Linux Arpeggiators, Part 1

So why package your own kernel?  In short, Debian kernels are not vanilla kernels, and many times self-compiled kernels can leave a little to be desired.  By following their official packaging procedures, you have a better chance of building something that not only works, but others can use.

Speaking of others…

None of this is very useful if it can’t be shared, so I’m looking into moving the entire thing to a public git repository.  git is all the rage right now, everyone is doing it.  I’ve often toyed with the idea of keeping my life in a private git repo, but that’s a bit overkill – I mean really, wtf is so important in my life that I can’t lose it? 

Time

There never seems to be enough time for anything anymore.  Holding down the 8 to 5 followed by doing a piss-poor job at being a dad leaves little time to take care of personal projects.  (They don’t tell you these things when you’re 16 and looking to get laid.)  Time management appears to be the thing I need to be focusing on, primarily because I’m simply not getting anything done.  By the time you subtract out all of the have-tos, you’re only left with an hour or two each day, and maybe then not even that.  What else can go?  Sleep?  I’ll be 35 this November, and I don’t see sleep getting less important anytime soon.

More later…

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

…You write texts in unusual and innovative formats; you are an experienced musician with
many questions, which other musicians cannot answer; you work with images and keep
making new discoveries at their diffuse borders; you perform, but the space doesn’t always
play along; you know a lot, but like to listen; you sometimes look over the fence; you are
fast, but slow down in unexpected places…

I’m still trying to figure out what all that means. The most interesting thing in that description is the mention of “writing texts in unusual and innovative formats;” how many innovative formats can there be for text? I must dig into this further.

Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Delia worked for the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, which produced sound effects for BBC shows. While they did not write the composition for the Doctor Who theme, they were responsible for realizing it. Umm, with no musical instruments.

Outstanding.

Thus, I have been wrestling with the question of why my musical personality has begun to fade. Why are there no new ideas in my mind? Why do the same tired licks come out of my fingers each time I sit down to play? Why do I not get excited over the prospect of playing anymore? The answer came in recent weeks, traveling to Yet Another Wedding Reception Gig with my good friend Don. On the way home, we listened to some heavy music. As we were driving, I asked him some pretty probing questions about how he hears music, and what he draws from listening to great composers. His answer was profound in its simplicity – “I don’t think about all of that stuff; I just listen.”

Of course! His simple answer had hit be square between the eyes. The primary reason for my decline was that I was not listening to music anymore, I was just playing. Thus, all that my ears heard was only what my brain knew, meaning that my musical abilities never grew beyond what I was capable of. If practicing is the process of giving your voice a vehicle, how do you gain a voice to express? What good is all the technique in the world if you have nothing to say? This is why a musician must listen, both passively and critically, to everything that he can get his hands on.

Thus the excitement is sparked again, but now the question arises – what do I listen to? I’ve downloaded countless (free as in freedom) albums of music lately, but none of them have inspired me to any great lengths. Tonight, however, that changed, when (somehow) I stumbled upon this:

Glenn Gould, my favorite pianist of all time, playing my favorite composer – Bach. Hearing this caused my heart to literally leap with joy. It has been so many years since I’ve thought about Gould that it was like seeing a long lost friend. His interpretations of Bach are somewhat questioned by some; I have rather nasty memories of being told not to play like him by teachers. Yet, he is a genius. Take, for example, this amazing short interview with him on the playing of a Mozart piece:

The first comment on the YouTube page is rather telling:

Is Gould pretty much saying that his Mozart was played for the purpose of trolling the musical establishment?

Yup, he is.

My joy has returned. My muse has come home. No, I cannot play anything like Gould can, but it sure feels good to want to again.

Josh

Well, then, since it is not immediately obvious, allow me to explain.

Women have much more power in relationships than men do. Not just by social convention (which, believe me, is power enough), not just because others are more sympathetic to their side of any story (which, believe me, is also more than power enough), but via the full weight and majesty of the law.

Let us construct, in our heads, a hypothetical scenario. I shall use you and I as examples, just give some sense of the impact of these events on people’s lives.

Let us suppose that we meet, by chance, in some gathering place in some city where, at some time in the future, we both reside. I am tall, handsome, muscular, well-dressed, and confident; you are pretty, intelligent, charming, and you get my jokes.

Nature takes its course.

About a year later, you decide that I am a good catch, the best of your available options, and you would like to be married. You drop hints, but I demur. I like you well enough, but you want children and I do not. Not to mention that I am still considering my options and am unready to enter into any sort of lifelong pact.

(This is the branch point. This is where we tell the story of what you could legally do, were you so inclined.)

You simply stop taking your birth control pills, without a word to me. This is not a crime, because legally, I have no right to know. They are your pills, and it is your body.

After a couple of attempts which I did not know were attempts, you become pregnant. You may have attempted with other men as well. Let’s leave that matter unresolved for the moment.

You do not tell me until you start to show. This is also perfectly legal.

Once I figure things out, I offer to pay for half the termination procedure. You decline to undergo one. This, too, is legal. The law allows you the “right to choose”. I, however, have no such right.

I do a little snooping, and discover unused quantities of birth control pills in the bathroom cabinet. Since they come in those neatly dated little wheel-things, I am easily able to deduce the exactly day you stopped. I terminate our sexual relationship post-haste.

You are angry and accuse me of putting you in this delicate situation and then abandoning you. I demur, arguing that you placed yourself in this situation. Negotiations deteriorate.

I demand a paternity test, not feeling very trusting at this point. You refuse. You can do that. You have the legal right, it’s your body, I cannot force you to undergo amniocentesis.

You give birth to a daughter, and name her Zoe. I am named on the birth certificate as the father, simply because mine was the name you gave when they asked. I was not even there.

Now, I have refused to marry you. I still have that right, in most situations. (Look up “common-law” marriage, a law that allows a woman to force a man to marry her.)

So you legally demand that I provide you with the benefits of marriage anyway, to wit, a large portion of my income. You have the legal right to do this. It’s called “child support”.

In court, I demand a paternity test, but am denied one. You see, because I offered to pay for an abortion, I acknowledged the child as mine. And my name is on the certificate. And, most important of all, the very court that is ruling on the matter receives a cut of all child support payments. (Bet you didn’t know that, did you?)

Legally, the money is for Zoe, but the checks come to you, in your name. You can spend them however you like, with no oversight whatsoever.

I’m not even sure Zoe is mine.

Now I’m in a bad situation. But the story does not end here.

The tanking economy causes budget cuts, and my cushy job as an engineer at a major defense contractor is lost. The only thing thing I can find to replace it is a job hawking cell-phones in one of those mall kiosks. This is not, however, grounds for reducing my child-support payments. The initial amount of them was determined by my income at the time, but legally, they are a right belonging to Zoe, and determined by Zoe’s need, so my income is not a factor.

Now I cannot pay. I am a “deadbeat dad”, according to society. And the newspaper my photo is published in. And the website my picture is posted on.

My failure to pay tanks my credit rating, too, with all its attendant woes.

The economy loosens up a bit, and I reapply to my old firm. They’re keen to hire me, but they can’t. With a record of delinquent child support payments, I cannot pass the background check. Now my career is blighted, too.

Many years have passed at this point, and I’m in deep trouble. Broke, no career prospects, poor credit, spotty criminal record (failure to pay child support is a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions), depressed, no means or confidence to attract another woman even if I could ever trust one again.

But the story doesn’t end here.

Desperate, I manage to find some pretext to visit you, and I steal some of Zoe’s hair from her hairbrush in the bathroom. I pay for a lab test out of my meager remaining resources.

Zoe isn’t mine.

I take you to court, and lose. Yes, lose. Because I had already been paying child support, I am the publicly acknowledged father. (If you do not believe this could possibly happen, I sympathize. It’s crazy. But google “joseph michael ocasio” and prepare to be shocked.)

Okay, end of scenario.

Look where we are. My life is indeed ruined. At no point did I have any power to stop it (except by remaining celibate my entire life). At every point, what you did, you had the legal right to do. You didn’t have to “get away” with anything. You could write a book about it, and nothing would change, because it was all legal.

The only thing protecting most men from this fate is nothing but women’s lack of inclination to do this. They are entirely in her power.

Would you accept being in an 1700’s-style marriage, where your husband owned everything, and had the legal right to beat you, simply because he was a “nice guy and wouldn’t do that”?

That is precisely what men are being asked, no, expected, to accept.

Is it any wonder we are distrustful and suspicious to the point of paranoia? It’s our only defense. The law will not protect us. The law is against us, straight down the line.

Think about it. Try to imagine how that might feel.

I have tried everything – Windows XP, Windows 7, Debian, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Arch, Ubuntu, and finally back to Debian – and no matter what I do, I cannot get good audio performance out of this little bastard of Satan’s loins. The most frustrating aspect of my journey was realizing (tonight, oddly enough) that I’ve become better at compiling applications than using them, and that’s bad. For all of the work that I’ve dumped into making this system sing, I haven’t actually made it play.

Really, it’s a great netbook. To be perfectly honest, Debian Squeeze has been my best experience to date. If you use it as a netbook, it works wonderfully well, The second you try to do something out-of-the-ordinary with it (i.e., build a new kernel for doing some simple audio sampling or what-not), it fails.

At this point it’s probably best to cut my losses and forget about it. Or, be happy with just the few apps that might perform reasonably well, like the MIDI sequencers, and be done with it. Compiling, searching, trying to make something more of a system is something of an addiction of mine, so I doubt I’ll stop. Still, it’s fscking annoying.