the sonorous swell

Music you should listen to at least once

July 27th 2008 | Music 1 Comment »

First up, one of my all time favorite bands: Thrice. These guys are simply amazing. All four volumes of the Alchemey Indexes have been in heavy rotation on my music player at work. This isn’t the Thrice I originally started listening too with album The Illusion of Saftety, they’ve gone completely beyond metal or any category you would want to put them into. All I can really say about them is that they love making music, they love exploring music and it is awesome to be able to enjoy the ride with them. You can expect to be giving a full spectrum of their abilities with the Alchemey Indexes, metal, electronic rock, and folk. This music inspires me and gets my mind twisting down all these different stories the songs conjure up.

Next: The Album Leaf – In a Safe Place. This cd is pure relaxation, perfect for doing just about anything. It is hard for me to describe these guys. I want to say that the music doesn’t get in your way and is perfect for working. But if you do actually listen to the music, it’s very good and as I mentioned soothing. The music itself covers acoustic guitar, piano, and some soft electronic effects. The cd is mostly instrumental, but there are a few songs on it that amazingly do not interrupt the flow of the entire album.

Iron & Wine – Dusty told me about this guy a few years ago and I’ve really only gotten into him recently. This is a very mellow completely acoustic guitar solo act. Definitely a nice twist(from my normal music). The lyrics to some of the songs are amazing.

Muse – All I can say is if you have not listened to the Blackholes & Revalations album you are truly missing out. This is a great album and I hope there is more of this music on the way. This is another band not content with sticking to one style of music, and even on this album they don’t just stick with driving techno rock music.

Finally, I want to talk about Revolution Void, I haven’t listened to this music that much but what I’ve heard I have enjoyed. It can be described as electronic-jazz but I think it is better than the music I think of when I here those two words together. Anyhow he releases his music under the CC so you can download it for free, and if you enjoy it you can give something back to him. Something worth looking into if you’re looking for something different. So far it sits in the work music category, not annoying enough for me to skip it but not quite good enough for me to want to listen to in my car or at home, but that could change as I listen to it more.

It amazes me as I listen to all this new music I can always go back to stuff I’ve listened to for years and get right back into it. It’s not the same as when I first heard it, but it is still great, like having old friends that were with you through the tough times. Ghoti Hook, Five Iron Frenzy, Alkaline Trio, and many others will still be in my playlist for years to come.

Compiling packages in Ubuntu

May 11th 2008 | Ubuntu Comments Off

Brad was asking me the other night to try and compile wormux (yes we both loved Worms Armageddon) because he was having some issues with it. Now I guess I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while but I have yet to actually do any development on it, and it has mostly been just to keep my server up and running. In Gentoo, if you installed a package you’re pretty much promised to have all the development files needed to compile the package again later. Ubuntu doesn’t even come with a compiler intially! No problem though, all the things you could need for compiling c/c++ programs can be easily installed with:

sudo apt-get install build-essentials

That little command will get you set up with autoconf, make, gcc a couple of libraries and a few other things you’ll be needing. However it’s not enough to actually compile wormux. We need more libraries, specifically wormux lists, libsdl (and several other libs that extend sdl), libxml and libcurl. Hrm, cool enough, Ubuntu has libsdl-dev, libxml-dev, and libcurl4-openssl-dev (somehow I figured out that was the package I needed as wormux lists libcurl3-dev). You can go about installing each dev package as you need ie:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

But there is a much easier way. If the package you want to compile has a source package you can do this:

sudo apt-get build-dep wormux

And boom, there you go. Use ./configure followed by make and you should have a fresh binary to run through your cpu. Though once I was finished with this I ran into some issues and a couple questions. For example look at the output from initally running the above build-dep command:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
cdbs comerr-dev debhelper fdupes html2text intltool intltool-debian
libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfreetype6-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
libglib2.0-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libglu1-xorg-dev
libgnutls-dev libgnutlsxx13 libgpg-error-dev libidn11-dev libjpeg62-dev
libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev liblzo2-dev libogg-dev libopencdk10-dev
libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0 libpthread-stubs0-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev
libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev
libsdl1.2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libsmpeg-dev libsmpeg0 libtasn1-3-dev
libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libvorbis-dev libx11-dev libxau-dev
libxcb-xlib0-dev libxcb1-dev libxdmcp-dev libxml++2.6-dev libxml2-dev
mesa-common-dev patchutils po-debconf x11proto-core-dev x11proto-input-dev
x11proto-kb-dev xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev
0 upgraded, 57 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 4231kB/15.3MB of archives.
After this operation, 56.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

A lot of these development libraries are completely unneeded for compiling wormux and while initially conveinent using build-deps does not give you an easy method for removal. There is no “apt-get remove build-dep package-name.” Which most of the time that’s not a problem, when people decide to compile software they usually have plans to work on it for a while. However, in my case (just installing the deps to help a buddy out with some compile issues) it would be nice to have a way to remove these packages.

So to end this tale, the best way to install development packages if you’re feeling lazy is to use apt-get to install (and later remove) the dev packages individually (as done in the first example). You would then use apt-get build-dep for when you’re actually doing more serious work (presumably managing packages/releases for Ubuntu/Debian). The ideal solution is to install each package manually, cluttering your system the least amount and giving you full control. But as I’ve been told while looking into this, there’s no reason to sweat the small stuff, so I’ll probably stick with installing dev packages individually and removing them when I get in the mood for cleaning my system later.

In like a lion

March 2nd 2008 | Random Comments Off

So, I’m looking at that nice list of goals I made in my last post and feeling a little bit disappointed with myself. I’m behind on all goals, except fast food. Though I haven’t been perfect at avoiding fast food I’ve definitely cut way back on eating out. And to be fair things haven’t been as simple as they should be. Right after I wrote my post I got sick and then a few weeks later I moved my girlfriend from San Diego to Kansas in 3 days. So there has been a lot of things going on. However it has all settled down, and now the weather is getting nice out. Yet, I’m here no where ready to run. So that means it is time to kick some lazy butt and get into gear.

Programming/Game development wise I have been somewhat sidetracked, but I do have everything setup on my linux install now so it is ready to go. Python plus pygame: check, subversion: check, music and rhythmbox: check. I must say that I am more and more amazed with Ubuntu everything “just works.” I plug in my camera, and boom it asks me if I want to import all my pictures. I put in a blank cd and bam! Do I want to make and audio cd or a data cd, and once I’ve made my choice I’m presented with a very simple interface to do whatever I chose. I have to say Serpentine is easily the best music cd creator I’ve ever used. There is absolutely no fuss or anything involved. I even was able to get my gamepad working in mame simply by plugging it in. Of course getting mame set up was a huge chore, but I don’t blame ubuntu, I blame the mismash of information and partial tutorials and the fact that I run amd64 on making nothing easy. However I’m happy to say that I did prevail and am now considering writing up a post about the steps I followed to get everything in proper order.

I have nothing more substantive to post. There are a lot of software releases coming out soon that I am excited about. The major one is Firefox 3. Somehow throughout Firefox 2′s life span I’ve solely used the windows version, though apparently the linux version of FF is terrible and an afterthought (no offense to the wonderful people who made it, I’m just repeating what I’ve read and have experienced recently). FF3 plans on fixing most of that. Also the next version Ubuntu (due in April!) looks to be completely awesome. Ars Technica did a review about all the new features. I’m mostly interested in the sound features and getting caught up on other developments that have not been backported to Gutsy yet (*couhg* new pidgin releases *cough*) Anyway, I need to catch up on some sleep if I am to get any of these goals started soon.

Promises, promises

January 3rd 2008 | Goals Comments Off

Holy moly! Apparently it has been an entire year since I’ve updated this thing. I have no real excuse for it, just been busy and not really interested in posting a lot of things here. But that is about to change. I’ve set some goals for myself this year and I’ve decided this will be the perfect place to log my progress. So what are those goals?

Run 100 Miles
Don’t eat fast food for lunch
Write two projects/games

And that’s it. I mean there are other goals I have, I want to draw more, play guitar more, use my camera more, but I don’t have any concrete goals set for those and for now I want to focus on just a few things. So let’s break down each goal.

Run 100 Miles – Pretty straight forward, that’s only 2 miles a week if I take two weeks off. However living in Kansas has made me realize only crazy people run in the winter outside. So until the weather is nice I’m stuck with a weekly regimen of biking 3 times a week. I have my dad’s bike trainer so putting up 20 mins every other day should be cake, assuming I can convince myself to do it, which at this point I’m motivated so it’ll happen and be wonderful(err painful for the next few weeks). Then when the weather gets nice I’ll add running to the mix. So even if I only run one mile in 10 minutes (which I should be doing better I hope) I’ll quickly make up the first few months of not running if I run twice a week for a minimum total of 4 miles. Anyway that’s the major goal I want to accomplish I’ll be setting up something here I think to keep track of just how far I’ve gone.

Don’t eat fast food for lunch – Ever since I’ve been working lunchtime has been less than healthy usually and more than expensive (in the long term). So I’m cutting this out. I’ll take my lunch or keep food on hand to easily make something at home for a healthier and cheaper lunch. I’m making an exception for Chipotle and when my company provides me with lunch (which isn’t too often and even then it’s usually subs or something somewhat healthy). So I’ll probably be posting recipe ideas for lunch as they come to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a nice list for myself so that when I get bored of a certain set foods I can switch to something else.

Write Two projects/games – Okay well I’m computer programmer, that’s what I do for a living. Though usually I write in php, javascript, or html/css. Argue however you may as to whether or not that is real programming (short answer: it is) I want to take on a few personal projects this year just for fun and just to have another look at coding. Write now I’m thinking of writing a tetris type game in python just so I can learn python and have an initial go at putting together a game (ie all the parts, gfx, game logic, key handling, sound effects, who knows maybe networking). Why tetris? Cause it’s easy and I love some of the variants like quatra so I want to write a python version where the game logic can be easily replaced . The second project, well I’m not sure yet. I think Linux could use a good heidi-sql clone, but I’m not positive I’m interested enough in that to follow through on it. It could be a more ambitious game too, but for now I’m going to leave it open.

Anyhow, I hope the new year is going well for you all, and who knows maybe we’ll talk again soon!

Sleepy

January 13th 2007 | Random 2 Comments »

So its a new year. I’m still not sure how to use my web space but I went ahead and finally started paying for it. Before I had a free promotional thing from 1 and 1, while I never had any problems with their service, Dreamhost simply has more features I’m interested in. So friends who’s sites I’ve obliterated, it wasn’t on purpose. It was time for a move, so here we are. I’m not sure what I’ll do with all the old posts and sections I had before. I’m not sure how to get them on this site anyways. But here we go. Here’s to a new year and promises of change.