Advogato blog for MichaelCrawford

28 Feb 2008

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:49:26 GMT

Free Music

Come hear me play piano!

Next Show: Thursday, February 28, 7:00 PM

Open Mic
Bare Foot Coffee Roasters
5237 Stevens Creek Blvd
Santa Clara, California

Map

- Take the Lawrence Expressway / Stevens Creek Exit from Highway 280

Admission Free - All Ages.

Free compact disc to be given to all attendees.

I expect to play there most Thursdays from now on, and will soon start playing more widely around the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in Santa Cruz.

Can't make it? Watch my live performance schedule for future show dates.

I'm gonna be up late burning cds tonight. I left the last batch with Bonita to give out at her school.

I've been practicing every day, and will have a new song to play. I'm also learning another new one that I should be able to play in a week or two.

I have a couple friends up in Berkeley, so I'll be looking for an open mic up there so they can come hear me play.

30 Jan 2008

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:12:37 GMT

Open Mic Rescheduled

My appearance that I announced in my previous diary has been rescheduled from Wednesday to Thursday, January 31st. I found this out by visiting the venue - their website still has the incorrect date.

(I updated my previous diary to have the correct date.)

I expect to play Open Mics about once a week from now on, and will occassionally travel to other cities to play them. Keep up-to-date on my appearances by watching my live performance schedule.

All of my music is Creative Commons-licensed. You can download it here. Sheet music too, if you play piano.

26 Jan 2008

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:34:26 GMT

Music

I'm about to start playing Open Mics again after a long hiatus. Also starting in late February I'm going to start playing on the street - I got a battery powered amp for my keyboard.

I'll be announcing all my shows on my live performance schedule. My first appearance will be:

Open Mic - Thursday, January 31, 7:00 PM - Note The New Schedule!

Bare Foot Coffee Roasters
5237 Stevens Creek Blvd
Santa Clara, California

Map - Take the Lawrence Expressway / Stevens Creek Exit from Highway 280

Admission Free - All Ages.

Everyone who attends will be given a free copy of my CD Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft - it is Creative Commons licensed:

See you there!

31 Oct 2007

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:57:37 GMT

Rock and Roll!

I was in Sunnyvale, near the "Blue Cube" at the south end of Moffett Field when the quake struck. I was on the second floor of a large office building, talking to my wife on the phone, who is back in Nova Scotia.

Suddenly I started shouting, and she said "What, What?" and I said "Earthquake! I better get out of the building!"

Oddly, I was the only one who evacuated. But I remembered the October '89 Loma Prieta quake very well, as I lived in Santa Cruz at the time, and there were many aftershocks. I was concerned an even bigger shock might hit.

When I got outside, my cell phone wouldn't work, so I had to call my wife collect from a payphone to tell her I was OK.

30 Oct 2007

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:41:20 GMT

Ask Advogato: PHP and MySQL?

I want to write a small web application for use on one of my websites. I'm happy to Read The Fine Manual, but I ask your advice on which parts are most pertinent to my problem. The reason I don't want to just figure it all out for myself is that there is a dauntingly large quantity of documentation available online, so I don't quite know where to begin.

If you don't want to respond here, you can either email me at (Harvest This, Spammers!) michael@geometricvisions.com or post in my Kuro5hin diary, where the topic has its own individual page.

While I have done some web application programming before, it's been a long time, and it was all done in Java with Enhydra. Enhydra's a great application server, but it's vastly more powerful than my simple needs require. Also my web hosting service actively supports PHP and MySQL, so I wont need to ask the hostmaster to install anything.

It's been so long since I've done any SQL that I've completely forgotten it, and I've never designed the schema (the layout of tables and fields) of an SQL database before.

There is also the issue of security, a topic which has evolved vastly since my last web programming job back in '99.

I did work through the simple PHP tutorial at php.net, and feel that it would probably work just fine for what I want to do.

I think my database would only require a single table with a dozen or so fields.

I'd like to have a web page with a form on it. One of the form fields would accept the user's email address. When the form is submitted, it would be added as a new record to the table, with each form field being placed into its own field in the record. There would be some additional fields as well.

There would be an integer field whose value would indicate whether the record was new, had been downloaded, or was old. Newly-added records would be set to new.

Periodically I would log into a password-protected web page and download a text file containing all the new records. The text file would be formatted as either tab-delimited, CSV (comma separated values) or maybe XML. There would need to be some way to prevent user-entered data from screwing up this file, for example if a user entered a comma in one of the form fields.

Once the download has succeeded, the included records would be marked as downloaded. I think it would be best if I were to manually order this, rather than having it done automatically when the download completes.

Again on a password-protected page, I would be presented with an HTML table of the downloaded records, and I could manually mark them as old. I would want a way to either mark them all at once, or individually. Gmail has something like this, where one can check individual emails, or check all the emails displayed on the page.

When this happens, the email address from each record would be used to send the user a confirmation email; this would require my PHP script to either talk SMTP directly, or maybe pipe some text into /usr/bin/mail.

Note that this would not be used for spamming my users; the page containing the form would inform them that the confirmation mail was going to be sent, and that would be the only mail I'd ever send in an automated way.

If you think there's a better way to do this than PHP and MySQL, I'm completely open to it, however, I'm very loyal to my hosting service (I've been with them for ten years), and I hate to bug the hostmaster to go out of his way for anything.

Thanks for any help you can give me -- michael@geometricvisions.com

16 Aug 2007

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:20:02 GMT

Fix for libao dlsym_auto_underscore on Mac OS X

libao is a cross-platform audio output library used by, among others, ogg123. When libao-0.8.8 is built on Mac OS X, trying to run ogg123 meets with this complaint:

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _dlsym_auto_underscore Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/libao.2.dylib Expected in: flat namespace

I'm not sure, but I think the dlsym_auto_underscore was required in previous versions of Mac OS X, but for me on 10.4.9 it worked to simply remove it from the darwin CFLAGS setting in the configure script:

From this:


        *-darwin*)
                PLUGIN_LDFLAGS="-module -avoid-version"
                DEBUG="-g -Wall -D__NO_MATH_INLINES
-fsigned-char -Ddlsym=dlsym_auto_underscore"
                CFLAGS="-D__NO_MATH_INLINES -fsigned-char
-Ddlsym=dlsym_auto_underscore"
                PROFILE="-g -pg -D__NO_MATH_INLINES
-fsigned-char -Ddlsym=dlsym_auto_underscore" ;;

To this:


        *-darwin*)
                PLUGIN_LDFLAGS="-module -avoid-version"
                DEBUG="-g -Wall -D__NO_MATH_INLINES
-fsigned-char"
                CFLAGS="-D__NO_MATH_INLINES -fsigned-char"
                PROFILE="-g -pg -D__NO_MATH_INLINES
-fsigned-char" ;;

25 Jun 2007

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 05:54:21 GMT

Ask Advogato: Understanding BitTorrent Log Files?

I have a BitTorrent tracker for Creative Commons-licensed music. My HTTP logs tell me that about fourteen .torrent files are downloaded each day, but trackerlyze tells me that about 750 payload files are downloaded each day. This is supported by the enormous size of my log files.

But when I download my own torrents, I rarely see any other peers. The only seed is the one I operate.

I suspect my tracker is getting hijacked to serve for other files, but I am using the --allowed_dir command-line parameter to limit the .torrents to my own. Could it be broken?

Thanks for any advice you can give me -- michael@geometricvisions.com

17 Mar 2007

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:54:46 GMT

Writing

I just wrote a piece about recent events in Pakistan: the President has un-seated the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

Constitutional Crisis In A Nuclear State

It has a Creative Commons license.

21 Feb 2007

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:27:16 GMT

Music

Do you play piano? Or enjoy using a MIDI sequencer such as Rosegarden to remix music?

I have written the scores to my songs "Emergence" and "Recursion" in Lilypond. I composed them long ago, but only in my own mind - I never wrote them down before now. I had tried some other music scoring software, but was never satisfied with it.

You can find the scores on my music download page. There are MIDI files, US Letter and A4 PDFs, and of course the Lilypond source files, as well as audio recordings of them.

They each have the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. I encourage you to copy, perform and record them, and especially to use them to inspire your own music - provided you share alike, as is required by the license.

I have two other pieces still to score. It's going to take a while for me to get them done. I also plan to compose four or five new pieces, and once I do, I'll make new recordings and get a "glass master" CD made - that is, have my CD pressed in quantity at a factory.

If you make a remix of any of my songs, post them on the web and email me the link at michael@geometricvisions.com and I'll link you.

6 Feb 2007

Tue, 6 Feb 2007 13:51:45 GMT

Music

I'll be playing piano at an Open Mic at The Maplewood Pub in North Vancouver, BC tonight. More info can be found on my live performance schedule.

I just started piano lessons with a wonderful teacher named Angela Bonilla. She has a Master's degree from the conservatory at Versailles, France.

Yesterday evening she started teaching me Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I downloaded the score from The Mutopia Project, which transcribes scores from books whose copyright has expired. All their scores are either public domain or have Creative Commons licenses.

What that means is that I will be able to offer a free download of the piece once I learn it well enough to record. You see, one cannot offer free downloads of even very old music if one got the score from a book that is still under copyright.

I plan to contribute to The Mutopia Project when I get better at using the Lilypond music engraving program.