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October 2nd, 2008
11:33 am - SuperCollider!
Right, I only heard about this yesterday, even though the software was first released in March 1996 (although it's enjoyed quite a few improvements since then). SuperCollider is, according to its sourceforge site, "an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server."
According to Wikipedia, it's used by a fair number of notable artists including Aphex Twin, Autechre and Peter Gabriel. Wikipedia makes no mention, however, of its use by iPhone-wielding Japanese female Kraftwerk homage, Craftwife.
I tried to install it last night, but the code was recently changed to refactor some things into a separate library and the SConstruct file hadn't been updated to reflect that. It was, however, updated this morning, so I've finally got it working.
Unlike the $200 Vocaloid I bought earlier this year, SuperCollider, previously commercial, is now Free Open-Source Software. It works on Mac OSX, and to an extent on Linux (the difference is that, apparently, Linux doesn't (yet?) get all the fancy graphical stuff OSX gets). There's also a Windows port, known as PsyCollider.
I don't have time to play with it right now since I have to do mundane things like pay my rent and sleep through a lecture on Formal Models of Computation, but I'll get on it this afternoon.
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January 31st, 2008
01:48 pm - Bad Scientist! Bad!
Given my post last year about the cognitive difference between liberalism and insanity stupidity conservatism, of course I was going to be interested in this week's New Scientist cover story about political opinions being influenced by a genetic (or should that be genestic?) component. At one point, however, I did have to stop reading in disgust and take a deep breath before I could pick it up again and continue. A small quote:-
[Alford] found that identical twins were more likely than non-identical twins to give the same answers to political questions. ... Given that identicals have the same genes while non-identicals share only half their genes, the fact that identical twins gave the same answer more often than non-identicals suggests that the answer must be influenced by their genes. Um... okay? Here's another conclusion from the same information: identical twins are likely to have a closer relationship than non-identicals, and therefore will share a lot of activities (and hence experiences) which will develop more of their opinions in the same way. Sound far-fetched? I don't really have the evidence to back up this conclusion, but my point is that the printed conclusion is by no means the only plausible conclusion. Ultimately it boils down to the use of that word 'must'. Had it been 'might', I would have happily swallowed it. And it's not that I necessarily disagree with the science behind it - I just don't see the conclusion as it's reported.
It might be fair to say that I don't really understand the science, so I'm not in a good position to judge. That would be true. However, it's not the first time I've seen this kind of leaping to conclusions in New Scientist, and the other time was a science I can understand (though it turned out I didn't have to). The evidence was that Firefox had fixed more security holes over the space of the previous year than IE had. The conclusion was that IE was more secure than Firefox! It's clear to anyone that that conclusion can only be true if you assume IE was more secure than Firefox before these fixes were implemented, and if you're going to assume that, why bother to look at the evidence in the first place?
Not that it matters. I still ♥ it.
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December 30th, 2007
06:40 pm - I've lost everything
My external hard disk is pretty much dead. Neither Linux nor Windows can even recognise that it is a hard disk (though they both detect something there) so, although I'm fairly certain all the actual data is intact, there's simply no way to get at it short of expensive data recovery services - and as much as it hurts to have lost my entire music collection (it's all on my ipod, but pretty much stuck there) and all those movies, and all those old files, it would be cheaper just to replace them than to have them recovered. This really sucks! Even if I can replace all those files, of course, I still need somewhere to put them, which I currently don't have...
My mouse's scroll wheel is also broken. That's hardly on the same scale as the hard disk dying, but it's strange that that should happen on exactly the same day.
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December 13th, 2007
02:49 am - The Mystic Computer Scientist
 It's a well-known fact that Oriental dualism is largely divided by the yang - the masculine principle - and the yin, the feminine principle. This is opposed to Western, Zoroastrian-influenced dualism which distinguishes between Good and Evil and has probably set society back a couple of thousand years.
It is sometimes claimed that the yang is active, and the yin is passive, and sometimes claimed that both yin and yang have passive and active aspects. That latter view is, in Western lore, found in the Tarot, where Swords and Wands represent the active and passive masculine principle respectively, while Cups and Discs represent the active and passive feminine principle respectively. I'm not sure I prefer the demarcation between passive and active to the astrological triplicity of Cardinal, Mutable and Fixed (and taking that point of view, it's easy to see why not all reactionaries are conservatives) but what can I do about that?
 The mysticism of Tarot does impel one to want to plot a link between the four suits and the "occult elements" of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, (which appears to be entirely different in each element's character from the astrological quadruplicity which uses the same element names) but by merely looking at a deck of ordinary playing cards today, and noting the division into red and black suits (each of which is cognate with a Tarot suit), we can see that cards have an undeniable dualism. Incidentally, there is a school of thought which suggests that the 'masculine' Tarot suits are related to the I-Ching's yarrow stalks, and the 'feminine' suits are related to the I-Ching's coins, which suggests that it may not be entirely absurd to draw parallels between the Tarot and the Taijitu.
 The other interpretation of the yin and the yang - that the yin is inherently passive and the yang is inherently active - turns up in the oddest place, however: in Computing Science. As anyone with any knowledge whatsoever about the internal electronics of a computer knows, a voltage represents a binary '1', and no voltage represents a binary '0'. From this, it should be intuitive that the 1 embraces the active aspect, while the 0 represents the passive aspect. However, inspection of the numerals used shows '1' to be a phallic symbol, representing the masculine, and '0' to be its feminine counterpart. (This idea is challenged somewhat by the fact that '1' is Arabian, and '0' is Indian, but let's gloss over that for fear of opening up an entirely different can of worms - the idea can still remain.)
Of course, this binary system forms the basis not only for the internal workings of a computer, but also for all electronic communication; for the very Internet itself. That the Internet is, at base level, made up of various permutations of the masculine and feminine principles is proof positive (if any were needed) that The Internet Is For Porn.
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December 5th, 2007
01:06 am - Hooray!
I got my sshd working!
At least I think I did. I ssh'd out to the computing science computers and ssh'd from there back to my own computer. So basically I was logging in remotely to a local computer... BUT if I can remember my IP address I should be able to actually log into my home computer from uni, now. Which means I have no more excuses for "forgotten" homework. Bugger.
I also changed my window manager to use XGL, so now I can... well, see what ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lonely_minotaur did with it:-
I haven't quite got it there yet, but I've got it doing nice things. It's pretty.
I didn't actually do anything I meant to do tonight, though.
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November 16th, 2007
12:21 am - Poor dead card :(
Right. So apparently my PSU is the least of my worries. It seems my problem is in fact caused by bad video RAM.
There are two potential causes of this: one is overheating, the other is just plain bad RAM. Well, I've put heatsinks on the RAM, and tried underclocking it, even as far as half its default speed, but no joy. I think, therefore, it's simply bad RAM, and bad RAM means the only fix is to outright replace the card.
That's not cheap :(
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November 13th, 2007
11:09 pm - Local Cooling
I bought myself a sweet (and expensive) new "cooling solution" for my graphics card. Still fan-based, but totally silent, and keeps things nice and frosty.
All that would be lovely if it actually did anything for the problem I've been having with that card (polygons not being drawn where they should be, and being drawn where they shouldn't be, basically - but only in recent games. Anything DirectX 7 or older, or anything OpenGL at all, works pretty much fine). But nope, for that particular problem, it's done bugger all. I may be imagining it, but it also seems to have increased my incidence of crashing, too, somehow. I don't see how making the GPU cooler can cause crashes, but sometimes it BSOD's on me (I though XP was supposed to not have BSOD) and it blames the graphics driver. Well, whatever - it seems to me more like it's my sound card, but I was wrong about my graphics card problem being overheating, so I could be wrong about that too.
So that basically leaves two options - either it's just a bad card, or I need a PSU with a Molex connector for the graphics card (rather than the PCIE one I have, leaving me to use a hard-disk power cable for my card).
At the moment I'm hoping it's the PSU - if I have to replace that, so be it - the PSU I have will still be of use in the future when I finally upgrade my computer to 21st century architecture. If I have to replace the card, then the card I have at the moment's wasted.
Now I just need to find a PSU by one of the three reputable brands (Enermax, Antec, Coolermaster) that has a Molex VGA power cable yet still delivers a decent amount of power. I know the Enermax-with-Molexes only go up to 350W ratings, which, given that it's an Enermax, should be enough (no PSU ever gives its full rating except under laboratory conditions, but the three brands I mentioned deliver closer to than anything else). And somehow also find the money for it, which, given my expenditure on this lovely new fan which lights up blue, I don't think looks terribly likely.
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October 11th, 2007
03:17 pm - Disk irony.
Ok, so my new 750GB external drive arrived today and is currently sitting there as drive G. I decided I needed a new hard disk because my disks are getting a bit cluttered (and, hell, the new freakin' iPods have marginally more capacity than my desktop).
I decided to go external because I couldn't decide whether to get a new disk for this machine or to hold off until I get a new machine - this machine doesn't support SATA disks, but I don't think a new machine would support any internal disks I bought for this machine - an external will work with both, so I went external.
That's all fine, until I tried to install the tools for my new drive. I thought 'okay, install those tools to drive F' (which is my puny 40GB Windows system drive). This was met with the message... "There is not enough space on the disk."
*facepalms*
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June 2nd, 2007
07:36 am
Well, I installed Linux and broke Windows. Then I fixed Windows, because that's how hard I rock. In true binary fashion, the problem was solved by flipping a 1 to a 0. Admittedly the 1 which I changed to a 0 was the hard drive identifier for my Windows disk in /boot/grub/menu.lst on my Linux partition, and not actually a binary digit, but it tried.
I think this might actually be a problem with the openSUSE installer - it's capable of recognizing NTFS, FAT32 and Linux file system (and probably a few other file systems besides) disks, but it's apparently incapable of reading the file allocation tables. If it were capable, it would quickly have noticed that there is no ntldr on hd1, partition 0. There is, however, an ntldr on hd0, partition 0. Now, gee, which one might be my Windows disk?
Dumb software does not impress me. I might be being a bit harsh. Maybe it's unreasonable to expect the installer to actually check the hard disks to see which ones actually have operating systems on them. But it's also unreasonable to expect fancy GUIs on OS installers, and they certainly manage that.
In the 'dumb' software's defence, even Windows is confused by its own hard disk system. Apparently it thinks the Windows disk (hd0, remember?) is drive F. That's the first and last time I've ever heard of Windows allocating a drive letter other than C to the disk on which Windows actually sits. Maybe I'll hear more about that in future. (Incidentally, C is hd1, partition 0, while D and E are taken up with my DVD drives.)
Speaking of DVD drives (as I was, parenthetically), I had a problem with mine recently. I tried to play DVDs in it, and the sound was all chopped up and it was playing maybe one frame a second. Naturally my first instinct was that the disc had somehow become scratched, but visual inspection revealed no such evidence, and it turned out to be the same with all discs. Fretting, I rushed out of the flat without even stopping to switch off my computer, in search of either a DVD-drive cleaning disc, or a new drive (the price difference between the two is hardly enormous, but I went to PC World, where DVD drives cost 2.5 times what they actually should). Found a cleaning disc, anyway, and returned home to try it out. No luck. It did absolutely SFA. Frustrated, I hit the reboot button. It had no problems playing DVDs after that. The material lesson there is: try the simple solutions first. It sounds obvious but I seem to forget that all too often.
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