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My 2011 in Music

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:27:00 EST

For me 2011 was a pretty darn good year for music. I regularly listened to a lot more new music than last year. I also sampled more stuff after reading a few more music blogs this year. I especially appreciated learning about bandcamp.com and listing to albums from that site. I figure it influenced a couple of real purchases this year.

Biggest 2010 Albums of 2011

These are albums/artists that I listened to a lot in 2011, even though they weren't new this year. Some of them were new to me and others simply kept me coming back to them.

Borknagar - Universal: I still listen to this album all the time. Simply fantastic.
Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini: This is also a insanely good album. Even at work I've named some of my test data after the track names here.
Ghost - Opus Eponymous: If evil can be fun and poppy, this album is exhibit A. Every time I see someone diss this album online I want to shake them and tell them to stop overthinking it and just enjoy.
Julie Christmas - The Bad Wife: I simply love her voice. I hope Made out of Babies makes another album soon, but this solo album will tide me over in the meantime.
Melechesh - The Epigenesis: I simply love the middle eastern + metal sound these guys put together. I've used it to wake myself up on quite a few morning drives.
Shining - Blackjazz: This album is nuts, in the best way possible.

Standout New Music of 2011

The Good Ones

These albums were pretty good and I listened to them quite a bit.

The Sword - Warp Riders: Loved the title track. I preferred what these guys were doing on the first two albums, but still a very enjoyable journey though space.
Novembers Doom - Aphotic: Another solid album from this band.
Septicflesh - The Great Mass: Got this one pretty late in the year for it to really sink in on me, but it's kind of been a grower. The orchestral bits are worked in well with the metal side of things. I want to listen to some of these guy's older releases now.
Anaal Nathrakh - Passion: Got this one at the same time as Septicflesh. I had this playing when I was stuck in traffic one day and I think it made my crazy (more crazy?). Now sometimes I listen to it when I code in order to feel more evil. :-D

The Great Ones

These albums were really awesome and I listened to these albums a ton. They got the most use in my car so my last.fm stats really don't represent how often I listened to these.

ICS Vortex - Storm Seeker: I've really grown to like Vortex's vocals after listening to Borknagar so many times. I listened to the opening track, The Blackmobile, and knew I had to buy the album. While the remaining tracks differ quite a bit from Blackmobile I still think it's great. The whole album is good progressive metal, with what sounds to me a Yes-like feel.
Obscura - Omnivium: Kicked my ass. This is simply an amazing album there were a few things I liked more on the previous album, mainly the vocals, but well worth a listen. The cover is an illustration from a book on the mating process of Metroids.
Kvelertak - Kvelertak: I'm cheating a little here because only the US release was in 2011. This album is hugely energetic and I liked to listen to it on the treadmill!
Woods of Ypres - Woods IV (The Green Album): Can being sad be fun? That's how I feel about this music. Quite often I'd find my self singing or shouting along with the lyrics to this in the car. What's really sad is the recent death of the bands frontman (RIP).
Red Fang - Murder the Mountains: This band is hilarious, awesome, and makes fantastic music videos. Of course, the album itself rocks too. My favorite track is Throw Up, which sounds pretty Melvins-ish to me. I expect this band to get more popular soon.

My penultimate album of 2011

Mastodon - The Hunter: Mastodon did a great job building up anticipation of this album in my opinion. They released full song previews on youtube before the official release date. Like some I was unsure about some of the differences between what they're doing here versus Crack the Skye. But really, the album's a grower. I mean it's a huge grower. The first time I listened to 'Creature Lives' I wasn't sure about it. But now, and even more after attending the live show, I love it. I sing along to it. My favorite track is Spectrelight, but the whole last few tracks of the album are just tremendous.

My favorite album of 2011

Subrosa - No Help for the Mighty Ones: If you're wondering what album I could have liked more than The Hunter (maybe you're not) wait no longer. No Help for the Mighty Ones is a deep, beautiful and haunting album. I haven't read or watched some of the sources they used as background material, but I'm sure it could only help me appreciate it more. It's simply so heavy and sad it wraps around to wonderful. I'm not much of a reviewer and that's not what I was planning on doing here, suffice to say it's a great piece of art. My personal favorite track is Whippoorwill, but really, there's nothing bad here.

Recent Acquisitions

I got some CDs (real, physical CDs, yay!) this Christmas from my awesome family. I also got some Amazon points that I've already use for a few mp3 albums. These are albums that I haven't got a chance to listen to much yet but I expect I'll be queuing up to play pretty often.

Absu - Abzu: Love the opening scream. I've already listened to this a couple of times from the bandcamp page pre purchase. I've got to check out the previous album, Absu (oh-you-guys-are-clever) now.
Cave In - White Silence: I was a big fan of Zozobra when these guys were apart. So far I really like what's happening on this album as well.
Glorior Belli - The Great Southern Darkness: The title track is seriously badass.
Revocation - Chaos of Forms: Love the previous album and expect this one to rock as well.
Unexpect - Fables of the Sleepless Empire: I've been waiting for this album for what feels like forever. I'm simply giddy.
Yob - Atma: Doom. Doom. DOOM!

Please Release

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:54:00 EST

One nice thing about using Python is the simple and easy way to get libraries and other packages quickly and easily using tools like pypi and pip. However, when deploying I prefer OS packages (typically RPMs since I've worked at RHEL/Fedora using shops). Sometimes the libraries I need are not packaged by upstream and I end up building them myself.

None of that bugs me. What I what I wish was that more OSS projects, especially some of the smaller libs, would actually release occasionally. Instead I have to get a copy out of source control, which often has no release information. This makes me queasy because I have a hard time telling if the most recent versions are stable. Even if you don't want to make tarballs, at least periodically tag your releases in a way that makes us downstream users feel some confidence that your code isn't halfway in the middle of a refactoring or something.

If it's a "mature" code base, one that changes rarely, stick a release tag on there once a year or something. I'm going to end up testing this stuff for my own purposes, but a release tag at least makes me feel that I'm not going to end up wasting too much of my time on software left in the lurch. So far some of the worst offenders are on the dev sites like bitbucket and github. I don't know if my sample size is just too small or I have bad luck, but I have a guess that in the ye olden days people had to create a tarball just to get hold of the code, but these newer sites/tools make it easy for people to skip that step, and then forget completely about doing a release at all.

I don't actually think anyone is going to listen to me, and I'm going to have to keep building packages that have strings like "20101114git83848383f3892" or "20110109hgf110ac096f19" in them. But hope springs eternal :-).

Dell Vostro 3300 and Fedora 13

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:35:00 EDT

I recently got myself a Dell Vostro 3300 and am in the process of installing Linux, Fedora 13 to be specific, on it. I started out using the KDE Spin LiveCD and resizing the Windows 7 partition down to about a third of its orignal size. This was a little tricky because the Fedora automated installer saw the partition and recognized it as NTFS, but reported the size a 0 Bytes. This prevented me from running the resize tool in the Fedora installer, so I did it via the command line. I used ntfsresize(8) to shrink it, and then used manual partitioning in the Fedora installer to shrink the partition. I gave myself some wiggle room by making the partition a tad bit bigger than the size I shrunk the filesystem to.

A lot of the hardware was working right out of the box, wireless networking was the big exception. I knew the machine would come with Broadcom wireless beforehand so this was expected. After plugging into the wired lan and running the update tool I added the rpmfusion repos, and thanks to the hints on a helpful blog post I knew to install the kmod-wl package.

There is still more stuff to try out and I plan on writing about this machine a little bit in future entries.

my udev just exploded

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:54:00 EDT

Every time I reboot my server machine something explodes. It's my own fault, but its still annoying. This time I found out that the newer versions of udev really don't work with the deprecated SYSFS stuff. I found out because my system wouldn't create /dev nodes for /dev/sda1 and the like. I had to manually futz with udev to get the devices in dev, then mount the file systems, then ultimately I downgraded to udev-149.

I knew that version worked and found a bug (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302173) with a similar issue. I know the right way to fix it is to build a kernel, but I wish the warning the udev ebuild printed was a little more prominent - maybe print something like : "No, Seriously this version won't work at all with the old SYFS layout, you jerk".

Maybe then I would have paid attention. :-)

Fedora 12 works for me

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:59:00 EST

So I've been hankering to try a new distro for a while and after a few false starts in years past, I'm now running Fedora on my laptop. Fedora 12 is the first version I've simply been able to boot up with and have it just load and work without strange glitches. Even the much maligned (by me) NetworkManager is working quite well. Hibernate works, but there is a minor "scrambled" screen before it loads. Other than that, I'm pleased.

Following a couple blog posts got me up and running with the multimedia stuff that the stock distro does not supply. All-in-all it took me very little time to get stuff working well. I'm even all KDE 4.4-up. Aside from my second Kubuntu install from years ago (I think it was a 7.x, but I'm not sure) this has to be one of the bet Linux install experiences - especially counting the post install "get the environment the way I like it" work.

Nasuni, at long last

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:14:00 EST

Today is a crazy day at work, because we're launching our product beta to the world. The Nasuni Filer provides a local network filesystem (CIFS) that is backed by cloud storage, and the user can choose what cloud vendor to use. Files are encrypted remotely and snapshots are automatically made available.

I won't say what parts I worked on. At least not until its been out there for a while. :-)

Everybody is hopping around looking at a monitor we set up to show who's signing up and downloading filers. Let's see if I can get some work done today amidst the excitement.

My 2010 website refresh

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:48:00 EST

So I finally got to a point where I could no longer stand the software I wrote to generate this website. So I redid it, it has a significantly simplified core and I swapped the old Zope-Style page templates for the jinja2 templating library. I like Jinja and I've been doing a lot of Django stuff at work, so it makes sense for me.

I also use some standard library modules where I had been using custom code before. It is always an interesting experience to learn about something like that, a little bit deflating though. :-)

I don't write the code for this site for any other reason than fun. I get to learn a bit and keep coding at my own (snails pace) schedule. Now that the code is all nice and shiny I wonder if I'll have to write more often, not that I'm promising myself anything.

Link: About Intellectual Property and Competition

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:31:00 EDT

Just read this article: How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition. Which I thought was very interesting. I especially like: "Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed by more than one person at a time."

I think this is why people who defened very strong IP regimes by comparing to real property rights are not making a good argument. I don't totally agree with the article either but I always like to read arguments for limited IP with pro market perspectives.

Buy This Book

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:34:00 EDT

If you are interested in distributed version control, buy Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O'Sullivan at your first opportunity. I had a chance to make some corrections and suggestions at the online copy so I know it's good. :-)

And while you're at it download release 1.3 with the latest and greatest features and fixes.

Good Things in Bad Times

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:35:00 EDT

The good news starts off with the release of Mercurial version 1.2, in which my largest contribution becomes part of an official release. Now people who have multiple branches (probably named branches) that are unwanted can close a branch. As with normal operation in Mercurial nothing gets deleted, as that would change history, instead a new commit flags the branch as "closed." A closed branch can then easily be ignored by commands or tools. The heads and branches commands can be set to skip displaying the closed branch.

The other big thing in the release that is relevant to me is the addition of the pure-python modules. The parts of Mercurial that were covered by C modules now have python equivalents. I like this for a couple of reasons, it makes it easier for folks to try running on Jython or PyPy or other similar platforms. I also like it because python is (for me at least) easier to read than C. Now its easier to get the gist of a module before seeing the work done to speed it up.

Next up is the pleasant discovery of matplotlib a graphics & plotting library for Python. Or, I could say re-discovery because I think I ran across it a while ago but forgot about it. Now that I need to draw graphs with lots of data points for work, I think this lib will really come in handy. The result even looks pretty.

My self-made tool for partially synchronizing my music directory between desktop and laptop is making some good progress after being dormant for a while. The "pull" and compare functions are working but I still need to implement a "push" operation. The tool is heavily influenced by the Mercurial cli and even some of its code structure. I will probably will make the code available, but don't plan on advertising it too much. The "database" structure isn't a generic one with wide application.

The Anti-Resolution

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:58:00 EST

For the whole month of January I've been putting off writing an entry. I keep meaning to come up with something more substaintail then the average entry. But I do have some good news, I've got more patches in Mercurial, got even more new music, just tried KDE 4.2 which seems pretty sweet so far, and seem caught up on most of my outstanding tasks.

I'm still failing at being a Cool Internet Guy... but that was to be expected. In order to taunt myself I want to make a list of things I plan on writing about. This may (or may not) motivate me.

Hypothetical business ideas
Why I like filesystems over databases
Mercurial's general awesomeness
My ideal Linux distro
Books I've been reading

Furlough

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 20:05:00 EST

I've taken the week off. It's not company policy, I don't have to, but I always feel idle at work when coming in during these odd short weeks. The worst is the day after Christmas, I've done it before and didn't enjoy it. If I was deep into a project where I could work independently for a while it would be different, I think. Anyway, with a free week I can catch up on some reading... I haven't read a whole book since this summer.

Since I don't feel like doing anything difficult, I will very briefly rate the CDs I received as Xmas gifts:

Made Out of Babies - The Ruiner [4.5/5] - The vocals are both frightening and inviting at the same time. :-) Favorite tracks: Cooker, The Major.
Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works [4/5] - I love the pseudo-pop and Patton-esque parts... of course I like Patton's music so I guess that seems to make sense. Favorite tracks: Black Bubblegum, When Acting as a Particle.
Deadbird - Twilight Ritual [3.5/5] - I haven't listened to it enough to make a solid decision, but its pretty decent. Got it on a whim, due to Amazon recommendations.

Why Thee Kay

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:05:00 EST

Well, Python 3000 is done and 3.0 has been released. I like a lot of the changes that have been made to the language. My favorite is probably the change to make print a function, I've run into many situations where I would have like to create a class with a print(...) method but had to settle for a less convenient name.

But today, I'm not here to be positive. I'm going to gripe! Or a least express a little bit of skepticism. So far there are two things about the change that I don't quite like. There is the removal of the callable(...) function. This is minor, but I really don't get it. Maybe I'm weird in that I was using it pretty often. But it's easy to deal with, just create my own utility function that does the same thing.

Less easy for me to just deal with, is the change to unicode strings everywhere. What bugs me isn't that unicode is used as the default, but that "regular" byte strings have been sort-of deprecated. sys.argv, sys.stdin and sys.stdout are now "text" based which really doesn't make sense on Linux/Unix systems. How the hell does the language know that I'm not piping in binary data? I wouldn't be bothered as much if there was a bytes equivalent open by default (rawstdin or some such). I guess I can do something like: "os.fdopen(sys.stdin.fileno(), 'rb')" but that seems quite clunky. The old model was simple on unix-like systems, it was obvious and straightforward.

I hadn't thought much about the issue until I read some messages by Matt Mackall, the creator of Mercurial, who was complaining about the change. Personally, I would've gone with byte strings, that always have an attached encoding which is always defaulted to UTF-8 everywhere. :-) The fact that there is more than one way to represent unicode "text" makes it hard to know what the original byte stream was. This is too bad, because it's nice to be able to write stupid programs.

Power, Usability and Freedom

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:08:00 EST

I've been wanting to write about usability for a couple of weeks now. But, not the typical topic of usability in GUIs for average users. I've been thinking about usability of CLI tools and APIs for power users, administrators and developers. I don't have all my ideas prepped for this, so it's not happening today.

However, this article on the (so called) "Properties Pattern" popped up on my radar and really resonated with me. Since I do a lot of work related to configuration, to me, it just makes sense to build software that does not punish me when I want to add or modify values. In addition the pattern adds ways to talk about inheriting values and such. One thing that I really liked was how Yegge mentioned that it's very common but not very formal. I can thing of a number of times at work, and for fun I've done an ad-hoc sort of subset of this.

This brings me to the next thing I was thinking about, the traditional engineering trade-off. I think everyone has a bias, whether it is to work toward performance, or user-facing usability, or flexibility to change the system. In my case, I think I tend toward the latter cases. I prefer dynamic languages and having a way to store/fetch configuration without having to change a lot of code. It might bug other people that it you can't say for certain that 'foo' will appear somewhere or not, but that is part of the trade off. I'm not dead set on anything, though, but I like mulling over this kind of food-for-thought.

On an unrelated note, I don't think I'm going to try to do entries on Sunday. I think I should just start writing when I have an idea. By the time I decide it's time to sit down and write an entry, I've already forgotten some of the things I wanted to write. :-P

Only slight brain damage

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:37:00 EST

It turns out that I can think of good subjects for postings when I am driving around in my car. Then, I forget what I was thinking about not long after. Anyway, I wanted to make up for not writing anything last week, and writing a paltry little the week before by creating something good today. I tend not to plan the content of my posts out, so I have no idea how much I will be writing next.

First off, my "link of the week" is pretty interesting. Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson which can be read entirely online. I've read up to Part 2-16, and am constantly amazed at how relevant the essay is, especially in regards to the Wall Street bailout, the talk of a "Big-3" auto-makers bailout, and the general economic reporting on the news. Which is, by the way, generally awful.

I am amused that I didn't find the link on a site like reason.com, which I read pretty regularly, but on a post in a blog linked off of Planet Python. It should be a handy link to pass to people when I'm asked, occasionally, to explain my opinion on the current econ. talk going around.

At work, yet another animated movie is coming out from a company that is a customer. I usually feel funny about posting about work related things, because I don't want to accidentally give out any secret info. :-) But since the some of the customers are right there on the front of the company webpage, I don't mind linking to that.

And it is kind of funny looking at the website, as someone on the inside, the marketing oriented material is like a fun-house mirror view of what were talking about all the time.

Lastly, for fun, I've started fooling around with some python code that would be used to organize and label my music collection (mostly mp3/ogg) outside of Amarok. I love that program, but the new version lacks some of the file management features that the KDE 3 version had. It is also a bit of a pain to fire up a GUI application on the headless box just to pull files from an outside directory into the collection and have them end up in the tree structure I like. It's also a bit of a playground for doing things like trying to copy the way mercurial does it's test scripts.

Weekly Roundup - Need a better naming scheme edtion

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:40:00 EST

I feel old.

I hate game companies and the platforms I don't have. I simply refuse to waste money (or compromise my uptime) to waste time, even if is fun.

These signs are cool.

Weekly Roundup - Day Late Edition

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:40:00 EST

So I was lazy yesterday, and didn't make an entry. I was taking it easy recovering from a (for me) long night after seeing Zozobra and Pelican live! There were four bands in the show at Harper's Ferry that night.

Zozobra, the band I was most interested in, started off, and was very good. They were joined by Stephen Brodsky, who came on solo after. He had my attention at first, but the music was a little too much of a "downer" to hold my attention. I would have liked a little more - pep, to use a kind of old-fashiondy word. :-)

Kayo Dot, er... lost me and I think the crowd too. During the quieter parts of their set the crowd noise was prominent. Every once in a while they started to do something focused, and then they'd go back to doodling around. Too bad, because I think they were talented, just not the kind of thing I was hoping for in a live show.

Pelican was excellent, they have a powerful sound that, even when when it is not driving, gets you ready for the next wave. I got and listened to City of Echoes a couple of times before their show. I'm glad they did not do only pieces from that album, so far I like the previous work better. Regardless, the start and end of the show, redeemed the not-so-awesome middle bands.

Then as part of my recovery regimen on Sunday I watched two Original Series episodes of Star Trek, then a little football and then the whole of Star Trek the Motion Picture. Yes, I am such a huge nerd. :-)

Finally, since this is pretty good timing to remind every one that on Tuesday, November Fourth, to stay home and avoid politics if you can. Remember, don't vote, it only encourages them. (Not sarcasm, but I'd really hope that you do whatever you want to. Personally, I'm not going to.)

Weekly Roundup IV

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:02:00 EDT

I commited my most fundamental change to the codebase at work so far. I was pretty proud, but late on Friday we found some issues. However, it is nothing that I can't deal with in the scripted portion of the code. Have I mentioned how much I like working in python? :-)

Finally got Amarok Beta 2 compiled and installed on my system. That damn mysql embedded library did not want to link without -fPIC. Instead of waiting patiently, I just forced the CFLAGS on the mysql install. Not as clean as waiting for Gentoo to come up with a better fix in the ebuild but I can at least use the program with fewer bugs.

Weekly Roundup - Part Three

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:45:00 EDT

Arms very tired - Moved leaves around.
Helped fix a bug in hg on Saturday's bug stomping day.
I do not want to see any more New Hampshire political ads. Make that: I'm sick of all political ads.

Weekly Roundup - Part Two

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

True to my word! I'm writing another entry.

Food: I ate at an Indian Restaurant for the very first time.
Music: I dicovered, and really liked, Genghis Tron's Board up the House.
No two desktops (of mine) are not using KDE 4.x. This even includes work. Gentoo's even finally got it in the official portage tree, but I was happily using the overlay for a while.
One of my busiest weeks at work in a while. I am down with the sickness (Java). Wait, is that good or bad?

Remember kids, voting is for losers!