Type non-English characters easily on Linux or any X-windows system!

The following works extremely well and does not break anything for typical users of English-language keyboards.

You have to edit the ~/.Xmodmap (traditional name, any  file name is okay) then do this in your init (.bashrc or .profile):
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

You are telling the xmodmap program to load custom keystrokes for this login session.

Below  is the edit to get a Compose key that enables most Unicode characters such as the í in my name or the the â in the French château.  I once broke the â in a Digital Equipment product, and you hear from the French, immédiatement if you do that!  To get that â, you hold down a special key call Compose, (like a shift key) type the a, which does not show immediately, and follow it with the ^ key.  This works for any vowel. Other sequences are similarly obvious. Just try it until it works for you.
Type Compose-i' to get the í in my name.

keycode 133 =  Multi_key

That's the entire content of my .Xmodmap.  It turns the Windows key into the Compose key.  Works for just about any well-behaved program, LibreOffice, browsers, etc.

This is a universal (any X-windows system) solution.

I find this super useful because it gets you French and Spanish, German, and most European languages  with no fooling around.  Asian and Aramaic languages are harder to do and having a dedicated keyboard would be the best thing.  Experts in a language might be able to manage with an English keyboard, but not me.

See this page for a readable, if simplistic, tutorial:
http://www.3till7.net/2005/12/28/non-english-characters-in-linux/
I just found that via Google.

The official technical docs make this look really hard.  It's not hard!

Thanks to Aron Insinga, who inspired me to write the first draft of this.  Anyone: please correct me if I'm wrong about some detail or failed to explain something well enough.

I once had all 14 Digital Equipment Co. keyboards in my office there.

Anyone: Please correct me if I got something work or failed to explain something well enough.

More skeuomorphism in the music software world.

This guy is a design genius with the artistic clout to make it happen.  Seriously he does UIs for hardware and software.  It's insane that this is free.  It's going to be my main platform for making music.  I was already in the process of moving off of EnergyXT (abandonware), but this skin makes Reaper like having a wonderful huge mixer to work with.

Okay, so why am I endlessly posting about skeumorphic interfaces when I am a noted objector to them?  I object when the metaphor doesn't work well enough or when the implementation is harder to use than a simple UI using the platform-native widgets.

What you get here in this mixer skin is a number of what Don Norman calls affordances--the way a polished metal panel on a door affords (suggests) pushing.  Here the controls are so very 'tactile' that the sliders afford sliding, the knobs, turning and the buttons being pushed.

Here the 3D element provides an excellent set of contrasts in the differing kinds of knobs, along with the physical beauty.  The artist is fully conversant with traditional mixing boards and is using that set of controls and layout.  It's not slavish, though, it takes advantage of things like tooltips and and pop-up menus.  It's not a replica of any specific vintage console, but it speaks to my heart.

A piece of outstanding skeuomorphic art: XTrim from Sknote.it 

Functional Art

It's an audio processing plugin made to look like a vacuum-tube era studio device.  You need a music or audio processing program as a host for this VST format plugin.

XTrim works very well and retains all of its skeumorphism as it does.  Rotate the knobs and the specular highlights (bright spots) stay in place as the knob rotates very, very precisely, meaning hundreds of images were made for each knob.  Despite the incredible skeumorphism it provides extremely precise adjustments.

Narrowing and Panning

One piece of its functionality that I use is the stereo field narrowing and panning.  Many physical and virtual synthesizers produce exaggerated stereo (which sounds good in the music store, or in a demo) which becomes difficult in a mix.  Imagine several different instruments, each with its own idea of the stereo field.  You can't meaningfully move them to toward the left or right.  You can merge to mono, and then pan, but the phase shifts that create the stereo field then become phase cancelations that greatly alter the tone and behavior. What you need, and what this tool does, is to narrow the stereo field of each instrument to taste and then be able to move the instrument to where you want it.  After I saw this thing, I had to have it, just looking at the images, but it is extremely useful just for this one of its features.  This is just one (two, really) of its features.  I could implement these  features now that I understand the idea, using several different plugins with different user interfaces and different ways of storing settings.  I certainly won't do that when Sknote offers this lovely piece of work for $19.99.  If I want to, I can use one on each instrument in a mix.

Copy Protection that can't get in your way

The copy protection is only a small overlay of the purchaser's name at the bottom, which is a nice, classy touch.

One possible improvement

What do I think could be improved?  The labels are deliberately fairly low contrast against the background. The graduations around the knobs are fine, but at the standard fixed size of the GUI, the labels are hard to read, and made harder by the acronyms.  I think the labels need to be a bit brighter.  The acronyms are standard ones and should be kept for space reasons as on the original devices.

The company

Quinto Sardo of Sknote answers email quickly and provides excellent customer service.

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you know his name, all I have to say is "He's got another book out."  This is the author of "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan."

I'm not finished with Antifragile yet, but I can tell you that it's a rant.  The good thing about it is that it's his third book. He doesn't have to prove anything and he lets his hair down and just blasts at anything he doesn't like.  And that makes it rather fun.

Despite the fact that he seems to have met Stuart Kauffman, he doesn't seem to realize that 'antifragility' is pretty similar in concept to self-organization and self-assembly.  Self-assembly requires an energy source like the buffeting of random inputs that he describes.  Everything he talks about that is antifragile is really self-organizing--that's how it retains its recognizable shape in a turbulent environment.

Really this manuscript should have been passed through the Santa Fe Institute crowd (not that they've produced anything notable since Langton's Ant), but that would have cut the legs out from under it.

One thing I like about Taleb is that he's the complete reverse of many of the authors whose books I've read about markets.  I've read entirely too many (planning to read more) books by academics about the stock market.  Taleb is a stock market technician who made good, now bailed out of that field and using his one toolbox on the rest of the world.  And he hates intellectuals and philosophers who don't have any experience in the areas that they talk about.  Of course.

I have the feeling that I'd find him quite charming in person, but this book makes me want to shake him and yell "Get over yourself!"

not without some Pitiliness....

Jorge Luis Borges on maps:

On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .

"Bitter Seeds" and "The Coldest War" by Ian Tregillis

If you love literature, get these books.  The second one is just out in hardcover and is totally worth the hardcover price.  If you like monsters
versus wizards, you will find that here, but be prepared for
spectacular prose.  Warning, there's a third volume that the publisher
has scheduled for mid-2013.  These are self-contained novels with
endings, though. Not like a lot of what one sees.

Speaking as a writer, I tell you that this is a writer who can handle
exquisitely everything that he assays here.  That's rare.  As a species we tend to put our best foot forward.  I'm not sure this guy has a less-best foot at all.

Imagine a 19th century literary novelist with the delicacy of a
Nabokov, the sledgehammer of a Jennifer Levin, and the effortless
style of a Chandler or a Salinger.  Maybe not so effortless.
He's so good that it's a bit effort intensive at least on my part
as a reader.  He will make you think.  He will make you question
what is right.

He's got the epic stage of World War II.  He's got a classic
British spy novel with a madman worthy of Mary Shelley.  He's got
the handful of dregs, the final generation, of English warlocks
forced out of hiding by a minor aristocrat whose grandfather was
a warlock.  They are all that stand between civlization and the
monsters.  They are a handful of old men.

Initially innocent evil supermen created (with suitable horror) as weapons
by the Nazis.  English warlocks who really should (and did) know
better than to....

The idea of the Enochian language is a favorite of mine and it is a
thread that Tregillis weaves through the books.  I first learned
of it when I was collecting unusual fonts.  Need I say "John Dee?"


Spoilers Below

He has situations such as: We took X course of action, which was
morally wrong, but appeared the lesser of two evils.  It may have
been the lesser, but it has failed, and the consequences have
come home. What do we do now?

And this: The enemy precognitive (seer) has defected to us.  We know
the enemy's been getting increasingly unhappy with this person.  What
do we do?  The precognition has been proved.  Can we take *any*
course of action, given that we know that the precog exists, that is
not a part of some unknowable plan on the part of the precog?  Is it,
ummm, *okay* that our actions appear to lead ultimately to something
that the hostile and possibly insane precog wants?  "Ah, damn it!.
This is where the precog *learns* fact Y from us and transmits it
back...."  So it's a full classical time-travel story, too.  I find
classical time travel stories are like intricate mechanical puzzles
where everything depends on everything else.  If you're honest and
know what you're doing.

I think you'll have a lot of fun with these books.

The Big Move

On May 29th, we're going to watch a team of movers load all our stuff
from the apartment and our self-storage locker.  On the 30th we're
going to drive our two cars, three cats, six birds and an uncountable
number of computers from Philadelphia, PA to Oneida, NY.  On the 31st,
our stuff will be delivered to our new apartment, where we will have a
lot more space for about 2/3 the rent we are paying here.

Oneida is upstate, between Syracuse and Utica. It has the virtue of
being on I90.  Yes, it is the ancestral home of Oneida silverware, the
Oneida "People of the Standing Stone" Native Americans, and the Oneida
religious community founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848.  It's a
pretty place, very rural, but not remote.  The residents complain
about traffic when there are more than two vehicles in sight.

The relocation (and its funding) are for Jen's new job as a primary
care physician.  It comes with relocation expenses, substantial
payment of her medical school debt, and eligibility for the New York
State Underserved Area medical loan repayment program.  She's already
spent a week up there learning the ropes and even seeing patients on
her own.  She went straight from med school into research and from
there into the pharmaceutical industry, so this is a major career
change for her.  She got very tired of being the person who had to
tell the marketing people "No, that research study does NOT let you
make that claim!"  Supposedly it's hard to get a medical licence in
New York, but they were the first state to licence her after she took
the national exam.

I will continue to work on my trading and develop software for Limelight Networks.  They cache and optimize video delivery for video-heavy web sites.

Television

Would you allow giant corporations to run a pipeline into your brain?

All of the technological optimism that the early television movement was fraught with has been entirely overcome by the inevitable implications of the one-to-many broadcast model.  This was not seen at first because the model that television was compared to was that of radio, a medium which required imagination in its audience.  In fact, radio eventually succumbed to centralization by giant corporate conglomerates as it would have even in the absence of television.

An excellent CD Player that you can still find for cheap

The Aiwa XC-37M (and the earlier XC-35M) CD Changer is outstanding.  The Illinois Audio Society wrote that using its digital output it was the equal of the best CD player they had tested.   I will add that using its own normal analog outputs, it sounds very seriously good.  Not at all what you'd expect from an inexpensive changer.  You can still find these new, on eBay, for around $50.00.  The only downside I've heard anyone mention is that the status display and the play indicator LED blink during play.   If you listen in the dark, you might want to put tape over them.

The Way it Sounded

Album: "In the Court of the Crimson King"
Mix: 2009 new stereo mixdown by Robert Fripp and Steven Wilson 
Pressing: Discipline Global Mobile (DGM) Red Book standard audio CD  "40th Anniversary Edition"

This must be the way it sounded in 1969.  It's absolutely awesome.  I
do not use that word lightly.  This is on a whole different plane than
the "remastered" Emerson Lake and Palmer discs.  This is a labor of
love and it shows all over.  Every instrument has been brought out of
the murk and given its rightful place.  If there was a second flute
track, it's been moved-over in the stereo image so you can appreciate
it more.  This is a recording that has been loved.  Very Carefully.

Actually, it's better than it sounded in the control room, on 1969
control room monitors.  They never got to hear the subtlest details latent
on the tape.  And there's no tape noise.  No wow or flutter, no phase
problems.  It is better than being there in 1969.  And you can do it
at home for cheap.  This is better than time travel.



Fripp says:

The original Wessex recording was on 8-track. This necessitated several sub-mixes; such as drums, bass guitar, piano & acoustic guitar on one stereo pair and all the mellotrons on another. These stereo sub-mixes were then mixed down to the original stereo master; the final master took another generation, to allow for cross-fades; and production masters went another generation. The original stereo master was lost for decades, found by Simon Heyworth in a pile of KC tapes from the Virgin tape store, and until recently was the best master available.

This is huge: CoffeeScript becomes the default Javascript in Ruby on Rails 3.1

You will be hearing more about the CoffeeScript language now that the popular web-framework Ruby on Rails has adopted it as the default Javascript for their next release.   This is a huge event in the life of a little language that is just over a year old.  The V1.0 release was in December of 2010.

I adopted CoffeeScript as my language of choice somewhere in mid 2010.  It has the deep elegances of Ruby, including introspection.  It uses the indentation-based block structure that makes Python such a pleasure.  It's basically a mashup of my two favorite languages and it targets an almost ideal runtime: Javascript.  CoffeeScript is a self-hosting compiler that emits Javascript, so your code can run in a browser, or on NodeJS as a command-line server side language like Ruby or Python.  It's fast.  NodeJS is a port of Google's V8 Javascript engine into a POSIX framework.

CoffeeScript is one of those tools that is just beautiful in its simplicity.  It's pleasing to the eye, powerful, and easy to wield.


Some Details about the new features in Rails 3.1
Intro to CoffeeScript

ThinkOrSwim Trading Platform runs on Linux!

When I reactivated my trading account at TDAmeritrade, I found that they had bought ThinkOrSwim, which becomes their high-end trading platform.   They don't mention this, but if you click to download it and you are on a Unix-ish OS, the download you receive is a shell script which checks for a JVM and installs the code.   The shell script which launches the program is quite robust-looking. Unlike most heavily-multithreaded Java programs I've used, it doesn't feel sluggish.  I'm impressed.

This is extremely nice and it will probably woo me away from QuoteTracker, which is a Windows-native application.  QuoteTracker is a good tool, and is great for learning.  It has an ad-supported Free-as-in-beer mode.  TDAmeritrade had some agreement with them, and QuoteTracker is still (I tested it) ad-free if you are connected to TDAmeritrade, but the download link is broken and they seem to have stopped supporting it.

I don't have to boot Windows, even in a VM, just to have decent trading tools.  This is really outstanding.

The one issue I am finding with ThinkOrSwim is a lack of good documentation.  I've only found a poorly-written and unillustrated manual so far.  It's completely clear that it does everything QuoteTracker does and much more. No wonder TDAmeritrade wants to get you started with it via a hand-holding phone call.  I haven't received my call yet.