Blog Posts
13 Jan 2010 - new Synths, Small Album Update
No, I haven’t bought any more :^) I think that whenever you buy a new synthesizer, there’s a period of time where it’s almost unusable. It’s not so much an inability produce sounds, but rather a general dumbfoundness relating to how it should be used. This is how it was with my Nord Rack 2X that I bought over the summer. Was it better for bass sounds, pads, or leads? What are the harmonics like on the oscillators? Do I use it in the background or foreground? I essentially had a very expensive red box sitting there and no idea what I was going to use it for. Sure, I had plans for how to use it before I bought it, but trying one out in a store and actually using it in your own studio are two very different things. A little over month ago I finally had the “ah ha!” moments I had been waiting for. The first was when I discovered exactly what the Modulation Envelope section does, while the second was finding out just how flexible its two oscillators are. Will it replace my Poly Evolver or Prophet V software as my main workhorse synth? No, probably not. But it is definitely turning into a centerpiece in my music and will show up quite a bit in the next album. Meanwhile, I found an excellent free software synthesizer the other night called Synth1, by Ichiro Toda. It claims to be modeled after the Nord Lead 2, which I can understand as far as its structure goes, but I think it ends up sounding different. For being freeware, it sounds out of this world… as long as you don’t use the built-in presets. This will probably also start showing up on some tracks in my next album. Speaking of which, progress on Inside The Beat is coming along great. I’ve finished three songs and have been working on a fourth, although I’m thinking one of these may not make it into the final album for quality reasons. If it does get cut, it will probably show up on the EP that will follow the album, or as a B-side on a single. Also, if you haven’t seen them yet, I’ve put up promotional images that were taken for Inside The Beat up on my website and on the Facebook Page. A little outside of my normal style of dress, but it was LOADS of fun shooting these and I really think it reflects the view I have for the album. A very special thanks to my friend Curt Richter for shooting these!
05 Dec 2009 - Sequencers and LFOs
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written in this… gotta update it more often :^) Lately I’ve been playing around with my Poly Evolver quite a bit to try and get better at programming it. I bought the synth about a year ago, but I’m still just scratching the surface of all the things that you can do with it. So, aside from creating some drum sounds, I spent some tonight time messing around with the sequencer. It’s a 16-step analog-style step sequencer, which means that you have up to 16 steps per cycle in which it can control other things. Normally I approach sequencers as simply a device that one can use to control pitch over time. The most simple example would be to generate a simple arpeggio, while more complex examples can sound more like actual elements of a song. Both of these - which are just presets in my Poly Evolver - are programmed such that the sequencer controls the pitch of the oscillators. This means that, when the sequence played back, each step acts as if a new key is pressed at a certain pitch, thereby generating a melodic sound. In some ways it’s like the tape roll on an old player piano, except that it can only have up to sixteen holes. However, step sequencers can be used to control a lot more than just notes. The experiment I did tonight had the sequencer controlling the low pass filter instead of the oscillators. This meant that sound and pitch did not get generated when I played back the sequence. Instead, sound got generated the traditional way, with me holding down one or more keys. As I held them down, the sequencer acted as a retrigger, creating a straight rhythm. At the same time, I also had the sequencer modulating the lowpass filter’s cutoff frequency and (very slightly) the resonance, so you end up with this pulsing pattern that alternates between partially "open" sounding and partially "closed. To add a bit of flavor to the sound, I then finished off with some additional modulation from the LFOs. Now for those who don’t know what an LFO is, the term stands for "Low Frequency Oscillator". Just like the name implies, it generates wave forms at low frequencies. However, you never actually hear these waves directly. Instead they act as control signals that can be mapped to other areas of the synthesizer. A good example would be mapping an LFO that generates a sine wave to an oscillator’s pitch. As the LFO’s wave rises and falls, the pitch of the sound will "follow" this, creating a sort of pseudo police siren sound. Also, "low" is somewhat of a relative term. On the Poly Evolver, an LFO can be set so slow that it generates a single cycle only every 30 seconds, or as fast as 261 cycles per second (hertz), which is almost the equivalent of middle C on a piano. Anyways, for the test sound I made tonight, I had two LFOs controlling the volume of oscillators 3 and 4. The LFOs were set to a pretty slow square wave, which made one complete cycle about every six seconds. This basically gave the oscillators an On/Off effect. So, the final sound ended up being a pulsing sound, alternating between open and closed, with its timbre intermittently changing. You can hear the final result here, where I first play a single note/pitch, followed by a simple power chord. This isn’t the first time I’ve messed around with step sequencers to control a filter, but it is the first time I’ve actually figured out how to program an analog-style one. Since the destination possibilities for each step are huge, I should be able to create some pretty interesting sounds using it. What’s more is that it can also be used to control other synthesizers… or at least I think.
01 Nov 2009 - New Netbook
This morning I picked up a new netbook, a Toshiba Mini nb200. Spec wise it sports 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, an Intel GMA950 for graphics, and an Intel Atom N280 processor. This CPU is the same speed as an N270 (1.6GHz), but has a faster front-side bus at 667MHz. The screen is a bit bigger than the one on my 900A model Eee PC, though it still has the same resolution of 1024x600. Also, unlike my Eee PC, this one has a built-in web cam. The laptop itself is extremely slim, more so than my Eee PC even, and the battery is nice and fairly low-profile. The keyboard layout is pretty interesting, and somewhat reminiscent of my old Toshiba Satellite. There are dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys on the right hand side, next to the arrow keys, and even dedicated Home and End keys at the very top. The tilde key, which is important in Linux when you spend as much time at the command line as I do, is in between the space bar and alt key. Some may find this annoying, but I actually like it. Otherwise, the keyboard is extremely comfortable and I can type full speed on it. As for the mouse pad, it feels smooth, responsive, and I can slide my finger on the side for tracking. Multi-touch doesn’t work unfortunately, unlike my Eee PC, but this isn’t that big of a deal. Also, the buttons are actually quiet! This has always been one of my favorite things about Toshiba laptops, the mouse pad buttons don’t emit a loud click. So yeah, the system of course came with Windows on it (XP Home specifically), so the very first thing I needed to do when I got home was remove this and put Linux on it. Earlier this week I had installed release candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 onto my Alienware laptop from a USB drive. Now, the installer I originally loaded up had some issues with the GUI installer (probably because I followed instructions for a previous Ubuntu release), and so I was limited to the alternate installer instead. Not a problem, just a minor annoyance, so since I still had the drive set up for that I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, the installer decided that it couldn’t find the install ISO. Not wanting to recreate the USB installer again, I decided to stick with Slackware instead. As usual I booted into the Slackware 13 installer using a USB stick, and then proceeded to install using an pre-mounted directory (through NFS this time) as the source. The install went great, but when I was most of the way through I realized that I had a bad symlink on my server and so I was actually installing Slackware 12.2. Oops. So, I fixed the symlink, rebooted the installer, and then redid everything. The install goes so quick anymore that it wasn’t really a problem. During the final config I was of course given the chance to name my laptop. Keeping with my current scheme, female characters from anime or kaiju films, I decided to name it Kusanagi :^) After rebooting, I did my usual setup:
So how does everything work? So far, I can confirm that the web cam, SD card slot, VGA port, and both the wired and wireless connections work out-of-the-box with Slackware 13. Unfortunately the sound chip in it isn’t 100% supported by Alsa, and at first I had absolutely no sound. After I tinkered a bit (and installed a newer alsa-driver package from source), I at least got the headphone jack working. I can’t say if capture is working yet or not as I haven’t tried, but at least everything else (minus the speakers) is working perfectly. As far as performance goes, it’s noticeably more responsive than my Eee PC. My guess is that it’s because it has a real hard drive in it rather than an earlier generation of SSD. I’m sure the faster FSB also helps, though ;^) Now for some nice, large images. Click the links to open them.
20 Sep 2009 - Useful Windows Shortcuts
I don’t usually use Windows these days, but when I do, I generally find it a lot easier (and faster) to navigate with the keyboard instead of the mouse. So I thought I’d post a few keyboard shortcuts that can make peoples’ lives a bit easier. These aren’t the usual Ctrl+C (Copy) and Ctrl+V (Paste) shortcuts, but rather some slightly more obscure ones that you may not know about. Also, just to make sure people know… hitting just the Windows key will show the Start menu, while hitting the Menu key (which usually looks like this) acts like a right-click, Windows Key + L: If you have the normal login screen enabled in XP, this will lock your computers screen in the exact same way that hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del and then clicking “Lock Screen” will. If you have the Welcome screen, it’ll take you back to that. This works in Vista as well. Windows Key + D: Instantly minimizes all windows to show your desktop. Hitting it again immediately afterward will return all the windows to their previous state. In all honesty, I find this useless, not useful. Windows Key + Pause: Opens up the System window, which is the same one as when you go to Control Panel->System. Windows Key + Tab: It’s sort of like Alt+Tab, the window switcher key combination, but this one only switches the active item on the task bar without bringing the window to the foreground. Windows Key + E: Opens up Windows Explorer. Windows Key + B: Put the focus on the first item in the notification area (that place right next to your clock with the icons). You can then use the arrow keys to highlight different icons, the enter key as a left click, and the Menu key as a right click. Windows Key + F: Open up the search window, which I also find useless because I actually take time to organize my files… Windows Key + U: Open up the Utility Manager, where you can enable/disable things like the on-screen narrator and stuff. Windows Key + R: Open up the Run dialog (the same as going Start->Run). There are also ways to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to programs, so that typing them can instantly bring them up. For example, I have Ctrl+Alt+T bring up the Command Prompt, while Ctrl+Alt+E brings up Emacs. However, setting these things in XP seems a bit buggy at times, and I can’t always get them to work.
14 Sep 2009 - Midsized Clients
Computers are sometimes divided up into two groups, “fat” clients and “thin” clients. Strictly speaking, a fat client is something like your average desktop or laptop computer, which has everything it needs to run and operate right there inside of it. Meanwhile, thin clients have practically nothing on them, and rely on other computers, usually servers, to provide just about everything except the most basic local hardware and processing power. If you think back to the old days of computing, where you would see text terminals hooked up to a mainframe, and all the computing was being done on that mainframe, those are essentially early thin clients. Today thin clients are mostly graphical, but the concept is the same. The desktop and programs are handled by the server, and the local machine just acts as a display unit. I think we’re starting to see, or at least have the potential to see, something in-between these two ideas. Compared to normal laptops, nearly all netbooks are very underpowered, and the subset of them that use solid-state drives instead of the normal hard drive even lack a lot of disk space. But I believe that if we change the way we interact with the file system slightly, we can change them into what I call “midsized clients”. The idea for a midsized client came to me after I noticed that much of the data I use with my Eee PC doesn’t reside on the local machine, but rather on the file server I have set up here at home. Now, there are a lot of ways to access a remote file system locally these days, such as Samba and NFS, but I personally like to use SSHFS. But what if the data wasn’t the only thing that resided on the server? What if some, but not all, of the programs also resided on there as well? Specifically some of the larger software packages, like OpenOffice. In fact, that’s how I use OpenOffice on my Eee PC. Naturally, this also seems a lot like accessing applications through a web browser. Google Docs is a good example here since we’re already talking about office programs. But, in my opinion at least, I don’t believe that accessing a web app through an underpowered, low-space machine qualifies it as a midsized client since it doesn’t really fit into the classical examples of thin vs fat clients. To be a true midsized client, the program should not have to use any sort of special interface like a browser to be started. Instead, the user should be able to start it through normal means, such as a menu or on the command line. Thinking like this opens up some interesting possibilities. Some locations may provide only certain programs. If I only need program X at work, I can leave it on a server at work, mount the server’s directory locally on my netbook, and then access it transparently. Data can then be stored in a folder on the same server that I use for work-related documents. If I really need to access it later, I can always VPN back into work. Meanwhile, my other small applications and my desktop remain local, so I can still use my netbook without a network connection if I need to. It’s that last point that I think is the main difference between the traditional fat/thin client split, and this midsized client idea. Of course, none of this is formally implemented yet, and this midsized client concept is working entirely off of very traditional, strict definitions of fat and thin clients. What’s more is that, as with many technologies today, there are some blurred lines of what actually makes something a thin, fat, or midsized client. In fact, this whole idea of a midsized client may not be new at all; I didn’t exactly Google any of this before I typed this up. In the end, though, I find it a pretty interesting idea, and I’d be excited to see where it can go. I think I’m going to continue playing with it here at home since it seems pretty easy to get things working. I had OpenOffice working within 10 minutes of grabbing a binary package, mostly because of the simplicity of Slackware’s packages. All that was needed was some slight hacking of install script to keep from doing things locally. I also have a fast enough connection here at home that accessing it off-site through SSH is mostly painless. Let’s see how far I can take this…
21 Jul 2009 - Thoughts On The Recent EP
It suddenly occurred to me that even though I released my first EP, Opcode-1, earlier this month, I still hadn’t given my thoughts on it! Well, overall I would say that I’m mostly pleased with it. My goal with the EPs is to release music more often by compiling the “b-sides”, stuff that may not end up on normal albums, and remastered or rearranged tracks from long ago. Opcode-1 accomplished this quite well. The First and last tracks are by far my favorites, while the remasters are probably my least. I think this is just because I’ve heard the remastered tracks so many times (I originally wrote those in high school or right after it). As far as the sound quality goes, I’m actually very happy with it, but for some very specific reasons. At first I was worried that I had left off too much bass on the songs, but the more I listened to them the more I realized that I had gotten them quite balanced for what they are. What’s more is that, although you won’t hear it on the released tracks, working with these actually taught me quite a bit more about dynamic compression. The new stuff I’ve learned will make its appearance on the next Partition 36 release. My only real gripe with Opcode-1 is on a higher level. The style of songs on it aren’t what I originally imagined Partition 36 releasing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad release, not by any means. It’s just not what I had planned to write. So it’s more of a personal letdown than anything :^) Partition 36 is more than just my “one-man band”. It’s my electronic music project. The whole goal of it was to release music that was a little bit darker. I was tired of trying to write generic epic trance or video game music, and wanted to work with music that was influenced by the EBM and Futurepop scenes. Making this switch is requiring me to learn a lot of new things, and even relearn some old techniques.
16 Jun 2009 - Thoughts On A New Remaster Release
Many, many years ago (well ok, the summer of 2002), I wrote an album called New, which was before I called myself Partition 36. There were a couple of memorable songs on it, but it was the last track that recently caught my attention. It was called Boku no Kanojo ni Matteru, roughly translated as “Waiting for my girlfriend”, which is exactly what I was doing at the time when I wrote it. After listening to it a few times, I decided that I wanted to remaster it and present it in the sound quality that it deserves. However, rather than doing a straight remaster of the original, I thought it might be cool to instead change out some of the instruments. The original song was written entirely using the General MIDI patch set on my JV-1010 synthesizer, and the more I listened to the slap bass/fingered bass combination, the less I liked it. So, I started a new project, opened up the old file in a second window, and started copying tracks over. The first track I copied was the bass track. The sound of the slap bass in the original track was a bit too twingy sounding, while the fingered bass just sounded about right, so I wanted to get a good compromise between them. To do this I replaced them with a customized Prophet V patch that had a more rubbery/synthy pick sound on it but still provided solid bass frequencies. The downside was that this patch tends to phase in and out of being overpowering and just right in the sub-bass frequencies. Some quick processing and adjustment of the patch luckily fixed this. The drum track was next, which at first proved to be a bit difficult to tackle. In the original, the kick drum was fairly solid in the lower frequencies, but was also very snappy. I wanted to find a sound that would instead provide a decent amount of punch, not as much snap, and would also play nicely with the bass track. As usual, I went through many of the preset drum kits in Battery 2 trying to find something that I could use as a starting point, but nothing really fit. Then I got the wild idea of reusing the drum kit from another song I wrote recently, Space Train. As luck would have it, the kit fit great inside the mix, giving it more of a synth rock feel that the song was supposed to have in the first place. The only thing was that this kit was made from scratch rather than basing it on a preset one, and Space Train never used an open high-hat sound. Once this was replaced, the main work for the drum track was pretty much complete and sounded great. There’s a certain type of sound used quite a bit in electronic music called a “pad”. Just like the name says, it provides “padding” for the rest of the mix by filling it out harmonically. The original track used the Warm Pad sound off my JV-1010, which has always been a favorite of mine. However, it sounded just a bit too dense for this new mix. This was easily solved by finding a similar sound in my Jupiter-8V software. Next was the Koto sound used for the bulk of the melody. At first I tried replacing this with custom Prophet V and Moog Modular V patchs, but this proved disastrous. Instead I stuck with the original track, re-recorded it, and just passed it through a better reverb. I then layered a soft pingy sound from my Pentagon software synth with it in certain places to give it something extra. The melody is split between the Koto sound and another bell-like sound called “Fantasia JV”. This has been one of my favorite synth patches ever, and so I knew in an instant that I would not be replacing it. So I transferred it over and just re-recorded it. By this time the only thing left to move over was the guitar track. I have never, ever had good luck in finding a decent guitar sound on a synthesizer. Maybe I’m just not sequencing the track right, but I’ve never been able to get something that sounds close to a real guitar. For this song, I first played with the idea of changing it to a piano or electric piano solo, but it didn’t sound right. So I copied the old track over, switched patches on my JV-1010 to the “Big Hair Lead” sound, re-recorded it, and then passed it through a ton of plugins. In the end it sounds better than the original, but is still not very pretty. But I wanted the solo in there and it’s good enough for me. In the end, I think the remaster/reworking turned out pretty good. The guitar solo is still the low-point of it and I admit it sounds like crap, but I like the new sound a lot better. I decided to change the track name slightly to Ore no Kanojo ni Matteru, which still means the same thing but has a slightly different nuance. You can download the new version here, and you can also listen to the original version here. Enjoy :^)
29 May 2009 - Linux Systems
Truth be told, I am a die hard Slackware fanatic. Whenever I get a new PC, it’s the first OS I reach for, and it’s the one that I compare others to. Slackware has been what I’ve used on my server here at home since I first bought it. When I first learned Linux, I learned on a derivitive of Slackware, TopologiLinux (a way old version of it, anyways), and quickly switched over to real Slackware (which was at 9.x or right at 10.0 at time time, I think). This combined with my love for minimalist things is probably why I stick with it. However, for all the praise I can give the distro, there are still two sticky points for me: software selection and lack of Gnome libraries. When it comes to software, there’s a huge amount of stuff available to Slackware in the form of “Slackbuilds”. These are special bundles of scripts and source tarballs that produce binary packages for you (you did know Slackware has a package manager, right?). I keep a collection of them just in case I ever need to reinstall something. But unfortunately, a few packages I’ve needed, either for work or personal use, are either very out-of-date, or not available. A few of these I’ve compiled by hand - a skill I learned like day three of my Linux adventure; it’s not that hard, people. Whenever possible I keep these hand-compiled ones inside my home directory in Gnome support is related to this. Overall I rather like the Gnome desktop. It’s more comfortable than KDE 3.x, leaps and bounds better than KDE 4.x, and is pretty fast and stable. Still, it’s not my prefered desktop, Fluxbox or Xfce are. However, many apps out there rely on Gnome-centric libraries. When I decided to try installing Gwibber from source, I was blocked because I couldn’t get GConf2 to install properly, and this was a required package. Other packages have given me the same problem. So what do I run on my main laptop, which is where I need immediate package availability and a sightly wider range of apps? Ubuntu Linux, which is my 2nd choice in a distro. In actuality, I switch between Ubuntu and Slackware on the laptop a few times a year, usually when a new version comes out. But until GTK integrates some of the Gnome-centric libraries (which I think I read was a plan somewhere), I’m likely going to leave Ubuntu on it for a while and simply use Slack inside a virtual machine. For a Slack addict such as myself, Ubuntu actually feels restrictive. Heck, Debian felt restrictive at times. But I don’t think this semi-permanent switch to Ubuntu on my main laptop is going to be that hard. Of the four systems I use regularly, three are dedicated Linux systems (the fourth runs XP, and is the computer I write my music on). One, my main laptop (Emiko), has Ubuntu installed on it. My server, Nanako, and my Eee PC, Rei, both run Slackware. The server never leaves home and is mostly a file server, plus some extra things, and so it’s already set. Rei is really my play computer, and the one I use mostly at home or on the road. Of the sticky points I have with Slackware, they really only affect me at work. Since Emiko is the only real heavy-lifter for work, it’s OK if that one’s Ubuntu. I actually do very little on it here at home save for some web surfing, IM chatting, and light programming. The point I’m getting at is that, for the time being, I’ve reached a very good balance with my systems. I have XP here at home to do my music, Ubuntu on Emiko for work, XP on a VM for those few times I need it, and Slackware on my others for home stuff and play.
16 May 2009 - Pictures Are Worth A Thousand Words
In the front of almost any traditional Japanese dojo is the kamiza, or “top seat”, which is where a kamidama is usually found. In Aikido, this is also where the picture of O Sensei is hung (though in some schools, the kanji for Ki is found instead). From what I’ve experienced so far, the most common picture of O Sensei has been this one. It’s a very noble picture of him, I think, and I like it very well. During the beginning of class, while we’re all lined up in seiza, I’ll sometimes glance up at his picture. Usually I simply tell myself, ”I’m glad he was able to teach his art to so many people,” though sometimes my imagination start to wander. Know the cliche in horror fiction where the ominous picture on the wall has eyes that follow people? Sometimes I would get that same feeling when looking at this picture, like he was looking right back at me. His stern look felt, well, very stern. It wasn’t scary or anything, but it did feel like I was obligated to perform to my very best. This is all in my head, yes, but bear with me. When I switched to my current dojo, the first night of class I noticed we had a different of O Sensei hanging up on the wall. I still had that feeling that he was looking at me, but it was a lot more easy going and friendly. During the middle of class, if the previous technique didn’t go well for me, the other picture would have given me the feeling of “I failed.” But this picture almost feels like both he and I are laughing it off internally, like “learn from the mistakes this time and just try again next time.” Again, this is all in my head and personal experience. I don’t think either picture is more correct, or that one should be hanging and not the other. But it has proved to me that pictures really are worth a thousand words.
08 May 2009 - New Blog Layout
If you haven’t figured it out already (and chances are good you have), I dramatically changed the layout of my blog. The change came about for a few reasons, most seated in my innate fascination with minimalist things, and more generally in technology. WordPress was working fine for me, but I had a few issues with it. Most of the features I didn’t use, and some of the features I wanted to turn off but couldn’t figure out how or couldn’t to the degree I wanted to (trackbacks were one such issue, as well as people having logins, which made no sense). Then there was the fact that the theme I had been using was actually a bandage I hacked up one day after ruining my previous theme. Managing it was difficult, and I lost a few features I actually wanted (pages and widgets). Giving it deeper thought, I started to wonder what exactly I was after with a blog. It’s not so much a record of my life (“Today I went bike riding at…”) as much as a set of thoughts I have on pretty much anything. Records are better left to the microblogging and tumblelog services, which I think can capture “The Moment” better, or at least in a more interesting way. So if it’s a collection of thoughts, wouldn’t simple pages work just as well? I was then introduced to a cool piece of free software called Jekyll. The software is similar to my “WST” program that I started writing a few years ago in that it performs text transclusion, but it does a much better and thorough job. Basically I can now keep my blog stored as a set of mostly plain text files inside a directory tree, which I then manage with Git. Writing a post means I write a new file using whatever editor I want to (I wrote this one in good ol’ Emacs), “recompile” the blog using Jekyll, and then use rsync to upload it to my webspace. I don’t think it can get much more minimalist than that, unless I abandon all design and instead only post plain text files. I’m sure there are going to be a few kinks to work out still, and I’d like to expand things a bit, but I think this will work out better in the long run. Now, I wonder if cron could be integrated into this mix…
08 Apr 2009 - Some thoughts on negative space, ma, maai, and mushin
Growing up, I remember hearing a suggestion for how to listen to music (and also heard it repeated on an early episode of The Simpsons). Rather than listen to the notes, a person should listen to all the notes that aren’t being played. This is very similar to the idea of negative space, where the best example is probably “Do you see a vase or two faces?” While a soloist creates a thread of feeling with his instrument, there are “faces” to be seen outside of his notes which can be just as inspiring. A lot of Japanese music, especially the traditional music, incorporates a similar concept. In a hypothetical composition, you might hear a few plucks of a shamisen, followed by a bit of silence, followed by more shamisen. But is that silence really silent? Surely there will be a bit of “tail” sound from the vibrating strings. Beyond that, there is the sound of audience (if one is present), the environment, and maybe even the performer breathing. This is called ma in Japanese music, and though there is no direct translation into English, it’s still best described as “negative space” and is considered just as important (perhaps more so) than the notes themselves. In fact, John Cage’s infamous composition 4'33" is entirely composed of ma. In Aikido, and pretty much all Japanese martial arts, the concept of maai (“mah-aye”) is very important and represents the negative space between a person and their partner. Understanding how far you are from each other, how long it will take to reach a certain position, how long it takes to meet each other there, and the rhythm required are all extended aspects of a technique governed by maai. Again, this negative space is just as important as how to move your arms and legs, and is directly tied to the physical parts of the techniques. At the beginning and end of class, we all line up, sitting in seiza, and have some silence. But I realized tonight that it’s not necessarily silence. As we sit there resting and reflecting, we are in fact surrounded by ma! But rather than connecting to the smallest parts of the rooms (us and our voices), we are instead mentally connecting to everything else around us. It sort of gives us a context. Ma, and by extension maai, are pretty important. 4’33” would not have context without it. Without ma, notes would be constant noises without break, and so music would not really exist. Aikido techniques would not work. There would be no way to examine yourself since you wouldn’t have any separation from the room you’re sitting in or the person next to you. But maybe learning how to manipulate ma is an important skill. Another term, mushin, roughly means “no-mindedness”. In the context of Aikido, it means that a practitioner is able to react to their partner’s movements and perform techniques automatically, without any hesitation or thinking about what they should do. To do so, the person needs to have no ego, no anger, no fear, no desire, and no thoughts, simply intuitive feeling as they move. It takes a really long time to develop, repeating their movements over and over until they feel as natural as walking. But as far as I can figure, on the mental side of things, doing no-mindedness means letting your mind become part of the ma. You don’t think (and therefore separate yourself), you just be.
31 Mar 2009 - StumpWM on my Eee PC
I have something announce that may be shocking to some people: I can be very geeky when it comes to my computer. Ok, so obviously that’s a poor attempt at humor, but it is true. I usually run Gnome on my main laptop for various reasons. Besides appreciating the look, feel, and behavior of the GTK+ kit over Qt (a personal preference), I’ve grown fond of Gnome’s usability. Beyond that, it’s often times helpful to have the notification bar available since I usually have around 15 open over six virtual desktops (about half to two-thirds of which are XTerm windows). Besides, I sometimes have to show various apps and information to people who are used to seeing an environment that looks at least somewhat familiar, and so Gnome tends to work out nicely. But, being a huge fan and constant user of GNU Emacs, my fingers have built up quite a bit of muscle memory for things like “C-x 5 2”, “M-q”, or “C-space C-q C-y” (“Ctrl-x, 5, 2”, “Alt+q”, and “a way to cut and paste” for the Windows people out there). So much that I often find myself typing C-x C-s (save file) or C-_ (undo) inside of just about every other editor and app without even thinking. So having a desktop environment that shares these keybindings would be very helpful. A few years ago I came across such an environment called ratpoison, which provided an extremely minimal GUI environment. How minimal? Windows did not overlap, had no boarders, had no title bars, and the whole thing was set up to work entirely from keyboard commands. A cool concept, but was it usable? To find out I took it for a test drive for an entire day, using nothing but ratpoison. It turned out that it was quite usable, but at the time I was not an Emacs user and so I had a lot of problems getting used to the keyboard shortcuts (I think… all that was a while ago). Another window manager, StumpWM, is basically the same thing as ratpoison (written by the same author, too). However, it’s written using my favorite programming language, Common Lisp, has more features, and is a bit more customizable. I actually did the same sort of experiment with it as I did with ratpoison, eventually arriving at the conclusion that StumpWM was absolutely awesome and worthy of being installed with all my other regular apps. So as I said, I’m a computer geek, a fact that purchasing an Eee PC did not help. Since buying my second one, I’ve successfully removed the modified Xandros Linux that came with it, installed Slackware 12.1, upgraded to Slackware 12.2, installed SBCL 1.0.24 from source1, and as of tonight, installed StumpWM from source. StumpWM runs incredibly smooth on it, and my other apps seem to benefit from the extra resources that usually aren’t available to them. The biggest drawback so far is that my Eee’s screen size is 1024x600, (1022x564 in StumpWM once you account for the infobar I have up top). This means that tiling is somewhat limited unless I connect to a larger monitor, preferably one that is not widescreen. Splitting the screen horizontally helps some, but not with browsing. I’m going to keep this as my default GUI for a while on my Eee PC to see how it works out. Since my Eee is mostly used for surfing the web, talking to people, playing music, and occasionally an SSH session, I should have no problems whatsoever. 1 - I didn't actually compile SBCL on my Eee. I did this a few versions ago, but to upgrade to 1.0.24 I just copied binaries over from a different laptop since I was short on time. |
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