This draft for a book started off as a kjots file, which it represented as a way to draft books. I didn't like the way it marked up my text file; it squeezed out my white space, and it set a style that I found particularly ugly. So after playing with bluefish last week, I edited the markup created by kjots into ordinary HTML I like with emacs, and added style and reedited with bluefish which stays out of the way of the thought process in my opinion. I will think up of a better introduction to this project and also try to break it into some logical pieces to link together.
090927
2009 09-27 12:04 ( There is a Date insert, which obviously goes out to the shell. )
How is that for geekiness? It is Sunday, September 27. 2009. Leo Salem. my Dad's Brother is 81 today if I remember corectly. I am saying this to in something called Kjots, obviously part of KDE, under Ubuntu 8.10 running on my Compaq Presario in 3 GB of memory from a partition on the hard disk, not from the Live CD. I decided to install this after a I got fed up with Fedora 11, ha!
So, now I am an author. The book kjots let me title is called "Amusings", which sounds like I can go on and on with ner'y a concern for my reader since it i likely to only be me. It is likely to be mental stimulation, or maybe just msturbation, as I write and multitask.
The mispelling of the book title is intentional.
(10/29/2009): So now I have taken the HTML generated out of kjots and edited it back to simple HTML markup, added my own styling and trasnformed it into a form I can readily edit with my favorite HTML editor, which happens to be Bluefish, at the moment. I have a feeling that this file might get transformed into my XML whose style sheet supports linkages between subtitles and between pages. It is risky to edit one huge pile of HTML, let alone not user-friendly.
I thought that I was turning into an incurable bum on retirement and seemingly lazing around, but actually I work very hard in a way that no one notices. I spend lots of energy with music, usually at the beginning of the day from about 7 AM to close to 11 AM, have lunch, take a nap of an hour or two, then use the computer. I tend to do more than one thing at a time.
I find that I hardly care if anyone notices or cares what I do with my time. It is totally liberating to not be accountable except in small ways. I was never one of those persons who would be lost if they didn't have a job. in fact I say Screw business.
It is not that I can't do hard work, maybe not physical labor, but mental work I can still do. I had to solve lots of problems to get these Linux distors to run, like choosing disk partitions without clobbering the Vista install. As much as I vilify Windows, and the main reason is security and the nagging of its partners, like Norton, there are apps that are open source that work better under Vista than linux, the main area being graphics intensive ones. I will keep the Vista partition around. even if I make is sthink and shrink, but this all takes lots of thinking and lots of choosing to deal with. It is good for your head.
I am trying to notice details of how kjots works. It says I am typing in Page 1 of the book, but it hasn't paginated the text so far. It also seems to be designed to occupy only a snall portion of the desktop screen and it seems to use a smaller font than I'd like, so I need to see if I can set a bigger font.
So, one has to paginate with a command. this isn't like Word or oOO, of which 3.1 is installed here.
2009-09-28 10:55
I like Kjots, the CMS I am using to enter these notes. It can export its content to HTML with a simple style that is adequate. I haven't figured out if I can supply alternate style. One thing it needs is spell checking, though.
Last night, in order to test the sound and especially MIDI handling capabilities of this install, I downloaded MIDI files of the Bach Leipzig Chorales, BWV 651-688. The site I found had cross references to other Bach works that were based on the chorale tunes used, notably to 4-part settings and the cantatas that use them , if known. There were also references to some chorale-arias and chorale preludes in the Cantatas and to other organ chorales. Many of these had MIDI files that I down loaded and save to a dir on my new home directory. Now I had heard many other settings of these chorales as MIDIs before, and even converted them to MP3 files so I can play them on my Wackman CD player, which conversion is not necessarily supported here, so another reason to keep Windows and Mac for iTunes which can convert MIDI to MP3. Some of these settings were interesting for how well they did the inner voices, and so I can learn from them. This may be as subtile as just hearing files I may have already heard but on a new player, totum, with a current codac that may be better than the soundcard or MEDI sequencers I've had in the past. The site said that some of the files were generated from MusicXML sources. Even though my memory is good enough that I could catch many small errors. The author of the site disclaims responsibility for all the errors but asks people to donate and to report errors. I may do so, as I had done once or so in the past.
It does amaze me how good my memory is. I don't recall instantly what I've heard, but once I've studied and heard a piece many times, I can spot errors in performances very readily. The amount of work it takes to proof what I can tell almost instantaneously with a source such as the Bach Geseleschaft Edition, is much greater. That is what it would take to point out errors.
A scruffy Hippy, I should talk, came into Cafe Barrone this morning. He was obvioulsy a bum as he didn't have enough for a cup of coffee, or he wasn't together enough to have the money he had ready when he got to the front of the line, which was a considerable wait for him, so he left the line for a moment but returned to buy his coffee. The patrons in the line let him cut back in; they could have made him go to the back of the line. So I know one of the people that work there and wanted to alert them to this guy, so I said "Did you notice Sir Tokesalot?" Treavor glanced up and said "Oh, that guy." indicating that he was sitting outside behind me. So they knew about him.
I have always written a little bit every few days either in a journal or on whatever computer I've had access to. Often what I write on a computer is some kind of log of something I am attempting to do on that machine. There is some of that in this stream, which is OK because that is one of the things I do, but maybe I just try now to write what is happening. Ocassionally I get on a toot and think hard about some large problem or reply to somethig that someone has said that annoys me or otherwise sets me thinking. Then I write these polemics which are me at my best and worse. I have read my tiraids from years ago and say that I can reason and argue well, but then think why did I care about that issue then. I have moved on. I went through a period of detatchment a few years ago when I really ignored the news and politics. I am more emmeshed now, but there is virtue, and lower blood pressure, in caring less about arguments.
I have noticed that this app, Kjots, has no save or save-as. Maybe it saves as you edit. The format is probably some form of RTF (Rich-Text-Format) a mark-up, but it is not too extensive. This editor is designed to be small and fast and not in your face. I could use an HTML oriented editor, any may have ot convert this if i ever wanted to publish it to a website.
I installed Ubuntu with full servers even though I know that I get my internet address through DHCP on a private network and will never be able to serve web pages on the Internet directly, that is what we get for having commercial ISPS who want to sell static IPs at a premium, they effectly curb speech or force people to put their content on sites others own and control, and they lose the rights to their content therefore. This explains why the carriers are silent about IPv6, because it would allow for billions and billions, sorry Carl Sagan, of static addresses. I would run my own web server, not that anyone would actually find it or want to read my spew.
I should note that I am a web celeb. I am even referenced in Wikipedia, to a page on something called the "Salem Hypothesis" which has to do with a debate I had with a fudementalist engineer back in 1988 who insisted that his training as an engineer (Electrical) was sufficient for him to judge science and not be accsued of religious bigotry. The Hypothesis was that many crack-pots of bad science are engineers who lack the mental discipline of broad knowledge in areas outside their technical focus and the capicity for tolerating uncertainty and the technique of suspending judgement. This started off as a generalization that I was unable to confirm or reference to refereed literature. That has since happened as noted in the Wikipedia page as veted. By the early '90's the idea had been put in the FAQ for the USENET group talk.origins where the debate originally took place. Google my name and you get lots of hits on references to this.
I have noticed many instances of otherwise intelligent people, very often engineers of one sort or another, who go off half-cocked on political or other questions because they want certainty and to be right. They want to control their world even if it means inventing a lie. I had often wondered about Nazi Germany with its hightly educated populations and past cultural heighs. Now I understand more why that could hapen in the land of Bach and Beethoven, and it could happen here, as Saintclair Lewis told us as Fascism was emerging in Europe.
I remember my immaturity at being upset with seeing Hitler and Goebels attending a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin, probably around 1938 or so. Of Course the Nazis whould go listen to Beethoven even if they would miss the essential message, Beethoven would have been an ardent anti-Nazi as he had been called the "Republican Beethoven" in the original meaning of the word as being for egalitarian rights in society, not elites, not aristocracy, and definately not facist. The rant of the protagonist in Egmont, in Beethoven's setting with a snare drum in the background, sound ireely like Hitler.
I was surprized to see my friend Jack Martinez come into the cafe on Friday. If he comes by, which is about once a month from the train from San Francisco, it is on a Sunday. When I see him we often talk about current affairs and especially economics. Jack has an MBA from Stanford but his politics is like mine. So I was discussing the "Salem Hypotheis" and the role of elitism spawaning facism, and how the partisn dichotomy in America poisons political debates and obscures real issues. One of which I suggested to Jack is that we really do have a class war going on now, but added that it is one that tends to facshism.
The way this works is that the basic impulse behind facshism is "I've got mine screw you!" or alternatively, "I want yours, kill you." It is the opposite of acknowledging everybody's equal rights and is in play now as the health care debate. The swift reachtion against the health care solutions offered by the Obama administration is not just mistrust of the government it is that the government is going to take what I have and give it to someone who doesn't deserve it, another human being, prehaps, who can become sick and die of the same illnesses as I, but screw him. This is more than just making sure that illegal alians don't to covered, but that the 40 or so people who are Americans who are not concered don't deserve what the market has failed to provide, coverage they can afford. The broadside that you hear from the Right Wing is "Health Care is not a right but it is a privilege." is about as facshist as one can get. The idea behind political compromise is that the common good has some determinable meaning and that even though people may disagree stringly about how to do things, they can each give alittle in order to arrive at a solution that everybody can live with. Increasingly, ther is little middle ground, why?
I think this is the place where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the relative impovrishment of many comes into play and it explains why many financiers could have dared to fund the Nazis and other faschist regimes of the 1930's and since. Big money interfers with compromise. Rich people working behind the scenes, even if they don't want to pay taxes that would help others less fortunate, keep the partisan pot boiling because it concerals their greed and selfishness. They hope that the awful result will both not touch them and will allow them opportunity to make a killing, quite literally, on the mahem caused.
This is why despite the horrific abuse and corruption of the Bush Administration the Right can come out and snark on Obama. They have no contrition for the damage done by greed and corruption because it furthers their interests. So whereas Republicans and others on the Right should have been told to shut up, as 25 years of their policies had caused the presnet hardships, they are even more out-spoken because the agenda of selfishness must be conceriled behind partisan politics.
Amomg the Conservatives I really dislike the Libertarians. What to be a Libertarian really means. It is the facshist implse, which has always existed in the shadows in America. On its positive side it is a rebellious individualism, but put it in a city and the Brown Shirts might as well be in the street. It is anti-government, pro-business, pro-wealth, but more extreme than being a Republicanm who according to Rom Paul have sold out. Curious thing is that this attracts lots of wannabes, who aspire to the porragotives of wealth and control and power and don't you dare ask me to give it away to help anybody else. These are people that are not necessarily all that sucessful, but they admire success, relly, if even covertly. This must nearly have its roots in an early life of deprivation, but the urge to share without being stingy doesn't really get learned, nor has the idea that if you help everybody you help yourself, regardless of what you have. That is the mistake the Germans and the Italians and the Soviets made in the 20th Century. And that was probably parcipitated by the stupidity of financers in 1918 and 1929 who reacted in the facshist response. Incidently, it appreas that a faily significant number of Libertarians are engineers.
The lessons of General Semantics apply. the hooks of the propagandist are evidant, and yet I am shocked by how otherwise intelligent people ask me to hear sound bites or to read articles that are content-free and full of emotive words and invective accepted as whole cloth. Maybe such a person thinks I am so stupid as to not remember the lessons of Lee or S.I. Haykawia, ironic as his legacy had become, that the techniques used by Hitler informed the the need for General Semantics. When I saw the article that contained the "Right vs Privelege" rhetoric I was as shocked as I could be that anyone would swallow such cant without understanding its implications given the history of Nazi Germany. Now, I can understand why Hitler camer to power even though in retrospect his rise seems so improbable, and as with my reaction to his userptation of German culture, which has led the world in arts and letters, how well-educated and smart people can sucumb to fascism. I aslo see how greed and mismanagement of capital creates the furtile ground for it.
The silliness about the World Comming to an End, yet again, this time at the end of the cycle of the Myan calendar, on December 21, 2012, and with it the interest in the writings of NostraDomus, point to a prenicious tendancy in people, connected ultimately with events like the People's Temple Mass Suicide of November 18, 1989, and the similar David Karesh (1996) and Waco standoff of 1993 (?).
When people want to believe such things, they create the danger of making them self-fulfilling. I personally don't think that any of these people have the power to make the world end around the end of 2012. Even a nuclear incident wouldn't do that, but the danger is that many people could die around this time because of what they want to believe and what they can get talked into. Maybe one should be unconcerned as mass stupidity will win the Darwin Award, except the other innocents might get harmed.
On the other hand, people who get more power than some religious crackpot, in the vein of the remarks above can cause much more carnage. Between Hitler and Stalin, they are a cause of more than 25 Million deaths. Now, Stalin was not a Faschist, but he was a military dictator and Sadam Hussain was of the same ilk, a paranoid willing to do anything to keep power. It is this power trip that is scary, for all of the perpetrators of these murders would rather die and have their followers die than admit that they were wrong.
It is then well to be weary of people who talk about catastrophy as though they wish it would happen. They seem to be motivated more by the need to be correct in their predictions than to have empathy for those that might be harmed. It is a fine line between saying, for instance, that a large damaging earthquake is comming to the San Francisco Ca. area and that lots of property owners will be hurt and that many people might be killed, for geologic history makes that fact a certainty, and saying that some economic calamity is about to happen, or has been around the corner many times, and not come, for such human events can be shaped by human expectations in a way that natural disasters are not.
I have been looking at music editors and score writing programs that aid composition, and at some of the more complex applications that allow for loops and graphs. I am not interested in treating music as sound samples, it is not that I have anything against that, it is just that I am looking for the algorithimic solution to stimulate creativity, That means that traditional notation of figures with applied transformations leads to compositional ideas and with the allowance to add free parts in traditional notion, leads to a composition editor. The trouble is that the necessary integration is not there yet. Many music editors treat it as an engineering problem with sound samples, but loops could be figures in traditional nation that are transformed by modal changes and by the long known rules of composition, which are algorithemic in nature: inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminuation, transposition. The resulting music is a closed graph with one or more starting nodes. This can become a starting point for composition, and for somone whose dexterity is limited, a way into the process of composition.
A miminalist piece I heard recently provides an example, it is repeating loops that are gradually modified. but there is also a free part at times. As I listened I could hear how the harmonic possibilities were gradually elaborted even though their doman was very traditional: I - V -V7 - I, I - V - V7 - IV - I, I - Falt-VI - iv - I, and back to the first
over a piece that lasted about 10 minutes.These thoughts bring me to the theory of parsing and of graphs, or compiler construction, pieces of which I would need to master if I was to write a program which could generate music this way. The output may want to be
something like Music-XML since I have on this system several programs that can read that and produce scores and MIDI. I bought an older book on writing a compiler in C. It has good initial chapters on the theory and lots of code exampes. I rue the fact that the simplist C++ program hello.cc with a write to cout of "Hello World" wouldn't compile using GCC 4.4 under Cygwin, and the man page is horifffic. I am sure that GCC can compile this program, It is just not obvious which options I need to give to the compiler to do it.
I was able to produce MIDI output with Tomtom, but this time getting the codec was easy. Ubuntu doesn't do this automatically, so you still have to face the warnings about these being licensed, but as long as you are not using the codecs for profit you can download them and run them with no hastle. It appears that Fedora 11 even though it is intended to be the open source version of Red Hat Enterprise, still carries the policy of the latter intended for use inside businesses, and so interfers with using the "encumbered" codecs. This is a bad policy and Fedora is neither true open source nor should it be represented as adequate for use under GPL. Like Xandros it should be avoided as a Linux. If anyone were to ask my opinion as to which Linux to get I would say to avoid Fedora and Xandros.
There are a couple of programs for music that were available for fedora that I haven't found in Ubuntu, they might be installable here. So, it is annoying how these can be supported on Fedora and yet remain unusable and yet not obviously availabe here and yet readily usable.
To show the biases of each distro, Ubuntu must consist of about 30% base and 70% internationalization in size. The clue is the amount of packages it UNINSTALLED at the post-install step as it removed language support for practically every language and font known to mankind. This post install step took longer than the base install by more than twice. Had I known that the distro is more oriented to pleasing everybody in the world than to providing lots of apps I would have given it more thought. That was why I leaned toward Fedora but I forgot its stupid licensing policy, and even tried Debian but it failed to add packages beyond the base. I have a base debian install, but I don't know if I can get it into a GUI install mode. I may be able to install the chunks above its base with the shell commands, but I am no too experienced at expert mode admin of that distro, still It is known to grub and i may give it a try.