Pushing LilyPond to the extreme!!!

I'm pretty sure that the "shortest" note Sibelius recognizes is the 512th note. I've never *really* used Finale for more than 5 minutes, so I can't tell you how it compares to Sibelius. My *guess* is that it has a similar limit. Now, LilyPond is a different animal. I knew that LilyPond's limit for *unbeamed* notes is the 64th note, a la: But, when it comes to *beamed* notes, all I remember hearing is "the sky is the limit". So, I have put LilyPond to the test. Here is a case where LilyPond fares very well with 131072nd notes: Yes. Now if you ask me, that is FREAKIN' awesome! I won't make you count the beams, but there are 15!!! Trust me! I tried an example with 262144th notes, but the formatting isn't as pleasing: I'm pretty sure you could squeeze even more extreme note lengths from LilyPond if you use a smaller font size (these examples use the 20pt default). :-P All I can say is... Take that, Finale and Sibelius!! (P.S. Click on the images to see them in higher resolution)

Backward compatibility

Backward compatibility... Is it worth the time and effort? It depends on the circumstances and the technology in question. The fact that USB 2.0 is backward compatible with USB 1.1 is an absolute lifesaver for me. The fact that Firefox is capable of rendering some of most horribly-written, deprecated, typo-laden HTML with grace is another case where backward compatibility shines through. Over time, I've made a habit to always upgrade my software when updates are available. Arch Linux makes this easy for me. A simple `pacman -Syu` automates the process for me. Software developers release new versions of their software for a reason: 1) They have fixed some bugs 2) They have added new features 3) They have improved existing features 4) Any combination of the above The result is (almost) always an improved piece of software. This is a very optimistic point of view on my part, but it is usually true. Thus, I feel obligated to download their new, improved version. As a result, I am always living on the bleeding edge in terms of software. So I don't care too much about backward compatibility in relation to software. If it works with my hardware, I'm okay with it. Yes, Vista works fine on my hardware too, but I'm not going there. I wiped that baby from my hard drive in a flash... What do you think about backward compatibility? Any thoughts, anonymous commenters?

The Awesome Bar

Okay. Now that Firefox 3 has been out for a while, and the comments around the net have died down, I would like to say a few things about the revamped Location Bar (AKA, the "Awesome Bar"). First of all, the Awesome Bar is very awesome. It knows about your bookmarks, search history, tags, the frequency and recency of each visit to a site, etc. And it magically optimizes its behavior based on the way you use the browser. In other words, the Awesome Bar can be trained. Since I only frequently visit a few web sites on any given day, I bookmark these sites (click the star), since the Awesome Bar seems to give preference to bookmarks. Also, if I clear my browser history, the bookmarks are still saved (thankfully), so the Awesome Bar becomes even more useful. In fact, I've only clicked on the `Bookmarks' menu approx. 4 times since I've used Firefox 3. The most commonly criticized aspect of the Awesome Bar is its "intrusive" nature and "lack of polish" as compared to the old Location Bar. I can understand what these people are saying, but I honestly don't care. I love the Awesome Bar for its functionality and adaptive-learning characteristics. I don't care how it looks. I don't find OpenOffice.org's UI very attractive, but I do find OOo to be incredibly reliable and simple to use. Mozilla, you rock! Firefox 3.5 is going to be even more amazing!

RTL8187B will soon be supported

Fantastic news! The upcoming Linux kernel (2.6.27) will provide support for the RTL8187B (Realtek) chipset for wireless USB adapters. This is the chipset in my adapter, so I'm thrilled. Many people have tried to make these adapters work with the native Linux drivers. Info can be found here: http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/ http://www.a110wiki.de/wiki/Wireless There are two different USB IDs associated with this chipset (0bda:8187 and 0bda:8189), and they will both be supported. I accidentally discovered this information from browsing the commit history in the Linux git sources. All of the patches relating to RTL8187B were committed in July (so far)! Here are links to a bunch of the patches (mostly for my reference, but others might be interested in looking at the patches too): http://tinyurl.com/68ayq7 http://tinyurl.com/5w4au9 http://tinyurl.com/5oube6 http://tinyurl.com/6fxkls http://tinyurl.com/6k8sp3 http://tinyurl.com/6hgmp4 http://tinyurl.com/5jr3r9 http://tinyurl.com/67nesc Long live GNU/Linux!!

LilyPond Bug...Crushed!!!

I never thought I would *stumble* upon a bug in LilyPond, but I did. It was an outstanding bug that's been around for 1 1/2 years, and I believe that the default LilyPond build runs quite a bit faster now that the bug has been fixed. As I said, I discovered the *typo* by accident. When I was compiling LilyPond's documentation from scratch a few days ago, a compile-time error was preventing me from completing the build. It's strange though, because when I redirected stdout and stderr to a file, like so: $ make web > lily-makeweb.log 2>&1 the build successfully completed! After inspecting the log file, I noticed these *bogus* "programming errors" appearing at the spot where the build usually failed. I grepped the phrase in the source code, which took me to lily/include/smobs.hh. It turns out that this programming error was only supposed to appear when building an unoptimized, debugging build of LilyPond (which is not the default). But there was a typo in the #ifndef test (it checked for NDEDUG instead of NDEBUG), so the subroutine to check for these "programming errors" was being included in the binary no matter the configuration. Anyway, nobody else has mentioned a speed increase yet, so maybe it's just relevant to my setup. But it's exciting. I hope you enjoyed my convoluted bug-crushing story that involved changing one letter in an identifier name in a preprocessor conditional construct. :-)

Firefox 3 is here!!

This is SO exciting!! If you are reading this, download Firefox 3 right now. You should, for two reasons: 1) It is the best and fastest browser currently available 2) You can take part in setting a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day if you download it by approx. 11AM PDT on June 18. Here is what Firefox 3 looks like on my machine (first run): Isn't that awesome! Now, hurry! Go download. Download, download, download!

Blackboard...you have issues!

Okay. Blackboard and Linux do not get along at all. It turns out that Blackboard is currently 'unsupported' on the Linux platform. Not cool. I think Blackboard's programming team is living in the dark ages. Anyways...to the point: Fortunately, most of Blackboard's functionality is web-based, and since Firefox (all any platform) is more than capable of handling anything HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Blackboard works.......mostly. Since the Linux operating system is not 'supported', Blackboard performs a user-agent check to see if you are running Windows or Mac. If not, you cannot upload files to Blackboard. Not cool. I have tried the Firefox extension called User Agent Switcher that lets you 'spoof' your browser's identification, the version of your browser, and your operating system. For example, I could be running Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 on Linux, and using the User Agent Switcher, I could pretend to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (GASP!!) on Windows Vista (GASP!!), and no website would know the difference. Isn't that wonderful? Firefox lets the user be in control, and that's what I love about it. Unfortunately, this doesn't fool Blackboard. Blackboard looks for filenames that have backslashes in them. Aha! So if I try to upload a file called myCrazyLongFileName.cpp, Blackboard won't let you upload it. But if I rename the file to be \myCrazyLongFileName.cpp, Blackboard recognizes the file. And it gets better: Blackboard strips this backslash after you upload the file. Yes!! Glorious!!