Currently
Thursday, March 25 2010
I’m in the process of setting up a Subversion repository at the office, so we can manage our code more easily. Everything was set up nicely and I was able to commit and checkout code. I defined several users in the password file to prevent possible other users on the same network from accessing our repository in any way. It didn’t work though, or so I thought.
As an anonymous user I was able to list the directories in the repository and checkout code, something which I explicitly restricted. After some hours and a lot of yelling I was able to trace down my problem.
Subversion caches your username and password after a successful login attempt. So every time I thought I accessed my repository anonymously, Subversion actually sent a cached username and password to the server.
If you’re working on a Linux box or, in my case, a Mac the credentials are probably stored in your user directory:
~/.subversion/auth/
Deleting all the files in the auth directory will revert you to an anonymous user again, until you successfully login that is – Subversion will recreate the relevant cache directories. You can also set store-passwords = no in the configuration file, also located in .subversion.
Of course, if I’d bothered to read the manual* I would have known… Ashamed now.
*= In my defense, I did glance at the documentation…
Sunday, February 28 2010
“Three Tales” by Steve Reich is one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music written in the last two decades. It’s among Reich’s best works as well.
I generally don’t like operas and yet “Three Tales” is classified as a video opera – the visual accompanyment was created by Reich’s wife Beryl Korot. The piece is wonderful though, both in tone and timbre. And the complete lack of arias sung by pompous baritones and tenors certainly helps.
The opera is divided in three movements, each detailing a scientific event of the 20th century. The first part deals with the Hindenburg Zeppelin and the second about the American nuclear test on the Bikini atoll during the fifties.
The last movement is my favourite, an analysis of cloning, genes and the fusing of man and machine. You can have a different opinion than Reich on the matter (I certainly do), voiced by rabbi Steinsaltz and evident by the fact the previous acts of the opera end in disaster. But the movement itself is magnificent. This is largely due to the fact that the music follows the characteristic voice melody of the people Reich and Korot interviewed – inluding key scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks. But there’s something else, a sense of constant tension, of danger even. Nico Muhly, a composer and protégé of Philip Glass, explains the feeling than I’ll be able to:
Listen to how outrageous the choral harmonies are on the slow chords behind the active snare drum anxiety in the foreground: “Here we are, under the tree again!”
[...]
As is his wont, Steve Reich ends it in this weird modified six-four inversion, so you get the simultaneous feeling of resolution and suspense. This is a very effective technique for creating precisely the emotional ambiguities that works like Three Tales rely on.
Nico Muhly, “Beautiful Pictures”, 2007
*= Richard Dawkins says the following in “Three Tales”, which corroborates with my views on cloning and genetic engineering:
“Once upon a time there was carbon based life, and it gave over to silicon based life.
I don’t view the prospect, with equanimity maybe I’m just sentimental.”
Richard Dawkins, “Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality”, Three Tales Libretto, 2003
Friday, February 5 2010
Allow me to present something silly I’ve been working on lately. It’s called Pixelburg (and it’s in Dutch) and it’s a project two friends and I started a little while back, after playing SimCity on the Super Nintendo and consuming quite a lot of alcohol. Pixelburg is a fictional city based on the urban developments in the Netherlands after World War II. Right now its 1954 CPT (Central Pixelburg Time) and the development of social housing is in full swing.
I wrote the code which allows us to build city tiles (50x50px images drawn in a vector editor), publish a newspaper and post articles on its history and citizens. It’s not the most beautiful piece of coding I’ve produced, but it gets the job done and allowed me to invest a lot of time in using jQuery and utilising the XML capabilities of PHP.
We placed the first tree on January 1st 2010 at 0h00 and now Pixelburg is becoming quite the city with its 7 neighbourhoods and a nascent industrial estate. The city is already teeming with colourful citizens, like a corrupt real estate developer, a 200 year old farmer, a celebrity chef who specialises in cooking croquettes and a xenophobic granny who opposes the development social housing around her home at every turn.
Come visit Pixelburg. Please beware that Pixelburg does not support small screen resolutions and any version Internet Explorer.
Sunday, November 29 2009
Just finished installing Windows 7 on a new 27” iMac, which was a long and painful process. Apple has stated that they will support Windows 7 via Boot Camp before the end of 2009, but an unsupported install is possible. People have reported problems with black screens, which is caused by a faulty ATI driver. Here’s how I pulled it off, using the information from this thread on MacRumors.
- Partition your harddrive using Boot Camp. I’ve used a partition size of 50 GB, so I have enough to install Windows 7 (which takes ± 15 GB) and a modern game.
- Insert the Windows 7 DVD and start the installation from Boot Camp. The Mac will restart and the installation process will commence.
- After a certain point in the installation process – the part where it completes after a first reboot – the screen will go completely black. This is probably the moment when the display drivers are triggered. Do NOT abort the installation now by resetting the computer, the installation process continues despite the display problems.
- Leave the computer in this mode for at least 20 minutes.
- After that perform a hard reboot by powering down the computer and booting into the Windows partition.
- You should now get the option to start in Safe Mode, choose this option.
- The setup tries to continue in Safe Mode, but it can’t and you’ll get an error.
- Do NOT click “Ok”. Instead press Shift F10 to get a recovery console.
- Now type
compmgmt.msc to bring up the Computer Management Screen.
- Select the Device Manager and disable the video card under Display Adapters. Do NOT uninstall it, because you’ll end up in all kinds of hell.
- Close the Device Manager and click “Ok” on the aforementioned error message (7).
- This will trigger another reboot, but this time you should have video, albeit at a crippled resolution.
- Let the installation continue and log in to your new Windows 7 installation.
- Insert the disc with the Boot Camp Drivers (which is your Mac OS X installation disc). Do NOT choose to let Autorun.exe do its magic.
- Instead, enter
cmd in the search field of the Windows Start Menu.
- Before clicking the entry, right-click on it and select Run as administrator from the context menu. After that, click the item to fire up cmd.exe
- Enter the following commands:
D:
cd "Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple"
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi
Which will fire up the 64-bit version of installation of the Boot Camp drivers.
- Restart your machine after the install and you will notice the screen resolution still isn’t right. You can choose a lot more options, but the widescreen variety isn’t listed.
- Fire up Windows Update from the Start Menu and let it check for updates.
- There should be an item under Optional updates referring to your ATI graphics card, which is either a ATI Radeon HD 4670 or HD 4850.
- Install this update and reboot when asked. Windows 7 should reboot in the iMac’s native resolution and your done!
It’s not a guaranteed success, so your mileage may vary. If your first try doesn’t work out, consider trying again.
Tuesday, September 29 2009
During my teenage years I was rather obsessed with Romanticism and the music of Frédéric Chopin in particular. My tastes have broadened since then, but I’m still very fond of Chopin and piano music in particular, so I decided dive into the piano works of two other Romantic composers; Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt.
Schubert is universally beautiful, but I’m still not sure about Liszt. Most of the work I’ve heard from him comes across as technically complex, but rather cold. Liszt was a piano virtuoso in his days, which accounts for the technical complexity of his works, but so was Chopin. It’s as if Liszt treats the piano as a one-man, one-instrument orchestra, while Chopin is attempting to let the piano sing. It’s a bit hard to explain in words.
Another problem I have with Liszt are the various interpretations by pianists. A popular consensus seems to be that all of his music should be played forte and if possible fortissimo. Now, it could be that they’re just following the original annotations by Liszt, but so much emotion is getting lost by such interpretations. It’s like listening to variations on György Ligeti’s thirteenth etude, “L’escalier du diable” (wonderful music by the way), which has extreme dynamics – fffffff near the end of the piece.
Consider the Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, popularly known as the “Minute Waltz”, by Chopin. This particular piece of music has been raped to death by pianists who frantically try to squeeze all of the notes of the waltz in 1 minute of playing time – which is the amount the nickname and popular myth dictates. Sure, it’s a fast waltz, but it wasn’t at all intended to be played within the constraints of one minute. It’s just as annoying as the musicians who overuse the tempo rubato, just because they’re playing music by Chopin. So much is lost in those interpretations.
It could be that Liszt just isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t care much about Rachmaninoff either, who suffers from the same cold approach to writing for the piano. But I’m going to listen to some more music of him to see if my opinion changes. I’ve got some recordings by Leslie Howard which are a definite improvement over Stanislav Richter*, I must say.
*= I know. He’s one the greatest pianists of the 20th century. But still.
Monday, September 21 2009
Don’t you just love it when recording artists are on the barricades to protect their “rights”. We, the people, are robbing those poor artists, and all the happy people they work with, of their money.
Lily Allen cares so much about this, she recently released an official against “online piracy” and even started a blog. A shame though 80% of that blog consists of unattributed newspaper clippings and articles she “stole” from digital news outlets – like Techdirt, their response to Allen delivers some excellent points regarding her recent crusade.
I think it’s rather sad that a young artist like Allen is basically hopping on the propaganda bandwagon of the “music industry” (or “Big Content”), especially because her fans discovered her on MySpace and actively shared her early songs. I don’t think our dear Lily would be in the comfortable position she is today, and others with her, if it weren’t for all these stealing mofo’s on the Internet.
Oh, the title. In my opinion Lily Allen shouldn’t sing either. But that’s just me, nitpicking.
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