Laura Conrad

Mental Health Day

This has been a bad year in this part of the world for people
with pollen allergies. I’ve been singing O bother the
flowers that bloom in the Spring vigorously and frequently. On Thursday
night, I was congested enough to be having real trouble sleeping.

I realized on Friday morning that while I was almost certain it
was the pollen, I was actually hoping for a bit of a fever, so
that I could spend the day in bed.

Then I realized that since I work for myself, I didn’t really
need the thermometer to validate a day off, so I declared a mental
health day, and went back to bed after posting to this blog.

Two hours later, I woke up feeling refreshed and much less
congested. I took the dog on a walk, and hit the money machine
and decided to eat lunch on the patio at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

[Cambridge Brewing Company]

Then I went home and fooled around instead of practicing and
watched a lot of the baseball game and then watched other TV all
evening.

Results

Of course, what you hope about a day like that is that you’ll
wake up the next day invigorated and get lots more done than you
would have if you’d kept your nose to the grindstone both
days.

I won’t claim to have set the world on fire yesterday, but I
did some good practicing, solved a couple of problems on the blog
(note the Most Read
Posts section on the sidebar), and took the computer apart
to put back a video card.

I did spend more time watching TV than I sometimes do when I’m
getting a lot of work done, but it was TV I wanted to
watch. The Kentucky Derby had been a good enough horserace that I
wanted to watch the Preakness, and I had a movie from Neflix that
I’d been looking forward to.

Choosing a blogging platform

I started thinking about this again after my post
about how I write my posts.

I got a comment from a
reader who blogs on a platform (jekyll) that’s set up so that everyone
posts directly from their editor.

I actually started blogging on blosxom, which
is a really nice simple program. If all you want is to post your
own thoughts in a blog sort of format, I would recommend it.

However, if you want to add features, you will soon run into
problems like this,
from a pyblosxom (a close relative of blosxom) user:

I’ve just spent the whole night setting up blog comments. PyBlosxom doesn’t make it painless, sadly, more like the opposite.

First: don’t be scared by the list of comment-related plugins on the PyBlosxom site. There’s only one important plugin: comments. All others depend on it and enhance its functionality. The last three or four times I was about to add comments to my blog I got scared at step one: evaluate the available plugins. Don’t repeat my mistake!

Second, follow the instructions carefully. There’s no shortcut.

Third, fix what’s broken. Be prepared to debug the source
code. print >> sys.stderr, "message" is your friend.

Fourth, fiddle with the look (CSS and HTML).

It was when I wanted to add comments that I switched to wordpress. I figured that if you want other people
to do the testing for you, you need to sign up with a widely used
program, so that there will be lots of other people running it.

It has worked out pretty well. When I’ve run into problems,
I’ve pretty often been able to find a solution just by googling
the problem, and someone else had hit it before me and written up
the solution.

Monoculture

Of course, there’s a dark side to using the most commonly used
anything, which has been called the monoculture
problem.

If someone wants to do the work to crack a site for their own
nefarious purposes, they aren’t going to do it on some little
python program that’s used by a small fraction of the people who
wish they could post directly from emacs to their blogs. They’re
going to crack wordpress. This is the same reason why Mac and
Linux people worry a lot less about viruses and other malware than Windows people.

My blog has in fact been hijacked
several times, and when it happens, I always think of going back
to something simpler and less common.

My current solution to at least some of the hijacking problems
is to not use the wordpress uploading facilities. I’ve often
found they don’t “just work”, and to make them work, I’ve
sometimes done undesirable things that have compromised the site
security.

What’s supposed to happen is that you tell wordpress while
you’re writing a post that there’s a file you want to upload,
e.g. a picture. Then it uploads the file somewhere it knows
about, and there’s some simple syntax you can use for including it
in that post, and a slightly more complicated syntax for showing
it with a different post.

What actually happens when I do it is that is tells me I can’t
upload, and then when I finally do get it uploaded, I can’t
remember the syntax for including it. And if I have to upload 5
pictures (for instance, for the garden posts), I have to go
through this for each one of them.

So what I do instead these days is just upload the pictures
into a directory on my site (not under wordpress) and refer to
them by their normal URL’s. This would be a bit more typing if I
did it all for each picture, but since I’m in emacs, I just type
the URL once, and modify the filename for the next picture.

Organizing

I had been thinking that I might be moving towards not being an
organizer for a while. The thing that started this line of
thought was the number of places I’ve been (including NEFFA without bringing flyers for the Cantabile
Band.

But this week has refined that perception. I’ve done two
competent pieces of organizing (see below), and so I think the
problem with the Cantabile Band is that at this point in its
life it’s starting to need a different kind of organizing than
that flyer represents, so I haven’t been feeling like printing
off the flyer and taking it places.

Meeting

The first piece of organizing I did this week was the next
condo meeting. This could have been a pretty routine thing, not
requiring any special organizer gifts. But I decided to address a
long-term problem of the association: a lawyer bought a unit in
the building 15 years ago, and he read the rules to say that
nobody who wasn’t an owner should come to the owners’ meetings.
This has effectively disfranchised the one absentee owner, who
would have liked to send her property manager as a
representative. There are also
units where the owner has a roommate or partner who isn’t named
on the deed but who might be a good person to do some of the condo work. Since it’s only an eight unit building, and
there are always some owners who aren’t willing or able to
contribute, having even one unit that could be contributing and
isn’t makes extra work for the people who are.

I have in the past tried to get the rule clarified so that
owners could send representatives and roommates could come, but haven’t gotten any
support for that.

So my strategy this time was to concede the point about owners’
meetings being only for owners. The rules require one owners’
meeting a year, for the purpose of electing 4 trustees, who have
the power to make most of the decisions without necessarily
consulting the other owners. We had that meeting in April.

So instead of organizing an owners’ meeting, I organized a
meeting of the trustees, to which other residents and owners’
representatives are invited to come. I got all the other
trustees to buy into doing it this way, so that if the lawyer
decides to complain about it, I should be able to depend on some
support.

The other piece of organizing (still not completed) was to
revive the newsletter of the Homebrew Club.

This used to be an important organizing tool for the club,
which came out every month, and if you were trying to organize
an event, you knew you had to write it up for the editor (who
knew he had to twist your arm to write it up before the
deadline).

The club went through a rough patch a couple of years ago, and
got out of the habit of recruiting an newsletter editor every
month. We’ve
has been adding new members pretty regularly over the last year
or so. But of course, they aren’t members who know about
writing up their proposed events for the newsletter, or
volunteering to be the editor and twisting the arms of people
who were organizing events.

So we’ve had a committee to revive the newsletter, and I
foolishly volunteered to be the new editor. I figured this week
would be a good week to do it, because all my performing
commitments would be over, and it wouldn’t yet be time for the
Boston Early Music
Festival.

I’d done what used to be the normal thing, of sending out a
request for articles as soon as I got the editor job, and
reiterating the request a few days before the deadline. That
didn’t produce very many articles.

I was feeling like I might be getting too old for this
business, because there was a meeting last week that I just
didn’t have the energy to go to. Or rather, if I’d saved the
energy for that, I would have done less practicing for the recital, and that was the priority.

But yesterday I looked at what I had (the original deadline had
been Monday), and wrote a post nagging the people whose stuff
was still missing, and for some reason, this turned out to be a
better description of what the newsletter could be than my much
more general request for articles.

So I now have several articles that I hadn’t explicitly
solicited, and the promise of a couple more by tomorrow or
Sunday.

Band

I’ll write up why the Cantabile Band probably needs different
organizing now than it did a couple of years ago later.

Wendy and Lucy

This was the most upsetting movie I’ve seen in a while. I
remember hearing a story on the radio about the R rating it got
seeming inappropriately “adult”. The story’s point of view was that if kids can
handle sex and violence, they should be able to handle a story
about a car breaking down.

I’ll avoid spoilers, as had the reviews I had read before I saw
the movie, because it would be a different movie if the viewer
knew the ending in advance.

But I think the reviewer who complained about the R rating
may have missed how violent (including a rape scene) the movie really
was. The rape scene is actually quite tame compared with the
scene where Wendy’s taken away to the police station, leaving her
dog (Lucy) in a clearly inappropriate place. This is what leads
to her having to sleep in the woods without the protection of the
dog, and hence to the rape.

So not only did I spend a good deal of time explaining to Sunny that what
happens in the movie isn’t going to happen to us, but I’ve also
been thinking about all the white-collar violence that’s been done
to me that really did hurt more than the couple of minor assaults
I’ve been victim of.

The most recent one was the crabby neighbor who lived next door
to Bonnie, who decided (without having seen the inside of the
house) that the way we were approching cleaning it up for sale was
the wrong thing to do. She interfered several times with the way
we left trash out, and probably reported our “violations” (putting
trash cans out at 6PM instead of waiting until 10) to the town.

I can understand a town needing to have limits on how much
trash can be left on the sidewalk for how long. But in this case,
the reason we had so much trash to leave was that Bonnie had been
too sick to be taking it out every week for quite a long time, so
in my opinion, they could have cut us a little slack.

Luckily, Bonnie turned out to also have some nice neighbors,
who asked what they could do to help, so I asked them if they’d
take the trash out after 10. They were surprised that that was
necessary, since apparently it isn’t a rule that’s enforced unless
someone complains (hence my theory about the crabby neighbor), but
they were very helpful when I assured them it was a real
problem.

Anyway, none of this is anything like as bad as losing your dog
because of an encounter with the police, but it really does make
you shake with rage and frustration for at least as long as some
actual violence.

To get back to the movie, it’s very well done, but watch it
when you’re prepared to be upset.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001EUSYIA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Comparing Lilypond and Petrucci

While I’m working intensely on the site redesign, you might
have to put up with the things I’m writing about it to help me
think.

Here’s a query I made on the lilypond-users
mailing list:

In general, I love the way lilypond output looks when compared with
other computer-generated sheetmusic.

I’m aware that the ideal espoused by the developers is the 19th century
hand-engraved sheet music.

I usually like the look of my lilypond output as compared with the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century printers I usually transcribe.

I always like the look of lilypond output as compared with anyone’s
hand-written music.

But when I transcribe Petrucci from the facsimile, the spacing lilypond
does always looks clunky, especially in the parts with large
note-values.

I’ve recently figured out that the large note-values look better if you
put:

context{ Score override SpacingSpanner #'base-shortest-duration = #(ly:make-moment 1 1) }
in the layout block.

I believe Petrucci’s spacing is just equal spacing for every note, no
matter what its value.

Does anyone have any tricks for making lily’s output look a little more
like that?

I’m trying to redesign my website, and one idea I have is to have a
graphic in the header with a facsimile on one side and lily’s output on
the other. So it’s important that people not look at the lilypond
output and say, “Wow, that’s ugly compared to the facsimile.” Of course
one way to do that would be to use an ugly facsimile (of which there are
many), but it would be more fun to use a beautiful facsimile and also
have beautiful lilypond.

I’ll let you know if I get any useful answers.

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:

[Lilypond cantus]

And here’s the tenor part from lilypond:

[Lilypond tenor]

Site Redesign Progress

I finally got started on the site redesign, so this has to be a
short one.

It’s the kind of project that every time you solve one problem,
three others pop up, so I suspect it will be at least days if not
weeks before I have it ready even for friendly perusal, let
alone to loose on the unsuspecting public.

I’m starting with the thematic wordpress
theme framework. It allegedly lets you customize almost
anything, but that turns out to be only true if you know CSS. I
learned a bit about it the last time I did site redesign, and
actually sort of liked the look of the site I did for the Boston
Recorder Society (they changed it when I stopped maintaining it,
so you can’t see it there). Anyway, I have the mechanics pretty
much the way I want them, and the look something like the old
BRS site, so now all I have to do is:

Write the content for the new pages, including the new
search form.
Fiddle with both LaTeX and Gimp to get the banner at the top
of the pages right.
Fiddle with the wordpress stuff so the sidebars and footers
are the way I want them.

My accomplishments for yesterday included:

Finding where the home page on the new hosting site should go. I
broke accessing it altogether twice yesterday afternoon trying
to be too cute about that.
Setting up a test environment on my home machine. There’s
still work to do on this, because I used the Ubuntu wordpress
package to do it, so I have to fiddle with permissions and
ownership and groups and maybe links before it really lets me
work on it right. But I made substantial progress.
This morning before breakfast, I installed keyring and now I can do openssh to both the old
and the new hosting sites without entering passphrases.

I was frustrated enough yesterday when I had access to the new
site broken and hadn’t yet figured out how to customize anything
in thematic that I considered just going to bed and reading
trash fiction, but I have persevered, so far.

The most inspiring story I learned in high school was in the
history of English literature book. Thomas Carlyle had spend
several years writing the history of the French Revolution, and
he gave the only copy of the manuscript to his friend Macauley
to see what he thought. Macauley’s maid (at least, she had to
take the rap) thought it was trash and put it in the fire.
Carlisle went to bed and read trashy fiction for a week and then
got up and wrote the book over again.

I admit that story has more often inspired me to go to bed and
read trashy fiction than to write the history of the French
Revolution. But it’s really true that there are times you just
shouldn’t be doing some things, and it was looking like
yesterday afternoon was the wrong time to be slaving over a hot
computer.

Student Recital

My recorder teacher, John
Tyson, had his annual student recital on Saturday.

This year, we played in a charming little auditorium in the
Morse School, one of the Cambridge public schools.

Program

John teaches a wide range of students, from a doctor who’s
close to a complete beginner, to conservatory students who are
ready to give full-length concerts.

The usual arrangement for a student recital is to put the
less-experienced performers on first, on the grounds that they’re
more nervous, and also so as not to have a beginner playing right
after a virtuoso performance. That got modified a bit this time,
for two reasons:

All the students who were being accompanied by John’s wife,
harpsichordist Miyuki Tsurutani, had to be programmed at the
end, because she had prior commitments that meant she didn’t
arrive until almost an hour into the program.
There were two composers, Loeillet and Marcello, who were
represented by two sonatas, and John programmed them so that the
sonatas would be adjacent to each other.

My performance

The result of that was actually quite favorable placement for
my piece. I was playing a Loeillet sonata with my sister, Judith Conrad, on harpsichord, and the other
person playing Loeillet has only been taking recorder lessons
for a year or so. (He’s been playing piano for years, so he
isn’t actually an inexperienced performer or musician, but he
hasn’t been playing recorder for long enough to be able to make
the amount of difference between an Allegro and an Adagio that a
better player can. Sonatas are really more interesting when the
fast movements are faster than the slow movements.) So I was the first of the more
experienced players to play, after the audience had heard almost
as much intermediate recorder playing as they wanted to.

I played well. I’ve been doing a lot of performing this year,
and it’s been good for getting consistent breath support. I
also finally figured out this spring how hands my size can hold
an alto recorder without having the wrists in a tortured, bent
position, so that makes it possible to have my fingers almost as
relaxed on a 415 alto as they are playing dance music on a
soprano. And I spent the spring doing articulation exercises
while I walked the dog, so I’m finally in a position to play the
fast movements faster than they used to be. And the space was
really very friendly to the alto recorder/harpsichord sound.

My sister, who is a professional keyboard player with a real
flair for continuo, also played well. Unfortunately, we had
only run the whole piece once, and it was before I figured out
how I wanted to play it. Of course someone who’s a professional
accompanist can adjust to an interpretation she’s never heard
pretty fast, but it probably wasn’t fast enough to really carry
off some of the false endings and free tempos I had planned.

So I told people I wished my sister and I had had more time to
rehearse before performing. John said he didn’t think it
mattered; that you could tell it was two intelligent musicians
doing really cool stuff, even if not quite the same cool stuff.
He did say how impressed he was with my poise.

The rest of the evening

The disadvantage of using this space is that the modest fee
John paid to rent it only covered three hours, including
harpsichord setup and takedown time. The penultimate group was three New
England Conservatory students, including Ching-Wei Lin, John’s
most advanced student, playing the Dieupart Cinquieme
Suite in F. They had to cut it short, and play only the
first three movements. If you were considering this as a concert
that would have been the wrong place to make the cut. Of course,
considering it as a performing opportunity for people who don’t
always have as much chance to play for an audience as they should
for the amount of work they do, it was exactly the right thing to
cut, since they have all kinds of opportunities to perform.

But most of the players and their families could go over to
John and Miyuki’s house for a very good party, including jazz and
rock improvisations by the assembled.

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.