The Mandelbear's Musings

Mostly a good day, I think. I took a walk -- somewhere upwards of four miles -- and my knee didn't bother me. And I did some major work on the new makefile for recordings -- it combines the functions of the old "album.make" and two wrappers for practice sessions and concerts. More on that whey I actually finish it.

Still, it's functional, and I got a directory full of reference tracks put together, so I was feeling fairly accomplished.

And Colleen got from the bathroom to the bed without her cane! I saw it! On the gripping hand, she fell sometime around 1:30 and needed outside help to hoist her up. Nothing injured but her dignity -- she long ago learned how to fall without hurting herself -- but still...

So... mixed?

I got a call from a trade magazine to renew my (free) subscription. My address has changed, and they didn't have my email address. Do I really mumble so badly that it takes five tries to convey a street name and an email address? Spelled out slowly each time? I often do blame myself for not communicating well, but I don't think the problem was all on my end of the wire this time.

Not too many links this time; howtorunaband.com looks worth perusing.

Yesterday was pretty busy, actually. Started the day by rebooting the fileserver without the old IDE drives, though I left them in the case just, um, in case. Took a little longer than expected to get all the glitches out of the grub and /etc/fstab setups, but I never needed a rescue disk. Got a start on updating the daily mirror script for the new partitioning.

Measured the distance to the Younger Daughter's school -- it's about 1.7 miles by car, so maybe 1.5 by the obvious walking route. An easy morning walk for me, thought I don't think the Y.D. is interested. Would do her a lot of good, though.

Spent most of the morning at work reboooting the computers in my office and making sure things were still ok after Monday's power outage. Everything was fine, except that I missed a meeting because my reminder software runs on my desktop. Oops. Had a good idea in the afternoon that elegantly solves a nasty cross-site-scripting vulnerability, at least in the most common case. No, I can't say anything else about it yet.

Three mile walk, with hills. I needed that.

Spent some time in the afternoon researching short-run CD-ROM prices. I think I can get the bonus disk, About Bleeding Time, to a duplicator sometime this week, which means it should be ready in time for Baycon, in (urk!) a little over 2 weeks. I was originally planning to just get them printed, and burn them myself, which would give me the freedom to burn plain CDs or CD-Extra's for those who need them, but it's possible that CDROMs with audio will work for almost everyone. Depends in part on whether I can fix the remaining level problems by Friday.

When I came home I bounced the fileserver again to install the second 400GB drive for the mirror, formatted it, and finished rewriting the mirror script -- with some sanity tests in case I didn't finish the initial copy by the time the script had to run. Which I haven't -- I just started transferring the big partition this morning, and it looks like another hour or so to go. (8:24am: it's done now.)

Then, in a fit of productivity seldom seen in this decrepit old fractal, I added the missing bit of goodness to my TrackInfo script to look in the current directory for a secondary metadata file. That means that in albums like About Bleeding Time that have multiple versions of the same song, I can actually give them different descriptions in the liner notes. Yay! So I did that, too, burned a test disk, and took the flower_cat out for a test drive. Reluctantly gave up on putting in the version of "Silk and Steel" from Consonance -- the 5KHz feedback was never entirely suppressed, and it made the guitar sound twangy, too. Too bad -- it was a much better performance.

At this point the home network is in pretty solid shape, and shouldn't need much more attention until the time comes to move hosting for theStarport.org and its email, at which point I'll be able to dump my old DSL line. Repackaging the gateway and upgrading my workstation hardware are also on the short list, but aren't particularly urgent and won't require much in the way of time or planning.

Just after my last post I went in to work, telling the flower_cat that I was just going to put in a "half day", since I knew that we usually lock up at 3pm on the Friday before a holiday weekend. I found out when I got home that Colleen had been expecting me home for lunch. Sorry, Love -- when you get to work at 10am "half a day" does not end at Noon.

As I expected, I didn't get much actual work done, but there was some email I needed to attend to, a backup drive I'd forgotten to mount after the last reboot (when you boot a machine every six months or so you tend to forget), and some downloading to do.

Some of the downloading was due to the fact that VMware just started the beta program for Fusion, their desktop product for Intel Macs. The rest was due to the fact that I'm going to be working on Mom's old PC in a couple of weeks, archiving her files and wiping the disk. Not knowing exactly what vintage machine I was dealing with, I wanted to have a reasonable supply of up-to-date live Linux CDs to work from. I downloaded and burned Slax, DSL, and the latest Debian installer; I already had Ubuntu Edgy.

By that time it was closer to 4pm than to 3, so I headed for home. Along the way I managed to get in an hour's worth of walking, and my usual light lunch of mixed nuts and dried fruit (dates and figs at the moment).

Continuing in the vein of extreme geekiness, I spent most of the evening finishing up the Makefile recipes that import songs and fiction into the CDROM portion of my bonus CD, About Bleeding Time. Main things left to do for that are getting clean tracks out of the various concert recordings, writing the top-level web page, and making the CD art.

I've discovered that one of my favorite forms of hacking is writing Makefile rules and the scripts that I use in them. Make is the perfect tool for anything that involves updating and dependency-checking. It comes into things like CDs and songbooks because I'm constantly tweaking things all through the production process.

Now I'm going to finish my coffee and go out for a walk.

The tracklist program is finally able to handle track descriptions and two-song tracks, thanks to about four hours of hacking last night and this morning. The results are here and here.

Hacking and driving don't mix. Even thinking about hacking doesn't mix. Luckily I didn't find this out the expensive way.

My car ostensibly has front windows that go all the way down again. Took them two days.

It takes me about 30-40 minutes to take the chaoswolf to work and get back to the house. 50-60 minutes to drop her off on the way to work. That's 10 minutes to drop her off, a reverse commute, and the rest of the time fighting traffic going the other way. There doesn't seem to be a good way to do it.

Spent the afternoon (after a full morning of extremely useful meetings with some people from a company we're working closely with at work) hanging out in theStarport's office with a telecommuting cflute and doing some badly-needed reorganization on my web directories.

Specifically, I needed to get my Album directories under CVS control, and fix up the Makefiles so that they work either in the web staging-directory environment (where they do uploads, formatting, and the like) or in the recording/disk-burning environment. All it takes is a conditional in the Makefiles, but it's something I've been meaning to do for months.

Next are the Tracks and Songs directories. Tracks is straightforward with a little extra scripting; Songs will require a significant amount of makefile hacking to switch from the present arrangement of separate working and web directories.