Author: Laura Conrad

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

Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF)

I ordered my tickets to BEMF this
morning. I had been agonizing over how many to buy since the
brochures arrived in February, but I finally decided to go with a
minimal number. So what I got is all the Renaissance ones, all
the recorder ones, and all the 11PM ones. And a pass and a book.

The festival is a major event in the early music community,
which takes place in odd-numbered years. (In even-numbered
years, there’s an event in Berkely, California.) There are
concerts by world-renowned players, masterclasses with famous
teachers, fringe events by less-renowned players, and an
exhibition of instruments and related paraphernalia.

Two years ago, this blog was just starting to take shape, and I
announced that I would be blogging from BEMF.
I attempted to convince other people to also post about their
experiences, since there’s no way one person can cover all the
events, or even the whole set of events that are interesting to
them. I got more comments on these posts than I usually do, but
didn’t get a lot of guest blogging action, partly because a lot
of people who might have done it were out-of-town without their
usual network access. But mostly because if you’re as busy as
the really committed early music people are at BEMF, you don’t
want to add writing to it.

So this year, I’ll keep up my one post a day policy, and during
that week (June 9-14 for me) most
posts will probably be about BEMF, but I’m not going to try to
be comprehensive, even about what I’m doing. I will set up a BEMF 2009
category, and if you’d like to get a user account that entitles
you to post entries on this blog, let me know and I’ll set it
up. You don’t need my permission to post comments, and it would
be really good if my readers wanted to

In terms of preparation for BEMF, I’ll be putting out flyers
for the Cantabile Band
and Serpent Publications.

I’m hoping to get the new serpentpublications.org
site set up by then, but it’s going slower than I hoped for, and
the flyer might still have to stick to the current laymusic.org and lulu.com stuff.

Making the machine go

I’ve been spending more time than usual the last few days on just getting my
desktop computer to run.

Graphics card

The problem I was trying to solve was that it would slow to an
unusable crawl if firefox had been running for more than a day,
especially when the automatic backup kicked in every 4 hours.

One thing I thought might help would be to run the monitor off
of an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS graphics card. The network
know-it-alls on one of my mailing lists laughed their heads off at
this idea, but it still seems reasonable to me.

Unfortunately, it fixed the problem of firefox taking over the
whole computer when it had been running for more than a day,
because with the nvidia driver, the whole X system would freeze up
in much less than a day. The nvidia driver is a closed-source
product of the Nvidia corporation; there’s also an open source
driver called nv, but when I tried that, it would only let me run
at very low resolution.

Monitor

Then a small number of days later, I got home after midnight
and went to check my email before bedtime and the monitor died.
(The little light was yellow, and instead of turning green as the
screen came back to life, it went out and wouldn’t come back on no
matter what I did.)

So I hooked up the old heavy 17″ CRT that I replaced because it
got jittery and was giving me headaches, and ordered a new monitor
for pickup from microcenter. I use
microcenter (which is less than two miles away) for anything I
need fast, for anything that might have a problem with linux
compatibility, and for anything with a motor in it. They sometimes
cost a little more than buying online, but they’re really good
about taking returns.

I bought this
Acer 22 inch wide monitor.

I had to boot it several times in order to get it configured
right. It seems that with the nvidia driver, you have to run both
envyng and nvidia-setup, or some such to get it to recognize that
you have a different sized monitor.

And it ran for most of a day, but this morning when I got up, X
was frozen again.

So I googled some more, and found a different open source
driver called “nouveau”. It figured out the right resolution and
size to run the screen at, so it looks good so far. It’s only been
two hours, though.

If you’re running ubuntu and have an nvidia card, you just have to “apt-get install
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau” and then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to
say “nouveau” instead of “nvidia” or “nv”.

Browsers

I’ll tell you some more about the browsers I’ve been
investigating later. The current situation is that the google
chromium-browser is great when it works, but has serious bugs,
like not displaying this blog at all and the “copy link address”
not copying. So I’m currently using that as well as firefox,
which is still what my mail program opens links in.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00193QFFG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last Chance Harvey

This movie was a disappointment. Obviously
anyone who’s a huge fan of either Dustin Hoffman or Emma
Thompson is going to want to watch it. I won’t say we’re
wrong to want that, but really, there are better ways to spend
an evening. It’s slow-moving and in spite of a lot of really
good acting, not really a very convincing plot. You do believe
that they’re attracted to each other, but not that they really
convince themselves to give up their whole lives for each other
in less than a week.

I have a subjective reason for disliking movies where Dustin
Hoffman looks old — I graduated from high school the summer The Graduate came out, so I basically think of
him as my age. This is an oversimplification — the character
in The Graduate has just graduated from college,
not high school, and of course Dustin Hoffman was quite
a bit older than the character he was playing. So he’s actually fourteen years older than I am, but I still think of him as
a contemporary.

I no longer have the problem I had for quite a while after
reading Heartburn by Norah Ephron. Because he
played Carl Bernstein (Ephron’s ex-husband) in All the Presidents’
Men, I kept thinking of him as the person who was so mean
to Norah Ephron. But since the movie of
Heartburn came out, I now know it was Jack
Nicholson who was so mean to Norah Ephron, and that’s really an
easier fiction to sustain.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0015OKWKS&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=B00000F798&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=0679767959&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=B001LL9YRM&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=B000CEXEWA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the May 19 meeting

We played:

  • Sermisy, Aupres de vous (2 voices)
  • Campian:
    • When the god of merrie love
    • I care not for these ladies
    • Fain would I love a fair young man
    • When Laura Smiles
  • Sermisy:
    • Aupres de vous (3 voices)
    • C’est une dure despartie
    • Changeons propos

Schedule

Next week, May 26, we will have our usual dropin meeting at
7:45 PM at my place.

The following week, June 2, that meeting would conflict with a
rehearsal for a West
Gallery Quire performance on June 3. All the people who’ve
been coming to this group regularly are also singing in that
performance, so we may decide to rehearse instead of meeting that
night.

The week after that, June 9, is BEMF, and that meeting would
conflict with a Renaissance concert, so we’ll probably not meet
then.

But after that, we should go back to our usual dropin
meetings.

We’re also thinking about having a party on Sunday, June 21, to
celebrate the Summer Solstice.

Homebrew club newsletter

I’m late today, so I’ll just tell you about how the homebrew club newsletter I mentioned last week
turned out.

You can see it on the club site.

I’ve done quite a number of these newsletters before, but I’m a lot more
fluent now in some of the relevant LaTeX, like boxes
to associate a picture with its caption. (The LaTeX built-in
figure capability is designed for a book or serious article, not
for an informal newsletter.)

It’s still a bit of a pain using Latex, instead of a program
designed for that kind of publishing, but I’m so used to the way
to do things in LaTeX, and how good the results look, that I just
do without putting several articles on the front page and flowing
the continuations onto later pages, and such features.

If there’s interest, I could upload the source so that people
could see how you do such a thing. For now, just email me if you
want it.

The major energy drain doing this was that the club isn’t any
longer used to having a newsletter come out, so a lot of the
resources I needed weren’t on the web site, or hadn’t been used,
so they had problems. For instance:

  • The new logo adopted last month wasn’t yet on the site.
  • The link to the archive of beer-related images hadn’t been
    checked since the website redesign a year or so ago.
  • The list of officers wasn’t current.

Unfortunately I ended up doing most of the work over the
weekend, when a lot of the people who could have helped with these
problems weren’t available by email. And when they returned on
Monday, it wasn’t clear that some of the newer officers really
realized that they needed to support the editor of the
newsletter. So I ended up pretty crabby
by the time I got the masthead edited to as good a state as I
could get it into.

But I think it turned out pretty well, considering. Some of
the people on the informal newsletter committee whom I asked to
help proofread said good things about how it looked. No real
feedback from the membership yet.

Garden, May 18, 2009

Time for another set of garden pictures. It changes fast this
time of year.

Alliums

[Giant Alliums]

They’re in full bloom now.

[single allium]

It’s not a good year in terms of
numbers; I often dry them and put them in vases, and last year I
had two tall winebottles full. You can see I espouse the “buy things
neat bottles from discount stores” theory of interior decorating.

[dried alliums in two tall wine bottles]

Roses

All the roses in the back yard (which is fairly shady) are
still in tight bud, but some of the ones in front (southwest
exposure) are starting to bloom.

[roses]

Angelica

The Angelica has buds.

[angelica]

Iris

Both the iris and Siberian iris are budding.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Rhubarb

The Rhubarb continues to look healthy, but I don’t see any new
leaves coming in. If it were later in the season, I would say
that meant I should harvest the largest of the current ones, but I
thought you didn’t harvest rhubarb until June. On the bright
side, whatever was eating the leaves might have stopped.

[rhubarb]
[no new rhubarb leaves coming]

Woodruff

This doesn’t really look much different from last week, but the
picture of the flowers last week wasn’t very good, and I wanted
one for the homebrew club newsletter.

[woodruff]