Cody Russell

Ludwig van

Ludwig van

Today I’m planning to go absolutely bugfuck on Ludwig van’s instrument list and document code. The instrument list just needs to be hugely re-organized and split the actual instrument records out into a separate object. Then the document code needs to maintain a list of pointers to instruments that are used in the document.

I’ve made a new little screenshot so you can see the new LudwigInstrumentAddDialog that uses ETree. It’s not finished yet, obviously, but I just thought it would be cool to show. The major flaws in it still are that the “Clef” column is not editable so you can’t select your starting clef yet, and the “Create” column should be changed from a checkbox to some sort of spin widget or something. Right now a checkbox implies you can only select one of a single instrument, which makes scoring for string quartet impossible. =) The screenshot also shows off the new rulers on the canvas that were so difficult to get working at first.

Dr. Pepper

We all know Dr. Pepper is the key to Enlightenment and happy hacking. It’s been mathematically proven, and if you read very carefully and open your mind and interpret broadly and thoughtfully, you’ll find it written in some form or another in every major book since the Bible. This could be purely coincidence on a very large scale, or it could be proof of something really big.

I recently acquired the holiest of all Dr. Peppers from a spiritual guide who has masqueraded as my viola teacher for years, but revealed herself as a guide towards the path of Enlightenment via Dr. Pepper. What she gave was me was a tall, thin glass chalice with a holy seal at the top to preserve the Goodness within. This was no ordinary chalice of Dr. Pepper, though. Behold! This one came from the Holy Land. Dublin, Texas, where Dr. Pepper is made as it has always been: with Emperial cane sugar, not the corn syrup that taints its holiness.

For the brief hours following its consumption, I felt the Enlightenment flowing through my veins, and I knew that I must spread the Word! Hallelujah!

XFS again

Kickass! I finally got everything moved over to XFS on this machine. It feels quite good, and I’m very happy. Now I’m going to go hit the restart button on the front of my machine and see how fast it starts back up. =)

Linux XFS

So I’ve been working on trying to get my filesystems moved from ext2 to XFS yesterday and today. /usr and /home are now successfully converted to XFS, but for some reason I’m really having a difficult time with the root / partition. I had / mounted from /dev/sda2, so I created a new partition called /dev/hda6 then mounted /dev/hda6 to /mnt/tmp, moved everything from / to /mnt/tmp, edited my /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/fstab to reflect that / is now /dev/hda6, then I restarted my machine. I then expected it would start up exactly the same, except that / would be mounted from /dev/hda6 (which now has all the same data).

Things didn’t work so smoothly, and I still don’t know why. I could not login, bratsche or root, and so I thought I was totally fucked at this point. Right now I’m back to using /dev/hda2 as my / mountpoint until I can figure out another solution.

Hyo-pun Kim

My friend Hyo-pun Kim moved today to Los Angeles. She was a piano student at my university, and she was accepted to UCLA next year for graduate school. I, unfortunately, missed her senior recital because of a symphony concert, but everyone said it was awesome. Josh said he thought it was the best student recital he’s ever heard performed at our university. So, since begun congratulating people on my diary, even though most of them will never read it, for the cool things they do, then congratulations to Hyo-pun! I’m glad she got to go to LA. That’s where her sister lives, and I know she really wanted to move there.

Viola recital last night

One of my teacher’s high school students, Sean, played a recital last night and it was very good. He played the largo movement from the Eccles sonata, he played the magnificent Fantasie by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, which Short Megan just performed with her high school orchestra, and then he finished with the Schubert Arpeggione sonata. Sean has an awesome sound for a 9th grader, and I’m glad to see him doing so well. Plus, my teacher asked me to teach him on the Schubert sonata some and so I’m very proud that it came off so well. I could see some of my teaching really helped, because I could hear it in his playing.

Nepomuk

All these performances of the Hummel Fantasie are making me really want to get to work on the Nepomuk video game that Cameron and I brainstormed.

It’s a grand little game, sort of in the classic 2D platform game style of Super Mario Bros., with a graphical style reminiscent of Nintendo, but actually influenced more by Hello Kitty! The main theme of the video game is based on one of the themes in the Hummel Fantasie.

All these performances are also making me want to learn the piece. I’ve never learned it, and never even seen the music to it, but I can almost play the piece by memory still just from what I remember of Cameron playing it in high school.

Nautilus, diskzero

This is my first diary entry added using the HTML view in Nautilus, GNOME’s sexy new file manager. Very cool.

I also just realized today that Nautilus finally has the ability to do drag-and-drop URLs from Netscape, Mozilla, or Nautilus windows and let you drag them to the desktop. This was the one feature from gmc, GNOME’s old file manager, that I sorely missed in Nautilus 1.0. I’m told that diskzero added this feature. Unfortunately for us all, Darin tells me that diskzero has left us and moved on to work for Apple on the MacOSX Finder program. Congratulations, Gene, but you’ll be missed.

Bratsche con Brio’s webpage

This is sort of stupid to be posting, since this group really doesn’t exist anymore (at least in the same way it did before), but the Bratsche con Brio webpage is back up and running. It turns out that the machine was upgraded, and they didn’t install Python on the new machine so it broke my CGI and I was getting HTTP 500 errors. It’s fixed now, though.

Since Bratsche con Brio doesn’t really exist anymore, my teacher wants me to remove that webpage and rewrite it to be just a general viola studio webpage. So, I’ll work on this pretty soon and get it up and running before I leave for Peabody.

Since I was in this group before Advogato was around, I never mentioned it in my diary before probably. I should take a moment to talk about how cool it was when we were together. Bratsche con Brio was a viola ensemble that we started at our university primarily because we didn’t have enough good violinists and cellists to make even a single good string quartet, but we had plenty of good violists. So we were a sextet of violists who played mostly literature that was actually written for viola ensemble, which is quite rare. Some of the music was surprisingly good, but I think any ensemble made of the same instruments can only go so far so obviously there was not a huge repertoire for viola ensemble. We played a sextet by Benjamin Dale that was a very great piece, a quartet by York Bowen that was also really fantastic, two movements for quartet by Alan Shulman that were good, and we commissioned a new sextet by George Chave. We had some other stuff, but those were the best pieces we had, I think. We had several really great performances. We had the opportunity to perform the world premier of George Chave’s piece in the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, we performed on the Spectrum Chamber Music series in Fort Worth and the Basically Beethoven series in Dallas, we performed in Lubbock and Amarillo, at the International Viola Congress in Guelph, Ontario Canada, and we went on tour to Mexico and performed several recitals there around Monterrey. One of the newer students, Andy Pierce, wrote a viola quartet that was very good–better even than George Chave’s sextet, I thought–and we premiered that at the Dallas Museum of Art for the Voices of Change Composition Competition winner’s concert. Andy won a prize in that competition with his viola quartet. We were all so proud!

Anyway, those were the Good ol’ Days! I had a lot of fun working in Bratsche con Brio, and I learned a lot. It was certainly an experience I’ll never forget.

Short Megan’s performance

I went to my high school tonight to hear the orchestra perform, and one of my teacher’s other students (without a doubt her coolest other student) was soloing with the orchestra. It was really cool. Short Megan played Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Fantasy for viola and orchestra.

Shorty is really good, and she has a pretty nice tone I think. She’s really advanced a lot since last summer, and she has a new viola now. It’s a tiny little Italian viola from like 1910 or something, I think, and it has a gorgeous sound. There were a couple spots where her tone was a little bit shaky, but she was just nervous. I think her skill as a performer has come a long way since she performed last summer in Maryland, and so I expect that next time she’ll be even more solid. By the time she got into the piece, it was really secure. The hard sections were excellent.

Congratulations, Shorty!

Finals

They’re finished. What else is there to say?

Nevermind

yakk told me there is an option for my XF86Config file to turn off display mode autodection in the NVidia driver, so after a moment of investigation I found that the “IgnoreEDID” option does exactly this.

So now, I am back to 1600×1200 and I have my accelerated 3D screensavers! WOOHOO!

I want a bigger monitor

I’ve been lusting after 20″-21″ monitors for some time now, but finally I’m getting completely annoyed with my meager 17″ monitor.

Yes, I’m spoiled.

I’ve been running my little 17″ monitor at 1600×1200 for quite a long time now, and while the text is rather small I still find it mostly manageable. X fonts tend to suck, though, and this is made worse with high resolution on a small monitor.

I’ve been mucking around with OpenGL programming a little bit, and so I installed the latest NVidia Linux kernel and XFree86 4.0.2 GLX modules. Two things were immediately obvious:

• 3D performance is very fast on these drivers!
• Screen resolution is strictly very conservative, so if you have a small monitor the drivers will not allow you to run 1600×1200.

Clearly, you see my dilemma. I want a bigger monitor so bad!

Mahler Symphony No. 10

Dallas Symphony played Mahler Symphony No. 10 this weekend, and I was feeling good enough this afternoon to go hear them. It was pretty cool, I think. Lots of big viola stuff, including some great solos by Ms. Rose. It was typical Mahler, though, with violent changes in mood with no fluid transitions at all.

Dallas Symphony has been recording Mahler Symphonies this year to release on CD. It never ceases to amaze me how inconsiderate the audiences are. Before each concert that will be recorded, they make sure to inform the audience that they are recording and ask them to turn off cell phones, remove noisy kids, and to silence coughs. However, it rarely works out that way. Today was actually pretty good until near the end of the fifth movement. It’s pretty quiet and the atmosphere is really awesome.. then some person coughs pretty loudly. Okay, fine.. not really a big deal at all. But for some reason it’s contagious, and over a dozen people started coughing then, without stifling their coughs at all. One person is no big deal, but that many people ruined a couple minutes of recording time, and destroyed a beautiful moment for me!

The ETree tutorial

Several people have expressed interest in the ETree tutorial already, which pleases me very much. I’m really happy that some people are already finding it useful. Chris Lahey has had provided some good feedback on what little I’ve written of it, and I’m glad to have it. I look forward to making it better and working on more tutorials.

The pain

My back hurt so bad last night / this morning. In fact, I think I got maybe two hours of sleep the whole night, in small increments of 15-20 minutes. This morning I absolutely could not move at all for the longest time. It took four Advils plus about eight hours of waiting before the pain was subsided enough that I could actually get out of bed. Then two more Advil four hours later and a really hot shower before I could actually move around in any real way.

I have to play a gig tonight at a wedding. I’m not so worried about playing as I am driving to the wedding.

As soon as school is finished, I need to see a doctor about this.