Thursday, October 7, 2010

This is a Test of Heading Styling

This should have rounded corner box around the headings which is filled in with a light mauve. It worked, now for a white lettering with a dark green fill on a pink body background. The colors came out as I Imagined. I set some of the customary style I have used before with left and right margins. Setting the width auto made the box fit in the margin settings. What I would like instead is for the box to size to the text in the heading element. Don't know how to do that, yet.

"The Social Network" Movie

I saw this last night and it was pretty good. I learned today that the movie was based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich which I bought this morning. It reads like the movie told the story for the most part. It is fun to think that Facebook is a web site using much of the technology here, but of course the real magic is in its backend.

I missed the point of the movie, though, it is to make the technology go away so that the users can do what human beings have been doing throughout our history, checking people out and ranking them. Of course that can be purely based on appearence, or could be much more sophistocated. People can make mistakes on social networks that damage their reputation. It is easy when you are typing in front of a screen to forget who your unintended audience might be, just as I am sure that Internet presence can be used to screen applicants for jobs, it can make you a target for crime as well.

The real message of Facebook is that the problems of the technology that underlie had to be made to become invisable and unconsequential to its users. Availability would make or break it. Any downtime could be life threatening. So rather than reacting: "I know how this is done." one should think that lots of people knew how it could be done, but one someone had to make it happen in a way that it would become invisible. So, Mark Zuckerberg is a Computer Science Genius whose core technical achievement is to make the servers that provide 7/24/365 access to the web site. Coding the web site was really secondary to making it available all the time.

Facebook has been criticized of late for not providing enough security and just yesterday announce that users could download their own information, I think that means profile, as a zip file. My guess is that they implemented this because Facebook pages have been hacked.

In a sense I just don't get it. I have never had a Facebook profile, and in general think that Social Networking is a waste of time. I really don't get Twitter where you are restricted to 140 character "tweets". I guess that this works quite well in the mobile device world and don't knock that. When you count mobile and hand heald devices including the iPad, Linux and Open Source already have stolen most of the market share from Microsoft since most new installations of web-based devices are not on the desktop or server but in mobile, so I don't knock it, that is a good thing.

Maybe a reason to get a Facebook account is to solve a loose end created by the movie. Facebook is now worth several Billion dollars, so how do they raise revenue if the original plan was not to sell advertizing? Maybe they do that now. My house mate does go onto Twitter to get instantaneous local news, such as to find out about local disasters or even events like a noisy jet fly over such as happened during a Stanford football game last year.

Recently, though I did discover that the practice of making code snippets available is very much like social networking and that many of the comments and hence the readers of coding sites are using social networks to use these resources.

The Color of Epidote

Remember when Teal on Pink was all the rage? I think it was the late '90's, but maybe earlier. A memory that sticks with me is being in a hotel lobby in Denver that cast the color scheme in stone, literally. They had a pink quartize or fine grained Alaskite with Epidote rich Marble that carried these two colors. Now Epidote can be any number of colors, like Tourmaline, but the dark green, which the color of the filled boxes for the headings on this page, approaches a color I have seen in Epidote, in the marble in this hotel lobby, and in similar color schemes. It would be easy to change the background color of this page to match that pink, what I could do is to save that challenge for imlementing a style choice when the page loads that can be done with Jquery in all browsers.

On the Schubert Octet

I've been listening to the Octet for Winds and Strings Op 166 ( D. 803) in C Major, and today dug out a public domain score from Edition Eulenberg that I obtained from imsl.org. I had to settle the issue of orchestration, as in the "Trout" Quintet, Schubert uses Double Bass with Piano and no Cello. In the Octet I could hear the Double Bass but wasn't sure about either Cello or Viola, and from the recording it was not clear if one or two horns and basson, or the other way around. The score solved this mystery, the scoring is for Clairnet, Horn. Basson, String Quartet and Double Bass, making eight soloists.

In the recording I have it is clear that there are performance practice challenges. The brief preface from the printed score bear this out. There are changes to the Autograph in the last movement that had become traditional fixes which the editor of the Eulenberg score fixed, But in the performance the tempo of the Allegro make performance of the restored and difficult passages for the violin and clairnet quite challenging, especially for the latter. The deed is pulled off In tempo, but barely.

Just out of curiosity for the service and to see what might be published on the subject, I looked in Google Scholar for citations on the work and didn't get as honed a result as I would get from an ordinary web search, in fact the results were all over the place, something that surprized me. One result of this was that I came across a citation to a Dissertation from Boston University that I would have to pay to see, so I didn't go look. It was clear in the abstract that most of the issues I already knew about concerning this piece were discussed, the performance issues mentioned above, and the inspiration of Beethoven's Septet Op 20. Now Schubert wrote the Octet in February and March of 1824, Beethoven would premier his Ninth Symphony on May 7, 1824, and his Septet had been quite popular in Vienia. What amazed me is that some one could get an advanced degree for a dissertation on a single work, although to be fair there is a great deal of work that can be done on sources and research about performance practice, this can be overdone, any work can and must be approached in its current context as a living part of the repretore, defined by what pieces ensambles are willing to attempt and perform in public, not by some overstrieving for period authaticity.

An amusing side note: Years ago I xeroxed the Edition Eulenberg copy of the Schubert Octet in the Stanford Music Library and found the copy almost illegable due to the smudged print in the source. For that reason I never spent much time studying the piece. I think that the replacement copy I made from IMSL is made from the same damaged original, maybe it was scanned by Stanford, or by someone that used the same copy. In fact there is a newer scan of a score of the work at IMSL, presumably to fix this defect. The Eulenberg score I had printed is hard in many places to read because of smudging and bleeding of the ink from the original. I did download the newer scan, but I haven't checked it out for legibility as I do not intend to get it printed right away, Maybe if I get annoyed enough with what I have and want to study this piece at length I will have to do all that.