Fri, 10 Dec 2004

Wasting time?

I was watching a documentary of the tour of a band named Lightning Bolt. They rock quite hard. Then I started falling asleep. Not because it was late, but because the band was so good live it was just boring to see them recorded since that meant I wasn't at the show. Then I started thinking about my small obssesion with technology, especially of the free type. I started thinking about all the people I want to step up to and just tell them to stop fronting on the "I really agree with the principals but I'm not using it" style. Then I thought, "who cares?"

So that's what this is about, who cares, personal expression, the ability to freak out and not give a fuck so much...a sense of humor. I'm begining to tire of people without humor in their life. Especially people who have such a grim outlook on the world that their humor can make a cheery 6 year old want to die.

I say who cares because it's so easy to fall into the trap of alienation when shit just gets real obscure. Interests go deeper and deeper into speciality that the whole point of getting into that interest is lost. I'm begining to think of not caring as a form of letting go. Giving up that power that comes with feeling compeled to know everything and get involved in every aspect of a project. That place where it feels better to abandon the whole thing if it's not possible to understand everything.

Technology is great. People make wonderful, creative things with it but there's a terminal velocity for technology. And when that speed is reached it's just impossible to go any faster. Besides, is it even possible to get anything done when you've reached the fastest speed you're capable of?

Capitalism moves fast. Capitalism brings commercialism. Commercialism brings convenience. Convenience brings ease. Ease brings function to a form. How is it possible to take Capitalism out of that equation? I think it's very possible but it's so deeply rooted in American culture that any creation isn't taken seriously until it's reached the level of commercialism. Especially with technology, which I'm caring about less and less.

posted at: 02:29 | path: /theory | permanent link to this entry

This post was written from the corner of Delancy and Ludlow in NYC on a pda and uploaded through a public wifi node at a place called Alchemy 106. Nothing more special than the fact that it's possible. Deluxe.


posted at: 02:29 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry

Scout Nibblet
Odd name. Something about Nottingham. She has a whole record and it sounds good. I've heard her play live three times. Each one made me elated. Here it is.



posted at: 02:26 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Getting back into the Macintosh.
The apartment had a yard sale this weekend. It was the first weekend without rain or bitter cold since last summer. The only things I could find to sell were some old computer equipment so I broke out the old Mac hardware and tried to start it up. Then I found the old software CD's and realized I still had a great graphics workstation and a MIDI sequencer. I'm not going to think too hard about it but I'm kind of excited.

So what does this all actually mean and is it just a geeky adventure in old skool electronic aesthetics? I say no and here's why:

So I'm thinking of this thing as something that'll never play audio...ever. The problem before was I tried to make it use all the fancy DSP features of newer software. I think I'll find out if it's useful anymore by hooking it up as the primary MIDI brain in the studio and syncing the Linux box to record tracks. Could be fun. Of course I'll have to live with any bugs.

posted at: 02:23 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Tuning the audio system for hard disk recording.

So I got the old Mac running as a MIDI sequencer with Logic Audio 4.8 and I'm not interested in ever updating it. Now it's time to tune the old Linux box to record with low latency. Here's what I'm doing right now (writing this while the kernel compiles [too bad my CPU is all fast n'shit because it just finished before I could])

And the moral of the story is that the 2.6 kernel reboots my computer when it gets started. Boo. Fuck.

posted at: 02:21 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

My home desktop computer is named Angry-boomer

update: I got a portable, so angry-boomer's sound card is offline. If you're curious, the portable is an iRiver HP-140 and has a 40 gig hard disk, 15 hour battery live and is the same size as the iPod. It does cool shit.

This is an ogg stream of any sound that comes out of my sound card. Whatever I'm hearing, you're hearing. It's kind of like a webcam but for sound only.

This wouldn't have been possible without the excellent Jack Audio Connection Kit available for Linux and OS X and Karl Heyes's ices streaming client, Jan Gerber's jack plugin for ices and the venerable Icecast.

posted at: 02:12 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

The PD delay sampler adventure continues

So my initial 4 channel looping delay is stable and useable with both the computer keyboard and my pile of MIDI gear. It's alright but it's weird. The tempo is fixed and each loop doesn't really give a good idea of how long it is. There's a fill button but it doesn't really care how much silence goes on the end, it'll just keep the silence there until the buffer's at the end.

After talking to a guitar player I met at this great punk show at Asterisk gallery in Brooklyn, he said what I was describing sounds like this guitar pedal called the Boomerang. Sure enough, here it is. It's a pertty lofty goal but I'm up for the challenge. I'm putting the delay line concept away for a bit and using good old arrays. Press record and it starts filling up the buffer. Stop recording and it snaps back to the begining of the buffer and starts playing back. This patch is really gross so I'm not even trying to post anything public yet.

What'll be cool about doing this in software is the playback control can get all crazy-like. The speed is variable and the buffer is just an array of samples. Things like loop point markers and wiki-wiki scratching are just a few possibilities. With MIDI CC's and aftertouch this can get really cool.

posted at: 02:12 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

My First PD Patch

Well, this is the first PD patch I've made that I think is functional enough to share with others. It's a 4 channel looping delay bank and it only uses internal objects! Download it here.

I've been listening to a lot of live music where the performer uses multi-channel delay lines to construct a song. Perhaps the most amazing performer who can do this is Tyondai Braxton. I don't know what brand of gear he uses but I know whatever it is the delay buffers are huge, sometimes as long as 45 seconds to a minute. He'll sample an entire verse of a song (that he's playing live on a guitar), loop it, and start adding more channels. Its kind of fucking amazing.

The other inspiration for this patch is Don Caballero, and specifically, this record which I listen to a lot and think is totally rad.

Not surprisingly, Ty Braxton and Ian Williams (the guitarist from Don Cab) have joined a band named Battles (amusingly enough searching for nothing more than the word "battles" on google returns their site as number two, below American Civil War battle stories) along with John Stanier, the drummer from Helmet and Dave Konopka, the bass player from Lynx.

So yeah, listen to all this music, go see all these folks play live. They are awesome. If you want to make music like them but don't have mad money for the phatty delay gear (but for some reason have money for a computer) use this PD patch and you can do the same. Email me if you're putting it to good use or make some improvements.

posted at: 01:54 | path: /music/pd | permanent link to this entry

One part of the open source community.

I guess this one puts me on the map. For better or for worse.

The above press release is my third foray into a professional services limited company. The first two were fly by night dot coms and didn't leave many traces on the web. The first two times I was always in awe of the guys in the back room with the five workstations and three monitors and crazy graphical desktops I couldn't recognize even though I spent 8+ hours a day using a Macintosh and I was certian I knew how a GUI functioned. I was doing shitty front end programming and never touched the knowledge they lived in. One co-worker went on to write a big inspiring weblog that gets international acclaim. Andy is rad. He clued me into the wonders of Perl and Linux. I never knew what the fuck he was doing. Then there was Daniel Ceregatti, who was doing shit I still can't even dream of. But the day Kick Media went bankrupt I knew I had to get to that back room.

It's funny what Google remembers about Kickmedia. Most of the entries are people who worked there who were posting to email lists or web forums. Everything else are broken links or old press releases.

The first foray into front end web programming was so unremarkable the company hardly even exists andymore except for an office in Hong Kong. They provide "web services" for email and name registration or something like that.

Fast forward to 2004. After some time spent doing technical work with a print and video artist I ended up at Democracy Now! as a full time unix sysadmin.

Openflows is an impressive organization. One part hosting company, one part technology consulting company, one part software development company, and above all open source philosophy evangelists.

Openflows Networks Ltd. is the company that put the Democracy Now! website on the map. The Ltd is defined here as "Limited to any security or purpose." It's a distinction that's really important. The moral of the press release and the Openflows relationship is that building an Internet infrastructure is hard, and working with open source software to do it is also hard, but like Larry Wall says about the Perl programming language, "easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible." It's a phrase that translates to so many things.

Working with UNIX systems and open source software isn't easy if you want to do hard things with what's readily available. It's still sinking in.

posted at: 01:53 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Linux can be pretty cool sometimes.

6:09pm up 227 days, 14:15, 9 users, load average: 0.71, 1.29, 1.93

Boo-ya!

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

OpenBSD and old skool unix systems

I installed OpenBSD on a development server yesterday. I've been hanging out in #openbsd on irc.freenode.net and chatting it up with the locals. I'm starting to feel the strong sense of enlightenment surrounding this operating system.

On the user level it's probably one of the the least functional base installations I have ever used. For example, the default shell is csh, which doesn't even do tab completion or save a command history. But on the system level it's probably the most functional. I won't enumerate the wonderful admin-friendliness of it's default installation. Or it's delicate placement of services any good Internet serving citizen should be granted as a right. Linux distros's defaults pale in comparison.

OpenBSD was the origin of the OpenSSH protocol, which is the absolute standard for secure remote access for UNIX systems as well as tons of other swiss army knife applications involving remotely accessing a computer securely. This pride of creating one of the Internet's most fundamental systems really shows in the whole project. It assumes you want to do things well if you are going to do them at all. And it doesn't hold back if you're doing them wrong.

It's funny, but I think it made me feel that UNIX isn't scary at all. Everything is right there. The whole history of the Internet. Apple's choice to use BSD as the basis for Darwin was a good one but they have a lot of catching up to do. I think they'll get there but as long as their marketing monkeys are out there pimping iLife and the lot, their default 1.5 GB installation will pale in comparison the OpenBSD's 100 MB one (and that includes X Windows, SSH and Sendmail configured and running by default).

Chatting today with some new acquaintances, we got to talking about what OpenBSD "is". Being the n00b that I am, I have absolutely no claim to it's origins or definitions but I ended up saying this mistake:

<lee> I don't think any operating system is about doing anything. Isn't that the point?"
<lee> wait, that didn't make sense at all
<lee> s/anything/one thing/
<salan> lee, I so get you. openbsd is my anything.

It was very poetic. I'll never forget it.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Internet security is a scary place

So is getting your apartment broken into. They stole my laptop and my roomate's DV camera. It got me into full-on paranoid hacker security mode. I had trouble leaving the house today cause I thought shit would get broken into again. One of my reactions was to take a look at wireless security. Even though the physical break in had nothing to do with the Internet, a strange coincidence let me pinpoint exactly when the break in happened. Looking at the last post here, you'll find that I recently started broadcasting all the music on my hard disk to the Interenet via an Icecast server. It's a nice way to listen to my 10 gig music collection while I'm at work. It's the next best thing to having a portable player but kind of cooler cause it's public. I noticed the connection got dropped at 12:30. When I got home I noticed that the power strip the cable modem was attached to was switched off. Since none of my roomates were home at that hour I got suspicious. One thing led to an other and the next thing I knew I was calling the cops telling them I had a log file of the exact time the break in happened.

Unfortunately nothing came of it. The boneheads got away clean, no one saw them and they left no prints despite touching lots of plastic stuff in some pretty targeted places. TV fans take note, dusting for prints is hard and rarely yields any useful data, especially for petty theft cause the cops don't really give it much time. It ain't like the movies.

Then I almost fell for this fraudulent email appearing to come from Ebay. The Internet is really freaking me out at this point on both good and bad levels. Now that I'm laptop-less, I'm rediscovering my Linux based PDA, the sharp Zaurus. I spent all day learning how to run Kismet. Since it runs on my PDA and NYC is such a compact place, I decided to take the wardriving metaphor to a more eco-friendly level and did some "warwalking" as I left work, intentionally bypassing two subway stops so I can see what the Wi-Fi spectrum was like between an area of roughly 20 city blocks.

The results were staggering. In 30 minute walk Kismet found 228 wireless networks, most were real access points and were active. A high number were not using a password, some even had factory default settings.

So the combination of the Ebay fraud and the number of open networks got me inspired. I'm doing research now, looking first for any blogs dedicated to publishing any wardriving/warwalking information for the public. Next I found a nice program named KLV that takes Kismet's results file and formats it in nice HTML for easy browsing. Then I'm looking for any clearinghouse websites keeping information about email fraud and which catalogs the story of the scam. I managed to use some unix tools to trace back the source of the Ebay fraud to a South Korean corporation's network where a Windows box was compromised and used as a relay to log people's personal data for later identity theft. I'm sure they didn't have a clue and I can't really do anything because I don't speak Korean.

I'm in the zone, excited at the new world of wireless. I'm trying to turn this blatant violation of my personal space and property into something good, for the benefit of everyone.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Hacking the Columbia University computer lab part II

It's a shame that I have to describe these actions as hacking when they can be better described as "use". The line isn't so fine, really. Although the difference should be quite clear, other's don't seem to agree.

So here's the challenge. You have a server on the Internet with sshd running. Someone has sent you an email with an attached file that you need to copy from your email box to the server in question. You are nowhere near your own computer but there's a university computer lab within eyeshot. Word, just jump onto one of the workstations and remotely copy that file.

The first computer is running some version of Windows but you can't tell because there's been an attempt to lock it down by the University administration. The only menu options in the Start bar are two applications, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Pressing the "Run program..." key command pops up a box saying "this function has been disabled by the administrator." In fact, any key command using the Windows meta key has been disabled. Right clicking is also disabled...system-wide.

Believe it or not, this is where windows gets really cool. Open up Internet Explorer. If you paid attention to Microsoft's first anti-trust trial you'll remember that Internet Explorer isn't only for the Internet, it has a full-featured filesystem browser built-in! Try typing in the address bar "C:/". Again, "this function is disabled by the administrator." Fuck. Now choose to "view folders" from the menu. If all is good, a sidebar of your local filesystem should appear. Fresh, you got to the C drive! Security by obscurity means more fun for you. Travel to the system folder and find the cmd.exe program. Double click on it. Fuck, again "this function has been disabled by the administrator." This administrator is really annoying. Mind you we haven't even gone on the Internet yet. Just for kicks, find the explorer.exe program and double click on it. This one runs. Not a surprise since it's basically Internet Explorer with more bells and whistles. Word, now we can see the entire filesystem and all removable media.

Of course there is no SSH client on this computer so you have to download one from the Internet unless you planed ahead and have a CD-ROM with some SSH clients on it. You think to yourself, "one of those USB keychain things would be pretty l33t right now." Wrong again, this thing is bolted to the desk and all the USB ports are blocked by wood or iron. The only removable media drives are CD-ROM and floppy. Go to google and search for "putty download". Click on the first hit...

...oh double fuck! A proxy error. Somehow this site is blocked on the campus network. Travel to other random Internet nodes. Hmmm, all blocked by the proxy, but google wasn't. Try Yahoo. It loads...alright, they whitelisted some sites and blacklisted everything else. We just have to turn off the proxy setting in IE (this is getting ridiculous, how do these people use the Internet? Like a television?) under the "Internet Options" find the LAN setting option. But lo and behold, "this functions had been disabled by the administrator." It's time to give up.

This was a fun exercise in trying to use a computer that ended up as hacking that computer only to find out that whoever configured it wasn't interested in anyone actually using it in the first place. I was totally stumped about that Internet proxy thing. That was some uber fascist shit. Totally against the whole point of the Internet. Then, my best gal once again dropped the gem of knowledge that made it all work. Fucking Yahoo Briefcase. 30 megs of storage if you register for free with a fake name! Put your ssh clients in there, get though the proxy because it's a yahoo site then run the program from the My Documents folder on the PC. Word up.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

An IRC transcript of mine I find particularily ammusing and insightful

[16:23] *BOFH1* I'm going to enable packet filters on the server now
[16:24] ->*BOFH2* aight
[16:26] *BOFH1* ok so the server is in full bofh mode
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* yeah!
[16:26] *BOFH1* you can't do shit on it
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* excellent

Sometimes the opposite of what's expected is the best thing.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Crazy Computer Person.

I was just described to a young adult getting a tour of the control room as a "computer person who does the crazy things with computers." What kind of response do I give to that? For comparison, what if somone is getting a tour of a mental hospital to dertimine if they would like to send their insane child there. The tour guide points to a person working on a computer and says "that is our computer person, he's crazy and he works with computers." Not too different, these two things are. i don't really know what other metaphor to use here. something like "would you call a doctor a crazy medical person" is way too pretentious. mood is an easy thing to pass off as insanity, so that makes it sound even more ridiculous. I think I am trying to express the feeling of alienation by others. When I started all this programming/computer aproachability madness the point was to help people understand that using a computer for useful things is simple if you just get over the initial fear. When things start to click and you're working faster you should feel less confused, not more.

I'm begining to feel the pressure of technological fear in others. I'm starting to see popular technology as an alienating artifact. It goes far deeper than ignorance. In fact I don't believe it has anything to do with ignorance in most cases, since the people who depend on computer technology usually do some sort of intellectual work, which would imply that they have some analitical skills. I believe it's a psychological condition. A refusal to explore something unknown because it is so very unknown.

I also attribute this alienation to Capitalist sales tactics. Capitalism has transformed into a method of alienating individuals from their own culture. By comparison, University computer users are much more accepting of change. Those working within "The Free Market" however, are accustomed to all their products being handed to them in convienient simple packages. They are also acustomed to highly specific objects that perform simple functions in extrordinary ways, ways that make them feel superior with the least amount of effort. This is what technology is all about, right? Due to the extreme care and sensitivity of all the expectations in this model, there is no incentive to learn a new system if the one you already have pleases you and is free of any visible shortcomings. So I can only conclude that these are times of great expectations with a more selfish and cynical twist. It is not, "how can I assist this great creation?" but "give me my great creation, it might work out."

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Listening test for very low bit rate Ogg Vorbis encodings

The source is Democracy Now from July 20th 2004. It's the first two minutes of the show. It's a decent real-world test because there's music, speech from a studio mic, speech from a telephone and speech/music coming off tape, so you can A-B with a good spectrum of sound. For kicks I posted the times each encode took on my system.

System specs:

Original uncompressed recording (mono, 44100khz, 16 bit)

Ogg Quality 3
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 3 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 09.4s
Rate: 12.8233
Average bitrate: 73.9 kb/s

Ogg quality 0
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 08.3s
Rate: 14.4509
Average bitrate: 48.3 kb/s

Ogg quality 0, resampled to 22050khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.4608
Average bitrate: 30.7 kb/s

Ogg quality 0, resampled to 11025khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.6s
Rate: 33.2143
Average bitrate: 20.6 kb/s

Ogg quality -1
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 07.4s
Rate: 16.1914
Average bitrate: 37.1 kb/s

Ogg quality -1, resampled to 22050
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.3804
Average bitrate: 23.6 kb/s

Ogg quality -1, resampled to 11025
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.5s
Rate: 34.0317
Average bitrate: 16.4 kb/s

My conslusions are that compared to the original, the -1 qualities sound just as acceptable as the 0 qualities. Since we are shooting for nothing more than intellegibility here, I'd say that the lowest possible quality is recommended for targeting a modem audience in a live stream.

The quality 3 sounds exactly the same as the original to my ears, so I'd say that's a good setting for targeting a broadband audience.

posted at: 01:42 | path: /hacking/audio | permanent link to this entry

This is the first real post in my new blog. While personal, I'm also going to make some guidelines for it, so it doesn't spiral into the common tone of most blogs, which may look nice and professional at first but aren't that interesting when you get to the reading part.

So here's my guidelines:

  1. Post at least once a day.
  2. Write about technology but don't repeat the same crap that's on the web already.
  3. Stick to free software, because that' when things get interesting. Don't ignore commercial software, but don't take it too seriously either.
  4. Write about music more and give props to the homies.
  5. No gossip

This should be interesting to look at in a year or so.

For those interested, this was typed in the OS X program called TextEdit and uploaded to a server running Linux. It was displayed in your web browser using a Perl script called Blosxom.



posted at: 01:22 | path: | permanent link to this entry

This is a post to show Taryn that it is easy to update a Blosxom page.
pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh :P

posted at: 01:22 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

About

I work with communications, open source software, sound and video. I'm the most happy when I work on all of these things at once. Sounds, Systems, Robots, Rocking Tigers.

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