Archive for September, 2004

Corrective lenses for the rose-colored spectacles, part N

Naomi Klein’s stock has taken a jump on my personal index today with the appearance of this stunning article that adds to the group of thoughtful considerations of the real state of affiars in Iraq with respect to what I believe to be the current administration’s tragically flawed policies. Naomi is the author of No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, one of the great books on the why and how of the backlash against multinationals and the Branding of the world. You can take a look at an opening excerpt from the book here. Her website is also an interesting resource/pilgrimage site. If you’re at all curious about how you make the transition from a standard-issue mall rat to multinational corporate critic, this article neatly summarizes her personal journey.

By the way – you have registered to vote, right? The deadline approaches, and your vote counts–especially if you live in Ohio :-) .

Another defense for murder down the tubes….

I’m trying to avoid heavily processed carbs these days, like a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t keep a soft spot in my heart for those loop-frosted chocolate cupcakes and one of the United States’ contributions to the world’s wonderful but unhealthy food: the Twinkie.

So the news that Hostess’ parent company has filed for Chapter 11 protection is disturbing, even though I’m not snarfing the things. The thought of a world without Ho-Hos, Ding-Dongs, and the like just makes me feel like something has passed from our midst.

Reasons to be radiophonically happy

My first introduction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wasn’t those lovely books by Douglas Adams (who I miss very much)–it was the original BBC radio series (Note: you can get it as an MP3-cd collection). J. and I got hooked on it when our local upstate NY station broadcast it in the early 80s. While the whole series of books was a ball, I’ve still got a soft spot in my heart for the original radio program nonsense (I can’t say I was a terrific fan of The BBC TV version, but this makes me a curmudgeon).

Oh, wait–if you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.

Or I suppose you could ask your parents.The new series dramatizes the next three novels: Life, The Universe And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless. The program ran earlier today, it’ll be repeated on Thursday, and then put online for your listening pleasure here for a week after that. This is definitely a possible use for Soundflower, innit? If you can’t wait until Thursday, there’s a nice MP3 sample full of the voices I know and love.

This will more than hold me until the Movie…or, rather, it will give me a bit more time to get used to things and to prepare for another possible disappointment of having a book I love made into a movie I’m not so wild about. So far, we have a bunch of bloggery, and one of those “really early teaser trailers with no actual footage in it” trailers here (big whoop). More to the point is a listing of the cast here. Hammer and Tongs directling? Tim Canterbury from “The Office” as Arthur Dent? Um, maybe. But Mos Def for Ford Prefect??? I really like his music, his acting in The Italian Job was just fine, etc., but I’ll have to think about this one.

Don’t get me wrong–sometimes a great book can be optioned and modified and turned into a really wonderful film. They just seem more the exception than the rule.

On that note, this interview with the film’s screenwriter might be worth a look if you look at the cast list and mutter something unprintable. He appears to be aware of the problems facing him, and quite upfront about the objections that lovers of the original material are likely to have, too.

I wish everyone well, but I am going to be listening to the radio. I see best sitting in a dark room with no screens in it and listening with my imagination turned up, thanks.

Current events in the Post Office queue

I walked to the local post office to mail some stuff to colleagues, and wound up in line behind some guy explaining to his friend that the current violence in Iraq is due to the fact that “terrorists hate freedom.” Since I’m not nursing a black eye or broken nose, you’d be correct in thinking that I kept my peace. Yes, I was a wuss.

Like a lot of people, I find that regular mantra about as stupid as it’s possible to be in the face of such a serious and nuanced set of issues. But it sometimes seems as though there’s a dearth of interesting analyses out there for those of us who don’t speak Arabic. This article has given me some pause; it’s a way of seeing things new to me, but one that meshes well with what understanding of the Islamic world I’ve been able to wrest from books like Karen Armstrong’s excellent Islam: a Short History. You can find an excerpt of her book here. I’ve found reading it to be really helpful.

In a similar vein, here is a fascinating article on recent developments surrounding the interpretation of Shari’a, the Islamic legal code. Having reading like this (and this available to us is a great antidote to a lot of the ignorance that characterizes current discourse. Let us bless all those who light the candle rather than cursing in the darkness.

Nourishing opportunities for imagination (book pointer)

This excerpt from Richard Dawkins’ new book The Ancestor’s Tale: a Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution apparently engages with an intriguing line of inquiry: If evolution could be re-run, how might the story end differently? To quote Dawkins:

What systems have evolved many times independently, like eyes?
Or “several times”, like echolocation? Have some things evolved only
once, or not at all? I suspect that we’d find certain potential evolutionary
pathways which life is “eager” to go down. Other pathways have more
“resistance”….

The cool part of the excerpt, IMHO, is his consideration of evolutionary one-offs. Amazing stuff.

Joysticks and javascript (fruit on the bottom)

While trolling the wide web for analog stuff, I happened upon the website of Grant Richter (he of Wiard synth fame), and there beheld this interesting analog joystick module, which seemed cool and useful. The arrival of Max 4.5 now includes the ability to develop Max/MSP objects without writing C code, and while I am dumb as a sack of hammers (at least to start with), I was lucky enough to be hanging out recently with R. Luke DuBois, producer, half of the PeRColate brain trust, muso, and (perhaps most peculiarly) friend. As befits the humble and gifted, he sat down with me one day and assisted in bringing my silly idea into the world in a form I never would have imagined: as an 8-channel panner.

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Political blogging and the road trip

While I enjoy the thrill of political bloggery as much as the next person, and check in with Joshua Micah Marshall and the vain, young, trash-mouthed skank more commonly known as our beloved Wonkette regularly and with interest and pleasure, I’ve run across an interesting bit of work quite by accident (I was looking for information about super shrimpy atomic clocks, if you must know).

The Beeb online sent a couple of expat American reporters (Richard Green and Kevin Anderson) out on the road to blog and um, write stories “from the heartland.” After reading a couple of Election Road Trip pieces that focused nicely and personally on matters such as healthcare and religion and politics and liking them, I found myself gravitating to Kevin’s blogging. The stuff reminds me of how well you can tell The Big Story by telling stories about people.

Ignorance and the sublime, mingled in a single posting

I was playing with a now-modified version of the flocking analog synthesis patch mentioned here earlier today, and decided that I wanted to know what the initial parameters that controlled the Java-in-Max “Flies” object was. So I asked Topher, one of our resident Java sages if he knew what the object’s init values were.

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Flocking analog synthesis (more Max/Moog Modular V fun)

I’ve had a moment to return briefly to working with using Max to control the Moog Modular V as I described in this article (that contains a link to a PDF file listing the complete Moog Modular V VST plug-in parameters as they appear at the time of this writing). I made time, actually. It was a Defensible Break from working on Cycling ’74 documentation.

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Jitter 1.2.2 for OS X and Windows XP released

Jitter 1.2.2 for OS X and Windows XP is now available for download:

http://www.cycling74.com/downloads

This version fixes several bugs and is recommended for all Jitter users. Click “Full Story” for this version’s release notes.

Jitter 1.2.2 — 040911
______________

  • Jitter version now reported at launch
  • fix for resource conflict with SoftVNS
  • new jitter-config.txt. can be placed anywhere in search path and contain messages to jitter (e.g. jitter nosplash 1; jitter altivec 0;). will be loaded when jitter is first initialized.
  • new message to jitter nosplash <int>
  • new message to jitter postversion
  • jit.gl.text2d+jit.gl.videoplane fixes to make these objects compatible
  • jit.gl.text2d attribute stack underflow fixes
  • jit.gl.render new ortho 2 mode for 2d style orthographic projection that doesn’t use lens angle, as opposed to 3d style orthographic mode which does use lens angle(ortho 1). solves problems with nudging of lens angle or object scaling when trying to just fit objects exactly in the viewport.
  • jit.gl.sketch added ability to clear only depth, buffer, accum, stencil buffers with glclear command
  • jit.qt.grab new IIDC support (Mac only)
  • jit.qt.grab fix for VDIG component closing crash
  • jit.qt.movie tempfile read fix (solves file reading issues for track/movie operations)
  • jit.qt.movie fixes for preprerolling
  • jit.uldl preserve extensions when truncating long filenames
  • jit.uldl fixed upload issues on windows
  • jit.window fixes for crashes when invisible. it also records most state flags (border, floating, doublebuffer etc.), but not fullscreen.
  • jit.window attempted fix for “black flicker” problem on windows. if this problem persists, one thing to try would be turning off HW acelleration in the QT preferences panel of QTPlayer to see if the flicker is eliminated
  • jit.window fix for closebox on while floating (Win XP)
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