It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you really want a change put into an open source project, you submit a patch along with the bug report. Sure, you might complain that the average user doesn’t have any programming experience and that it’s unreasonable to expect them to learn some complex system and then figure out how to make the change they’re looking for, but you’re just not in the secret society of hacker enthusiasts who fix their own damn software and give back to the projects they use.
Read more...
I was in rehearsal today, doodling away second oboe for Saint Saens’ Organ Symphony for the nth time, and it occurred to me: I’ve listened to and played this piece of music enough times to know the full overall flow as well as a good chunk of the orchestral parts, not just mine. So when the hymnal calls give way to the triumphant entrance of the organ in the last movement, or when the tempos start shifting, simultaneously speeding up and slowing down, at the end of the piece, it’s not surprising; it’s almost inevitable. Couldn’t have it any other way.
Read more...
Conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel will be visiting MIT today to accept the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. Part of the awards ceremony will include a session with Dudamel conducting the MIT Symphony Orchestra; I’ll be on stage playing Oboe and English Horn on Rimsky Korsakov and Mozart. Our regular conductor (Adam Boyles) has been prepping us for this by taking, erm, unusual liberties in tempo and phrasing.
I’m not usually very aware of names of conductors, but I have heard Dudamel’s float across WQXR on occasion. The evening promises to be exciting.
Read more...
I’m happy to report that I’ll be interning at Galois over the summer. I’m not quite sure how the name of the company passed into my consciousness, but at some point in January I decided it would be really cool to work at an all-Haskell shop, and began pestering Don Stewart (and Galois’s HR) for the next two months.
I’ll be working on some project within Cryptol; there were a few specific project ideas tossed around though it’s not clear if they’ll have already finished one of my projects by the time the summer rolls around. I’m also really looking forward to working in an environment with a much higher emphasis towards research, since I need to figure out if I’m going to start gunning for a PhD program at the end of my undergraduate program.
Read more...
Hello from Montreal! I’m writing this from a wireless connection up on the thirty-ninth floor of La Cité. Unfortunately, when we reading the lease, the only thing we checked was that it had “Internet”… not “Wireless.” So what’s a troop of MIT students with an arsenal of laptops and no wireless router to do? Set up wireless ad hoc networking.
Except it doesn’t actually work. Mostly. It took us a bit of fiddling and attempts on multiple laptops to finally find a configuration that worked. First, the ones that didn’t work:
Read more...
Last week, I was talking with Alexey Radul to figure out some interesting research problems that I can cut my teeth on. His PhD thesis discusses “propagation networks”, which he argues is a more general substrate for computation than traditional methods. It’s a long work, and it leaves open many questions, both theoretical and practical. I’m now tackling one very small angle with regards to the implementation of the system, but while we were still figuring a problem out, Alexy commented, “the more work I realize it takes to do a good job of giving someone a problem.”
Read more...
I was having a discussion a few nights ago about attention, and someone mentioned the fact that contiguous blocks of time are precious. It’s obvious once it’s been pointed out to you, and with it in mind I’ve noticed my tendency to bucket useful activities into various categories: checking email, reading news feeds and simple tasks fall into the “less than an hour” time bucket, while really actually creating software, fixing hard bugs or reading code fall into the “more than an hour, preferably several hours” time bucket. I’ve recognized that attempting to tackle the “more than an hour” bucket in the snatches of time between classes and extracurriculars is simply wasteful.
Read more...
I love listening to music, especially new and interesting pieces that I’ve never heard before. Unfortunately, being a somewhat frugal spender my own personal collection of music grows very slowly; perhaps a bit too slowly for my own tastes. When I need new music, where do I turn?
- MixApp is a collaborative music listening application. At its worst, it can be simply used as an extension to your current music library; anyone who is your friend and who is online, you can search for music and queue it up for yourself. However, the serendipitous part of MixApp is when you’ve dropped into a room of people you don’t know and music you don’t know, but man, it sounds good and suddenly you’re being taken on a sonic adventure across artists you’ve never heard of and a genre you’ve just discovered and wham: you just got MixApp’ed. Update: MixApp is dead (the founders went on to build Meteor), though there are replacements popping up like turntable.fm
- Pandora and last.fm are both pretty reliable methods to get a stream of genre appropriate singles, one after another. The serendipity level is not as nice as MixApp, though, so I don’t find myself turning to these much.
- There’s not really much that can beat a good radio host. People like David Garland and John Schaefer have such a diverse and deep palette of musical knowledge, and they’ve had every evening for who knows how many years to hone the craft of sharing this with the listeners of public radio. I was very pleased when WQXR finally managed to get a high-quality internet stream back online.
- I was room-skipping on MixApp one evening, and was caught by the Kleptone’s latest album Uptime/Downtime. I have nothing against mix artists: the whole tradition of music has been founded upon the borrowing, stealing, and building upon of earlier work, and in many cases, an adept mix artist can improve the “popular music” material it was founded upon. Or sometimes the source material is just really awesome, and should be listened to in its own right: one of the most interesting musical adventures I’ve had recently was taking the samples list for Uptime/Downtime and listening to each source piece in turn.
- Orchestra, wind ensemble, small ensemble, or really any type of ensemble, rehearsal, affords time several months to get intimately familiar with a particular piece of music. I would have never have gotten the chance to fully appreciate contemporary works such as Bells for Stokowski or Persichetti’s Masquerade for Band without this really in-depth exploration into a piece.
I should consider myself extremely lucky to be living in an era where new music is constantly at my fingertips. How do you seek out new and interesting music?
Read more...
And so classes begin this Spring Term of 2010. The classes that I am currently signed up to take are:
- 6.005: Software Construction
- 6.02: Intro to EECS II
- 6.045: Automata, Computing and Complexity
- 6.945: Large-scale Symbolic Systems
- 21M.283: Musicals of Stage and Screen
6.945 is the “fun” class of the semester; I expect to have to sink a lot of time into and get a lot out of it in return. 6.005 and 6.02 are strictly being taken because my degree requires it (I’ve scheduled 6.02 as a conflict class on top of 6.945, so I’ll probably have to do a little more legwork to make sure I get all the material for that class.) 6.045 is my mathematical class for the semester; no pure course 18 class for me, unfortunately! And on the advice of Robert Jacobs, 21M.283 is my HASS-ish class (I’m quite pleased that I’ve gotten the HASS-D requirement out of the way).
Read more...
As treasurer for the Assassins’ Guild, I often have to beg and plead GMs to get posters for their respective games, since the UA Finboard has a requirement that, to get funding for events, you need to supply posters.
So I was quite surprised, amazed and impressed by Lauren Gust’s work on posters for Arcadia. The composition is simple, but effective, and definitely adds to the atmosphere of the game. Click for larger versions, and you can get full size PDFs of the posters in Lauren Gust’s public. For a little more background into what the posters are referencing, check out the Arcadia Rising scenario.
Read more...