Deep Ellum Arts Festival 2001

Posted on 9 April, 2001 by steevithak

Last week was another busy week. Lots of Perl and a smaller amount of C programming. More progress on robots.net. The robomenu is now working. The robomenu is a database of robots with photos and descriptions. I’ve only managed to get about half the records into the database (they were originally static pages) but it is online and seems to be holding up okay so far. I’m using PostgreSQL as the database and a Perl DBI program to generate a set of static pages every night. I’m still working on the interface that will allow users to submit new robots but that should online within a week or so.

On Saturday Susan and I got to see Dmitry Sitkovetsky as guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony. He conducted the DSO in four pieces of Chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The Shostakovich piece was a transcription for Chamber Orchestra of the String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 and was particularly good. We tried unsuccessfully to find a CD of the piece Sunday. We’ll probably have to order it on Amazon or catch a used one on eBay sometime.

We spent a while at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival on Sunday. Lots of live music including a group from Central America playing some sort of traditional folk music with lots of curious instruments. There were some Celtic bands, some Jazz groups, and quite a selection of local rock groups – like Baby Jane Hudson and Eden Automatic. The weather was great for a day outside and most of the people had brought their dogs. I think we saw at least one of every possible kind of dog while we were there. It was an Art festival so there was quite a bit to see in the Arts and Crafts department as well, though the weirdest aspect of the whole thing was a collection of Art Cars from all over. There was a Van covered in bright orange stucko, a car decked out to look like the yellow submarine, and several cars that I guess you’d call debris cars. One was covered with plastic toys like Godzillas, Boba Fetts, and Mr T dolls. Another was completely covered by sea shells with a variety of rubber octopi and other sea creatures attached. One had a back seat uplostered in one and five dollar bills and an outside covered with quarters, nickels, dimes, and an assortment of jewlery. Weird stuff.

Hacking While Mir Burns

Posted on 22 March, 2001 by steevithak

I’m having fun tonight. On my main Linux box I’m hacking on a weird pile of code that’s a combination of C, Perl, and Javascript while I listen to some old Krafwerk CDs. On my other box, I’ve got several nice real-time Mir telemetry feeds. The streaming video feed is too clogged up to be useful but CNN has a cool 3-D graphic that updates once a minute and there’s also a map showing Mir’s current position. NASA also has a Mir position tracker but it’s not as interesting as some of the others. I couldn’t find any live webcam views of the Taco Bell Mir Impact Target though, so I guess we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if we get free tacos.

Music and Robots

Posted on 12 March, 2001 by steevithak

I had a nice quiet weekend for change. Nothing really interesting to report other than a DSO concert on Saturday. Two Prokofiev pieces – first the Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Opus 19 and second the music used in the Russian films, Ivan the Terrible parts 1 and 2. Interestingly, they had decided to enhance the experience by putting a big screen up in the performance hall and showing a collection of excerpts from the films as the music was played. While not exactly a Robert Wilson production, it was still quite interesting. And an excellent performance of both Prokofiev pieces as well.

This week I’m trying to split my time between work that pays the bills and continued work on robots.net which is a bit more interesting. Things are picking up quickly with the site and we’re getting an impressive number of hits already. Actual registered users are accumulating fairly slowly so there’s not much discussion going on yet but I guess it takes a while for these things to reach critical mass. If you’re interested in robotics, feel free to stop by and check things out.

Flying Lizards and Other Music

Posted on 22 January, 2001 by steevithak

I finally managed to obtain one of two out of print Flying Lizards CDs that I’ve been trying to get my hands on for while. I won an eBay auction for their first, self-titled CD last week and it arrived today. It’s the first time I’ve heard their stuff in years. Now if I can just find Top Ten, the other Flying Lizards CD I’ve been looking for.

Speaking of music, Susan and I attended the Saturday performance of the DSO. It was a very trimmed-down orchestra – really more of a chamber orchestra – playing a selection of Haydn symphonies and Gabrieli’s canzonas for brass. Both were enjoyable. Unfortunately, I’ve had to add the Gabrieli pieces to my CD shopping list. More CDs to hunt down!

Melody Explorer

Posted on 12 June, 2000 by steevithak

I was thinking about ways of generating music mathematically last night. I’ve had this idea for a while of making a compositional tool that works something like the old Kai’s Power Tools Texture Explorer did. You could generate a sequence of notes, then mutate the rhythm, melody, and harmony over time using genetic algorithms to approximate what the user wants. Anyway, the issue that occurred to me was that we usually do our math in base-10 but music generally uses either one of the common 7 tone scales such as the diatonic or the 12 tone chromatic scale. One possibility is to work in a 10 tone microtonal scale but a lot of people wouldn’t find the sound very pleasing (microtonal scales usually have more tones than the chromatic scale anyhow). The other option, of course, is to let the user pick the scale and do the math in an appropriate base for the scale. It sounds like fun but I probably won’t have the time to do it anytime soon as it’s not the sort of project someone is likely to pay me for! Oh well.

Speaking paying work, I’ve been working on a new web site that’s going to be using mod_virgule and have been making loads of changes to the code. Some bug fixes and some new features. Raph‘s been way too busy lately to do much maintenance on the official release, so I’ve decided to release my patched version for anyone who’d like to have a look at it. Once the official version starts seeing active development again, my version will probably mutate back towards the main source tree and go away.

Texas Scottish Festival and Highland Game

Posted on 5 June, 2000 by steevithak

Saturday we went to the Texas Scottish Festival and Highland Games. After going last year, I decided this was something we should do every year. There is always lots of cool stuff to see but it’s really the music that makes it worth the trip. The Houston group, Clandestine, was there again this year and sounding as good as I remembered. I picked up their newest CD. Highly recommended. I also picked up two of Ed Miller‘s CDs. We spent most of the day there and at least half of it was just enjoying the music. But we took time to wander around looking at the other sights: sheepdogs, bagpipes, Scottish harps, shortbread, and lots of vendors selling all sorts of strange things. We missed the Scotch whiskey tasting seminar though – maybe next year.

I packed up my latest mod_virgule patches for Raph this morning, maybe we’ll see some new code in CVS soon.