Cody Russell

Performances

I had a concert last night with Irving Symphony, where we played Saint-Saens piano concerto no.5, Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan”, and a piece called “Huapango” by someone I can’t remember. It was fun. I really like playing with that orchestra, although I really think they shouldn’t be playing “Don Juan”.

Tonight our viola class had a studio recital up at school, and I played the Vaughan Williams Romance. It went okay considering that my pianist and I pretty much threw it together today.

My back

It’s killing me! I really need to see a doctor soon because this is getting out of hand. I could barely walk to school from the parking lot yesterday.

26 Apr 2001

Censored

Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

ETree

I started hacking some on LudwigInstrumentAddDialog recently. I wanted to use the ETable widget for this dialog box, and so I’ve been fooling around with that recently. Today I switched it over from ETable to ETree, but I’m not certain that I will remain with ETree in the end. Either way, ETable and ETree are both very cool widgets I think. They’re still in development, though, and it’s very easy to crash them if you don’t form your XML headers and states to be exactly the way they want them. When school gets out, I’d really like to make patches to provide warning messages instead of crashes in these cases.

Die Kunst der Fuge

I got a recording of Keller Quartett performing Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge and it’s really, really good, I think. I love Bach’s instrumental music, especially fugues, and I love string quartet.. so this is really fantastic to me. I had never heard Keller Quartett before, and I think I should hear more of their recordings.

More good online recordings of viola music

Not long ago I posted a link to a recording of Patricia McCarty that was really beautiful. Now I have a link to a couple recordings that my dear friend Paul Coletti has on Minnesota Public Radio’s website.

Coletti is one of the greatest violists in the world these days. He’s a beautiful performer, and a really Great Person. I won’t say that about very many people, but he certainly deserves it. I’ve had the pleasure of both playing for him and hearing him perform several times since I met him. I hope I’ll have a chance to see him again this summer in Annapolis.

Here are a couple recordings of him performing some music by Rebecca Clarke. There is a recording of her Sonata that we all know and love, and a lesser-known work called Morpheus. Coletti recorded both of these on his English Music for Viola CD, which was, I think, the first CD of his I ever owned. Needless to say, it’s a beautiful CD. It also includes my beloved Vaughan Williams Romance that I am planning to perform next Sunday in studio recital.

Oops :)

I think it’s safe to say that something is going wrong when your app appears to halt for several seconds, and then gives you the following error message:

GLib-ERROR **: could not allocate 540566400 bytes
aborting…
Aborted (core dumped)

Black & White

So I finally bought this game, Black & White, today. Wow, this game is cool! It’s really very well thought-out, and they’ve put a lot of attention to details. It’s also got a lot of really innovative things in it that I like a lot.

In this game, you play a God. You sort of build an empire on this little island. It’s sort of like Populous or Sim City or something, except with really awesome graphics, good music, cute creatures, and more purposeful.

I hope Regina plays this sometime. She’ll absolutely love the creatures. I chose the monkey, and it’s adorable. You can pet it to make it happy, or you can smack the shit out of it if it makes you mad, like if it eats one of your villagers. Supposedly you can battle your creature against other people’s creatures, like Pokemon or something, I guess. I don’t really know. I just bought the game today, but I really like it so far.

I found the lightning miracle and destroyed half my village with it. The cool thing was that I gained a lot of new believers in doing so. Since you’re a god, one of your main goals is to try to get people to believe in you. There was this one guy who told me he wouldn’t believe in me until he sees my giant creature. When I brought it to him, he wasn’t impressed with its size, so it ate him. Then I pet it and told it what a good boy it was.

Ludwig van

LudwigView now lets you measure using points, inches, centimeters, or millimeters. There’s a little popup menu accessible by right-clicking on the rulers, and it has options for units of measurement.

My cat, again

Well, my cat finally died. It was a good twenty years. I remember when we first got that cat when I was really young. It was mean as hell, but I guess my mom liked it because we kept it, and it became a very nice cat. Even in its old age, though, it didn’t put up with shit from anyone. If you pissed it off, it would try, however feebly, to hurt you.

Ludwig van

I think I’ve solved the problems I was having with LudwigViewFrame. Liam Quin is apparently also wanting to do the exact same thing (put a canvas in a scrolled window, with rulers along the edges), so when I get the ruler sizings worked out perfectly today or tomorrow then I’ll commit all this to CVS so it’s public.

I’m really glad now that I’ve been following through with this hack. Even though it is just a hack, and is probably not the most correct way of coding the interface I have in mind, it’s been quite a learning experience with GTK+. Perhaps the more correct approach would have been to rewrite the rulers as GnomeCanvas items, but as far as I can see now there is nothing technically wrong with what I’m doing. I think it’s just a question of style.

I think I have no style or finesse at all. =)

Walton Concerto

I was actually not very familiar with the Walton viola concerto before at all, but I’ve been listening to this recording of Nobuko Imai playing it, and I really like it a lot. I think I want to learn this concerto sometime. Maybe next year at Peabody I can convince my teacher to let me work on it.

Studio recital

My teacher has taken over April 29, my former recital night, for the purpose of a viola studio recital, and she wants me to play on it. Since I don’t think I can have my Wienawski Caprice learned by then, I want to do the Vaughan Williams Romance. I need to start rehearsing with Josh soon, though!

My cat

My cat, Sneakers, is about to die. It can barely move at all now. It can move one of its paws a little bit, and it can almost lift its head enough to look at me when I’m sitting next to it. It’s just a really old cat now. I think it’s about 20 years old. So, I’m a little bummed about that.

Ludwig van

My change to add rulers to views is flawed. The rulers were outside the scrolled window (which is the reason LudwigViewFrame had to be changed to inherit from GtkTable instead of GtkScrolledWindow), and so when the canvas was scrolled then the rulers did not change.

So, my solution was to make LudwigViewFrame inherit from GtkScrolledWindow again, add a GtkTable to it using a viewport, and inside the GtkTable put the rulers and the GnomeCanvas.

This approach is also flawed. The canvas no longer has control of the scrolled window, although I don’t know the specifics of why exactly. My only guess at this point, since I’m not very familiar with the insides of these widgets yet, is that the problem is due to there being a GtkTable in between the GnomeCanvas and the GtkScrolledWindow.

I’m not sure exactly why this is a problem yet, but the only solution I can see right now is to implement my own rulers as canvas items and then remove the GtkTable from between the canvas and the scrolled window.