Visualizations of Music

So very cool. Someone has made videos which show which instruments are playing which notes as the music plays. Some examples:

Beethoven's 5th, 1st movement

Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement

Bach Double Concerto

Pachelbel's Canon (which illustrates why this comedian hates it so much).

These appear to have been done by the same YouTube user, but their page doesn't seem to link to all of the extant videos. (Warning: that page starts playing The Stars and Stripes Forever after a few seconds!) There does seem to be a playlists page, though, which gives a thematic/historical categorization and includes more of the recordings.

 

(I discovered these videos via Kristin Cashore's blog.)

The War On Halloween

The Onion takes on the War on Halloween.

Why I Enjoy Foxtrot

Last Sunday's strip.

The Benefits of Checking One's Credit Card Bills...

extend to finding out that McAfee keeps billing for anti-virus software that has been uninstalled from a non-working computer, even a year later.

It's amazing how willing companies are to take advantage of standard human cognitive deficits.

Sun breaks gethostbyname(), nscd.

Thanks, Sun!

gethostbyname(3) is supposed to return the canonical hostname in the h_name field of the struct hostent that it returns a pointer to. It is supposed to return any aliases (e.g. CNAMEs in DNS) in the h_aliases field.

Sun recently released a version of /lib/nss_dns.so.1, which is used by nscd (which, if it is running, all calls to gethostbyname(3) go through). This is part of patch 140391-02 (for SPARC) or 140392-02 (for x86). The -03 version of these patches also has the problem. This patch is part of the most recent Recommended Patch cluster, and it is included in the Solaris 10 u7 release.

This patch messes up the return from gethostbyname(3), so that when you look up a CNAME, the CNAME goes into the h_name field and the actual canonical name goes into the h_aliases field.

This breaks anything that uses gethostbyname(3) and actually expects the h_name field to contain the canonicalized hostname. (At work, we found the bug because certain software wouldn't start right -- because the start script compares the local hostname to the result of a lookup of a CNAME, and that no longer worked right.)

Note that this bug persists even if you have hosts caching turned off in nscd.conf.

The simple workaround is to turn off nscd (by using svcadm disable name-service-cache). This can cause some serious slowdowns if you have a lot of name lookups (e.g. directories that contain lots of different users and groups). I measured a slowdown of a factor of 7.7 doing 'ls -l' on a directory containing 150 files each owned by a different user and group. (It was a local directory, and I redirected the output to /dev/null, so I believe I limited confounding factors.) If you don't want to turn off nscd, your only other choice (until a real patch is released) is to ask Sun for their IDR ("Interim Diagnostics and Relief") pseudo-patch for this, which is IDR142516-01 for SPARC, IDR142517-01 for x86. This will require a Sun service contract.

Feh.

Best Shop Sign Ever

Seen in a shop window in Niagara Falls, NY:

Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww!

I was leaning my arm on a Juniper firewall (which I use for work), and touching my iPod in its Bose dock, and got what felt like a heat burn (the Juniper is not cool to the touch), but turned out to be an electric shock!

Who's more likely to blame? Apple, Bose, or Juniper?

Time to dig out my multimeter.

 

UPDATE: I got my multimeter out and there is about 80 Vac between ground and the housing of the iPod when it's sitting in the dock. The other iPod in the house shows the same thing. I then plugged one of the iPods into the DC adapter (DC adapter into wall socket, USB-to-base cord connecting it to the iPod) and *that* gives 37 Vac between wall ground and the iPod housing.

WTF? Is this why iPods occasionally explode?

Or have I just managed to totally forget how to use a multimeter??

Lois McMaster Bujold vs. E.R. Eddison

Lois McMaster Bujold crystallizes why I couldn't get through The Worm Ouroboros:

I am also slogging through The Worm Ouroboros, (~1922), by E.R. Eddison. Early 20th C. British adult fantasy, post William Morris, also a little after the charming Lord Dunsany, I think (both of whom are much better writers, so far.) The book reads like Medieval/Reniassance Romance (the other sort of Romance) fanfiction, actually. Some wince-worthy naming choices that one must sort of muscle past lead to a tale about a cast of characters in the old high heroic mold, i.e., with the emotional maturity and egocentric focus of an overdressed drunken high school football squad, except they are running countries. Redshirt follower death-rate very high, female characters few and decorative rather than functional. Historically interesting as a reaction to the relentlessly mundane turn contemporary mainstream fiction was taking about then, I suppose. I'm having trouble deciding who I dislike more, the heroes or the villains. Eddison does get off some pretty elegant prose passages now and then, granted. Shall perservere, hoping for a payoff.

Animal Rescue after the Rapture

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets will care for your pets after you're Raptured up into Heaven. (They're all atheists.)

Bobby McFerrin Plays the Audience (Literally)

Like there weren't already enough reasons to love Bobby McFerrin, here's another. This is almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face, as well as your brain.

We're all Going To Die!

Krakatoa is active again.

Review: Harry Potter And the Half-Blood Prince

We saw the sixth Harry Potter movie last night. It was highly enjoyable until about 2/3 of the way through at which point the edits for the book-to-film transition started coming unglued, and in fact ended up changing things on an important character level.

I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books being able to follow it, though. There was a LOT left unsaid.

No adaptation of a 650+ page book into a 2.5 hour movie is going to avoid cutting enormous amounts of material, and in this case, most of the cuts were fair (and some were annoying but will almost certainly be addressed in the extended cut DVD) -- until the end. They cut out some really important stuff, and changed two very important plot points, which bear directly on characters (not just plot stuff). We were annoyed by that.

However, it was an enjoyable movie, and -- especially considering how bleak the end is -- the first 2/3 of the movie was very funny. We were with a good audience for that (20-somethings mostly, at a 9:30pm showing). We laughed a lot. The young woman playing Lavender Brown is a hoot, and we loved Luna Lovegood's lion hat.

Overall? Far from the best movie of the series (I say #3, The Spouse says #4), but entertaining.

This, Mr. Bezos, is why I Will Not Buy a Kindle

They revoked the purchase of several George Orwell books after the publishers changed their mind.

George Orwell!

This Explains a Lot

Cats embed a cry inside their purr to get humans to do what they want. This explains

 

...sorry, I had to go feed my cats.

As I was saying, this explains a lot.

DM of the Rings

I know I'm way late to this story (and had to see it on Boingboing too), but DM of the Rings is freaking hilarious. It's the story of a D&D campaign wherein the DM is trying to do Lord of the Rings (and the players not only don't know Tolkien, but don't care and think that all the tedious backstory is just boring). It's a webcomic made of screenshots from the movies, and it's brilliant.

Warning: this may suck your brain for a day or so.

Why To Love John Hodgman, Part 51241

John Hodgman addresses the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.

 

(Via Pharyngula.)

 

Edited to add: Hodgman interviewed by Psychology Today. (Hodgmanian Synchronicity!)

Bad Web Design, No Donut!

So I was looking at the lyrics for Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown album, and each song links to a separate domain, like http://know-your-enemy.com/ for "Know Your Enemy".

This seems overconsumptive and stupid. American Idiotic, even.

 

Updated to add: This apparently is my day to stumble over horrible web design. I was reading this Inside Higher Ed article mocking (former Bush chair of the Council on Bioethics) Leon Kass and I wanted to look up "apodictally", so I tried to highlight it, and seemed to fail. It turns out someone decided that the Inside Higher Ed style sheets should make highlighting merely change the color of the text from black to blue-so-dark-it's-almost-indistinguishable-from-black. Perhaps highlighting in a useful (read: visible) fashion is for Lower Ed.

Jesse Ventura vs. Dick Cheney

More evidence -- as if we actually needed any -- that torture is not a partisan issue, except in the minds of idiot and/or evil right-wingers: Jesse Ventura vs. Dick Cheney.

What? I've read all the Hugo Nominee Novels? That Can't be Right

I think this is the first year in which I've read all Hugo nominee novels before the convention at which they are awarded.

(Were I voting, I'd go with Anathem. Although that young Charlie Stross surely deserves something after having been nominated <N> times without winning, Saturn's Children is not my favorite of his works.)

A Feature that Windows really Should Add

I have a Windows box for work. I don't log out of it very often. I am really kinesthetically oriented for icons and window placement etc. So when a program crashes (damn you, Firefox 3.0.9 and 3.0.10, for being flakier than 3.0.8 and earlier!), I tend to quit all the programs that have taskbar icons to the right of that program, so I can end up with the "right" taskbar arrangement after restarting everything.

A few days ago, my boss pointed me at Taskbar Shuffle, which (without even needing a reboot!) allows you to rearrange your taskbar. Hallelujah.

<rhetorical>Why doesn't Windows come with this feature?</rhetorical>