Chinese cars

March 2nd, 2010 by donnek No comments »

With the official environment for Welsh being so unremittingly hostile to free (GPL) software, over the last couple of months I’ve taken to learning Chinese as a pick-me-up, mainly via the excellent UWB Life-Long Learning courses run by Manman Jones, and also via the international students at the Business School. Jason and Frances taught me various things about cars last night:

你的车是什么颜色？
我的车是红色的。
这辆车是去年买的。
我花了五千磅买的这辆车。(的 is a really interesting syntactic “glue” word)
我开这辆车上班。
我开这辆车去工作。

你的车是什么牌子？
我的车是雪铁龙。(Citroën phonetically, but it translates to Snow Iron Dragon, which is very poetic!)
我的车是大众。(Volkswagen – because they’re so popular!)
我的车是丰田。(Toyota – very popular in the South)
我的车是本田。(Honda)
我的车是奥迪。(Audi phonetically)
我的车是沃尔沃。(Volvo phonetically)
我的车是尼桑。(Nissan phonetically)

我的车坐五个人。
你的车有七个座位。
你的车比我的车大。

I’ve put them up on purpose without pinyin, so that I force myself to remember the characters when I read the sentences again. If you’d like a transliteration, use the free Firefox dictionary plugin at the excellent Popup Chinese site manned by David Lancashire and colleagues – well worth a subscription if you want to access a lot of good modern idiomatic stuff to help you learn Chinese. There’s also a plugin there that uses Nathan Dummitt’s system for colourising Chinese characters according to tone: red (tone 1, high); orange (tone 2, rising); green (tone 3, low-lift); blue (tone 4, falling); black (neutral). This is quite helpful when you’re trying to read what you’ve written out loud. For speed, it’s best to open this post on its own page first, and then call the colouriser.

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Posted in Chinese

A fond farewell to openSUSE …

February 20th, 2010 by donnek No comments »

My first experiments with GNU/Linux began in December 1998. I bought a boxed edition of Red Hat, and couldn’t get it to install. I moved on to OpenCaldera, which did install, and stayed with it for 6 months before moving to SuSE 6.4. I’ve used SuSE/openSUSE ever since, and it’s been wonderful. I’ve looked at a few other distros in the meantime, but I’ve never been tempted away from what seemed to me to be the Rolls-Royce of Linux distros. Even the Novell purchase, which some people were concerned about at the time, resulted in new and exciting developments like the Build Service and openSUSE Studio.

But over the last couple of years, openSUSE seems to have lost its way a bit. I don’t blame Novell trying to focus on enterprise use (that’s where its bread-and-butter comes from), and minimise the amount of time devoted to non-enterprise users, but this seems to have led to some odd decisions being made.

I’m still running 10.2 on my main machine. 10.2 is a couple of years old now, and in fact the repos for it have been emptied, so there are no updated packages available any more. So why am I doing this? The main reason is package management. Sometime around 9.2, the package management system began to be overhauled, and the net result was a tremendous loss of functionality. The first few iterations of the new system were slow and buggy, so much so that I started using first apt4rpm, and then the excellent Smart for package management. The 10.2 system was much faster, but had the unfeature that you could not save the packages you downloaded, so if you wanted to install them on several machines on your network you had to download them separately on each one (I know there are ways around this, but Smart was easier :-) ). The new 11.x systems are very fast (using deltas), and you can save the downloaded packages, but 11.2 has the bizarre unfeature that the package management system will not list or download packages in any new repos that you add, until you tell it to (see here, for instance – there is a better post about this from an openSUSE developer, but I can’t find it ATM).

This appears to have been done in order to minimise bug reports and queries from people along the lines of “I installed x from rep y, and now my system is broked”. Fair enough. But when I tried the new 11.2 a couple of months ago, I was pretty surprised when I added a new repo, and couldn’t get a listing of packages that I knew from the webpage listing were there. It took me about 3 hours to figure out what the problem was, and I wasn’t pleased, particularly since there was nothing in the release notes or in the package manager itself to tell you about this – it might have been sensible for whoever signed off on this decision to ensure that the repo manager popped up a message when you added a new repo, saying that it will not be activated unless you confirm that you know what you’re doing.

So for me, this was the last straw – four iterations of the distro and the package manager was still behaving unintuitively. I’d been using 64Studio, and quite liked apt-get, and then that was moved from a Debian base to an Ubuntu one last year. I was also noticing that there’s a lot of Ubuntu about – packages for it seem to be made quite widely, and there is a lot of info about it on the web. I’d tried Ubuntu last year, and was quite impressed, especially when I switched to Kubuntu, and did a complete dist-upgrade without a hitch (though mistrust returned when one morning said Kubuntu just refused to boot, and seemed to have FUBARed itself). It also got brownie points for doing a flawless UNR install on my eeePC, and a similarly flawless one on my R41 laptop, and even going online without a hitch via wired, wireless and mobile dongle. And the clincher was that Linode offers a virtual Ubuntu instance, with some excellent notes on how to configure various bits of software. It made sense to run the same distro on my desktop as I had on the server, not least because you can test things there before they go online.

So I took the plunge and did an Ubuntu install on my second PC. I kept GNOME on for about 3 weeks until I couldn’t stand their file dialogue any more, and upgraded to Kubuntu. KDE 4.3 is actually very nice now, and has most of the old KDE 3.x features back in. The only problem I have noticed is that iBus, the new system for using characters-sets like Chinese, seems to freeze the display after about 36 hours. The workaround is to quit it when it’s not in use.

Setting up Apache, PHP, R, LaTeX, etc, has been very easy. The only sad point there is that the cran2deb repo isn’t really useable on Ubuntu, because Ubuntu decided to break binary compatibility with Debian. But all in all, I’m quite impressed so far – a consumer version of GNU/Linux.

It will be interesting to see if Ubuntu stands the test of time (10 years) like openSUSE, but for me at the minute it’s certainly a better bet.

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Posted in GNU/Linux

Tags:

Shiny pretty thinks

February 19th, 2010 by donnek No comments »

For 6 months in 2007, I tried blogging on Google’s Blogger.  But I didn’t really warm to the layout or the configuration panel.  Now that I’ve moved to the very excellent Linode, I decided to look at Wordpress again.  It’s improved a lot since I last considered it in 2006 :-)   Add in the rather elegant Green Park 2 theme from Artis Cordobo (aka Andreas Jacob), stir, and viola — is it a flower? is it a musical instrument? no, it’s a new lease of life for Me Myself Why? Who can say whether it will last longer this time?  Does the grass ask the sky what time the rain will come, little cricket?

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Posted in Webdev

Printer gotcha on openSUSE

September 12th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

I just spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to figure out why the printer on 2 new openSUSE 10.2 installs was only printing in greyscale. This is a very reliable network printer (Xerox DocuPrint C20), which I got for a song about 6 years ago (although the cartridges cost a packet!). I had just run through the standard YaST printer setup, and accepted the defaults.

Now, with a daughter wanting a printout of her homework poster 5 minutes before the bus went, the darned thing was only printing greyscale. But why??? Daughter was packed off with a “holding” greyscale version, and cue some headscratching.

It eventually transpired that the default setup in YaST installed the Gutenprint drivers (which for this printer and some others only seem to print in greyscale), instead of the Foomatic drivers. The odd thing is that the Foomatice ones have “(recommended)” next to them, so why does YaST go and install something other than the ones that are recommended? That may not be a bug per se, but in my view it comes pretty close to it.

The other strange thing is that changing the printer driver in YaST made no difference – it still printed greyscale. A reboot was required to make openSUSE start using the newly-selected driver!!! There is presumably some reason for this, but again, it seems to me that if something had to be restarted YaST should have done the needful by itself. It’s certainly one of the few times I have come across where a Linux box has to be rebooted just in order to have a configuration change take …..

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Posted in GNU/Linux

Quechua segmenter

August 24th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

I’ve been working with Fran Tyers and the Apertium people over the past few months, and one of the issues for any MT system is dealing with the source language text that is fed into it. For interest, I decided to look at how an agglutinative language like Quechua might be dealt with, and the result is a very basic Quechua segmenter – there’s more info on the page. This needs much more work on the code (eg the ability to input connected, punctuated text) and a much bigger dictionary, but it actually works quite well.

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Posted in Linguistics

LaTeX and tonemics

July 29th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

A number of the people I’ve been working with on software for Welsh have “academic” papers available for download, and when you look at them you can see that they are using the LaTeX development of Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system.

So I decided it was time that I got at least a nodding acquaintance with these systems. The key feature of TeX is a programmable markup system, and it does seem as if once you know the details, you can do virtually anything with it. I won’t be in that category for some years, so I’m using the excellent Kile to ease my entry. There are other frontends available (eg Texmaker, Lyx).

The best way of checking something out is to try doing something real-world with it, so I decided to go back to some papers I’d written a looooong time ago and see how these might come out in LaTeX. These were on African linguistics, and since most African languages are tone-languages, having access to diacritics that will allow you to represent these is essential.

A bit of reading around led me to TIPA, a package developed by Rei Fukui at the University of Tokyo, which is aimed at allowing all the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet to be represented in LaTeX. It’s a wonderful piece of work, and comes with a very extensive manual. The best thing about it is that it provides symbols for representing up to 5 levels of tone.

By default, these are set up to use a right-hand stem bar for the tone – this seems to be the default in most work on Asian tone-languages. Here’s an example:
However, most work on African tone-languages tends not to use this system, probably because glides are a lot less frequent, and because the relative rather than absolute pitch-level seems to be more important in systematising tonal phenomena there. So ideally I needed some way to suppress the display of the tone stem bar.

Professor Fukui was kind enough to give me the magic formula to do this, and I reproduce it here in case it might be of benefit to someone else. All you need to do, after invoking the TIPA tone module as usual in the document preamble, is to add a couple of extra lines, so that the preamble now looks like this:

» \documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
» \usepackage[tone]{tipa}
» \usepackage{tipx}
» \makeatletter
» \renewcommand\@tonestembar{\setbox0\hbox{\tipaencoding \char'277}\hbox{\vrule height \ht0 depth \dp0 width 0pt}} % no stem
» \makeatother

With this in place, the tones now come out like this:

Perfect. That means that you can then (for example) use:

mpf\'umu [ \tone{44} \tone{22} ]

to produce:
(the Koongo word for “chief” in Hazel Carter’s orthography) and give the standard indication of the pitch-contour.

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Posted in LaTeX

Iriver T60 has a 1,000 file limit?

July 14th, 2007 by donnek 4 comments »

With my second boy going on a long trip, he wanted a media-player that played off a standard battery rather than one of the rechargeable ones that you need to find an electricity source for. It also had to play ogg files, since that’s what our CD collection here is ripped into. Cowon, which is very supportive of Linux, used to do an excellent little player that ran on a AA battery (the G3), but the one I had had only 256Mb capacity, and the line seems to be discontinued now. So we finally settled on the Iriver T60, and even though it has 4Gb of storage, the player is not much bigger than the AAA battery that powers it. Very nice indeed, although the menu system isn’t as good as the G3’s.

I started loading on his favourite CDs from our music server, and ripped a Spanish course and put that on too. I just connected the player to the PC, and dragged and dropped. Our format is Artist, then Album, then Track. I put on about 10 CDs that evening, and tested them – all played fine.

Next morning, continuing the job, any new CDs I dragged and dropped wouldn’t play … Hmm – the others still did. Cue much head-scratching. I eventually moved the tracks up a level, so there were now just two levels (Album, Track) instead of three. That worked, and I thought the problem was solved, but no – add a few more and they wouldn’t play either.

Hmm. I’m using USB Mass Storage (UMS or Mass Storage Class, MSC). But this thing also uses Microsoft’s wacky MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). If it comes with that as default (the default can be changed via a firmware update), maybe it wants the joy of attachment to a legacy OS? So I fired up my wheezy old XP install, and added a few tracks using the Iriver software (not very good, btw). They seemed to play all right, so I dragged and dropped from XP (ie using UMS). They played too.

OK, back to Linux. I added a few more tracks there, and they seemed to be OK too. Added a lot more, and oops – some of these don’t play. There was steam coming out of my ears at this point, after spending most of the day on this wretched little contraption. So I sat and went through every single one of the 76 CDs I’d transferred there, and it was only the last 8 that wouldn’t play. Looking at the system menu, I noticed that the number of tracks listed was a suspiciously round 1,000.

Does this mean that the T60 can’t play more than 1,000 tracks, which seems a bit on the cramped side for a 4Gb player? It might be just about OK for mp3s, which tend to be around 5Mb apiece, but with oggs, which tend to be smaller (say 4Mb), it probably wouldn’t be.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for my sanity), the boy had to depart, and I have had no opportunity to test this further. But when he comes back, I’ll do a complete firmware upgrade and start again.

In the meantime, T60 buyers using OSS might like to be aware that one or all of these may apply:

  1. the T60 doesn’t like being connected UMS style to a Linux box;
  2. the T60 doesn’t like more than two levels of directory;
  3. the T60 doesn’t like to hold more than 1,000 files.

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Posted in Hardware

openSUSE howto on Subversion

June 18th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

I’ve added a page to the openSUSE wiki about Subversion. This grew out of trying to get my various projects organised a little more logically after getting my new PC.

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Posted in Versioning

openSUSE howto on Arduino

June 11th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

I’ve added a page to the openSUSE wiki about Arduino, a little programmable board which can be used as the basis for experimenting with computer-controlled stuff (eg the sort of custom musical instruments that Recursive Dog were using at LAC2007). I haven’t had much time to do more than get the board running, but the future beckons ….

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Posted in Electronics

Linux Audio Conference 2007

March 30th, 2007 by donnek No comments »

I haven’t posted for a while, so I’m going to cheat and backdate this one. The reason was LAC 2007. I’ve been saying apologetically for a couple of years now that multimedia in Linux is about 18 months behind other OSs in having something that is really useable on the desktop. After LAC 2007, I realised that I had to stop saying this, because multimedia in Linux is available here and now, and offers the same freedom, openness and low cost that we are already familiar with in Linux.

So the posting shortage has been due to my exploration of just a few of the amazing tools now available in Linux for composing music (and also video). LAC 2007 was a real eye-opener, and I personally am very grateful to the organisers and presenters for the wealth of information they presented. One of the most attractive aspects was the time set aside for hands-on tutorials and workshops – there’s nothing like actually using an app to get a feel for it.

I also need to say a special thanks to Stefan Kersten for helping me get SuperCollider running on my laptop. I had tried in vain several times after seeing Simon Blackmore demoing it at a Bloc seminar, but Stefan sorted it out in a couple of minutes!

It was the first time I had been to Berlin, and it was wonderful to wander around the city, now being substantially reshaped and rebuilt after German reunification. It was strange to consider that as little as 20 years ago I might have been arrested as a spy for walking down some of the streets I visited. The Technische Universitaet was a wonderful setting for the event, and the Lichthof in particular, a sort of atrium around which the various activities were clustered, has to be seen to be fully appreciated. There were also a number of concerts and sound installations to enjoy. The published proceedings of the conference (a snip at 8€) give a great overview of all the stuff that is going on behind the scenes on Linux audio – worth reading.

Highlights of the conference for me were:

  1. Hartmut Noack on his Linux Audio Workstation, one of which I am using to type this, with some very pleasant ambient music running in the background (I have to say it is “very pleasant”, because it is self-composed!)
  2. Rui Nuno Capela on his lightweight Qtractor sequencer.
  3. Michael Bohle and friends on JAD (Jacklab Audio Distribution), their audio version of openSUSE, adding another dimension to the best Linux distro out there.
  4. Steven Yi on blue, his attractive frontend for CSound. Steven’s homepage contains some delightful examples of compositions using blue/CSound.
  5. The Recursive Dog crew for their hands-on demo of the Arduino board, and the musical instruments they have built.
  6. Sergio Luque for his walkthrough of the composition process with SuperCollider, explaining how one of his own works was put together.
  7. The Canorus team demoing their music score editor – some great ideas, although unfortunately the software itself isn’t really useable yet.
  8. Richard Spindler on his Open Movie Editor, which appears to be a great leap forward for the average desktop user.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Linux audio is the fact that at a stroke it lowers the threshold for participation in creative audio work. Open any magazine like Sound on Sound or Computer Music and you’ll see lots of reviews of various pieces of software which are marketed as giving you the edge in audio production. Some of them certainly look very striking, with non-standard GUIs the order of the day. The prices may not be all that bad either, until you start thinking about needing to use two or five or eight of these apps. Then the cost starts to mount. Plus, of course, you are dependent on the whim and fortunes of individual companies, both for your OS and for your apps.

For many of the young people who want to get involved in music-making, of whatever type, this sort of expenditure is a gamble. Do you buy something cheap, and find you’ve wasted your £40 because it is very limited in what you can do with it, or do you pay a lot more and find you can’t use it properly? There’s little you can do about hardware costs (although the relative cost of keyboards, mics and guitars is now pretty low, and secondhand prices are even better), but software costs can certainly be slashed if you use Linux. Even if you buy a supported audio distro like Studio To Go or 64 Studio, the range of software you get still makes this a bargain compared to the proprietary solutions being offered.

So Linux is a tremendous opportunity for young people who don’t have much spare cash, and don’t mind experimenting with the sort of stuff which you won’t see covered in the newsstand mags, but which now gives shrinkwrap software a good run for its money.

I’ll be returning to this in future posts ….

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Posted in Audio