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Apocalyptica
Recently, a friend of mine turned me on to a band called Apocalyptica (thanks, Oboe). Long-time readers of this blog know I’m a huge fan of classical music and not such a huge fan of most forms of popular music. Being a musician myself, I’m rather particular about the types of music I enjoy and listen to on a regular basis. And it’s not that I disapprove of certain genres of music outright, since I do appreciate the artistry of certain bands that fall under the headings of alternative, rock, and even rap and hard rock (for the sake of simplicity here I will lump all forms of metal under the banner of hard rock, even though I’m sure that will cause metal purists to foam at the mouth).
The thing I love about Apocalyptica is that they’re a group of four metal-style rockers – who are all virtuosos of the cello. They’re simply amazing to watch and listen to, since their music is very definitely a form of hard rock but played exclusively on cello. I love their sound, and as someone currently learning how to play the violin, I can fully appreciate the level of skill necessary to play the music they do.
If you haven’t experienced Apocalyptica yet, below is a video of them playing Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in their unique style. And then, if you want more, try setting up an Apocalyptica radio station on Pandora.com and get a sampling of them and other groups like them.
HowTo: Install Ghostscript on MediaTemple
I thought I’d go ahead and describe the process for installing Ghostscript on a MediaTemple (dv) server, especially since I’ve already got one reader who would like to see it.
Use your favorite shell client to log on to your (mt) account as root. I use PuTTY Portable from the portableapps.com website. At the command line typ:
which will run for a moment and display a long list of output. Once you have the command line back, type:
make
which will take a bit longer to run than the configure command. Again, once you have the command line back, type:
make install
which will actually install Ghostscript on your server. Provided everything went well and no error messages showed up at any step along the way, you should now have Ghostscript installed. The default location for Ghostscript is:
/usr/local/bin/gs
Typing:
which gs
in the command line will confirm this. If you want to do cleanup, just move back up a directory to
/usr
and type :
rm ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz
rm -vrf ghostscript-8.63
From there, just configure whatever script you want to run with ImageMagick and Ghostscript according to said script’s specifications and have fun!
Fractional Canceling Error
I love this post from Matt Spring on Built on Facts the other day. In it he describes a mathematical manipulation on a test that “he think[s] should almost be worth negative points.” In this case it was a student who took the part on the left side, cancelled the m to get the part on the right:
(1)
Which is, of course, wrong wrong wrong. There’s a little rule in math that, in order to cancel out a denominator, it must be able to cancel out on both sides of the subtraction sign in the numerator. Here’s what the formula should look like, after applying the rule properly:
(2)
As you can see, the m simply can’t cancel out from both sides. Just for fun I ran a little check on myself just to make sure I did it right (since I’m a little rusty on my math sometimes). Let’s let F be equal to 26, m to 7, and g to 3. Substitute those into the original equation (1) and solve:
(3)
Now, substitute those same numbers in for (2) and solve:
(4)
Same answer, so I know I did it correctly.
Now with LaTeX! (Again)
One of the things I have really enjoyed about having my website on a MediaTemple server is the fact that I now have full root access (via SSH), which means I have more control over my own setup. The downside of this is that I’m still learning a lot of the basics of how to manage a server in this manner. This results in quite a few headaches from time to time, as I have to learn how to do ‘new’ things by doing them wrong about 100 times first. Don’t worry – I haven’t managed to actually break anything yet.
One of the features of Shamus Writes that I lost when I transferred from Bluehost to MediaTemple was the ability to insert LaTeX code into my blog posts. On Bluehost, I’d had to cobble together a ‘dirty’ solution, since they didn’t allow us root access on the shared servers to install software and weren’t willing to work with those of us who wanted it to install it for us. When I switched over to MediaTemple, I was more concerned with getting everything set up and learning how everything is put together here than I was with trying to figure out why LaTeX no longer worked.
Now, five months after the transfer, I was ready to tackle the issue again. In order to run to LaTeX on a server, though, you need four things installed: 1) LaTeX (duh); 2) ImageMagick, for managing the image files; 3) dvipng, for converting LaTeX’s dvi files into a usable PNG format; and, 4) Ghostscript. MediaTemple has ImageMagick, LaTeX, and dvipng installed on the server right out of the box. What puzzles me, though, is why they neglect to install Ghostscript (GS), when that is an essential part of any LaTeX installation.
Since GS clearly wasn’t installed, however, I decided it was time to venture into the dark waters of installing the application on my server. The trouble I kept running into, though, was in getting the GS install package uploaded to the server in the first place. I knew it needed to be on the root somewhere, and my first approach was to try uploading the package via FTP – but nearly every location I tried refused the upload outright and the two or three directories that would allow me to upload would then refuse me permission to run the configuration command. I tossed a couple of queries at MediaTemple’s (mt) tech guys trying to find out, first, if Ghostscript was installed (it wasn’t) and then, how I would go about installing it for myself. I’d already read through the Ghostscript documentation and found the installation instructions less than adequate, given my paltry knowledge of working in Unix. Unfortunately, the (mt) support guy wasn’t much more help, referring me back to the Ghostscript website to check their documentation.
It basically took me two days to finally find a blog that described the process to install a completely different application on an (mt) server. The article dropped the clue of going into the directory to which you would like to install and then downloading the install package directly to that directory. That was the piece I was missing, and from there it was pretty straightforward to run through the process of configuring and building GS and then installing the program.
I definitely learned a few things, both about using shell on an (mt) server and on installing applications on said server. And I have LaTeX working again, which is a nice bonus.
Monday Linkfest
I do so love XKCD. Webcomics for brainiacs. Nothing better.
If you haven’t seen it already, I have a photoblog. I haven’t really pointed at it much, since up until recently I hadn’t had a ready supply of photos to post to it and the content was generally pretty stale. Fortunately, my housemate bought a nice digital SLR camera a little while back and has been gracious enough to let my wife and me borrow from time to time. Currently, I’m running a series of photographs taken on a recent trip to Louisville. Over the course of three days, I took somewhere in the vicinity of 800 pictures, and I’m posting the best of that crop to my photoblog. The photoblog is a picture a day, and there are just over 40 pictures in the archives already. I also have enough pictures queued up to post one every day until the end of the year, and I’ll be adding more to the queue over the next several days. So, if you enjoy photography, feel free to check it out, and either bookmark the site or add the RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. I’d love to share my work.
Reality - Checked
Scalzi has a nice little reality check over on his site this morning:
1. It was Obama who won, not necessarily the Democrats. Which is why, while the Democrats gained in both the House and the Senate, they don’t appear to be having the blow-out additions to their numbers some folks seemed to think would happen (note that at least a couple of Senate races are still in play).
Regardless of your feelings toward Barack Obama, he is going to be our next president, and as such we him our support. Now, folks, how about we put aside the petty, juvenile grievances, do away with the name-calling, and get on board with this to help our new president do the best job possible, eh?
Something I Never Thought I’d See Again
Gas prices under $2.
This Election Is About Obama
Purdue University is currently running a Vote Early campaign to encourage their students to get out and vote this election cycle. A great idea if you ask me. The student political organizations are campaigning hard for their chosen candidates, of course, and sidewalk chalk graffiti is in abundance.
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed – nowhere I’m the past week have I seen an actual ad touting the virtues (or vices) of John McCain. No, what I’ve seen to the exclusion of everything else are ads either for or against Barack Obama. The pro voices are the loudest, of course, and are frequently seen to calling for change with your vote.
I suspect that it’s the demographic at Purdue that makes Obama such a hot an exciting topic here on this campus, and after all, why not? Obama is young, charismatic, and energetic, where McCain is the exact opposite. As such Obama is going to appeal to a great many young people.
Even so there are plenty of Obama hatred out there in the student body. But rather than campaign to McCain’s virtues to counter Obama’s own, the arguments scream out – falsely – about Obama’s rumored terrorist connections, calling him a terrorist’s friend and pointing out that at least one terrorist organization that I’m aware of views Obama favorably as the next American president. Frankly, these so-called arguments make me angry simply because they are designed to generate fear reactions, not to mention bring patently false. They’re designed to play on ignorance to create votes, and d such they disgust me as being low, cheap, and underhanded methods of undermining what should be an intelligent election process – but then again, when was politics ever about fairness and truth?
Almost makes me want to vote for Obama just for spite.
Heroes Hate
Heroes has become the show that I love to hate, which is ironic, considering my raving accolades of the show during its first seaons (right up until the debacle that was called the season finale). It’s actually quite gratifying to see several other sources around the web share my disdain for Kring and his sub-par writing. I’ve never been sorry that I turned my back on Heroes, and I can ignore the disappointment that I feel about Kring’s mis-management of a show that had the potential to be bigger and better than X-Men.
I realize that a lot of my friends are still huge fans of Heroes, and to that I say, You have my deepest sympathies. I’ve no doubt that Heroes has many interesting and fascinating tidbits, but unfortunately you have to dig through the rest of the rubbish to find them, and by then even those tidbits have been tainted by the overall foulness of the rest of the show.
So where did Kring go wrong, aside from just being a generally mediocre writer? In my opinion, he went wrong by violating one of the most important rules of writing for TV – he created a cast that was far too large to follow in episodes that span only one hour a week. Even in the first season, I complained that he gave too little face-time to most of his characters, which made it extremely difficult for viewers to get involved with them. There were a dozen characters, each with their own storylines, none of which really started to overlap until the last handful of episodes. It’s extremely difficult to get vested in a cast of characters that you don’t spend any time with.
Now, most popular TV shows have a cast of between 5-9 characters, but what makes that work is that these characters share lives, events, trials, heartaches, and so on. They are involved with each other, and through their interactions we learn about the way they think, how they feel, who they love, etc. The size of the cast of rarely changes, and if it does, it’s only to add or subtract one or two characters at a time – and if one leaves, there is typically another entering to replace them and maintain balance. Heroes has never had that kind of synergy and depth, and we as viewers cannot care that much about these characters.
The other side effect of having too many characters on so many different sub-arcs is that it leaves the storyline thin and stretched. I don’t doubt that Kring has some amazing conspiracies and secrets woven into the fabric of his show, but with so many characters gallivanting about the country doing their own thing, there just isn’t time in an hour to flesh any of these plot points out effectively. As a result, the writing comes across is sloppy and slipshod, and Kring – rather deservedly – gets a bad rap.
What Kring really needs to do is trim his cast of characters down to about eight or nine favorites, kill off the rest, and bring his chosen ones together as a team to face off against crime and villainy. Then, I think, he stands a chance of salvaging Heroes from a fate worse than death.
Not Just a Good Idea…
Scalzi’s got this one exactly right:
I propose trading in Columbus Day, a worthless “surprise! You don’t get mail today!” holiday if there ever was one, for an Election Day holiday instead — a real holiday, where you get to skip work and everything. #
Halo 3: Recon
Bungie has finally dropped a trailer for their latest reveal – an expansion (presumably) for Halo 3 set during events between Halo 2 and Halo 3. Our new hero is an ODST, alone in Covenant-occupied New Mombasa.
Two things about this trailer video really fascinate me, both with regard to the city-governing AI, the Superintendent. The first is the level of expressiveness in the Super’s reactions. The icon the Super uses to represent itself is simply a circle with two eyes, and yet that is enough to convey a wide array of feelings with respect to events taking place within its city. Most of the expressions are flashed across the screen almost faster than you can catch them without slowing the video down, but it’s well worth taking the time to focus on them for a few moments, since a lot about the Super’s personality can be derived for those glimpses.
The second that’s fascinating is watching the Super’s process for gleaning information about the drop pod. The Super attempts to identify from its civilian database the vehicle on its crash approach, and when it fails to do so, it accesses the UNSC database and makes a positive ID. From there, you can almost see the Super switch gears as it elevates both its awareness and priority level for the drop pod’s passenger as it begins to use the city signs to guide the ODST to some, as-yet unknown destination.
As always with Bungie content, there is a lot hidden in the trailer for attentive viewers to puzzle out. Already I’m looking forward to next fall and seeing this new expansion.
I love how every time I turn around, there’s a new “1,000,000 for/against [some random cause].” The latest I’ve seen is “1,000,000 against the new Facebook layout1.” Why is one million always the magic number for these groups? In just about every case I’ve seen, one million isn’t even a majority number. For instance, in the case of the aforementioned group, one million users is, at best, only seven percent of the Facebook population2. If only 7% of a population dislike the layout, then that group is just going to have to suck it up and deal.
The same is true for just about every other group out there trying to rally for one million members. It’s rare that gathering that many people under one banner is going to be a majority. That being the case, why stop at one million? If you really want to sway the PTB3, go big. Go for 50 million or 1 billion.
I think people go for one million because it’s a familiar number and it’s much easier for us to conceptualize than one billion or even 10 million. Few of us have ever seen one million of anything but we know what a millionaire is. Anything larger than that is usually outside our ability to imagine.
Maybe I just harbor a grudge against most bandwagons, since so many of them seem pointless and unnecessary, but for crying out loud, if you’re going to rally a group out of a population that’s over 75 million souls, one million just isn’t going to cut it. It’s in the numbers, people.
1 Really? I mean, really?! I love the new layout, by and large. I just wish they’d finish the tweaking. Weeks on end of roaming bugs gets old after awhile – but then again, I did opt in to beta-testing the new layout. And for that matter, folks who don’t like the new layout can always choose to switch back.
2 Based on a listing of 14 million people who used applications on Facebook last year. This source suggests that the number may be well over 75 million by now, and so that percentage will be much smaller.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
