Jonathan Saggau's Blog

That's right, it's Tom Selleck's birthday, too.  Oh, and....um ... Oprah (52), too.   Louie Perez from Los Lobos (53)...   The, uh, "Gallery of Mirrors" guy, Emanuel Swedenborg (Died 1772)...  Heather Graham (36)...  Chekhov (Died 1904) ... John D Rockefeller Jr. (Died 1960) ... Ann Jillian (56). 

Scully's older than Oprah.

Magnum, P.I. "Oprah" La Bamba a mystic Roller Girl a playwrite a philanthropist Scully Me

What a crowd

Fifty years ago, on Jan. 29, 1956, editor-essayist H.L. Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore," died at age 75.  This gives me an excuse for my favorite Mencken quote:

“The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the middle ages”

This one's a close second these days:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

And, since I have had the flu recently:

1973 - Johnny Rivers received a gold record for the hit single, Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu As is tradition, Rivers removed the fragile gold disk from the wooden frame and, as he was putting it on his stereo, had a ferocious sneezing fit and never did find out how his song sounded in solid gold.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who has tried to comment on my 'blog, please try again.  My server was blocking outgoing smtp and I wasn't getting the notifications to approve comments.

oops.

Posted by jonmarimba at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm stunned.

Last year Carnegie Hall brought the London Symphony under Pierre Boulez to play (among others) Stravinsky's *Rite of Spring* on my birthday.  (My favorite "classical" piece of all time and the reason I started writing music in the first place; thanks to Barry Larkin for being the guy.) 

This year, they've done it again.

The MET Orchestra under James Levine, while not crossing an ocean to play for me, has decided to cross some busy New York City streets to play (I still can't believe it) Stravinsky's *Rite of Spring* on my birthday at Carnegie Hall.

Posted by jonmarimba at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Holy crap, I called 'em.  That's right I'm really getting rid of my cable service, DVR and all...

Oh the agony!

Hit from every side by "special offer Jim*"

"Wouldn't you rather keep it?  Maybe we can downgrade your service a little.  How about a discount?  Maybe you don't need the DVR. Oh, shucks we can't get anybody out there for a few weeks to uninstall it.  You'll have to return the cable box to our office. You know the internet connection is about 50% more money ($60?!) without regular cable service, right?"

My God.  Cable company or crack dealer?

At least I've found an alternate company for my internet connection.  They are a reseller for cable company X and they'll sell me the same service for about 2/3 the price.  That's right, the very same internet connection.  I don't even have to return the equipment.  They just switch my bill over.  No downtime.

Too good to be true?  Time will tell.

*Names changed to protect the guilty

Posted by jonmarimba at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spent some time at Mundial (thanks to Google for the SMS service and the address) Makin' Troublesome Noise with AM (I think I'm the sidekick. I wanted to be the superhero, but...yeah, I'm the sidekick...) and my fellow noise nerds(TM) at share. The guy who hosted the event, Daniel, mentioned that one could do a "featured set," which is sort of a featured performance before all of the geeks crack open their laptops and jam all night. He must have been out of his mind to think the noises our little corner of the room was making are even close to ready for public consumption... but, it seems maybe-not-so-young-anymore Mr. Saggau will be finding his way back to "the stage" again... sort of.

minus the stage...

and the lights.

I do not miss the lights.

Scary.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I've been going 'round and 'round (including sending a DVD-R via UPS RED which - I'm told - was corrupted upon arrival) to get a binary database save file to the company that handles the database maintenance at one of my clients so that they can perform an upgrade to the system.

I finally bit the bullet... and did everything I could think of to make sure that the file got there intact:

* I ran a full verify (a sort of fake DB re-load and data check) of last night's database backup file save: AOK
* I ran an md5sum of same: 330413342523fc3a6f4462647e849a98
* I moved it to the Linux file server on the local network... md5sum: 330413342523fc3a6f4462647e849a98 (no loss of data)
* I gzipped it ... md5sum: e4e706a416e6f852074c007c865ea207
* I gunzipped it ... md5sum: 330413342523fc3a6f4462647e849a98 (no loss of data)
* I gzipped it again ... md5sum: e4e706a416e6f852074c007c865ea207 (same as before; we're OK so far)
* I uploaded it (gzipped) to the company (can't run an md5sum on their server...)
* I downloaded it to my home computer: (gzipped) md5sum: e4e706a416e6f852074c007c865ea207
* I gunzipped it at home ... md5sum: 330413342523fc3a6f4462647e849a98 (no loss of data)
* I sent the gzipped file back to the client server, gunzipped it, and RAN ANOTHER VERIFY on the database server

(I kid you not). It survived all that network time and now I know, given that it survived the entire round trip intact with nary a bitshift (provided there are no leaky microwaves or solar flares at their location), that file on their server is golden. It outta be... I'm going crosseyed.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Stupid nerd trick:  (File under... DUH!)

When working on real-time audio control, it's probably not a bad idea to try to get the best possible time-slicing quantum possible.  What with latency to think about and generally wanting everything to just-happen-right-the-heck-now(TM)...

This can be taken a bit far, though.  Say, for instance, you fork a thread to respond to an event coming from an audio synthesis server and, to compound the fun, you forget that you're writing instructions for a computer.  You know, one of those things that does only and exactly what you tell it to do.  What happens?  You suck up every available clock cycle by writing an empty "while x!= this_event_thing: do nothing" loop.  This isn't so surprising in retrospect.  It's exactly what you're telling the computer to do!

How do we keep from spiking the processor while avoiding any appreciable latency?

We can put a time.sleep(0) (python) in there which will yield the cpu to any other >= priority thread.  This keeps the system responsive, but will still take every last available clock cycle. 

Being one who never wants to watch my powerbook melt through my desk (that G4 thing can get HOT),  there is another option.  Put a very short time.sleep() increment in there.  Right now I'm using this:

while self.theIncomingMessage is not "The expected Message":
   time.sleep(1./96000.)

Pretty much zero latency and no unnecessary processor spin.  Sweet.


I'm not the only one...

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-July/056629.html

Note that Sleep(0) is a special case of yielding the current thread's
timeslice to any other equal priority thread in the process, but is
otherwise equivalent to no delay at all.

Posted by jonmarimba at 01:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I somewhat impulsively deleted my myspace.com profile a couple of days ago in an effort to prod myself into putting some "real" blog software on my new server/media center/mac mini/ does-everything-except-make-toast (so far) computer. So here it is, folks! I'll be archiving some of the old posts from myspace here and generally using this space to let google index my brain, so-to-speak. If you're somebody I know "in real life" or if you just want to say "HI," drop me a line here.

Posted by Jonathan at 02:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)