrying about it:

http://www.rossde.com/certified_mail.html

2009-04-03

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0600

“We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective.” – Iowa Supreme Court, 2009-04-03

(Full opinion, Summary, Discussion)

2009-01-22

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0600

“If working on branches turns out to be actually harder with svn because it has no clue where the branches are, we might be better off with cvs after all.” – Joern Rennecke

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00153.html

2008-12-11

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0600

I like this article:

http://www.baobabhealth.org/2008/02/09/text-editors-and-electric-kettles/

I tend to like things that are more towards the “text editor” end of the spectrum myself, because I’m good at putting together simple parts in an open-ended framework to produce something useful. However, I have also learned that most of the population isn’t that creative, and needs a more structured interface to guide them through a predefined process. That’s probably why I don’t build user interfaces. Anyway, go read the article.

2008-10-25

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0600

This is what’s up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE

Go vote.

2008-10-22

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Chris Matthews: “You got a candidate who doesn’t know the job description.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-9VW4ewI1M

2008-09-11

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:00:00 -0600

John McCain is deceiving you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH0xzsogzAk

2008-09-04

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Google gets it:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_04.html

Processes are better than threads.

2008-08-17

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Despite a handful of grammar typos, this is a good article about the relationship between capitalism, communism, and democracy.

2008-08-13

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0600

The Foundation for Responsible Television has two good shows on vegetarianism: “What the Best Science Says About Your Health” and “Eating Our Way To Better Health”. Check ’em out.

2008-07-05

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Winning the Presidency is not enough; we need people in Congress who will help Barack Obama put the country on the right track. You can help out now by making a contribution or volunteering to to help Rick Noriega and Tom Daley get elected.

2008-06-26

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

This is very cool – how to thank the soldiers you see in the airport, or anywhere else:

http://www.gratitudecampaign.org/

2008-06-07

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Texas Democratic Party Convention, Day 2:

Our Senate District caucus didn’t go all night. But we did prove that we’re not very good at doing things like lining up and counting.

I mis-read the schedule, so I’m here earlier than I needed to be, checking out random training and exhibition booths.

Update, 15:32:

Hillary Clinton’s speech this morning was patched in to the convention floor this morning. The crowd on the screen seemed to meld with ours, creating a sense that we were there with her. There was something awesome about it. I even felt a little of the sorrow those who have given her so much support must have felt. Later in the speech, the internet connection started flaking out and we didn’t hear the latter portion, but we heard the important stuff.

Now we’re getting ready to vote on the Texas party chair—looks to be contentious….

18:17: Things got interesting.

So we had two contested offices, which required speeches from all the candidates, followed by a roll call vote of the entire delegation. Yep, a roll call vote. Fortunately, they didn’t read off names; we counted up within Senate Districts, and had a roll call of the districts.

Then, just after the results of those votes were announced, we had a resolution introduced to end the allocation of national delegates on the basis of the precinct conventions (also known as “caucuses”, or the “Texas Two-Step”). After a bunch of points of order and parlimentary inquiries, we got to a motion to table the resolution until the commission appointed with investigating the best solution to this issue could complete their investigation. This would effectively kill the resolution at this convention. We held a voice vote, which was (of course) immediately followed by a call for a roll call vote. So we counted up within Senate Districts, and just as the secretary called for the tally from Senate District 1, a very official-sounding voice came over the loudspeaker telling us that there was an emergency in the Convention Center and that we were all to evacuate.

Now that was a hoot. Thousands of people flowed out of the cavernous hall and into the streets of downtown Austin. Not long afterward, we got the all clear and all filed back in. Once again, the roll call started and we got through it without further incidents. The result was just announced, with 78.7% voting to table the resolution.

Now we’re hearing from the rules committe.

And we just had a big SNAFU that looks to me like fallout from too much haste from the chair in holding voice votes. Untimately, that haste didn’t save us any time, and probably wasted it. Oy. More later….

The group from Corpus Christi (hosting the 2010 convention) brought beach balls. A great time was had by all as we held a sort of beach ball hailstorm up in the front of the hall.

As the evening rolled on, we reached that point where you know you’re waiting for a committee report, but have no idea when you’ll actually get it. So, I slipped off to Sixth Street to see my favourite Austin band, Opposite Day. That was definitely the right move. They ended their set, I said “hey” to the band, and returned back to the Convention Center just in time to witness the protests from this round’s collection of people who were unhappy with the nominations of at-large delegates. (Pretty much the same thing happened at the county level.) As expected, it came to a roll call vote which passed. An interesting note is that when we held the vote, everyone was under the impression that the committee would basically have to start over again if it was voted down. After voting within our Senate Districts, but before the roll call, we were informed that that isn’t how it would happen, and that the Obama and Clinton campaigns would select the delegates in that case. Fortunately, we didn’t get into that scenario.

Then, apparently not satisfied with dragging out the process of accepting the report, the cranky people decided to gripe about the nominations of the PLEO (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) delegates, once again proving that the lower the stakes, the more passionately people will fight for something.

We adjourned at 12:11, just in time for me to go see Congratulations playing at the same bar Opposite Day was at. So I didn’t get to go to any swell candidate parties, but I ended the night surrounded by friendly faces.

I got up really early, so I don’t know why I’m still up and writing, but I am. So there you go, the Texas 2008 Democratic Convention in a nutshell or two.

2008-06-06

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Texas Democratic Party State Convention, Day 1:

So far I’ve seen two candidates for national delegate whose promotional materials say they are for “Barak Obama”. If you want me to vote for you, you have to spell it right.

Since I’ve been hearing it all day long, let’s all sing it together: “This is the ringtone that came with my phone. This is the ringtone that came with my phone. THIS IS THE RINGTONE THAT CAME WITH MY PHONE.” You know the tune.

Senate District Caucuses: Chaos, with votes. Ours settled out eventually and we managed to elect a few of our committee people, but we didn’t get to all of them. Tonight is going to be interesting.

Invocation: Longest. Prayer. Ever.

The mayor of Austin is speaking now. Decent speech.

21:19 update, waiting for sign-in tabluation results:

High-profile speaker of the day: Chelsea Clinton. It was pretty cool to see her in person. Maybe it’s partly because she’s Gen-X, but I like her. She gave a nice quick speech about coming together as a party. Cool.

Then we had the endless parade of Texas House reps. That was cool, but long. That was the point, of course, but it was still long.

Before long, we’ll be back into our Senate District caucus, which will include somehow selecting three delegates from about a hundred people who want to go to Denver. I’m ready to be here all night. We’ll see if that’s what it takes….

2008-06-05

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Texas Democratic Party State Convention, Day 0:

“It’s 204 miles to Austin, we’ve got an empty tank of gas, a dead battery, it’s really windy, and we’re in a Miata.” “Let’s roll.”

And roll, I did. Down my driveway, and popped my clutch, and up started the Miata. The Miata uses an AGM battery, and I was a little concerned about driving it, given some concerns I had read about jump-starting one on miata.net. But drive it, I did, and it’s holding up okay so far.

This was my first road trip out of the DFW metroplex in the Miata, and I’m not so sure about it as a road trip car. It was super windy today, all the way from Dallas to Austin. Even with the windows up, the noise and buffeting of my head from pressure variations was so annoying that I only made it about 30 miles before I had to stop and put the top up. At least I could hear the radio that way. Anyway, I’m thinking my 280ZX may be the better road trip vehicle; it certainly has more room for stuff.

The high price of gas has done nothing to reduce the traffic on I-35 between Dallas and Austin. The right lane is full of semis, and the left lane is full of dorks not passing them. Some of them are semis as well. This was at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of nowhere (i.e. 10 miles north of Waco).

Tonight’s fundraiser shindig sold out before I stoped procrastinating, so I’m sitting in my hotel room writing instead. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some actual political stuff to write about.

Addendum, 2008-06-06: I-35 through downtown Austin is a tangled mess of onramps and offramps that makes you constantly change lanes to get to where you want to go. It’s like somebody took a giant traffic circle and unrolled it.

2008-06-04

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

The Texas Democratic Party State Convention starts tomorrow evening. Whenever I simultaneously find the time and a wireless connection, I’ll try to post notable updates here. Stay tuned…

2008-06-01

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Check out this speech by Chris Barton, from the 2008 Collin County Democratic Party Convention:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOOtZW7hgSk

(I missed seeing the speech in person, because I was stuck in line waiting on a paperwork SNAFU so I could get signed in.)

2008-05-26

Mon, 26 May 2008 12:00:00 -0600

“This, Senator, is too much, because a senator, a politician, a person who can let hang in midair the prospect that she might just be sticking around in part just in case the other guy gets shot has no business being and no capacity to be the President of the United States”

– Keith Olbermann

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24798368#24798368

2008-05-18

Sun, 18 May 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Cosmic Cafe is open again!

The fire a few months ago gave us a long reminder of just how much we love this restaurant. They’re open again, so get yourself there and support them! Go every week—I want to run into you when I’m there! It’s up to us to keep Dallas cool by supporting great businesses like Cosmic Cafe.

2008-03-05

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Yesterday was a loooooooooooong day. Got up at 5:30; froze my butt off; got sunburned; froze my butt off again; stood on my feet all day; ate adrenaline for dinner; watched the day’s contest end in a tie; went to bed at 1:00.

2008-02-17

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Tonight’s turnout was amazing at the Obama Precinct Captain training in Collin County! In the picture above, you can see the huge number of people waiting outside the Irish Rover, because inside it was already packed! Everyone waited around in the cold for the first group to finish so they could get the rest of us in for a second round. I’m amazed by the energy of this campaign, and really excited to be able to participate in it!

For more information, visit the Barack Obama web site.

2008-02-12

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Confused about the delegate count? So is everyone else. Visit http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/ and watch several media sources be confused too.

2008-02-11

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Obama?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fZHou18Cdk

Or McCain?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs

Both great videos. Take the time to watch them.

Texans, on March 4, you know what to do.

2008-02-04

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Does art make good politics? Can politics make good art? Whatever. Just watch this video:

http://my.barackobama.com/yeswecan

And vote for Barack Obama, whenever your state’s primary is.

HoB

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:57:59 -0600

Short for “House of Blues”. This page is mainly here just because the wiki thinks it should be a page because of the capitalization. Keeping this page around is simpler than using nowiki tags….

2008-01-03

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:00:00 -0600

We’re off to a good start, with Obama in the lead! I like this analysis of the results from the Group News Blog:

Total Voter Turnout (approximate) 356,000

Percentage of total vote 24.5% Obama 20.5% Edwards 19.8% Clinton 11.4% Huckabee (R)

2007-11-19

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0600

With Microsoft Windows and modern LCD monitors, you get to choose between text that is too small to read, crappy fonts, or a blurry display. Isn’t that nice?

(But the information here might help a little.)

2007-09-12

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:00:00 -0600

I hereby declare that the phrase “CD release party” is officially retired from the English language. Once a term for a one-time intimate gathering of a band’s cool friends and loyal fans, with a tray full of cubes of cheese and little hunks of broccoli, or maybe those tiny little sandwiches that annoy Nigel Tufnel, the term has now become a useless label attached to an entire sequence of ordinary gigs following a CD release and bearing little resemblance to actual parties.

Besides, nobody buys CDs any more anyway.

2007-09-03

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:00:00 -0600

We’ll all miss Carter Albrecht.

I regret that I never got to see his band Sorta. I had almost gotten around to it, just not quite yet. That’s the way things go, I guess.

But I saw him many times over the years, beginning with some of the prime years of the Dead Thing on Saturday nights at Dada. And the first time I ever played MalletKAT with Magpu, he was in the group that opened up the night. I saw him play some great shows with the New Bohemians. And I saw him play a solo show at Bend Studio last November. I’ll always remember that show.

Farewell, Carter.

2007-08-31

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:00:00 -0600

Nixing Ubuntu.

So I recently tried installing Slackware 12 (I have been running Slackware 10), and discovered it doesn’t include Gnome. I don’t use a Gnome desktop; I use good old twm. And yet, it turns out that I use several useful Gnome applications that won’t compile on Slackware 12. So I decided to look into other distributions.

Last night I tried Ubuntu 7.04. Well, I won’t be staying with that one. First of all, after installing it, my system won’t even boot. Grub dies with “error 15”. Maybe this has something to do with the fact I installed on hdb instead of hda, or that I use Reiserfs, or something. Whatever. I did manage to boot it by adding it to my Slackware LILO config.

But that’s where I get off this train. I use RCS to track changes to administrative files. There’s no rcs. There’s no cvs. There’s no tcsh. There’s no emacs. There’s no flex, bison, or m4. There’s not even a stdio.h. You get gcc, but I’m not sure what you could compile with it. This is the same problem I had when I tried running Debian a few years ago. I refuse to suffer through the slow trickle of chasing down the packages I need, one by one.

I like to install add-on packages from source. Ubuntu and Debian seem oriented towards just accepting pre-compiled bundles off the internet for everything. If I wanted to work that way, I could run Windows.

I want a Linux with a reasonable base system with the standard stuff I have come to expect on a Unix system. I guess I’ll try Gentoo next. And if that blows, there’s Fedora. And if that won’t do, it’ll be time to look into the aftermarket Gnome hacks for Slackware.

Feh.

2007-08-30

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:00:00 -0600

The Mad Scientists are cool. I like this quote about them:: If you haven’t seen them, they play this weird blend of psyche influenced rock with sharp funk rhythms and half shouted vocals. There is also some inexplicable guitar shredding to top it off but I’ve enjoyed them when I’ve seen or heard them. I prefer the originality of their music over a lot of Denton’s “tasteful” retro country rockers, music theory students, jazz heads, and gear fetishists. - We Shot Jr - It List: Sat. 9/2/06

(That’s a pretty good description of a lot of the Denton music scene….)

Keyboards

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 23:37:39 -0500

I started my musical jorney as a keyboardist. Here are the electronic keyboards I have used and/or acquired over the years:

Casio PT-20
Yamaha PS-55S (with futuristic-looking silver keys)
Roland D-50 (still my favourite in terms of keyboard feel)
Moog Rogue
Korg Poly 800
Korg DW-8000

Maybe some day I’ll upload pictures or something.

2007-06-07

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 12:00:00 -0600

If you weren’t at Bill Frisell’s performance at the Dallas Museum of Art tonight, you missed one of the best performances of the year. Go see him the next time you have the opportunity.

2007-05-23

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:00:00 -0600

It’s 24-Hour Video Race season! My team, Brand O, used exactly 24 hours to complete our entry. It screened in last night’s Guerilla division. We didn’t advance to the finals, but it was a good time anyway. Plus, we had a Fox 4 news crew follow us around through the whole filming process. The story on us aired last night, which was fun to see. There used to be an article on-line, but the link doesn’t work any more.

Our entry used to be on-line, but the link doesn’t work any more.

Head to the Angelika at Mockingbird Station this Wednesday and Thursday for more screenings, and next Tuesday, May 29, for the finals.

2007-05-21

Mon, 21 May 2007 12:00:00 -0600

Bruce Schneier is brilliant. Check out this quote from his blog:: I remember then-Attorney General John Ashcroft giving a speech in Minnesota – where I live – in 2003, and claiming that the fact there were no new terrorist attacks since 9/11 was proof that his policies were working. I thought: “There were no terrorist attacks in the two years preceding 9/11, and you didn’t have any policies. What does that prove?”

McFarlin

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 21:05:04 -0500

McFarlin Auditorium, site of many TITAS shows.

2007-03-13

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:00:00 -0600

It must be spring; there are suddenly tons of shows to go see. Check out the Calendar and go see live music!

2007-03-09

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:00:00 -0600

I just got word that the Dallas Hard Rock Cafe closed this month. I’m sorry to see it go, even though I hardly ever went there. Ever since they replaced their excellent extra-spicy veggie burger with some off-the-shelf brand name version, there just wasn’t much reason to go. Still, there was something cool about a restaurant full of guitars with “rock” in its name.

I guess we can look forward to having our own House of Blues, which will probably feature blues about as much as the Hard Rock Cafe featured hard rock. I hear rumour it’s going to be smoke-free; yay for that. And there’s a part of me that prefers to see places that aren’t name-branded, but if it turns out to be a good music venue, it’s a good thing overall.

Most importantly, go see shows at the Granada whenever possible. Smoke-free, great sound, great bands, cool employees. And not part of a world-wide chain.

2007-02-23

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:00:00 -0600

The Borders at Coit and Arapaho is going out of business. Last day is tomorrow, February 24. Books 40% off. CDs 40% off and 4 for the price of 3. (But you’ll have to ring up more than once if you get eight and don’t want them to give you the cheapest two free.)

2007-02-11

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 12:00:00 -0600

The Gypsy Tea Room is closing. I won’t miss the smoky air there, or its lack of comforts like decent seats, but it has been the site of many a good show nonetheless. I’ll miss it for that. Last chance to see anything there is March. My pick for a good final show is Michael Franti & Spearhead on March 2. After that, see you at the Granada!

2007-02-03

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:00:00 -0600

The RPM Challenge is under way. Record an album in the month of February. Sounds like a pretty good idea.

Mathematics

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 13:53:37 -0500

I provide free tutoring in mathematics, especially Statistics, for students at Collin County Community College. I used to keep a schedule here, but I’ve gotten lazy about updating it, so just come in to the Mathematics Lab and one of our friendly tutors will help you. One of them might be me.

RecentChanges

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 03:37:18 -0500

This page shows everything that has changed recently, and is a good place to look to keep track of what is going on here.

Media List

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 03:02:49 -0500

This is a list of reminders to myself. I have no idea if this information is useful to you.

Cuong Vu It’s Mostly Residual

Jana Losey’s new one

Frederick P. Brooks: ‘‘No Silver Bullet’’

Bruce Tate: ‘‘Beyond Java’’

Project O: Now as Then

Pilotdrift: Water Sphere

Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil

Splendid: Have You Got a Name for It

Giant Sand: Is All Over the Map, Cover Magazine

(check stuff on the Knitting Factory label)

(check stuff on the Omnitone label)

Djam Karet probably has some new stuff

Audio

Don Ellis?
Dave Douglas / Freak In
Dave Holland / Not for Nothin'
EST / EST Plays Monk
Ingrid Jensen (Project O) / Now as Then
King Crimson / (new 2003)
Misfits / (Walk Among Us ?)
Rush / Different Stages
Steve Tibbetts / Steve Tibbetts
Virginia Mayhew / Phantoms
XTC / Apple Venus Volume 1
Beastie Boys / The Mix-Up
Michael Brecker / Pligrimage
herbie hancock / river: the joni letters
terence blanchard / bounce
gangbe brass band / togbe
gangbe brass band / whendo
lionel loueke / in a trance
lionel loueke / virgin forest
avishai cohen (trumpet) / after the big rain
richard bona / tiki
blue in the face soundtrack
milton nascimento / Angelus (PM on guitar)
milton nascimento / Encontros e Despedidas (PM on guitar)

Video

Grateful Dead / The Closing of Winterland
Pat Metheny Group / Speaking of Now live
Blade Runner
Unforgiven
Shakespeare in Love
A Clockwork Orange
Dr. Strangelove
Dune

Books

Horowitz & Hill / The Art of Electronics
Hunter S. Thompson / Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Bruce Schneier / Beyond Fear
Thomas Frank / What’s the Matter with Kansas?
George Lakoff / Don’t Think of an Elephant

Electric Guitar Wiring

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 04:13:17 -0500

In 1987 I bought a Cort electric guitar, an inexpensive Stratocaster-style guitar. It came with a lousy five-way switch that usually only worked in the bridge-only position. This defective switch started me on a journey through the complex and fascinating world of electric guitar wiring.

At this point, I have pretty much lost count of how many times I have taken this guitar apart and modified its innards somehow. When my initial attempts to fiddle with the switch were unsuccessful at solving the problem, I removed the five-way switch, replacing it with three slider toggle switches. However, I mis-interpreted the intended schematic of the five-way switch, and as a result I wired up the pickups wrong. Somehow I got it set up so that the tone knobs could also bring pickups in and out of the circuit, independent of the positions of the switches. It took me a while to realize this, though.

Fortunately, I discovered the Guitar Nuts web site, which showed me schematics for what the guitar wiring was really supposed to look like. I did the shielding and star-grounding mod described there; I’m not sure it made much of a difference in how much my pickups hum, but it did put me on a path to getting everything inside better-organized.

Inspired by the vast array of wiring configurations on the Guitar Nuts site, I began designing increasingly complex pickup configurations. I eventually replaced the bridge pickup with a rail humbucker, replaced the slider switches with bat-handle toggles, and added two more switches to enable a ridiculous number of pickup combinations. On the last re-wiring, I also stripped out all the cruddy wires I had been re-using and used brand new wire throughout, with many different colours for easier identification.

So, what follows are the details on that latest wiring job.

This photo shows the completed wiring:

The ring terminal that serves as the center of the star grounding is inside the black electrical tape. The large brown capacitor connects the guitar’s internal ground to the cavity shield and the strings. This capacitor protects the player against shock resulting from DC voltage being applied to the cord. The small green capacitors are for the tone knobs.

Along the back, there is a row of five toggle switches. Most of these are on-off-on DPDT switches, but the second from the left is an on-on-on, for parallel/single/series humbucker switching. It is also slightly bigger than the others, because I couldn’t find a sub-mini on-on-on switch.

The coiled black wire is from the humbucker; I didn’t want to hack off the excess wire because you never know when you might need it, and extending a shielded wire like that is tricky. The electrical tape to the right of the picture shows where I had to do exactly that with the wire from one of the pickups. Repeated re-wirings over the years eventually drove that pickup to the point where I had to splice and extend it.

This picture shows the wiring from the other side; here the switches are clearly visible:

Here is a top view, where it is easier to trace some of the wires:

This shot shows the ring terminal with the electrical tape off, and my band’s sticker inside the body cavity. (Putting a sticker inside like this improves the instrument’s sound.)

I mainly took these pictures so that I could review the wiring later without taking the guitar apart; they don’t really show the “how-to” details of setting up a guitar this way.

More interesting is the schematic:

(which will be added much later)

Peavey Rage 108 Footswitch Mod

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 04:43:09 -0500

I got my electric guitar back in 1987. As a kid with not much money and no job, I was intent of minimizing cost as much as possible. So I figured I didn’t need an amp; I could just play it through my stereo. But after attempting that for a while, I learned that an electric guitar played through a stereo sounds nothing like Jimmy Page, or Steve Howe, or any of the other electric guitar sounds that I loved.

Years went by, and I eventually learned that the amp was an important part of making an electric guitar really rock. (I hadn’t discovered effects yet—that came later. Bwahahahaha!) I was still on a budget, so I went for the cheapest amp I could get my hands on. Some time in 1991, I think it was, I went to Whittaker Music (with my grandmother, if I remember right) and bought a Peavey Rage 108. This was back in the days of the Gorilla amp—remember those? The Rage 108 was similar and about the same price, but seemed somewhat better constructed to me.

It turns out that this $100 amp is actually a nice little amplifier. You can get some decent sound out of it, and the distortion channel sounds good and crunchy. When you consider how small and lightweight the thing is, it’s a pretty handy piece of equipment.

But, the one thing that always frustrated me about it was that it’s hard to switch channels on it while playing. The channel selector switch is a tiny little toggle switch nestled in between two knobs. So you either have to set the amp up where you can easily reach it with your hand while you’re playing (and even then it’s a pain), or you need to try to poke at the switch with your foot, which is more likely to spin the adjacent knobs and mess up your settings.

So what I really wanted was the ability to switch channels with a footswitch. I searched around on-line and didn’t find any information about mods for doing this, so I decided to dive in and figure out how to do it on my own.

It turns out that it’s really pretty simple to add a footswitch, so here are my notes on what I did to add one to my amp.

Disclaimer: Use this information at your own risk. If following this advice causes your amp to emit purple smoke, it’s your own fault, unless you think that’s cool, in which case it’s still your own fault.

First, you have to get the “head” out of the “cabinet”. To do this, you unscrew the four screws on the top (the ones that don’t appear to be holding anything on from the outside):

(Having the head held in by screws from the top like this seems to be a pretty standard setup for Peavey amplifiers.)

Before you pull the head out, disconnect the wires from the speaker. They are connected with spade lug connectors, so they just pull off. Note which wire is which so you can re-connect it later. You should then be able to slide the head completely out of the cabinet.

Inside the head, there is a circuit board. A variety of things stand in the way of removing the board. You will need to remove the front knobs by pulling them straight off. The jacks have hex nuts around them; use a wrench to remove those. The board is also held in by several screws; unscrew them.

Once the board is loose, you should be able to pull it out of the sheet metal enclosure:

It will still be connected to the sheet metal by several wires, but you should be able to manipulate it enough to get it to where you can access both sides of it easily. Be extra careful with the speaker wires when pulling it out. they are held in place by a couple stiff protuding connectors which can get caught up on the square hole in the sheet metal, and the sheet metal may nick the wires:

Next, remove the channel switch by desoldering it:

Note that four of the pins are bent over; you will need to carefully straighten them out to remove the switch.

With the switch free, bend back two of the pins, as shown. (You could cut them off, but I wanted to make sure I could undo all this if it didn’t work.) We are going to re-route these pins through a jack on the back of the amp. Note that the pins on the top are connected to the corresponding ones on the bottom; this fact will come in handy.

We will need to run four wires from the switch and board to the back of the amp. I used a four-conductor-plus-shield microphone cable for this. Solder two of the wires to the top pins corresponding to the bent ones:

Solder the shield (or a fifth wire, if you don’t have a cable like this available) to the center pin:

At the other end of this short piece of cable, we’ll add a jack to allow the footswitch to be plugged in. We need a 1/4" tip-ring-sleeve jack with “closed tip, closed ring” switches, like the Switchcraft 14B (Mouser part number 502-14B). Make sure the cable is long enough to reach from the switch to the back of the head, and solder on the jack:

Note how the wires are in pairs, with the two white ones “normalled” to each other, and the same for the two blue ones. The shield is connected to the sleeve contact. It doesn’t really matter which pair of wires goes to the tip and which goes to the ring. However, it ‘‘is’’ important how each pair is connected. The wire attached to the channel switch should be the one that is disconnected from the plug when the plug is inserted. The other wire (which will be connected to the circuit board next) should be connected to the plug when a plug is inserted. Verify this with a continuity tester to save yourself headache later.

Back at the switch end, solder the two free wires to the circuit board, in the two holes that were previously occupied by the pins that are now bent up. Put the switch back and solder it in, making sure that the bent pins do not make contact with the exposed part of the wires soldered to the board:

Be careful not to scratch up your circuit board like I did:

To help ensure you don’t nick your speaker wires, I recommend padding the edge of the square hole with some electrical tape:

(Be sure to put your band’s sticker on the inside as well! It makes it sound better.)

Mount the circuit board back in the enclosure, and put back the knobs and nuts on the front panel:

Drill a hole in the back and mount the jack. A five-wired jack like this is kind of bulky, so you may have to fiddle with it a bit to get it to fit right.

Now we need to build the footswitch itself. It’s just a SPDT switch with a tip-ring-sleeve plug. Attach the plug to one end of a shielded two-conductor cable:

Attach the shield to the sleeve; it doesn’t really matter which wire goes to the tip and which goes to the ring.

Drill two holes in a small enclosure. One will hold the switch and the other will admit the cable. Attach the switch to the cable, with the common terminal connected to the shield:

Then mount the switch in place. I like using a cable tie as a strain relief:

You then should be ready to go! Apart from the jack on the back, there is really no sign that anything is different about the amp:

(Also notice how easily the footswitch can be stashed inside the amp.)

The front switch now sits at a little bit of an angle because the wires run underneath it to the circiut board. But it’s hardly noticeable:

When the footswitch is not plugged in, the front switch works like it always did. When the footswitch is plugged in, it overrides the switch, allowing you to change channels without missing a beat.

Rock on!

Moog Rogue Trim Pots

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:32:41 -0500

Tweaking your Moog Rogue

Disclaimer: Use this information at your own risk. If following this advice causes your Moog to emit purple smoke, it’s your own fault, unless you think that’s cool, in which case it’s still your own fault.

Have you ever wondered what the nine trim pots on the back of a Moog Rogue are for? I did, and so I did some experiments to figure it out. Since there isn’t any information about this on the web, I decided to write up my results. The information in this document is purely the result of my own research; I have never seen the Moog service manual.

(In the time since I originally wrote this, I came across some more information about adjusting the trimpots, at: http://elists.resynthesize.com/analogue-heaven/1999/07/271757/. You might want to refer to that information too.)

Across the back of a Moog Rogue, you’ll find nine trim pots. I only was able to figure out what eight of them did; the ninth one (near the power switch) seems to have some vague effect on tone or volume, but I have no idea what it really does. I will refer to the others as 1 through 8 as shown in this photo:

http://www.cliffmccarthy.net/images/moog_rogue/moog_rogue_trimpots.jpg

As best as I can discern, these trim pots function as follows:

Keyboard control voltage adjustment

Octave switch range

Oscillator 1 pitch

Oscillator 1 range

Oscillator 2 range

Oscillator 2 pitch

Oscillator 1 keyboard tracking

Oscillator 2 keyboard tracking

Notes about these adjustments:

‘‘‘1. Keyboard control voltage adjustment’’’

This adjustment allows you to adjust the voltage output range of the keyboard, and should be the first thing you tweak. To measure it, connect a cable to the “keyboard in/out” jack on the back. Like the panel says, be sure you use a stereo (tip-ring-sleeve) plug. I find an insert cable handy for this. Using a voltmeter, measure the voltage between the tip and the sleeve. The voltages should be as follows:

Low F	0.000 V
Low B	0.500 V
Middle F	1.000 V
Middle B	1.500 V
High F	2.000 V
High B	2.500 V

The low F voltage remains fixed, all the other voltages change as the trim pot is adjusted. You probably won’t find a setting that exactly hits the right values at every point on the keyboard; aim for the setting that gets the closest overall.

‘‘‘2. Octave switch adjustment’’’

This pot controls the spacing between the octaves as selected by the octave switch on the front panel:

http://www.cliffmccarthy.net/images/moog_rogue/moog_rogue_octave.jpg

Initially set the switch to 32’, as this setting is unaffected by the trim pot. Turn on just Oscillator 1 and get a reference note in tune, using some combination of the pitch bender, the tuning knob, or the other trimpots. Then, with the switch in the 16’ and 8’ positions, adjust the trim pot until all three octaves are in tune.

‘‘‘3. Oscillator 1 pitch / 6. Oscillator 2 pitch’’’

I think this is a straight pitch tuning adjustment for each oscillator. Before tuning the oscillators, set the tune knob straight up and the interval to “unison”:

http://www.cliffmccarthy.net/images/moog_rogue/moog_rogue_tune.jpg http://www.cliffmccarthy.net/images/moog_rogue/moog_rogue_interval.jpg

The range covered by the trim pots is quite large—about an octave. If you find that you are having to turn the pot to its limit to get anywhere near the right note, your pitch bender may be out of adjustment. The pitch bend wheel is held in place by a set screw that is accessed through the hole in the finger notch at the crest of the wheel. Use an allen wrench to adjust it. (You’ll have to guess at the size.) If you center the pitch trim pots then turn the pitch bender until you hit approximately the right pitch, you can then loosen and re-center the pitch bender. Make sure you can still turn the wheel through its full range without hitting the limit of the pitch bender pot. Once the bender is approximately in the right place, adjust the oscillator trim pots again.

‘‘‘4. Oscillator 1 range / 5. Oscillator 2 range’’’

I’m not exactly sure what the relationship is between these pots and 7 & 8. My guess is that 4 & 5 are adjustments internal to the oscillators, while 7 & 8 control the degree that the keyboard control voltage affects the pitch. To get these in tune, check notes across the whole range of the keyboard. Tune a low note using trim pot 3 or 6 (depending on the oscillator), then check a high note and adjust this trim pot until the high note is in tune. Then go back to the low note, which may have drifted a bit, and adjust trim pot 3 or 6 again. You will probably have to iterate this process a bit until you hit the right combination. When everything is adjusted correctly, you should be able to play both oscillators in unison across the whole keyboard without them “beating” anywhere along it.

‘‘‘7. Oscillator 1 keyboard tracking / 8. Oscillator 2 keyboard tracking’’’

I’m not sure how tweaking these is different from tweaking 4 & 5, so you’re on your own here.

Contact Info

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:03:08 -0500

To contact me, send e-mail to:

wiki at cliffmccarthy dot net

But convert that into an actual e-mail address, using the transformation that should be obvious to you as a human, but not to a spambot. (Heck, it’s probably obvious to spambots too. Oh well.)

Film

Thu, 18 May 2006 16:21:13 -0500

Sometimes I help make movies, or “films”, as we call them when we want to sound all pretentious and artistic. I generally do this with some friends, calling ourselves Brand-O. We started out making films for the Dallas 24-hour video race, put on by the Video Association of Dallas, but we have started making random recreational films in our free time as well.

You can see some of our work at:

http://web.mac.com/bwhitewater/iWeb/Brand-O/

We also dig Smoking Crayolas, because they’re cool.

The Video Association of Dallas has also started putting on a 24-hour film race called Guts and Glory, and in 2008 they started including Super 8 as well as 16mm. Here are some useful Super 8 links:

About this Site

Wed, 10 May 2006 20:30:31 -0500

This site is something of an experiment in content management. Over the last few years, I have used wikis in various contexts, and I have found their user interface to be incredibly simple and effective. The wiki interface provides the simplest means I have ever seen to keep a page up-to-date, and the simplified markup makes it easier to focus on creating content.

While I think the collaborative aspect of wikis is cool, that is not my goal with this site. I am merely using the wiki software as a tool that allows me to easily update the site from anywhere.

2008-05-21: Up until recently, I had no protection enabled against editing this site. However, in the last week or so, spambots have begun dumping tons of link spam into the wiki. So, I set a password on edits. Sorry about that. I was about the only person making edits anyway. If you want the password, contact me and I’ll give it to you.

Throughout these pages, any first-person pronouns generally refer to me, Cliff McCarthy.

Enjoy!

Computers

Wed, 10 May 2006 01:09:03 -0500

Software engineering

Usability

Blog / Wiki packages

Software

http://www.kernel.org/ for the only operating system you’ll ever want
http://www.slackware.com/ for the most “classic Unix” Linux distribution ** Slackware 12.0 (or maybe it was 11.0) dropped GNOME, so to compile handy tools like grip and gthumb, you need something like: *** dropline GNOME *** Freerock GNOME *** GWARE
View Mail (VM) for Emacs (and the old site)
http://www.freshmeat.net/
MPlayer
Linux is not Windows
Enhanced CTorrent - super simple BitTorrent command-line interface
Penguin.SWF: Flash on Linux
Sendmail / SSL ** http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=287 ** http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/sendmail-smtp-auth-howto-224543/ ** http://aput.net/~jheiss/sendmail/tlsandrelay.shtml ** http://www.screaming-penguin.com/node/4214
jhead, a tool for working with EXIF data in JPEG files

Networking

Games

http://www.ddrfreak.com/

Philosophy

Koans ** Hacker Koan from Wikipedia ** Some AI Koans from the Jargon Wiki ** Rootless Root – the Unix Koans of Master Foo ** Some AI Koans
The Tao of Programming
The Unix Power Classic
Software development quotes
Jamie Zawinski on tabs versus spaces
Perl versus Python

Other

http://www.hpcodewars.org/
[[Hard Drive Recovery]]

The Denton Institute of Phrenology

Mon, 08 May 2006 12:27:32 -0500

The Denton Institute of Phrenology is a marching band that spontaneously takes form on the Fourth of July in Denton, Texas. It is led by Jeffrey Barnes, the woodwind-playing genius from Brave Combo. It is the only marching band I am aware of that incudes guitar, melodica, accordion, violin, and a Kikkoman drum set. In 2007, it also featured Paul Slavens playing a totally phat Casio SK-1 through a boom box that added tasty distortion. We perform patriotic pieces like “This Land is Your Land”, “Yellow Rose of Texas”, and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”, in keys called out by Jeffrey the morning of the event. The group also includs a precision drill team, who are no longer confined to the machine shop, thanks to modern rechargable battery technology.

We dress patriotically and wear hats.

And remember, “This Land is Your Land” starts on the IV chord.

Kobushi

Mon, 08 May 2006 12:14:20 -0500

Kobushi is a Japanese taiko percussion group based in the Dallas area. I played with them in 2004. Big drums, jumping, and shouting. It’s a lot of fun.

Magpu

Mon, 08 May 2006 11:58:26 -0500

I first saw Magpu in May 1998, and immediately dug their unique sound. Over the following year, I became friends with the band, and started occasionally sitting in on various types of percussion. In October 1999, I joined them on MalletKAT for the Project Pu recording sessions. This led to an invitation to play with them at their Club Dada gig on 22 November 1999, and I was with the group from that point onward. The departure of bassist Kyle Grundmann brought about our “farewell” show on 13 September 2002. We played three more gigs after that, in different configurations; as of 2006, our last public show was as a quartet on 22 May 2003, though I hope we’ll have a reunion performance some day.

Music

Sun, 07 May 2006 03:05:06 -0500

Recordings I’ve made

I’ve started recording some different stuff for 2011.
I’m still writing 12 stupid songs for 2010.
In 2005, I recorded a CD entitled ‘‘It Never Stopped Me Before’’.

Bands I have played in

Equipment

Deagan 1100 Vibraharp (a.k.a. vibraphone)
MalletKAT
Other Percussion
Guitars
Keyboards
Woodwinds
Also see the Projects page for some equipment-hacking I have done.

Listening

Late Night Bands

Theory

I have some crazy ideas about music theory. Some day I might describe some of them here.

Resources

http://www.freedb.org/
http://www.frets.com/ - Excellent guitar site
The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics
http://www.tonepad.com/ - Guitar effect circuits
http://www.hipshotproducts.com/ - Guitar hardware upgrades

Live Music Archive contributions

Sometimes I tape performances. Sometimes I upload shows to the Live Music Archive. Like these:

McCarthy

Sat, 06 May 2006 16:06:11 -0500

The keeper of this site.

Now I’ve got one of those myspace thingamajiggys. Whee. Facebook is a useful tool but becoming more toy-like by the minute.

There is a lot of Media out there that I might buy, watch, listen to, or otherwise check out some day.

I invented the following U.S. patents:

8,209,413
8,112,756
7,996,846
7,941,804
7,748,005: System and method for allocating a plurality of resources between a plurality of computing domains
7,228,546: Dynamic management of computer workloads through service level optimization
7,225,223: Method and system for scaling of resource allocation subject to maximum limits
7,143,413: Method and system for allocating system resources among applications using weights
7,140,020: Dynamic management of virtual partition computer workloads through service level optimization

Projects

Sat, 06 May 2006 16:03:19 -0500

Calendar

Sat, 06 May 2006 16:00:45 -0500

This is a collection of upcoming events (mostly musical) that I’m interested in. E-mail me (see Contact Info) for more information about any of these, or to find out if I’m actually going….

Also, this listing is assembled from stuff I read on web sites and other sources of information. Sometimes those sources are wrong. Sometimes I make typos. Check out the facts before driving clear across Texas because of something you read here.

2013-02-08 Kristy Kruger, etc. @ Opening Bell
2013-02-09 A Taste of Herb @ Allgood Cafe
2013-02-14 Sara Hickman @ Poor David’s
2013-02-15 Kristy Kruger & Ginny Mac @ Banter
2013-02-20 Dave Mason @ Granada
2013-02-22 Matt Tolentino Band @ Allgood Cafe
2013-02-28 Mike Doughty @ Kessler
2013-03-08 Sound Tribe Sector 9 @ HoB
2013-03-12 Alabama Shakes & Michael Kiwanuka @ Palladium
2013-03-14 Dumpstaphunk & Soul Rebels @ Kessler
2013-03-19 Greg Osby @ Dan’s
2013-03-21 Yes @ Verizon
2013-04-08 Sigur Ros @ Verizon
2013-04-13 Slightly Stoopid @ Palladium
2013-04-22 Sarah McLachlan @ Meyerson
2013-05-03 Diana Krall @ Verizon
2013-05-07 – 2013-05-19 Fela! @ Winspear
2013-05-10 Elizabeth Wills @ Uncle Calvin’s
2013-06-20 Yellowjackets w/ Felix Pastorius @ One World Theatre (Austin)

(If you’re a performer listed here and I don’t show up at your gig, it’s not that I don’t love you; it’s that I can’t be everywhere at once. And if you gig around Dallas at all, you should be quite familiar with the phenomenon of people not showing up by now….)

HomePage

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Hugo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Write text.
Link to things.
Organized pages.
Sequential posts.
Inline images.
rel=me
Inline audio playlist.
Inline video.
Consume it as source.

Notes

content/pages/_index.md supersedes themes/fromblank/content/pages/_index.md.

“Pages” are just organized units of data that don’t fall into an ordered feed-like sequence.

If there is no front matter, the date renders as, “January 1, 1”.

Test section

this is a link

this is also a link, relative to this page

this is a link to the top of the site

We have pages, posts.

02:55 Burrito Transplant Surgery
03:02 Revenge of the Rather Large Burrito >
03:20 Star Wars Disco Theme >
03:13 Revenge of the Rather Large Burrito

alt text?

Useful Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Non-theme text from content/pages/useful-links/index.md.

Useful links!

None yet.

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