Monthly Archives: March 2006

7 posts
Audio Technology Music

Resonance and Diffraction

3 comments

Sound waves are delicate and fragile things. They need a medium simply to exist at all, and any variations or interference in the ether can change their whole character.

Ever since 33.3 LPs started coming out in stereo, we’ve had an obsession with recording accurate sound. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of million dollars setting up just the right acoustic space, you can position the baffles and mics just so, isolate and eliminate residual hum…you name it, just to get the exact right sound on tape (or these days, disk).

Some folks are just obsessive, and they don’t realize one simple truth: real life is noisy, hissy and generally out-of-tune. You can get it all perfect, down to the last detail, but know what? 99.98794% of the general population is going to listen to it on sub-par equipment anyhow.

Picture your masterwork being dumped to a TDK AD60 and crammed in the tape-deck of an ’85 Fiero with a 10-watt system as the owner barrels down a gravel road.

Continued...

Code

Gtk themes

I won’t throw stones in the Gnome/KDE debate. KDE is obviously on a more robust development track, but I’ve always preferred the GTK approach for its speed and clean layout. It’s a drag that Patrick is no longer supporting it in Slackware, but Dropline is an excellent way to manage it.

Of course, the one thing Gnome lacks is the ability to change color-scheme on the fly. KDE, WindowMaker and even Blackbox have utilities for this, but not Gnome. You have to rely on individual static themes for that, and let’s face it, most of them are garish and poorly designed for everyday use.

One of the interesting forks of the GTK toolkit has been Xfce. Olivier Fourdan’s default theme has a nice, clean interface that strongly resembles the “Plastic” KDE theme (it works under Gnome. You can get the engine here.). The config file is well-written and easily hackable, and it’s what I use 98% of the time, so I’ve taken to writing variations to it.

Continued...

Visual Media

“You win again, gravity!”

Futurama never stood a chance on network television. Sure, it was created by Simpsons creator Matt Groening (and billed as such), but it never got much of an initial push by Fox, and after a few episodes, it got relegated to the usual Fox treatment: it was regularly pre-empted, its schedule was shuffled on a regular basis (making it impossibe for even diehard fans to catch), and its promotion dwindled to zero.

This is what I despise about Fox. They’ll throw a ton of money at anything (sometimes good), but if they don’t see the dividends immediately, they doom it to a slow death by obscurity (sometimes bad). This same treatment sank other worthy shows, like Firefly and the Family Guy.

It’s interesting to note that the latter two shows found an unexpected and vibrant second life on DVD. Firefly became a cult hit after its demise, and fan reaction was such that Joss Whedon was greenlighted to make a feature film, Serenity.

Continued...

Code

This page best viewed with anything but IE

I don’t use Microsoft products. No. Really. The last time I used Windows to any degree was around mid-to-late 2000, and after that, not at all. Since then, Linux has met all my needs, and with alot less hassle.

As a result, I have no idea what’s going on with Microsoft’s development cycle, and I really don’t care to. The last time I even booted into Windows was when I got my laptop a few months ago, and that was just to make sure everything was up and running before repartioning and erasing it.

Somehow Windows XP was even more heinous, resource-intensive and just plain awful from a UI standpoint than its ancestors. I couldn’t do anything without six unrelated dialog boxes popping up (“I know my wireless adapter’s connected! You’re trying to download “updates” right now!”), and it was just plain ugly, and from what I could tell, the user-interface is completely uncustomizable.

Continued...

Info Dump

Lori’s Travels

Lori’s got some more pictures up on her site. Some are from a Christmas/New Year’s celebration (they do celebrate Christmas as well as other holidays) in Dushanbe, and there are a couple of pages of their vacation in Turkey.

Code

Back in the Saddle

Okay, the site’s working again. I’m using WordPress to manage content, and it’s taken awhile to convert everything. The layout is more robust, and I’ve got everything categorized. And yes, there’s now comment capability, so vent away.

The site theme is October Language, for which I used Chad Coleman’s Stucco theme as a rough template. Unlike most other WordPress themes, I’ve chosen to give it a wider layout, and it’s scalable. It’s licensed under the GPL, so feel free to use or alter as you like; just make sure the credits in the .css file stay intact.

I was using Blogger for the previous layout. There. I’ve admitted it. Stop laughing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I was lazy. It was easier at the time, and it supported standard CSS. For the last few years, I’d been hosting everything of a 200MB drive, and since space was at a premium, it was better to use off-site software.

Continued...