Dec 27, 2012
First of all, check out AI3 because that's really important and fun. I've added two features. See if you can find them. Google has started indexing me slowly. I hope they don't spend too much time before they decide that it's not worth a high ranking. CPU time isn't free. I've been slowly promoting words and sentences that I like. You can tell that my favorite vocabulary is very biased toward things that I think about but don't get the opportunity to speak about. That will change as my power of linguistics improves.
Now for the music, 2012 December 27 [flac]. I actually made this today in a few hours. Don't expect too much from it, it's an experimental 3 instrument song, (plucked instrument, bass, and electric snare) played on keyboard with Rosegarden, ZynAddSubFX, and JACK. It shows the progress of my musical composing skill, still quite amateur. The plucked instrument (aka guitar but it wasn't really a guitar so much) is by far the best part of the song. I rerecorded the first 4 seconds because the original patch (which is quite good in the middle and end) started off with a cacophony of horrible discord. You might say that the entire thing is a cacophony of discord but I rather like it. The bass was put in when decided that the plucked instrument had too many silences that I didn't feel like removing. So I figured out how to make the bass work and then just hit 5 keys over and over again in any rhythm and melody that made sense. It doesn't sound very good at high volume, so I took it to its lowest audible volume so that it'd only pick up the silences and a bit the rest of the time. The drums were quite easy copy and paste and took almost no time to work with. I tried to do a really fast paced drumming session and it totally didn't work at all with the slow plucked instrument, so I chucked it. The end is rather abrupt because it ends on a short high note preceded by another high note instead of a long low note. I left it that way because endings are overrated and this is a quick experimental song and should sound like it. The middle contains quite a few silences which don't make sense and you get a little bit of the bass and snare and then a few more notes. Once I have more practice, I will certainly make my songs a lot cleaner. I wonder how many rests a rock song can get away with. Maybe 2 if it's long. Also note that the entire song is in the key of C. I haven't figured out keys well enough to use any other key than Major C so it sounds like I don't know anything about music. Well, I don't. I have spent maybe 6 months of free time in my entire life working on music and this is the output. Half of that was practicing keyboard at age 10 or so. Some of it was practicing drums with RockBand (1, 2, 3, and The Beatles) which I didn't use at all because this song didn't seem to call for it. I spent a few months of free time in 2003-2004 working on CSound, SoundTracker and MusE. Skills you learn in one music editor transfer fortunately. In CSound I created a ton of original samples which I didn't use in this because ZynAddSubFX has completely changed the way that I deal with instruments. If you're interested, there are other samples of my music here on this blog:
Dec 24, 2012
AI3 is officially in beta. Hooray! Start testing when you get a free minute. Send any bug reports to me. I am so excited to work on them and respond to you.
What is AI3? The way that I usually describe it is like an inverse thesaurus. Instead of finding a synonym or antonym for a word, you find the most likely word to put afterward and the context of that word. You can also find sentences that use two words. If you're stuck on a word, check out a few hundred uses of that word. Unlike Google, most of the results are not sorted by popularity. They're sorted by position in the database.
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Dec 13, 2012
Some of you may be excited to hear that I am finally on the brink of releasing a very interesting website. How interesting? It has kept my interest for weeks even though some of it is hard and some of it is annoying.
gzip -l ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz
compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name
1137167097 403791553 -181.6% /home/jvoss/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2
zcat ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz | grep -e ^INSERT -e ^LOCK -e ^UNLOCK |wc
4716 642299 4698740275
It's alright if you don't understand what the above means. The first one shows a bug I found in gzip where when you try to find out how large something is when it's bigger than 4GB uncompressed, it wraps and gives you a small number and a negative compression ratio. It's not a vulnerability so don't worry about it. The second one shows that there is about 4.7 GB of interesting data in that file.
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Nov 18, 2012
Sometimes you get more done by doing nothing at all. It's pretty rare, so you always want to do something rather than nothing. But some nights just don't go the way you wanted. Tonight I woke up at 1am wanting to do a little bit of hacking on my website. Everything was going alright. I only made 5 updates to the website.
update comments set moderation=5 where id = 1507606; update comments set moderation = 0 where moderation <= -1 and (content not like '%http:%' and posted_by not like '%http:%' and subject not like '%http:%' and content not like '%https:%' and posted_by not like '%https:%' and subject not like '%https:%'); update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'qdoiyQEAaWd'; update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'ZNzbBCfWReAQVApO'; update comments set moderation=5 where subject = 'CxBCrAoBcAnBXxzvJ';
It was then that I discovered that I had lost useful data before a certain date. That's alright, it was intentional but I want the data back if I have it. It turns out that I have several backups of the data I lost. So I decided to create a database and import the data and do some easy database import if the data is just there.
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