Author: Laura Conrad

Following up

Ubuntu upgrade

The Ubuntu people made a change to the X windows interface for
the 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) release. It doesn’t matter very much
to me, but it does (by default) remove a feature that I use once
in a while. Formerly, if you wanted to kill your X windows session
without rebooting the machine, you could say
<CTL><ALT><backspace>, and now by default that
sequence doesn’t do anything.

I’m not sure I agree with this decision — the rationale is
apparently that people sometimes hit that sequence by accident,
which doesn’t seem to ever happen to me.

In any case, if you want the feature, putting it back is pretty
easy. There are places that will tell you what to put in your
/etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but the easy way is to install the
“dontzap” package, and then run dontzap -d.

Lilies of the valley

When I posted the last set of garden pictures, I forgot to
include the lillies of the valley.

[mint]

Buying ebooks, Part II

I’m sure you’re sitting on the edge of your seat to find out
what happened to my quest to give the publishing industry money
for a book I can read on my Nokia 810 Internet
Tablet.

I told you a couple of days ago about trying
to buy a .lit book from a linux computer running firefox.

Next I tried buying one from a Windows computer running
Internet Explorer. Here’s what I wrote about it to a mailing
list that discusses such things:

I keep hearing (I think on this list as well as other places) that
people buy ebooks at fictionwise.com in .lit format, and then use clit
to turn them into html and read them on the platform of their choice.

I have occasionally gotten a .lit format book from somewhere and been
able to use clit to read it, but I’d never seen one I wanted to buy.

Then last week, I found out that The Lord of the Rings is now
available as an official ebook, and decided I would buy it.

This turns out to be too hard for me to do. You would think that if I
wanted to give someone $30 for a book, they would give me the book, but
not if Microsoft is involved.

First they said I should get a free one to make sure I had a process for
making it work. That sounded reasonable, and they actually sold me a
free ebook without asking for my credit card number.

Then I went to download it, and they said I had to be on a Windows
computer (and in Windows Explorer).

So I went away, but after a few days, I realized I had a couple of other
things I needed to boot windows to do, so I booted Windows, and fired up
IE and went to my bookshelf in Fictionwise.

Then they said I needed the latest Microsoft Reader software, so I
downloaded that.

Then they said I needed to activate the Reader on that computer. It
took quite a while to find out how I should do that, and I had to type
illegible characters several times to set up a Passport account.

Then they said I needed to install ActiveX, without telling me how to do
that. I did a search, and found someone who had the same problem and
had been told that it’s a browser option and where to go to change it,
so I did that.

But I’m still getting the error message about needing ActiveX, or to be
logged in as a real user (which I am).

So how do you buy a .lit book from Fictionwise, if you do, or is there
some other way to get commercial DRM books like the Tolkein that will
let me read it on a linux computer?

And how does anyone stay in business if it’s this hard to buy something
from them?

This reminds me of the time when I was in college and the lock to my
dorm room was balky, so I started thinking about getting the kind of
religion where you don’t ever lock your door. I already almost have the
kind of religion where I never buy DRM, and it looks like I’m not
capable of backsliding from it even if I want to.

One of the readers of the list took pity on my and sent me a
500 line python script that converts ereader books to html.

So this morning, I bought The Hobbit from fictionwise in the secure ereader
format. I had to tell the download program my name and credit
card information, but then it just gave me the file, without
complaining about what browser I was using or making me type
illegible characters or anything.

After that, there was only an hour or so of debugging, and now
the book looks pretty good in all of ereader running under Wine, firefox, and FBReader.

Actually, it looks a bit better in firefox than in the other
versions. FBReader is clumsy about placing the .png files for
the runes, and eReader doesn’t indent the verse gracefully.

For those who want the gory details, the two problems I had to
fix before the HTML displayed correctly were:

  • The .html file didn’t specify the character encoding, so all the
    quotation marks and such were displayed as something like 222
    in emacs, and as a ? in a diamond box in firefox. The fix was
    to put:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
    charset=ISO-8859-1">

    at the top of the file.

  • The html file referred to a lot of the graphics as generated
    filenames
    with mixed case letters, but the script had actually written the
    names with all lower case. I haven’t scripted that fix yet, but
    if I hit the problem again, I probably will.

I haven’t yet read it on the Nokia, but my experience is that
if FBReader on the desktop can read it, so can FBReader on the
tablet.

So if you want electronic books without being a pirate, you can
have them, even if you want to use non-commercial software to
read them.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Garden

Time for more garden pictures.

Roses

They’re still in pretty tight buds. I staked the one in front
that was falling over the sidewalk.

[rosebud]

Woodruff

Still lots of pretty tight buds, but it’s starting to open
up.

[woodruff]

Rhubarb

It’s continuing to get bigger. The directions said not to cut
it for two years, and to cut carefully the third year. This is
the third year, so I’m expecting at least a little bit of sauce
for something. After this, I should have to bake pies to be
able to put anything else in the plot.

[rhubarb]
[new rhubarb leaf]

Pansies

The pansies have been flattened by the recent rain.

[flat pansies]

Alliums

The Giant Alliums are about to burst into bloom. I bought a
bulb assortment (tulips, daffodils…) in the fall of 1984, and these are the only
things still going from that investment.

[Giant Allium bud]

Mint

This was slow to come up at all this year. I was worried that it had been killed by the cold
weather in January, but it’s doing well now.

[mint]

Buying ebooks

On my list for later this morning is to boot the laptop into
windows and do several things I can’t do on linux:

  • Print the final tax returns from TaxCut.
  • Fix some annoyances with the Universal remote
    setup    .
  • See if it’s really possible to buy DRM’d books from Fictionwise and read them
    on a non-comercial OS.

The others have been discussed at length (taxes
and remote); this is the day for
my rant on the ebook marketplace.

I’m surprised that this topic hasn’t come up before, more than
two months into this daily blog, because a lot of the blogs I
read are devoted to rants about the publishing industry’s
benighted attitude towards ebooks. So I would have expected to
have wanted to rant myself before this, but it wasn’t until last
week that I felt the rant coming on.

What happened last week was the discovery that
The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit
and The Children of Hurin, but apparently not
The Silmarillion) is available in official ebook
form.

I’ve had an illegal download for some time, and that’s the way
I reread it these days, but it certainly isn’t ideal — it
screws up all the letters with accents, for instance. So
although I’ve already bought it in both paperback and hardcover,
I would be willing to buy it again as an ebook, if that meant I
could read it on my device of choice (the Nokia
N810).

If you haven’t been following this topic, the major topic of
debate is the fact that many publishers and authors aren’t
comfortable just letting you download a book in a format like html
or text or various open book-specific formats that you
can read on any computer you can put it on. They feel that there
will be too much piracy, and they’re only comfortable letting you
buy their books if they have something called DRM (digital rights
management) attached to them. There are a lot of good arguments
against this point of view. The most concise summary of them is
that if you buy a book with DRM, you don’t own it, you’re only
renting it for an unknown length of time.

The conventional wisdom these days is that if you need to
convert a DRM’d ebook to something readable on an open platform,
the Microsoft .lit form is the format of choice, since it’s
apparently just a wrapper around some html. So once you’ve
unwrapped it, you aren’t any longer bound by the DRM limitations.

So when I found that Fictionwise didn’t have Tolkein’s books in
what they call “multiformat”, which means you can download any
of a number of open formats to any device you like once you’ve
paid for it, I attempted to buy them in .lit format.

The shopping cart was fairly confusing, but I manged to get to
where I could push a button to complete the purchase, but it
warned me that I should download a free one first to verify that
I would be able to read it on my platform of choice.

That sounded like a good idea, so I moved all the Tolkeins to
my wish list, and tried to “buy” the suggested free .lit
book.

They had no problem letting me do a $0.00 purchase without
giving them my credit card number (don’t laugh — lots of
shopping carts won’t), but then when I went to
download it, I couldn’t because I wasn’t on a Windows
computer.

So in order to give them lots of money for a book I want to
buy, I have to boot an operating system I don’t want to run.

And then they’re surprised that ebooks aren’t taking off
faster.

If you do want to see whether you like ebooks, I recommend
getting started the way I did — either download works that are
out of copyright from gutenberg or manybooks, or buy non-DRM’d
books from Baen or
fictionwise.

Maybe it will turn out that there’s a way to get DRM’d books to
work without booting windows, or that booting the windows
occasionally to do the download is worth being able to get the
books. If so, I’ll let you know.

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

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Fortepiano Concert

The HIP (Historically Informed Performance) movement has been
moving steadily into the nineteenth and even twentieth
centuries. I was aware that there was enough difference in
orchestral instruments and their style of playing for this to be
interesting for orchestral works. And of course, singing and
playing music in the size hall it was designed for can be a lot
more satisfying than in a space designed to seat two or three
orders of magnitude more people than the composers and original
performers envisioned.

However, it wasn’t until last Sunday that I really realized
that the nineteenth century piano repertoire could benefit from
HIP.

The Loring Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, built in 1760, has
a Longman and Broderip square piano built in about 1800. I heard
a concert played on this piano last sunday by Judith Conrad.

The first two thirds or so of the concert was what I expect
from fortepianists — eighteenth century music where the
composers clearly expected non-equal temperaments and the piano
was playing in ensemble with instruments like the baroque flute
that hadn’t yet been engineered to play in a modern concert
hall. I particularly enjoyed the Haydn Flute sonata, ably
played by baroque flutist Michael Shand.

The fugues of Antonin Reicha, who straddled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, also benefited from the shorter reverb
times and more intimate tone of the earlier instrument.

But then they switched to Mendelssohn. I grew up hearing
pieces like the Mendelssohn Songs without Words
played on a Steinway, and it hadn’t really occurred to me that
they too would benefit from the more intimate sound of the
earlier instrument. It’s clearly music for the living room and
not the concert hall, but I hadn’t realized that it was for a
living room with a cute little piano that plays thirds that are
consonances and gets out of the way of singers and instruments
who are trying to make music with it instead of dominating
them.

Another HIP aspect of this performance was that the audience
was invited to sing along on vocal works that complemented the
performance. I personally find this adds a lot to my ability to concentrate on other people’s music for two hours.

Unfortunately, the first Sunday in May is a terrible time to
play a concert, because you have to share your audience with all
the other people who are trying to play concerts then. So this one
drew 9 people and was probably doing well in comparison to some
other events. I would suggest that most performers whose rehearsal
schedules aren’t tied to the academic calendar should avoid concerts in
December and May.

Report on the May 5 meeting

We played:

  • Barnes (ed.), English Country Dance Tunes
    • Prince William of Gloucester’s Waltz
    • A Trip to Tunbridge
    • Bath Carnival
    • Fandango
  • Morley, Miraculous love’s wounding
  • Phalese (ed.), Motets from Bicinia
    • Beatus vir
    • Beatus homo}
    • O Maria mater pia,
    • Per illud ave prolatum
    • Oculus non vidit
    • Justus cor suum
    • Expectatio justorum laetitia
    • Qui sequitur me
    • Justi tulerunt spolia
    • Sancti mei
    • Qui vult venire post me
    • Serve bone
    • Fulgebunt justi sicut lilium
    • Sicut rosa
  • Glogauer LIederbuch:
    • Du lenze gut
    • Die Katzenpfote
  • Morley, Say, Deere, will you not have mee?
  • Harrison, Give me the sweet delights of love

Schedule

We’ll be having our usual Tuesday drop in meetings at 7:45 PM
at my place
for most of the forseeable future.

We will skip the meeting on June 9
during the week of BEMF.

We’re thinking about a cookout to celebrate the Summer Solstice
on June 21.

Other events

John Tyson’s student recital will take place on Saturday, June
9 starting at 6 PM. If you’re interested in coming, let me know
and I’ll send you directions.

Lots of people we know will be playing at the BEMF fringe
concerts. More details later.

Another picture from the Walk for Hunger

It’s far too late to do a real post, so here’s another picture
from the Walk for Hunger:

[Sunny, Ishmael, Laura, Paul, Anne]

The photographer was Ishmael Stefanov (left) by time delay.

One of the performers, who didn’t read any preliminary play
lists, and still didn’t really have his notebook in
order at the actual performance, told me yesterday that we should have done a
completely different kind of program.

This is probably why the great conductors never socialize with
the orchestra.

Walk for Hunger, 2009


[walk for hunger 2009]

We had good weather for what we were doing. There were a
couple of raindrops at about noon, and a few more at 2:30, when
the other group was playing, but the clouds made it easier to
see the music, and it was close to t-shirt weather. (I had warm
underwear under mine; otherwise I would have been wearing a
sweater.)

We were worried about whether the pieces with just vocals would
carry to where the walkers could hear them, and they certainly
didn’t carry as well as the recorders or the brass or string
instruments, but I checked while Ishmael and Anne were playing a
duet, and you could certainly hear that it was happening, so you
could go closer if you wanted to hear better.

Of course, the ipod generation doesn’t believe it’s music if
you have to move to hear it. We’ve been asked several times
playing at picnics why we couldn’t just amplify what we were
doing so they didn’t have to move.

I’ve looked into amplification, and my impression is that even
when I was younger and stronger, anything light enough for me to
carry sounds pretty tinny. And of course, for this application,
we’d need something that ran on batteries, which increases the
weight.

The serpent was a big hit, as was Paul Ukleja’s trumpet
rendition of Stardust Memories.

We needed to ask Paul to play some solos to give us breaks in
the morning, because the only group we could find couldn’t start
playing until 1 PM. They had 6 recorder players and a violinist,
and played very well out of an anthology of Elizabethan
music.

For breaks from the singing, Paul, Ishmael, and I played
Country Dance music, and found a few things that really worked
pretty well with fiddle, recorder, and serpent.

I decided to do all the performing standing up, so the serpent
was resting on a 24 inch stool, which seems to allow it to
vibrate more freely than when it’s supported on my legs. I
think I’ll make a point of performing that way in the future.
But I think I’ve said that in the past, too.

Swine flu II

I posted the
previous installment when I needed a fast post, so I
didn’t do any research about what’s already been said about the subject.

Subsequent googling turns us this
article from
2000 about tuberculosis and Spanish influenza. This is much
later than my conversation with my friend, and includes an
argument for tuberculosis being a contributing factor that I
hadn’t remembered. Typical influenza deaths occur heavily in
infants and the elderly, but in 1918, there was also a spike in
20-30 year olds.

Very little of what I’ve read about the flu in Mexico addresses
this issue, but
this
piece from
the New York Times does point out that there were some deaths
among young adults, which was one of the factors that triggered the
concern on the part of the Mexican government.

Walk for Hunger Retrospective

This is usually my big performance of the year. I gave the
details in my Cantabile Band
post yesterday. For this one, I thought I’d dredge up
some pictures from previous Walks.

I’m certainly not going to have time to post tomorrow morning.
I may post to the spindle later today, or I may wait until I get
home with a picture and post that.

2008

This was last year. The real performance was when we played
for Bonnie in her hospital room. This one was dampened by both
rain and Bonnie dying; one performer had done dropin rehearsals,
and another performer had another event to go to and dropped in
for the first set but had left before this set. The rain actually
stopped by noon, but I don’t think most of us remember it that
way. We did a lot of trios, some of which we’re repeating this
year; I hope it’s more cheerful to sing about walking over hills
an dales and birds singing.

[walk08]

2007

The year before may have been a high point of some sort. We
did a performance of a lot of the same repertoire at the Boston Recorder
Society Play the Recorder Day, and really knew things pretty
well. People had learned some things about how to secure music
and stands from the wind the previous year.

[walk07]

2006

2006 was the year we played at the Jeremiah
Ingalls festival in Vermont, so we put a bunch of shape note
stuff on the program. I think it was an entertaining program if
you liked both listening to music and watching musicians run up
and down the riverbank chasing their music.

[walk06]

2005

2005 was another year it rained, although, again, it really
cleared up pretty well by the time we were playing. But the viol
player didn’t want to get her instrument out, and a less
experienced performer freaked out when I suggested switching some
parts so that I could play bass on the serpent. It wasn’t even
her part I wanted to switch — it was the person she was standing
next to. So now there’s language in the FAQ
about how in a dropin group you have to be prepared to be either
one-on-a-part or not one-on-a-part.

[walk05]

2004

2004 was the year of the best professional coperformers.
It was really hot and two very good recorder players came and
played duets and lots of people stopped to listen to them.

[walk04]

2003

This was a big band performance. I think I made everybody come
to at least one rehearsal, but not necessarily enough rehearsals
for them to have learned the music. And it was a big enough crowd
that it was hard to hear. I think it wasthe year we started having
other groups to help us out, but I got several groups, only some
of whom showed up when and where they were supposed to.

[walk03]

2002

This was a big band where not everybody came to a rehearsal,
and nobody could hear anything from the other end of the group.
It might have been the first year we had the whole day to cover,
and I pretended we could do it with solos, and people had the idea
they should be able to walk to the bathroom (a mile or so away)
between sets. I opened my big mouth at dinner afterwards about
how to run a recorder society, and
that’s how I got stuck doing it for a while.

[walk02]

Previous

2001 was the year I founded the Cantabile Renaissance Band.
For two or three years previous to that, I had a fairly good
recorder trio, and we just bought some of the books of recorder
arrangements we knew pretty well and played. I think we were only
covering two hours, and we met regularly anyway without random
people dropping in. The biggest problem I remember was that if
the wind came up and you were facing the wrong direction, the
sound didn’t come out of the tenor recorder. A recorder group
that meets regularly really makes more sense in this context than
the crazy stuff we do now, but I don’t have one of those, and I
don’t know many people who do.