Word for today: Panopticon. It's where the NSA has put you.

The Panopticon Prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in ~1790

ACLU.org article on NSA tracking of all cell phones all the time.

Edward Snowden and the Universal Panopticon

Edward Snowden is a great patriot and American hero of the current era.  I am supremely glad that I'm only at most two (and really only one) link removed from someone who has collected all the Snowden documents and is studying them.  I would spend too much time screaming and throwing things were I to be doing it myself.

The UK is now going after the editors of the Guardian.   I wrote the following in response to Marty Hiller's post that links to a petition about that:

 I'm going to be very grouchy and extremely worried (more so than I am now) unless a lot of senior people go to jail for significant time. It's not as though this was not deliberate policy. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and it's not as if people were ignorant. Reimplementing the Internet from scratch isn't going to be easy, but it's a simple technical problem. Simple fully open modern best practices would fix almost everything. But I'm not spending effort there. That solution stands or falls on getting "Grandma Sally" and the teens and tweens to use it. That's the real problem. That and the fact that the telcos will spend billions to fight being put back into their box of providing only packet-forwarding. I wouldn't even let them see routing information. There's no reason that can't be encrypted with the public key of a trusted, auditable DNS/routing service. This is going to be extremely ugly because the telcos will buy law as they usually do. And, no system is idiot-proof and disinformation about how to be secure will weaken almost anything I can think up.

-----
Writing for a different audience, I should strengthen that and explain myself a bit further.  The NSA knows where every single cell phone in the world is, all the time, unless they are switched off.  I wouldn't trust the off switch, if I were you.  So, the NSA knows who your political associates are.  Any information that's available to the government is available for abuse.  Remember J. Edgar Hoover's little hobby of helping out presidents he liked?

I imply in the above that I'd accept simple encryption of packet headers (the internet is a packet network, information travels in packets and the packet routing header is like the address on a letter that you send via the Post Office).   When I say encryption I'm talking about negotiated dynamically switched pluggable ciphers with keys that are secure against being broken for the foreseeable future.  I'm talking about chaffing and winnowing on top of that and using all the obsolete fields in the headers in arcane ways.  (I've done this.)  I'm not sure if foreseeable should include Turing-complete (fully functional) quantum computers.  It would be good if we could stay ahead of those things.  They are still looking almost impossible to build, but some day the NSA will spend enough billions, and the week after that there'll be cheap counterfeit-but-working chips for sale on the street in Shanghai.   Praying that that won't happen isn't going to do much good if it is physically achievable.   Look at the books by David Deutsch for a glimpse of what physicists think is possible.  "The Fabric of Reality" is a good place to start.  Deutsch is a physicist at Oxford.  He's not a New Age guy.

I got an offer a couple of weeks ago to be the CTO of a firm that intends to "make the internet safe."   They've got a pile of academic research that they assume you'll be impressed by.  It doesn't matter for one second what their technology is.  It relies on getting "Aunt Sally", her friends, and all the teens and tweens of the world to drop the real Facebook and Twitter and G+ and SoundCloud, to go with their replacements in something like an opt-in  web-of-trust world.  Okay, so none of their friends is there....it's SAFE isn't it?   Just how safe was your behavior when you were a teen?  Besides, that web-of-trust world will last just as long as it takes someone's idiot uncle to add "that annoying guy at the office" to his trusted circles just to shut the guy up.

If we fix the obvious problem with the NSA tapping everything all time in the only way that will really work, most of the big telephone and networking and cablevision companies are going to die.  If they can't see what you're watching, they don't have any information to sell.  Solutions that involve trusting the government to clean house and remain clean-and-sober, are absurd.  The only thing that can possibly work is an infrastructure that's inherently secure.  We can do that.  I know smart people who are working on the technical side right now.

Having a free, perfect, solution won't work.   Aunt Sally needs to prefer that solution and go cold-turkey on Facebook.

The best infrastructure imaginable will still allow your child to give his address or phone number (maybe via evading pattern-matchers) to a predator in a chat room.   That's why Eli Yudkowsky thinks we have to create trustworthy godlike artificial intelligences).   I'm almost more afraid of that solution than I am of the alternative that he's afraid of.

This next decade is going to be interesting, in the traditional Chinese sense of "interesting."

What I Look At

This is what I tend to be looking at when I'm doing programming work.  It's subtle, but you can see the effect of rainbow-delimiters-mode on the second line of real code.  Nested parens and braces get highlighted in different colors.  It beats counting them!  All the long explicit names are there so that some future maintainer can understand the code.  There's way too much use of numeric constant indexes here.  It's hard to make myself replace a one character 0 or 1 with the name 'base_offset', though.  I'm not sure that would improve clarity.  This is definitely not as clear as I would like.

The Kitchen Computer

It's the perfect computer for my kitchen.  I'll have to find one.  I'm sure you can play kill-the-bit on it while waiting for the food to cook.  Check out the genuine vintage sexism in the original photo caption.  Mind you, this is sexism from Neiman-Marcus PR flacks against a chef who can read binary and enter her recipes using toggle switches.  My mother and aunt Jane hand-built mad scientist radar research prototypes at MIT during WWII.  They never really wanted to learn to cook, though. I had to scrounge through the cupboards on my own.

The described UI is wonderful.  It's too bad they don't have a photo of that part.

I knew this generation of computer hardware rather inimately.  I hand-debugged H316 hardware in Alston, MA in the dead of night, part of my early internet plumbing days which extended to debugging Pluribae (plural of Pluribus?) at BBN.  They had Tenex at BBN, of course, and I developed a sort of channeling skill where I could discover commands and APIs by absorbing the mindset of the developers.   There was no documentation.  Channeling the developers' mindset continues to come in handy.

Giant map for my Chinese phase, which is still going strong

This thing is a real whopper of a map.  It's the best topographic map of China that I've been able to find.  I got it on eBay, which is where some of the greatest stuff washes-up.

- HUGE Vintage Canvas Backed Roll Up Wall Map - China

- Canvas Backed

- Made in Germany by Denover Geppert

- BIG - 66" x 90"

 

Reverb, verb, verb, verb, erb, erb, erb, buh, buh, buh....

Ariesverb, it doesn't get better than this.  If you can just use the presets in the demo, get 0.7.6 beta demo.  If you want to save your work and can live with a host-provided GUI, get 0.4, which sounds just as good to me. Insanely wonderful modulated tails to die for.  You wouldn't think that modulation in the tail was important--I didn't--but it is.

Wizooverb, if you can find an old copy. One of my go-to reverbs along with Ariesverb. Great sound, great GUI.  Wizoo is gone, and no one took it forward.  Algorithmic and "High Def" Convolution.  Cute trick: Convolution early refections fading into an algorithmic modulated tail, but you can get one or the other purely if you want.  Sounds terrific, but more clinical than Ariesverb.  I probably haven't played with it enough. I think it has modulation somewhere. Much, much more approachable than the latest Ariesverb which lets you play with the algorithms. Won't ever go 64bit, obviously.  Where the heck is the code?  It should be released, not chained. I'm an Open Source hacker.

Ambience.  The go-to reverb for many people, but for some reason not me.  Lots of people agree with the tag line "Rivals the quality of many commercial reverbs."  Lots and lots and lots of great presets.  Get it for this alone.  Among the preset developers you'll see Rob Papen who is rather famous in the plugin world. Hey, I'm liking the presets right now as I write this.

MuVerb. Algo. From MuTools, makers of the MuLab audio production workstation. Original algos, not Synthedit. Really nice tails! Odd, but nice purple GUI.  Seriously, this is a nice reverb and I need to start using it!  Watch me put this up near the top of this list.

Reverberate LE.  Convolution with many controls. Commercial promo-ware which probably gets updated.

Old freebies that are still useful, but will probably stay 32bit:

Epicverb from Variety of Sound.  He's still in business and has other great stuff.  This is the go-to freeware reverb for many people.  Algorithmic.  Get the presets that are in another download.  Nice GUI for a freebie! Not too many controls, but I have trouble controlling it.

Revolverb Lite.  Convolution reverb for people who are non-technical.  Three total controls, plus loading your convolution file.  Sounds great, just like you'd expect a good 16bit convolution verb to sound like--despite the dated GUI.  Was this the first freeware convolver?  There never was a non-Lite version.  Just get this. You'll like it.  Download a few impulse response files and go to it.  Search the forum (not the whole site) at kvraudio.com.  This verb does not get enough attention.

SIR is the commonly-mentioned freeware convolver, but since it went commercial for V2.0, it's really in the same boat as Revolverb, but it works and offers more controls than revolverb.

EVM V90. I don't like all his plugs, but I have some affection for this one. Maybe it has some fixed modulation in the tails.  Can go to huge hall/outer space sizes.  Simple, cute, algo-only.

Gigaverb.  Algo. Nobody but me seems to use it. I mentioned huge halls in EVM 90.  Gigaverb is for when you really need spaces up to 300 meters in size and decays of up to a minute. Smooth! Good to have in your collection.  Hard to find, get it here: http://www.mathieubosi.com/zikprojects/GigaverbVST.zip

Antress ModernSpacer (black or silver) The Modern-Foo plugins, and there are dozens, are a mixed bag, but this is a nice little algo reverb.  Algo. Sounds pretty good to me.  Hmmm, a quick check says it doesn't appear to be a Synthedit-made plug.  I don't like his other verb.  Remember that (pace Waldorf, Inc.) black sounds better.

Cinematic Reverb.  Algo, ancient GUI.  Good sound, and can go into nearly infinite decay. I love infinite decay.

Freezechamber.  Algo. Speaking of infinite decays... This thing has a freeze button which keeps the reverb sound from decaying!  I think it's just looping over the buffer, but with some smoothing so there's a clean loop.  Doesn't sound like a loop, though. This is a serious product. Has manual, has MIDI controls. Just get it.

Empire 2.  An oldie from the well regarded spiritcanyonaudio.com.  Nice sound, you get to select from the algorithms, which have helpful names like "Catacombs" and "Ballroom."  Ugly but usable GUI. A professional product, really.

Hispasonic reverb, hispverb, Hispasonic.  I don't know why this algo seems to sound better than the Freeverb it's based on. I think this is just a skin, really.  Maybe it's the latin flavor.  It has the "Olga synth" factor for me.  I can't read the controls and have to experiment.  Algo, the Freeverb algo.

Freeverb.  Algo. Many people like it.  I don't use it or the Hispasonic version.  Ugly but usable GUI.  Has a convo version that I have not tried.  Now has 64bit.  In active development.

LIŚĆ VERB (hey,with a name like mine, I can type this name correctly) Brand new. Synthedit.  Is this the standard Synthedit reverb?  Doesn't sound bad, and the GUI is rather nice.  I want to like the guy whi makes these "Saltline" plugs. Has a weird freeze implementation that is hard to use, you have to turn a knob.  I don't love the sound. Maybe that's just me?  I haven't seen any reviews.

Mverb. Wusik did a new GUI for this classic algo. Get it from their site. I like the "quad" version which gives you two reverbs in parallel in one plugin.  I used that for flexible early reflections using one, and tail from the other. See the original Novaflash-style GUI on the single version and recoil in horror. No offense to that artist, I just don't get his GUI designs.  I just picked up the 64bit versions since I was writing this.

Reverbering. Rather old, but I like what I heard just now. Bizarre GUI, good sound, very few presets--but nice ones.

GlaceVerb. A current favorite of many people.  Nice sound, seriously great GUI, with a checkerboard display of the room you've created.  A professional product all around.  Can't go wrong with this one.  See their new synth plugs, too, but I have not tried them.

Reverb-O-Matic. Fun!  Moorer's six comb filter algo.  File name moorereverb differs from the plugin name I seen in Reaper (Reverb-O-Matic).  You can get wild interacting chaotic echos with the six LP coefficient sliders.  Eccentric GUI. Wear sunglasses or ingest substances before opening.  Wild fun!

RoomMachine844.  Algo. Old GUI looks like a drawing of a rackmount.  Decay control seems to operate backwards.  Some people love this thing and it doesn't sound bad.  It was a go-to for a while in the freeware scene.  Original algos.

Space360. One of those interesting reverb plugs that show you the parameters as speakers and a human head in a room, but, no, you can't drag the icons.  I can't get good results right away with this and I dropped it.  You might do well with it.

Last but not least: Algorverb. Simple, clean GUI.  Really nice sound.  Original algos.   A forgotten gem.  I love this one.  You can push it into oscillation, and infinite decay. A grand total of four presets, but it's so simple that it's ultra easy to make your own sounds.  Six total sliders.  No other controls.  Mayhem if you want it.

That's all folks.  That's the contents of my Reaper reverbs folder.  Try not to ask me about my old EnergyXT reverb folder. It's scary in there.

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.