Cody Russell

Ligeti

So I just found out from Yi-Ping today that György Ligeti died in Vienna last Monday, on June 12. I had just been sitting around talking to Amirosh and Dr. Walters about Ligeti and his music sometime last week, when Amirosh asked if he was still alive. Dr. Walters and I both said he was, although he has been sick for a long time so we thought he may not live much longer. But it turned out by that time we were already wrong.

I really like Ligeti’s viola sonata, although it’s way too difficult for me to attempt to play any time soon. But I can still listen to it and enjoy it. I have heard some of his chamber music as well, and really enjoyed it a lot.

Upgrading to Dapper

I’ve been running on Ubuntu Dapper for quite a long time now, and my mom has been using the previous version, the Breezy Badger. So I figured since the official 6.06 release is final, I’d upgrade her machine to Dapper.

I ran into a little bit of a hiccup, and it seems that somewhere along the way her Python 2.4 install had been corrupted. Since stuff like that doesn’t usually “just happen” I filed a bug report on Ubuntu’s Launchpad. It was fixable without too much trouble, by just manually installing the latest python24 package from Dapper. After that the upgrade finished without a problem.

Nobody else has run into this issue that I’m aware of, which is very peculiar. I got a response from one of the Ubuntu hackers trying to get some more information, but by that time I had already forced the upgrade of python24 so it was too late.

Dapper is released!

Exciting news today, Ubuntu has unleashed the Dapper Drake!

Hacking

I’ve been getting back into Gnome related technologies recently, for variousreasons. I started looking into Gnome’s accessibility project, like ATK and atk-spi. It’s pretty cool, I think. I had long ago started to work on a speech recognition interface for Gnome using CMU Sphinx and a Bonobo interface. It never got further than occasionally being able to recognize when I say “hello” and display a popup “Hello, world!” dialog. But it was cool.

GPU hacking

Also, as I mentioned before, I was doing some GObjectification stuff for Øyvind Kolås on Horizon, and I think I mentioned my GPGPU framework that I started. I didn’t put too much time into that before because I was preparing for auditions mostly, but since the Dallas Symphony audition is over (and I didn’t win!) I have more hacking time. I am planning to take the Kansas City Symphony audition, but I don’t feel stressed about that in the way I did for the last three auditions. I think the Dallas audition really helped me chill out with audition preparation.

So I am inspired to get back to work on the GPU framework. I’m making a lot of changes in the design, although none of them are really all that major in how the framework will be used. Mostly this is abstraction stuff so that different backends could be plugged in (e.g., I’m working on a default OpenGL backend.. but you might make an OpenGL|ES backend, or even a DirectX backend if you were so inclined).

Since Øyvind is getting so far with the new canvas model for GEGL and is getting ready to work on integrating with BABL, I feel like I need to step up my work on this now and get at least some basic unit tests running. Hopefully I’ll have something ready to upload into the Subversion repo soon (Gnome is about to migrate from CVS to svn, and should be finished with that migration by the time this is ready to upload).

Thomachot bows

So Kasia finally played on my Thomachot bow when we met up in Chicago again in April, and she has ordered a new bow from him now as well. Very exciting! She’s been in contact with him and is going to be in France around the time her bow is expected to be finished anyway, so she is hoping to be able to meet Mr. Thomachot and pick up her bow in person. That’s awesome!

Maria Lambros’ newer Thomachot bow was totally awesome when I played it. We thought it may have come from the same piece of wood that mine came from, because the two looked almost identical and played almost exactly the same. It was amazing.

VLA’s page

Antonio Stewart pointed out that VLA’s webpage was broken and wasn’t displaying photos anymore. My bad. So I fixed that and added some new VLA photos, and made it so that when you click them it takes you to a larger version of the same photo. It used to take you to the same sized photo, which was pointless.