I've ditched the usual header for the
moment, I think it doesn't help much anyhow.
This page is copyrighted by me, and may be read and transfered by any
means only as a whole and including the references to me. I
guess thats normal, the writer can chose that of course, maybe
I´ll make some creative commons stuff one day, of course I have
made Free and Open Source software and even hardware designs available!
This
page is under contruction, so check back later, too.
Sun june 15 17:53, 2008
Daring theories, interesting things I´m doing, questions.
AES Demo day
I happen to be a member of the Audio Engineering Society (a primary
american org), and I presented my main audio amplification setup at the
´end of year´ meeting.
So I packed 2 main speakers and the
sub and the amps in a car, got a notebook, a disc with music along, and
I even brought a mic to the meeting. Worked great, like it has in
various places and for various occasions for years already.
I might have played ´A touch too much´ (AC/DC) but that
seemed not needed.
I played some Chesky (neutral audio recording) CD songs (classic, a
capella with rythm, a blues), hits from 10cc to Rose Royce, a short
piece from Jimmy Hendrix (not very loud), a song from Jean Michel
Jarre´s Oxygene, I think David Sanborn, a decompressed piece of
Bostons´ "More than a feeling", and I shortly used a
´live´ amplified AT2020 microphone on a lexicon preamp without AD/DA conversion on my amps
and speakers. And I used half the time Linux (Fedora 8) and Windows XP
(pro) with the same external disk with songs.
No processing, no effects, only wavs straight to the Lexicon, and only
very few mixes with the Pulseaudio mixer at the beginning, so the whole
system was only used straight, and most of the time not loud enough for
itself to take notice of. The space wasn´t very big, maybe two or
three classrooms, only at the end I pushed the volume very shortly a
bit so that with mic outside the direct feedback range, and with
I think the Boston song people probably for a number of seconds
couldn´t hear eachother anymore. The volumes of the amps
weren´t full, and if I recall correctly, the whole chain driven
by the Lexicon cannot overdrive the amps as it is, I´d need to
rewire some things a bit for that, but I guess a good 50 Watts was nice
and loud to make clear that is possible, too, but it´s a
relatively moderate club, certainly not a disco or Rolling Stones 64
channel Mix demonstration!
The system can do what I call small PA levels without problems, as I
have demonstrated already at a musical instrument fair 2 years ago, the
amps in total should be able to do over 500 Watts of sine power with
probably quite some to spare, which of course is REALLY loud, and could
only be demonstrated when properly set up.
I found out a automatic fuse easily blows when the main amp is switched
on, so I use an improvised softstart:
Which puts a 150Watts Halogen light in series with the amp mains cord,
which after startup is shorted with a heavy switch, and the wires are
all thick, so no extra losses are imposed. The light flashes up and
dims out after about 2 seconds, and makes the startup nice and smooth.
Professors ?
Ouch, Theo, not those kind of difficult words, please, we all can
profess a bit, huh, and uhm, no need to make clear what the difference
between a paid university professor and a lot of bozos who think by
knowing what they all know they are better at that. It´s a normal
competition, but in a reasonable world a quite non-sensical one.
Normally the people who are either very good at academics or those who
are good enough and not that much talented or interested in other
things probably are a reasonable choice for the role of official and
paid professor though I guess my university experience may not lead to
average opinions, even in EE circles. In the US I think normally the
honour in that area would be better (I wasn´t there, but met more
than a few examples), on the other hand various european blood groups
would be more rigid about Herr professeur or something.
Remember I wrote the thesis that the average intelligence of a group of
people is quite probably lower than the most intelligent member? I dare
to go on a bit: even when a reasonable intelligence test is made in a
much longer time, and when the smart management of taking the smartest
of the group and making sure that person is feeling really good and
confortable and maybe has a good second is applied, still the score
will not be much higher probably than when that person would do the
normal IQ test.
I recall a relevant meeting being put on dutch television in the 90s
where R. Sheldrake took place amoung totally famous scientific names
like Steven J, Gould, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks and others. The
subject was "A glorious Accident" possibly refering to the big bang,
evolution, original sin, and what else.
The subject of morphogenetics is actually also a medial subject, but I
think many people including new agers are bound to go wrong or to
become oppressive about why a plant or animal grows like it does, and
what the spiritual is actually made of.
Neerhof I don´t think was a professor, but a good university
lecturer, teacher (sound wrong), assistant professor (wasn´t it),
anyhow in my first year of electrical engineering university he tought
Network Theory, which was also the name of the section I graduated in.
I think I liked the theoretical electronics and the powerfull computer
simulation schemes. Subjects of this kind of power and beauty laid out
neatly is like forbidden somehow now I think, while in fact sufficient
intelligence and transpiration of the students should be enough of a
filter.
from here
Well, hum, what does this mean? An extensive, accurate simulation? Oh
it´s a frequency picture, so it´s probably a steady state
wave solution. Ough Theo, you can´t say that! Why not, it looks
that way. Because that´s making you right about certain types of
science! Oh is it...
I asked prof. Spergel, who is quite a quite famous
astronomer/astrophysicist in the US and whom I saw in
the very interesting BBC documentary "The Six Billion Dollar
Experiment", some question about the theory surrounding the well known
big bang idea, and I got an interesting answer back. I´m putting
a few pages or so of theoretical treaty considering a fundamental
physics book (Negele and Orland, "Quantum many particle physics") in my
thought pipeline, because I´ve done that in the past and that
combines great with my theoretical EE knowledge.
Interesting montage edit in a picture from his Princeton home page.
Well in software land the term is problematic. I recall reading some
computer science magazines (scientifically orieted) at university and
they were never any good, really. They´d at best do some stuff
and be not all too pricky about it all, but usually worse. Science like
trying to patent algorithms is another computer disorder I think. I saw
Google summer projects, which I find interesting open source effort
being managed by at nest software bachelors or so in practice but it
sounded like so cool and so daring and interesting as if it were
professor Moog teaching his year 3000 synthesizer design to top
designers but then really cool. Somehow that´s wrong though
probably not so important.
I made this
comment on my graduantion (and nearly EE PhD) university website.
Recently I was looking at this
instruction from Avideh Zakhor about digital signal processing from
Berkeley (CA). I saw 1 through 4 or so while doing other things (viva
multitasking), which of course covered things I knew, but certainly I
would not hava all knowledge on top of my mind or remember by heart all
the formulas, but sure I could follow the main thoughts about the
transforms for instance. Could you ?
This is from the BBC documentary about the new collider at Cern in
switzerland (where I visited long ago):
More 70s music that influenced me (and why not other decades)
Of course I knew more than a few of the famous music, though I think in
holland not even all of the US number one hits were even necessarily
played at all.
I suppose it pays to look these up on youtube or equivalent.
What's The Mattter Baby -- Ellen Foley
I thought it was a cynical song at the time about bad relationships or
so.
Kim Wilde - Kids in America
Catchy, it sounded not like a commercial for the principle.
Hey girl -- Gruppo Sportivo
another well known song from them "Disco really made it":
Great school party performance in the gym at the time. I recall well
the warmth, the equipment, the live sound, the band and singers, great.
This was from the other place at the (whole not just a class) school
parties, which was downstairs with the big (certainly for the time for
teenagers) disco, resonated great with the big speakers at 500 watts or
so:
Rotating light on, "the Rolling stones, with ehhh Miss You" should last
forever, but this one is only the 9 inch version of 8:33... Maybe I
heard this one, but honestly 9 inch or import version at the time was
more for disco suckers. I for years amplified the school band for
rehearsals at friday afternoon and for performance for the school, but
I had only the 80 Watts Tandy (Radio Shack) PA system for that.... In
fact my self built home system from about ´80 which I brought to
school too at times for my own purposes (not the school band) was
better and probably louder (twice 75 measured sine watts, but the 100
Watt transformer, borrowed from dad, wouldn´t last that way for
long) but the speakers were ´only´ 45 Watt a piece, and
horribly expensive for me at the time ( about a hundred I guess) so
there was no way I wanted to blow up my great sounding system (much
better than the Tandy or the disco).
I made mixes at the time, and tape edits (with the mechanical pause
buttons of two good cassette decks), which was an idea from what is
called the Hit-Test from a program called the avondspits (means evening
traffic jam) which was a famous daily program of an hour on the public
popular music channel by a rather poetic person. There is an example
show here
, mind the productions and how they sound, that interested me at the
time.
The number ones from the beginning of the 80s that I knew:
15/12/1979
3
2
3
Weekend - Earth & Fire
12/1/1980
3
3
2
I have a dream - ABBA
2/2/1980
3
2
4
Rapper's delight - Sugarhill Gang
23/2/1980
5
5
3
Crying - Don McLean
29/3/1980
1
2
2
Pearlydumm - BZN
5/4/1980
2
2
3
Sajang E - Massada
19/4/1980
3
3
2
You and me - Spargo
10/5/1980
3
2
2
Sun of Jamaica - Goombay Dance Band
31/5/1980
3
2
2
Funkytown - Lipps Inc
21/6/1980
3
3
2
Cara mia - Jay & the Americans
12/7/1980
3
3
2
Late at night - Maywood
2/8/1980
3
2
2
Xanadu - Olivia Newton-John & Electric Light
Orchestra
23/8/1980
6
3
2
The winner takes it all - ABBA
4/10/1980
2
2
2
One day I'll fly away - Randy Crawford
18/10/1980
6
3
2
Woman in love - Barbra Streisand
29/11/1980
1
2
2
Never knew love like this before - Stephanie Mills
6/12/1980
2
3
2
Super trouper - ABBA
20/12/1980
2
2
2
Santa Maria - Roland Kaiser
from here . Some rubbish, some
great. Most pretty good. The singer from "Weekend" which in fact is a
great sounding dutch pop classic later became director or what that is
called properly of the other "legalized" pirate station from holland,
radio Noordzee, I listened regularly tot that station as a kid and
later as teenager.
Honestly these number one hits from two years before would be able to
break everybodys heart if they would turn bad:
24/12/1977
5
2
2
Mull of kintyre - Wings
28/1/1978
7
2
5
If I had words - Scott Fitzgerald & Yvonne Keeley
18/3/1978
3
3
3
Denis - Blondie
8/4/1978
3
2
8
Stayin' alive - the Bee Gees
29/4/1978
9
4
2
Rivers of Babylon / Brown girl in the ring - Boney M.
1/7/1978
9
2
2
You're the one that I want - John Travolta &
Olivia Newton-John
2/9/1978
4
3
2
You're the greatest lover - Luv'
30/9/1978
2
4
2
Grease - Frankie Valli
14/10/1978
4
2
2
Hopelessly devoted to you - Olivia Newton-John
11/11/1978
3
2
2
Dreadlock holiday - 10cc
2/12/1978
2
2
3
Get off - Foxy
16/12/1978
1
2
2
Trojan horse - Luv'
23/12/1978
3
2
2
Paradise by the dashboard light - Meat Loaf &
Ellen Foley
From the year before the summer of love, probably essential for the
advent of Jimmi Hendrix´s 70s, 1968, this
is a recording from a famous pirate radio station ( a ship at sea)
Veronica, which much later became "legal" and "incorporated" the show
is the top 40 with great and pretty good sounding hits fromthe time.
Holland had begon to decay in that time already, listen to it, and
laugh and cry, or decide what you think. I was two years old at the
time, I remember more the beginning of the 70s bright and interesting,
American music as most influencial.
This was fun but I suppose about great badness (beginning 80s I think
it was):
The "Spider Murphy Gang" with Skandal im Sperrbezirk was less funny but
a strong song:
A total classic, Fisher Z:
Late 80s for instance Terence Trent D'Arby "Rain" (from "Introducing
the hardline", example is on amazon from that album).
In fact some of the influential music fro me was from the 60s:
A boy named Sue -- Johnny Cash
My point of course being: this is music, it was influencial because it
should be and of course certain aspects talked to me, and then it is a
very high form of art and craftmanship.
As cold as ice...
In fact
Larry Graham as he examplifies important Funk bass music with a capital
F in the for me famous TV music course Rockschool was one of my main
examples when I started to play the synthesizer (the DX7 mainly).
Exciting. Great. No mother for ya...
"Release" from "The Essential Patti Labelle"
is on amazon.com with a small mp3 example, the youtube movie has been
removed, I suppose justified, I´m not at all sure if I´d
like my great music to end up there the way it is. Great song.
Taking about other eras anyway, the 90s were really poor till downright
evil, only a few noteworty performers and songs made it in the hit
lists without getting compromised or simply not there.
This was a (modest ?) hit in the 90s, De Mosselman:
hardcore protest, what a rare occurance.
I think this sums up important issues from the 90s era, I don´t
like to translate the title from the Raggende Manne song, which in fact
I saw live once at what in Delft Univesity was (is?) called the IO
festival because somebody I knew was a fan of the band;
Nineties, but different: http://www.tracychapmanonline.com/#/video/4524420614
try "The thrill is gone" with the great B.B.King (it´s on
youtube, too, appearantly with permission). In fact that song, also
with Mr. King but with some great jazz names in the performance was one
of my important examples for playing complicated blues in the time I
was rehersing for and playing in all kinds of band constellations.
To not end this lineup so incredibly depressing (and with the
functional dirty language of such songs), the 80´s had great
synth based songs:
The korgies, beautiful.
Stricktly from the 70s, Dan Hartman:
Sounds funny with a the Hague accent.
The eternal band SUPERTRAMP
Aka "The crime of the century"
and "Breakfast in America".
So 70s? Eh no man, I think evolving beyond that. Few bands are really
the top in world history in relevance, advanced and pretty lifting up
music which most of all tells the truth and edifies musically more in
one song than the most of the rest of the historic hit songs together.
Cynic ? No, I mean it.. And no, it is bluesy a bit, and no party-rock,
but it does bring hope and for me was not feeling like ironic or so. I
suppose some american music should be better for ancestral reasons,
though there is no law against foreigners of that major cradle of rock
and everything else that matters in modern music (almost) winning a
high place in the pantheon or maybe a well placed podium on the
Olympus. I think the drummer is from California, and it is obvious the
music is more american than english in nature. Joe Jackson is another
example I think.
Maybe americans thought they wouldn´t need the weight of the
bands´ works (not the name) or simply think not those ways much
because they do not like the message type. ´Let the crime blow
over´ Lets hope it does, but a lot of peoples minds need to
change for that to happen.
So can I play the music of this band? Yes, and a bit no, I can´t
fellow-invent it when I play along, it isn´t exactly what I would
do harmonically and tune-wise. But like with most music I know well, I
can play along and do impersonations of more than a few instruments on
a good instrument (I use a Yamaha S90 a lot) but getting the feel and
the whole and the driving and space creating rock rhythms right is very
hard.
a fully open source created rock and roll tryout by me: wav file (20MByte), mp3 file (4MB)
Recent TV
I tried out a cheap but good recent lcd TV, one with sort of an
intermediate resolution, 900 times 1400 or so, which looks good, though
honestly my often in use construction with the Pinnacle TV Usb deluxe
hardware mpeg2 encoder (6 mb/s) playing with Mplayer on the server
machine I use with a years old but still fairly luxury 1680x1050
monitor looks better in most cases, but it depends a bit on what kind
os syncmaster, progressive encoding, and cable channel optimizer the
guys on the sourse side of the cable fiddle with and adjust good or bad.
However the TV look fine and of course I had to try a computer on it,
which works, and it even has a HDMI connection so I tried out a cheap
but well working HD dvd player and a HD cam on it, which is cool, but
honestly the Dell M90 I use for HD monitoring wins even though it is
years old technology. It was more expensive of course and has total HD
resolution, and a pro NVidia quadro card to help it. The TV seems to be
ok with my normal filming product though, so that was good, and then HD
of course looks great.
There was some news from the software radio front, new hardware being
prepared at Ettus, I don´t know if I can say what they wrote in
email, but I didn´t get the idea BBC HD will decodable with open
source sw soon...
I saw it is possible in europe to buy a discounted 128 Tesla processor
PCIexpress (for the time being) video card for a under 600 euros.
That´s half a Teraflop and incredible bandwidth 2 or 4 Gig
memory. Amazing.
A good companion of this idea would be this boaed (image from the
manufacturer) :
which is another PCIexpress board but 4 lane (instead of 16) with quite
a number of fast flash memory chips on it, which are arranged as fast
mass storage with access speed of over 600 Megabyte per second. Thats
dozens of times more than fast harddiscs! And they´re totally
quiet (solid state) lightweight, and much lower power than a harddisc.
Except they´re no so big yet, IIRC a number of tens of gigabytes,
60 or so costs $2500,- . But than I could probably store 32 bits per
RGBA component uncompressed 4k images at 24 frames/sec for good quality
cinema replacement. Flash of course cannot be rewritten indefinately,
but it takes 3 years of continuous writing to reach the end of life of
the memory.
Life and nature?
I´m sure that´s important, but then at a decent level,
maybe like good sailor, or it easily becomes boring romanticism
I´m sure.
I have done that before, but I never sailed anything even close to this
size, but I was looking at some yacht flyers in this case on the
internet:
great upper picture, the lower one wouldn´t do it for me.
This looks good:
Ahaaaaa, electrical:
!
It isn´t total nature but the roses grow good there it seems:
The pond I made has received vegatation, but it has hardly surfaced yet:
Another piece from (1080i, 25 full frames/sec) HD video recording, a
moving shot having been deinterlaced with ffmpeg after transcoding to
large search radius h264. It´s a simple screen grab, no
processing was done to film or this picture.
The above is from a sequence of photographs I made which I put together
as a few second film of the flowers opening in the sun.
The flower is moving in the wind, this is a unprocessed screendump from
a h264 transcoded (with larger search range) fragment (played at a
smaller than1080)
Original recording with the Sony HC3 1080 2.2 megapixel HD video camera
(an older one with tape and firewire) of some flowers in a field, not
deinterlaced played with the open source mplayer on a 1680x1050 screen
(1.7k, a bit less than full HD resolution)
Transcoded via h264, and subsequently deinterlaced with ffmpeg
transcoding to mp4 (quicktime for linux), rest the same.
Played with NVidia´s purevideo.
A roses closeup:
a piece of the pond in the sunlight
Some people I knew.
I´m reading the latest Sandford.
It´s wonderfull (well almost) to virtually stawl around in
Sausalito (Maybe I should find someone who´d say "you´re
on" when I want the purify that environment from the evil new age...)
The below looks the same as a little while ago, but close views seem to
have been replaced with new pictures, unfortunately the very nice HD
pictures have been replaced with medium resolution ones, which on a
small screen or beamer probably doesn´t matter, but on an HD
screen zooming has become useless.
A swimming pool makes great nature when it´s warm.
I took the liberty to look up some swimming pool pictures on the web:
"way expensive but nice lighting..."
"not the price of a car, and too big, but great!"
"expensive, but what a colour...."
This
site was the reason to look at the pools "Six steps to paradise",
amoung which the regulations of the state
of california, amoung which:
115922. (a) Commencing January 1, 2007, except as provided in Section 115925, whenever a building permit is issued for construction of a new swimming pool or spa, or any building permit is issued for remodeling of an existing pool or spa, at a private, single-family home, it shall be equipped with at least one of the following seven drowning prevention safety features: (1) The pool shall be isolated from access to a home by an enclosure that meets the requirements of Section 115923. (2) The pool shall incorporate removable mesh pool fencing that meets American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Specifications F 2286 standards in conjunction with a gate that is self-closing and self-latching and can accommodate a key lockable device. (3) The pool shall be equipped with an approved safety pool cover that meets all requirements of the ASTM Specifications F 1346 . (4) The residence shall be equipped with exit alarms on those doors providing direct access to the pool. (5) All doors providing direct access from the home to the swimming pool shall be equipped with a self-closing, self-latching device with a release mechanism placed no lower than 54 inches above the floor. (6) Swimming pool alarms that, when placed in pools, will sound upon detection of accidental or unauthorized entrance into the water. These pool alarms shall meet and be independently certified to the ASTM Standard F 2208 "Standards Specification for Pool Alarms" which includes surface motion, pressure, sonar, laser, and infrared type alarms. For purposes of this article, "swimming pool alarms" shall not include swimming protection alarm devices designed for individual use, such as an alarm attached to a child that sounds when the child exceeds a certain distance or becomes submerged in water. (7) Other means of protection, if the degree of protection afforded is equal to or greater than that afforded by any of the devices set forth above, and have been independently verified by an approved testing laboratory as meeting standards for those devices established by the ASTM or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). (b) Prior to the issuance of any final approval for the completion of permitted construction or remodeling work, the local building code official shall inspect the drowning safety prevention devices required by this act and if no violations are found, shall give final approval.
In short it has to be kid safe.
A picture of a pool I made:
Sort of 70s bookstyle or maybe magazine style processing.
Unbeatable freshness. Even though in holland there appears to be no
more chlorine in tapwater.
I used to have a friend whose dad had this hip machine at the time (end
70s):
Moving flowers don´t make much noise, and neither do ants, so
probably I only recorded busses and construction sites...
Freedom, yeah right
Exagerated colors like in nice old prints without the nice...
I was lost but it was close, the GPS in the phone the picture was made
with worked, but somehow there was not even a minor internet
connection, so that I couldn´t make out where I was.
Spielberg frames from his western series from the BBC digital sattelite:
!
