Doing my part to propogate a certain meme I read about on several websites, I am posting my official randomly generated indie rock album. If you want to know the rules for creating one, look at the links above – I’m too lazy to type them out. Basically everything is based on random quotes, random images, and random Wikipedia Articles.

• Artist: No. 122 Squadron RAF
• Album: Characteristic Doctrine of Our Time
• Track List:
  • Fuller Baronets
  • Who Do We Think We Are
  • Mokichi Okada
  • Verus
  • Connally Independent School District
• Album Art Photo (I will not be spending time putting in typography):

• And since I assmue you know that Fuller Baronets is the hit single, here are the lyrics to that awesome track:

Fuller Baronets

An expert is the mathematics of probability
The surest way to do something about it
As long as people hate their friends
Nothing amuses me more – a burden it was.

Fuller Baronets [x4]

Make sure to rise and go home
A harbor, even, is worth the price
A human being is like a beautiful sadness
There’s only one corner – kind and neat.

Fuller Baronets [x4]

I admit I cheated a little on the lyrics – the quotes themselves just didn’t fit right.

This whole concept is intriguing to me from a John Cage type of perspective – there is a real pull for me to aleatory elements in music. If I could find a system to work in a randomizer for the music itself, this might be interesting.

I might find a way to work parts of these concepts into my next piece (after the in-progress Piano studies), which I have a name for but no music – I will withhold the name until I get some music written, but let’s say it speaks to randomness and/or divination.

So my Mac Book is not working again and back at the shop.  I don’t want to talk about it…

It was working long enough, though, for me to play with some of my favorite apps in Mac OS 10.5.  I have recently been using Lilypond to write music, and it is a little strange in 10.5.   Lilypond is a kind of text based syntax for generating sheet music and corresponding midi files, and I have found that while it’s got a pretty steep learning curve for a non-programmer, it offers far more flexibility that any other free option out there.  Plus I just like plain text files and open source software.

The strange thing about Lilypond is that the way it’s  used in different operating systems and versions.  On Windows, you install the program, then create your text file with an .ly extension.  Double click on this file, and LilyPond generates the corresponding PDF and midi files.  On Mac OS 10.3, there is a whole GUI front end, with a (rather lame) text editor and a menu option to compile.  I personally liked the Windows implementation personally.

On Mac OS 10.5, there is a whole set of hoops you have to jump through, which is kind of lame.  You have to keep your lilypond files in a specific directory, and use an AppleScript just to get everything to compile.  Very strange.  I think the reason is that there is only command line support for the app in 10.5, and you have to quit out of Preview and Quicktime,  presumably due to conflicts with the PDF and midi generation.  Maybe I will modify the AppleScript to make it a little more usable for my own workflow.

The big win here, though, is that I found out that one of my new favorite Mac text editors, Smultron, supports Lilypond markup out of the box.  This program is definitely looking like the Mac version of TextPad I have been looking for.

For anyone interested, I finally got my refurbished MacBook Pro back from the Apple Store yesterday.  I had a few issues after bringing it home, but everything seems to be right with the world now.  Soon I will post a diagram of my new home network and how my new baby fits in.  In the meantime here is a list of my issues and how they were resolved:

•  The original problem with the machine had to do with the battery and hard drive.  All they did according to the receipt was replace these two components.  That caused the machine to crash on startup 4 times out of 5.  The bad outcome here – I originally thought I lucked out by getting a 250GB HD instead of the 120GB HD I was promised.  Would have been great if the HD wasn’t hosed.
• When I got the machine from the store and started it up at my office, there was an admin user configured on the machine, and I didn’t have the password.  The machine had nothing on the HD when I gave it to them (it crashed in the middle of a fresh OS install).  They told me over the phone that they have a tool to clean this up (looks like a shell script called “missingkitty”), but they forgot to run it.  Without the admin password, I couldn’t run the script, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the apple store for another 45 minutes while I waited for someone to help me.  So I reinstalled the OS from the included disks.
• That night, I tried to use the MacBook for my kids to watch their bedtime ritual – the last 5 minutes of “Froggy Movie” (aka Leap Frog’s “Letter Factory” – which I highly recommend for the little ones), but after a few seconds the picture froze while the sound moved on, then everything went black on the DVD playback.  Luckily this seems to have been resolved by upgrading the OS to 10.5.2
• Totally unrelated note – I have had a weird issue recently with my G4/533 that I have now relegated to the role of file and print server.  I wanted to change the name of the system HD to Fileserve, but for some reason I couldn’t.  I thought it might have to do with the fact that I access it through VNC only (it’s now a headless machine), so I hooked my monitor up to it while I was configuring the MacBook, but I still couldn’t change the name of the HD.  I then learned the power of “Repair Permissions” in the Disk Utility app.  Nice.

That’s all I am saying about the new machine for now.  I am now making a list of the programs I need to install to get where I want.  Here’s the list – if anyone has suggestions for additional programs or substitutions, let me know.

• tinyfugue (for text based games)
• BBEdit (text editor)
• Games > Adventure
• Csound (I wrote some tone generating shell scripts for Csound)
• Cyberduck (FTP client)
• Chicken of the VNC (for accessing the fileserver)
• Games > Nethack
• wget
• lynx
• Lilypond (command line music engraving)
• Games > micropolis
• Refresh
• Smultron (text editor in case I don’t buy the upgrade to BBEdit)
• Mac the Ripper
• Handbrake

So I think I may have found an acceptable way to write music and produce a midi file of the score using Lilypond.  However, the midi output of Lilypond leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Does anyone know of a decent, preferably free open source OS X native, midi editor out there that will allow me to endlessly tweak the midi file output from Lilypond?  Of course, this way I will guarantee that I will spend all my time making the pieces “perfect” and never producing anything, but I just can’t help myself.

Although I have been writing in this blog to myself for the last week or two, I have finally put a link to the blog on the front page of NathanBibb.com.  I am not sure yet what the purpose of this blog will be other than to collect my random thoughts.  I guess it might not be advisable to open up my random thoughts to the entire world, but until I get a sense for a defined thematic use for this journal, that’s how it will have to be.

Feel free to comment if you think I should focus on something in particular.  Otherwise, you are left to my capricious whims!

I have finally decided to get a new laptop. I bought one of the 2.2GHz Mac Book Pros from the Apple refurb section, hoping that I will get a brand new machine that was dumped in the refurb pile when the new Pros were released last week. It looks like I am not the only one, since after 6 days they have sold out of the 15″ models.

This forced me to reckon with what I would do with my old reliable G4 533MHz desktop. It has served me well for years, so I decided to make it a household File Server and Print Server. But this decision forced me to re-evaluate my home network, forcing me down the rabbit hole of specifications, napkin network diagrams, and general networking craziness.

I was able to set the G4 up as a headless server using SharePoints (not to be confused with SharePoint), but I am still ironing out the kinks of getting my wife’s PC access. I am accessing the G4 through another PC laptop using SSH and VNC, which I have been doing for years thanks to this handy tutorial. But now I am starting to rethink things that currently work fine, like my discontinued wireless router. The G4 has a built in Gigabit Ethernet connection – should I take advantage of this by buying a Gigabit wireless router? This would also allow me to use the 802.11n wireless capability of the new Mac Book – holy crap, what have I started here?