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RIP, Steve

Posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 00:17 in Uncategorized by Dan

Today, the computing industry and the world in general lost a visionary. While I am no longer the rabid Apple fanboi I once was, I have reason to believe that this is a direct result of Steve Jobs’ waning influence of late at Apple. Because just about everything ever created under his watch, be it at Apple, Pixar, or NeXT, has been pretty damn revolutionary.

I’ve been using Apple products before I ever even touched my first PC. The Amiga was my first platform, but in first grade, we had Apple IIs and old System 7 Macintoshes. Hell, the first programming I ever did was in LCSI LOGO on said Macs. One day in 5th grade, I noticed that they were throwing out all the old Apple IIs, so I snagged a ROM03 IIgs headed for the dumpster. It remains among some of my most prized pieces of computing history. But this is about Steve.

The story of him leaving Apple to found NeXT, which produced what remains one of the most elegant platforms ever created (and which lives on to this day in OS X and, by extension, iOS), and then returning to save Apple from otherwise sure demise is one of the most inspiring in the industry. Then, to turn that company into the empire it is today is nothing short of impressive.

Say what you will about Apple (I know I’ve said much), his contributions to the field (and dare I say, to humanity) are undeniable. And I take solace in the fact that Apple’s recent actions with regard to being litigious assholes are not consistent with his spirit, at least I hope. True innovators compete in the marketplace, not the courtroom.

Rest in peace, Steve. You will be sorely missed.

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Why I’m Not Upgrading to OS X Lion

Posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 at 22:59 in Operating Systems, Ranting, Software by Dan

With all the hoopla in the Mac community about the upcoming release of 10.7 Lion, I felt the strong urge to inform the world why I am not upgrading, why others should not, and why Lion ultimately is a piece of shit. Here we go.

First off, Apple, I would greatly appreciate it if you would stop trying to turn my once-mighty Macbook Pro into a piece of shit iOS device. When 10.6.6 came out with the “Mac App Store” I was moderately ticked off. But now that I’ve learned that 10.7 basically is the next step of turning OS X into iOS, I am only slightly less than furious. iOS really isn’t that horrible a system for what it is, aside from Steve’s hard-on for the walled garden. But iOS does things the way it does because it is designed for touchscreen devices, which my laptop is not. (I could go into a rant about how the iPad is the biggest piece of shit on the planet, and it and all tablets deserve to die a slow, horrible death [but won't], but we’ll save this for another day).

Next, we have the fact that Lion is only available as an App Store download. What the fuck?! Sorry, but I already have a problem with buying general application software sans physical media. Never mind an entire fucking operating system. Fuck recovery partitions, too.

So, you shouldn’t upgrade because you would be supporting this madness. Even though realistically, such inaction will make fuck all of a difference, because sadly, people buy into Apple’s kool-aid. I used to love Apple products, and you’ll have to pry my Mac from my cold, dead hands. But all good things must go downhill, right?

The Mac is a general-purpose computer. Let’s keep it that way.

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webpftable

Posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 02:36 in FreeBSD by Dan

It just dawned on me that I had never actually released webpftable. I wrote this little CGI utility many, many moons ago to allow “trusted” ports to be authenticated before their being opened up to the world on my pf box. I’m just going to paste the introduction to the README here, since I don’t feel like regurgitating it.

webpftable is a (very) simple CGI application that, upon successful authentication against
passwd(5), adds the client's IP address to a pf table.

It is available as a source tarball for FreeBSD (and possibly OpenBSD) systems. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

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Macaroni & Cheesy Sage Stuffing

Posted on Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 03:41 in Food by Dan

As someone who loves to cook but takes the easy way out sometimes, I’ve tinkered with various “mods” of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (KD for the Canadians out there.) This one is probably my favourite yet, and I figured I’d share my method. Sorry for all the eyeballing…for me, experimental cooking doesn’t lend itself well to measuring things out. <grin />

Ingredients:
1 box KD
1 small onion
1 stalk of celery
2 tablespoons salted butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Milk
Ground sage
Old Bay seasoning (or just celery salt, black pepper, and paprika if you don’t have any)
Plain breadcrumbs
plus whatever KD recipe calls for
Method:
Begin preparing the KD according to box recipe. While water is boiling and macaroni cooking, chop the onion and celery and sweat in a medium skillet with the butter, olive oil, and a generous sprinkling of Old Bay. After preparing the KD according to box recipe, mix in celery and onions. Resume heating on medium-low. Eyeball a large portion of breadcrumbs and mix in. Splash enough milk to properly moisten the breadcrumbs to a stuffing-like consistency, sprinkle a dash of sage in and mix. Remove from heat and serve immediately.

Possible vegetarian Thanksgiving side dish this year? We’ll see.

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Site moved

Posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 08:34 in FreeBSD, Web by Dan

First, I’d like to express my most sincere gratitude to Matt Juszczak and atopia.net/bitvenue for having hosted theamigan.net for over 6 years. Not having to pay a dime for hosting with shell and everything else (even root at one time!) on a fast server sitting on a decently fat pipe was quite nice.
But anyway, a while ago, Matt e-mailed me to say he was shutting down pluto (the machine theamigan was served by) and scaling back his webhosting operations. I decided that it was high time I moved my site over to my own server. Yesterday, this became a reality, as I moved the entire theamigan.net domain over to styx (using FreeDNS), my home server (sitting on a “lowly” 20/5 FiOS connection).
Along with this move, hopefully this blog will see more updates, and theamigan itself has a redesign to look forward to. Maybe I’ll actually put some new material up.

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Scary Lucid Dreams

Posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 16:22 in Personal by Dan

Today, a very interesting and scary phenomenon happened to me. I decided to take a quick nap on the couch in the parlour. It was still very much daytime. Soon, I had a lucid dream. But here’s the catch: the setting was in the exact room that I fell asleep in. So for the duration of the dream, I was convinced that it was actually happening and I had simply woken up from my nap. In the dream, my buddy called me, and my stepmom came home with some pizza. But once I decided to get up from the couch (I had fallen asleep with my legs hanging off of it, and it was the same way in the dream), I could move my legs all I wanted, and I saw them kick around, but I could not actually lift my body from the couch. At first, I thought I was high or drunk (but was confused because I was completely sober), and eventually I did this weird thing where I could get off and see myself on the couch but I wouldn’t actually be off the couch. After I stopped trying to move, I would revert to being on the couch. Then I tried again really really hard to get up and couldn’t do it and became mortified for about a minute, until the fear actually woke me out of my sleep.

Scariest thing ever.

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My review of Snow Leopard

Posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 21:52 in Software by Dan

Well, I’ve been playing with SL for about two days now after having installed it yesterday on my Penryn multitouch MBP. Here are my impressions of it:

  • It is fast.
  • Whatever new features it has are nice touches.

This wasn’t meant to be a flashy release. Very low-key on the outside, while architecturally, the changes are quite massive. To start, this is the first practical application we’ve truly seen of EM64T (AMD64, whatever) on OS X. As an aside, all these stupid “OH MY GOD! 10.6 BOOTS AN i386 KERNEL BY DEFAULT! APPLE IS SWINDLING US ALL! BUT LOOK AT HOW COOL I AM: I FIGURED OUT THAT IF YOU HOLD ’64′ IT WILL BOOT X86_64!!!111″ stories I’m seeing all over the place are…well…wastes of keystrokes. Who cares if the kernel isn’t running in long mode? All userspace components (libraries, executables) are! The small gains from forcing everyone to boot 64bit are deeply offset by the hundreds of 32bit kexts in use for which a 64bit build may not see the light of day for months. I booted my machine with the 64bit kernel…there really isn’t that much of a performance gain (though it is noticible). As an early adopter of amd64 back under FreeBSD when the Athlon 64 was fairly new (which was a bit painful, but worth the experience), I applaud this non-boneheaded approach to backward compatibility, with graceful fallbacks to 32bit mode. Note that I speak without having ventured into the braindamage that is Win64.

Anyway, I digress. In this release, everything is faster. Safari loads in 1 bounce. The time from login to the point where I can actually start using the system is much shorter. And, despite the changes in drive capacity measurement base, it did free up quite a bit of space. It’s probably the first commercial OS release I’ve seen where the base install was smaller than the that of the release that preceded it.

I eagerly wait to see what can be done with OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch.  I also am pleased with Quicktime X; the screen capturing feature was a welcome addition.

My only complaints stem from 32bit compatibility and the abolishment of input managers: I miss multiclutch dearly, and now it is all but useless (unless I force everything to run 32bit executables).

As for the Exchange 2007 support, I’m having some weird-ass issues connecting to RIC’s Exchange server. It half-works, but on subsequent connection attempts the server rejects my password. I’ll have to give USS a call to make sure my settings are okay.

That’s about it.

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Ted

Posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 15:48 in National Politics, Ranting by Dan

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the news of Senator Edward Kennedy’s passing. To me it came in the form of a facebook status, not too long after it happened. And while some may say, as a friend of mine did last night when I first heard the news, that he’s had terminal brain cancer for over a year, his passing still comes as a shock, at least to me. Hell, an article of his was featured in Newsweek just last month. An article that certainly resonated with me, and helped inspire me to get my ass out of the house and (try to) attend a town hall/community dinner on the subject. How could he be gone?

Senator Kennedy may have started out well before my time, but he was a man who was definitely in touch with the concerns of my generation. Healthcare was just one of the issues, though it was one he felt to be most important. He was also revered, even among his colleagues who didn’t agree with him on anything. Sheldon Whitehouse said at a Q&A session that after Kennedy returned to the floor after a medical leave, senators from both sides of the aisle rose, some with tears in their eyes.

Chappaquiddick notwithstanding, Kennedy was a respected man and public servant with a huge legacy, from a political family filled with mystique. His name will go down in the history books, just as his brothers’ names did.

On a much lighter note, let’s talk about some junk mail I received today. This piece is from a company called “Domain Renewal Group,” and they sent me a notice offering to transfer my domain, theamigan.net, to them for the “low” price of $30 for one year. Let’s recap here. I pay $9 a year from namecheap, the domain’s original and current registrar. Why the hell would I go through the trouble to pay more money? Why did they waste their time and money printing the notice? This is the type of garbage environmentalists should be hooting and hollering about; I rarely see more of an utter waste of trees.

That’s all.

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AutoTune

Posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 20:33 in Music, Ranting by Dan

“Another autotune rant! By someone else! Agh!”

Yes, I heard you. You said something to the effect of the last line, right? Well, I don’t care.

I decided to try a little experiment as I sat here, bored and…bored. I took the (now mostly finished) mixes of Spatula and Gel Cell, threw Logic’s Pitch Corrector plugin on all the vox tracks, and A/B’d them with the originals. What did I hear?

I heard in-tune harmonies on Spatula. In-tune harmonies which completely missed the point of the whole “diabolical” feel of the vocals.

I heard in-tune doubletracking in Gel Cell. Sure, Adam does a decent job keeping in tune with himself. But in 2009, that doesn’t matter. He can sound like a pitch-perfect robot with just two clicks of a pointing device!

So anyway, I hear you saying, “well, Dan, you play synthesizers for chrissakes! If you’re so against mechanically-produced music, then you must be a hypocrite!”

I retort with this: it may be an oscillator (or sample player) producing the sound, but I am in control of it. If I want to detune it x cents, I have the power to do so. (Normally I don’t).

Lastly, the voice is the one instrument that most fluidly and accurately reproduces the emotion felt by the musician. Vocals are raw, powerful representations of emotion, thoughts, and ideas. With this emotion, there will by fluctuations in pitch. If I want a machine to produce voice (or sound like such), I either use a speech synthesizer or a vocoder (or both). Autotune sucks the human quality of vocals not unlike the way in which a shop-vac cleans the floormats in my car. Which is to say, in a very violent fashion.

So, in short, while it may be tempting from an OCD standpoint to plaster autotune all over our vox tracks, I think it is safe to say that autotune will not be making any appearances on M&C’s album, at least not in any capacity that it was originally designed for.

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Selling the mk

Posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 09:07 in Music by Dan

I want to sell my microKORG and get a few extra bucks for it.

But I can’t.

You see, as I’ve suspected for ages, and what I’ve discovered today, the microKORG has some weird-ass internal signal routing. I have a patch, for example, that I made ages ago (when I first got the mk) that sounds like the VCS3 lead in Led Zeppelin’s In The Light. Today, I tried to replicate this patch on my Ion, a synth with very straightforward and documented signal routing. The patch I have calls for osc1 and osc2 to both be triangle waves, with no modulation between them (no ring/sync), and one of them tuned an octave down. But I noticed that when I have two triangle oscillators, mixed the exact same way they are on the mk, the ion makes them sound much different (and arguably, the way they should sound judging from the parameters). However, trying to isolate either oscillator on the microKORG produces some, well, fucked-up results. Listen to the podcast to hear it all.

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