Author: Laura Conrad

Using a different browser

Until the recent urge to upgrade my computing
environment, I was using firefox as my
main browser. This was not because it’s a particularly good
program, but because it has managed to get enough market share
away from Internet Explorer that the people who design
websites test on it. There are very few websites, except for
the ones that deliberately try to restrict themselves to
commercial OS’s, that don’t work on Firefox for Linux.

Unfortunately, there are at least two major problems with
Firefox on Linux, that cause me to try other things from time
to time:

  • It has major memory leaks. This means that if you keep your
    system running for weeks, or even days, at a time, after a while
    Firefox will grab enough of the memory that everything,
    including the program that draws the windows on the screen, is
    gasping for memory, and going to read the hard drive before
    drawing every pixel. I knew that killing firefox would fix
    this, but I kept not getting around to it until killing firefox
    took several minutes, because of waiting for the pixels to
    redraw.
  • Less common of a problem for me, but still a sign of an
    uncivilized program, is that once you play music with firefox,
    it grabs some sound resource, and doesn’t let it go, so the next
    time you want to run some of the other music programs I use, you
    have to kill firefox to do it. (For those who wonder, the way
    to do this is the command “alsa force-reload”. This kills all
    the programs that are holding onto resources that prevent alsa
    from reloading the modules it uses.)

Now some people claim that opera is a good
browser for their purposes. Whenever I download it and try it,
it takes me about 10 minutes before I find a site that doesn’t
work with it. I believe the site I do my online banking at is a
frequent offender, so if you have a bank that tests their online
banking with opera, maybe you don’t have my problems. But
switching banks is even harder than switching browsers, and by
most of the bank evaluation criteria I use, mine is pretty good, so
I’m not going to drop them just because their software testing
leaves something to be desired.

A lot of the other browsers for Linux are in fact using the
mozilla engine, which is the same one Firefox uses. Of course,
I don’t know exactly where in the code these memory leaks and
resource hoardings happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a
different browser using the same engine had the same
problems.

However, it is possible to install an alpha test version of
google’s chromium-browser for Linux. The version for windows
has been out for a few months and gotten rave reviews for being
clean and fast. The Linux version has a lot of things
that don’t work, but for the ones that do, it’s really a lot of
fun to use.

It’s a nuisance to be doing testing on alpha
software (which was pre-alpha until a few days ago). And of course I
need to restart chromium-browser every day when I get the new copy.
And do some testing to find out which things work today.
Yesterday was very exciting, because “copy link address” worked
for the first time. But today, it doesn’t seem to want to
display some slightly complicated PHP for my wordpress
administration, which it’s been doing for some time. Another
button that’s inconsistent is the “Publish” button when I
publish a new post. And of course, they aren’t even claiming
that printing or flash work. I also still haven’t reconfigured
emacs to use chromium instead of firefox, so when I click on a
URL in my email, I still get a tab in Firefox.

So I do still have to keep a copy of Firefox running, but it
usually only has one or two tabs on it, so it isn’t that much of
a nuisance if I have to restart it, and it actually behaves very
much like a civilized program if you’re closing most tabs right
after you open them.

Garden, May 31, 2009

Sad news about the Angelica

[replanted angelica]

Sunny and I went to look at the garden after our morning walk,
and the angelica wasn’t there. There was a shallow hole
instead.

I looked in the compost bin, and there it was, but all the
flower stalks were broken or smashed. I put it back, and gave
it compost and water, and maybe it will survive, but I would
guess there won’t be flowers this year.

It was looking happy after being transplanted, but of course I
dug it up carefully and took as much of the roots and soil it
was used to as I could. The vandal who put it in the compost
bin didn’t bother with that.

Here’s the email I wrote the condo association:

In the minutes to the last owners’ meeting, I wrote:

Nobody in attendance requested any changes to the existing
plot assignments.

Secretary’s note: this means that the plot formerly assigned
to Mary and Jeff is currently unassigned. I put a couple of
things there last summer when I was cleaning out my deceased
friend’s house and garden, so if you want to put anything
there, feel free, but please ask if you want to take anything
out.

Someone pulled up the angelica plant which I had carefully moved from my
deceased friend’s garden in Salem, and which was about to burst into
bloom, and put it in the compost bin.

I have replaced, it, but the bloom stalks are broken, so I don’t have
much hope for it at all, and none for this year. I am really upset; I
was looking forward to having that plant.

I think it would make sense to assign that plot, so this sort of thing
doesn’t happen in the future. If someone else wants it, I will move
both the angelica and the lavender, which is also about to bloom.
Otherwise, I will take it, and please, nobody else pull anything else
up.

I don’t understand this vandalism. Why would anyone not want a blooming
angelica in their back yard?

[angelica flower stalks]

Upset was actually putting it mildly. I was weeping
hysterically for most of an hour, and I still tear up when I
think of it. Of course, it being a condo problem, I also
started thinking about all the other things I’ve been mad at the
possible suspects about, but I’m trying to control that.

I’d probably be upset anyway, but it being one of the things I
took from Bonnie’s garden makes it worse.
That was something she put a lot of herself into, and I wanted
to save as much of it as I could. Other friends took things
too, so even if the vandals pull up both the angelica and the
lavender (I think the daylilies I put in the front yard are
already gone), there will still be some, but I won’t have
it.

Lavender

On a more cheerful note, the vandal(s) didn’t pull up the
lavender, which is also about to bloom.

[lavender]
[lavender buds]

Roses

The roses are blooming.

[roses]
[rose]

Iris

The iris and the Siberian Iris are blooming their heads off; I
cut two stem of iris for my tall blue winebottles.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Overall view

You can see from this that the Alliums and the lillies of the
valley are over, but there’s still a brave little pansy. I forgot
to take them, but there are drumstick alliums with buds.

[garden]

Programming again

The web application I’m trying to set up for the Serpent Publications
website is the most programming I’ve done for several years.
I made my living as a programmer for several decades, so I wasn’t
expecting it to be quite this hard to get back into it.

Part of the problem is that mysql and php aren’t what I ever did for a
living. I don’t remember the details of the vocabulary even for
what I did used to do very well, but I never knew either mysql
or PHP without a reference book.

Anyway, I was finally making progress on setting up the mysql
views this morning, and I completely forgot that I hadn’t posted
to this blog, so this is a fast one because any minute now Sunny will decide
it’s time for his walk and I’ll have to take him.

Anyway, my advice for what it’s worth, if you haven’t
programmed for a while and need to, is to go back to doing very
small things at a time. It’s generally good advice for
programming anyway — you get testability and reusability and all
kinds of good things by breaking up the job into little
pieces.

So yesterday, I wrote up a list of all the fields that should
be in the pieceinfo view of my musicpublish database.

This morning I got each of them to work individually in an
interactive environment.

Then I wrote the sql that defines the pieceinfo view, which
takes data from the piece, book, and composer tables, by way of
the Book_Pieces_Table for joining book and piece.

Another good piece of advice is to set up an interactive
environment that you’re comfortable with. The command line mysql
is pretty good, but I got farther and faster when I switched to
the emacs sql mode.

Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve got a working although minimal
CSS theme, most of the hard part of the mysql is written, so what
I mostly have to do is write some PHP (some of which I may be able
to substitute python for), and then I’ll have a subset of the
functionality that I can throw at people for testing.

I’m not really sanguine about getting the whole application
written before BEMF, but I’m
optimistic that I can get at least as much functionality as is in
the current site, with improved design for easier upgrading.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

This
movie is pretty typical of what Woody Allen is doing these
days — Beautiful music and photography, good writing and acting,
an interesting location, characters a bit more individualized than
he used to do.

I’ve only spent a few hours in Barcelona (between trains), and
it was a cloudy day, so I’m not that good a judge,
but it certainly seemed like a good depiction of what the city looks
like. Not the loving detail of the New York brownstones in Interiors,
but probably as good as the London in Match
Point.

As far as the acting goes, Penelope Cruz stole the show in a
fairly minor role, but everybody was pretty good. They seem to be
well characterized without the irritating mannerisms of the
earlier Woody Allen.

The topic of the movie is the characters’ choices between
settling for the comfortable and getting burned by passionate
romance. The most intriguing interlude is the one in the middle
where the two Spanish artists form a ménage à trois
with the American dilletante. Not especially believable, but a
good fantasy, and it doesn’t last long.

So if that sounds interesting, you’ll probably enjoy this
movie. I don’t know of anyone who’s been as consistently as
interesting over as many decades as Woody Allen.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001DJ7PR8&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0792846087&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EQHXNW&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Roasted vegetable potato salad

I had lots of ingredients but limited time to make a contribution to a
cookout last Monday.

So I decided to just roast all the vegetables and then put them
in a salad.

I sliced a bulb of fennel, quartered an onion, added a pound
of potatoes, slathered all of this with olive oil, put them on the
broiler pan in a 500 °F oven until the potatoes were done.

Then I let them cool, cut the potatoes into halves or thirds,
and put it all in a covered bowl to take to the picnic.

At serving time, I added some of my tofu vinaigrette.

Tofu vinaigrette is basically like regular vinaigrette, except
you blend in some tofu. If you’re buying the tofu specially for
this purpose, you get the silken kind, but whatever you keep
around works.

There was a nice roasty flavor, and the tofu vinaigrette is a
really pleasant dressing. It isn’t overly acidic, but still has
flavor.

Several people took seconds, and my mother took most of what
was left, so I had only a small contribution to Tuesday’s lunch
when I got home.

Report on the May 26 meeting

We played:

Sermisy
Amy souffrez (2 voice)
Aupres de vous (2 voice)
Anonymous
Duet 113
Bicinia (ed. Phalese)
Fantasia 25
Fantasia 1
Fantasia 2
Sermisy
Amy souffrez (3 voice, with ornaments from the Attaignant
keyboard tablature)
Aupres de vous (3 voice)
Changeons propos
Vignons, vignons
Heurteur
Quand je bois
Purcell
He that drinks is immortal
Down with Bacchus

Schedule

We will not be meeting either next week or the week after,
because of the West
Gallery Quire rehearsal and the
Boston Early Music Festival.

After that, it will be Summer time, and the livin’ is
easy for lots of us, so we should get lots of people coming
and be able to do polychoral Gabrielli and other things with lots
of parts.

So here’s the schedule:

Tuesday, June 2
No meeting
Tuesday, June 9
No meeting
Tuesday, June 16, and subsequent Tuesdays
Meetings resume at 7:45 PM at my
place.
Sunday, June 21

Party at 4 PM at my place.

Party

From time to time, the Cantabile Band has parties, so that we
can invite all our friends to have as much fun as we do. The big
difference between the parties and the meetings is that we eat and
drink before as well as after singing and playing. Also because
we have friends we like to sing and play with who have trouble
making it on Tuesdays. And in this case, because the Walk for
Hunger wasn’t really the best environment for some of the music we
played there. I was very impressed that we didn’t get lost when
the helicopter went over, but the audience probably wasn’t able
to hear how impressive it was. So we might get together and burst into song from that program from time to time.

Since the party will be held shortly after BEMF, I’ll be
printing the invitation on the back of the flyers, so that people
can check us out by coming either to a meeting or to a party.

If you want to print either flyers or invitations, you can
download them. The invitation
includes the flyer as a second
page, so if you don’t have a double-sided printer, you may want to
print them separately.

Assuming the weather is at all friendly to such things, we’ll
be doing the eating and drinking in the backyard, and will have
the grill going, so you’re welcome to bring food contributions
that need grilling.

Cantabile at BEMF

At BEMF, I will be attempting to keep the flyer table at the
exhibition stocked with our flyers, in the version with the
invitation on the back. If you’re going to be hanging around the
exhibition, it would be good if you could help with that, at least
to the extent of letting me know if we seem to have run out.

If you’re going to fringe events of interest to the same
population we recruit from, it would be good if you could take
some flyers, either to leave on a table or to hand to likely
suspects.

BEMF events of interest

I have tickets to several of the BEMF concerts: all the 11PM
ones, all the recorder ones, and the Renaissance music ones. So
that’s Tuesday evening, Wednesday through Saturday at 11PM, Friday
evening, and Sunday afternoon.

There are fringe events where our friends will be playing or
singing:

Monday, June 8
12:30pm Seven Hills Renaissance Wind Ensemble (Elizabeth
Hardy, Cathy Stein & Matthew Stein, shawms & dulcians; Rigel
Lustwerk, cornetto; Daniel Meyers, sackbut; Daniel Stillman,
shawm, dulcian & sackbut). Musicians of the Golden Fleece: Wind
Band Music from the Hapsburg Courts of the 16th Century. Program
featuring sacred and secular works by Thomas Stolzer and Orlande
de Lassus, Kappellmeisters to Louis II of Hungary and Albrecht V
of Bavaria. First Church in Boston. $15 donation. 617-388-2363
or 7hillsband@gmail.com.

Tuesday, June 9
12:30pm Harmonious Blacksmith (Ah Young Hong, soprano;
Justin Godoy, recorder; William Simms, lute, theorbo, guitar;
Nika Zlataric, viola da gamba; Joseph Gascho,
harpsichord). Phantasticke Spirites. Inspired by the bawdy and
joyous spirit of English songs, Harmonious Blacksmith improvises
and ornaments the music of Byrd, Morley, and their
contemporaries. Named after Thomas Weelkes’s fourth book of
madrigals, this program also draws from the keyboard music in
the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. First Church in Boston. $20/$10
st, sr, BEMF, EMA, ARS. 781-507-4160 or
info@HarmoniousBlacksmith.com.
4pm Seven Times Salt (Karen Burciaga, violin; Daniel Myers,
recorders; Josh Schreiber Shalem, bass viol; Matthew Wright,
lute; with guests Tracy Cowart, mezzo-soprano; Michael Barrett,
tenor; Kyle Parrish, narrator). A Brave Barrel of Oysters: Music
of Samuel Pepys’ London. Sample the delights of Restoration
England, as described in Samuel Pepys’ diaries. Music of Lawes,
Locke, Matteis, and Pepys himself! Beacon Hill Friends
House. $10 suggested donation. 508-878-7028 or
Karen@seventimessalt.com.
Wednesday, June 10
3:30pm Judith Conrad, clavichord. The Labyrinthine Keyboard
Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621). Sweelinck’s
Fantasias are among the monuments of early Baroque music. They
require a different sort of listening from the classical forms
of music, in much the way that the walk of a cathedral labyrinth
is so different from a standard religious service. Performing on
a triple-fretted clavichord by Andreas Hermert of Berlin,
2003. The Paulist Center Library. $20 donation to benefit the
Iraq Family Relief Fund. 508-674-6128 or
judithconrad@mindspring.com
Thursday, June 11
9am Viola da Gamba Society of America. The Gamba Gamut. A
series of five mini-programs, spanning the repertoire of the
viola da gamba, performed by emerging and established artists of
the VdGSA. 9am: Empire Viols present The State of Gambo, a
program of accompanied duo viols, with music by Young, Jenkins,
Hume, and Simpson; 9:45am: Brady Lanier, viola da gamba & Molly
Hammond, harpsichord, present a program of Marais and Forqueray;
10:15am: Brandeis University Viol Collegium, directed by Sarah
Mead, presents a program of works drawn from manuscripts from
the Gorham Collection at Brandeis (includes Lasso, Willaert,
Vecchi, and others); 11am: Brook Green presents a program of
solo music for treble viol, including works by Bassano and Hume;
11:30am: Long and Away presents Ye Sacred Muses, a program of
English consort songs and dances. Cathedral Church of
St. Paul. FREE, donations welcome. 239-994-3924 or
scf@cwru.edu.
12:30pm Boston Recorder Quartet (Roxane Layton, Judith
Linsenberg, Roy Sansom & Tom Zajac, recorders). Recorder Music
from Seven Centuries. Works for recorder quartet by Byrd, Bach,
Rore, Merula, Sansom, Shannon, and Anon. Emmanuel Church. $15
donation/ $10 donation for st, sr, BEMF, EMA. 617-489-3906 or
dellalsansom@earthlink.net.
2pm Saltarello (Sarah Cantor, recorders; Angus Lansing,
viola da gamba; Andrus Madsen, harpsichord). Handel’s Italian
Passion and English Charm. Handel’s solo sonatas, most of them
written during the first two decades of the 18th century,
exhibit him at his best. At once tuneful and inventive, fiery
and tender, Handel was so fond of these pieces that returned to
them again and again, borrowing bits and pieces for use in other
works. Come hear what made these sonatas so irresistible! The
College Club of Boston. $15/$10 st, sr, BEMF, EMA,
ARS. 617-669-4292 or sarah@cantornote.com.
Friday, June 12
3:30pm Judith Conrad, clavichord. Tangled Mysteries:
Clavichord Music of Renaissance Poland. Music from 16th-century
tablature books from Lublin, Warsaw, and Gdansk, performed on
early clavichords, after original instruments from Silesia
(ca. 1470 & ca. 1600). The Paulist Center Library. $20 donation
to benefit the Iraq Family Relief Fund. 508-674-6128 or
judithconrad@mindspring.com.
Saturday, June 13
10:30am WIP Series (Works in Progress). Mini-recitals by
fabulous folk: featuring Judith Conrad, Sylvia Berry, Gail
Olszewski, Larry Wallach, and Mariken Palmboom. Harpsichord
Clearing House, Radisson Hotel Dartmouth Room, 6th floor. $5 or
FREE with BEMF Pass.
12:30pm Convivium Musicum, directed by Michael
Barrett. Going for Baroque. The Electors of Saxony made the
court at Dresden a haven for Protestant composers including
Hassler, Praetorius, and Schütz, shapers of the emerging Baroque
idiom. This concert will feature sacred works for voices by
these German masters. Church of St. John the Evangelist. $10/$5
st, sr, BEMF, EMA. 609-457-8573 or info@convivium.org.

If I’ve missed anything, you can leave a comment here, or email me and I’ll add you.

Other events

If you’re interested in the West Gallery Quire, come to either
the June 3 concert or the June 7 meeting.

The concert has the merit of having been rehearsed, and being a
selection of a lot of the better music. It will be at 8 PM on
June 3, at the Brighton-Allston Congregational Church, at 404
Washington St. in Brighton.

The meeting has the advantage that you too can play or sing.
It’s probably the best opportunity for several hundred or even
thousand miles for singing with a serpent.

Renaissance Band Flyer

I said recently that I wasn’t sure the
current Cantabile
Band flyer was the best flyer for our current purposes, and
also that I wanted to do the redesign before BEMF.

Since tonight is our last meeting before BEMF, I should get a
draft done now, so that people can comment on it.

The only obvious thing from the flyer of two years ago that’s
not really true any more is the statement:

Except for occasional meetings just before performances, we
welcome drop-in members who are not able to come regularly.

We do still welcome drop-in members when we aren’t preparing
for a performance, but we are performing more frequently and
preparing longer. So of the five months so far this year, three have
been closed to droppers in.

So I have a flyer with some minimal changes (new picture,
better description of the performing we do) up now at renband.pdf, and
I’ll see if the rest of the band thinks there need to be bigger
changes.

I’m reading a PDF book

I posted a
couple of days ago about my difficulties in reading PDF files
on the Nokia
N810. I also started a thread on the maemo-users
list, which you can read here.

The upshot is that I discovered that although the interface is
quite misguided in a number of ways, if you pull your stylus out
and fiddle with it enough, you can in fact read a PDF.

I still think it’s odd that a program that’s called a “reader”
doesn’t present the user with one button that always moves to the
next text to read. The way I actually have to read is to stroke
the stylus up and left to move the page around on a screen, and
then tap an invisible button on the right side of the screen to
move to the next page.

If they wanted to call it a “viewer” and not a “reader”, I
could understand this interface — it actually does let you go to
any part of the PDF file and view it at a wide variety of sizes.
But to me “reading” means going continuously through the text, and
this “reader” just doesn’t seem to be designed for that.

Another interesting point about that thread is that at least
two of the four people who participated (I’m one of them) were
interested in the problem because we were trying to read the
packet of Hugo award nominees which you can get by going to the Anticipation
website and joining. Without joining, you can read or download
(but not vote on) a large number of the nominees from the Hugos page
on the anticipation site.

Although you would expect Hugo nominated Science Fiction
writers and publishers to be more interested in how to implement
mobile technologies than the average publisher or writer, a large
fraction of the material is provided as PDF’s formated for the
printed page. No matter how good the interface design on the PDF
reader, a reflowable format is always going to be more flexible
for being read by a wide variety of people on a wide variety of
devices.

If you’re interested, the book I’m reading is Zoe’s
Tale by John Scalzi.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Lilypond vs Petrucci, Round II

I said in the round one of this
comparison that I’d let you know if I got any useful
answers to my query on the lilypond list. One of the list
contributors got interested in the problem and wrote me a new
layout block that does indeed look a lot more like what Petrucci
does. You can read the gory details on the
list.

Pictures

Here’s the first page of the Petrucci facsimile of Adieu
mes amours by Josquin:

[Petrucci facsimile]

And here’s the cantus part lilypond produces now that I have
the new layout block:

[Lilypond cantus]

And here’s the tenor part from lilypond with the new layout block:

[Lilypond tenor]

Reading PDF’s on the N810

I’m working hard on setting up the Serpent Publications
site, so you’re getting an email I wrote to a list on
something I’ve already goofed off about.

I’ll let you know if I get a useful answer.

Subject: pdf reading?

To: maemo-users@maemo.org

Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 13:36:26 -0400

I’m finding the interface on the included pdf reader on my Nokia
N810
pretty unusable.

My impression is that people on this list have mentioned that evince
might be better, but I can’t install that.

At least one of these problems must be fixable. So here are my
questions:

Included reader:
The file selector dialog (not only here but in the file manager
and other apps, but not FBReader) doesn’t allow me to select
from the external memory card (mounted as /media/mmc1), although
it does from the internal memory card (mounted as /media/mmc2).
Is there a way to fix this? I worked around it by opening a
terminal and copying the file I wanted to see from external to
internal, but there has to be a better way than that.
As far as I can see, the way to page down is to open the case
and use the down button on the pad. Is there a way to configure
it so that the +/- switch on top (preferable) or the buttons on
the side page up or down?
I have it zoomed to a size where the text area of the page is
the width of the screen, that is, the margins are off the
reader. But when moving down gets to a new page, the reader
resets the position of the page so that the left edge of the
page is at the left edge of the screen. Is there a way to tell
it not to do that?
evince:

This is generally true of a lot of the apps I try to install
from the application manager. It’s listed in “Installable
Apps”, but when I try to install it, it says, “Unable to install
evince. Some applications packages required for the
installation are missing.” When I click “Details”, it says,
“Application packages missing: libhildonfm2 (>=1;1.9.49)” Is
there a way to work around this?

If I do install it, will I have the same problems I do on the
included PDF reader?

This is somewhat frustrating, because people who don’t read
books on a mobile device do tend to assume that PDF is the way
to electronically distribute a book, and I could in fact read
them on the Nokia if the interface were a little bit better.
That is, for the book I’m trying to read, if the screen tries to
show both the printed area and the margins, the type is too
small for my 58 year old eyes, but if I can zoom it to where the
print area is the size of the screen, it’s readable without
glasses. But the designers of the application don’t seem to
have considered this usage pattern.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr