Newbie Geek Strums #5...

being a follow-on from Newbie Geek Strums #4 and its predecessors.

• rsi: I think I'm okay on this score now. I took a break after I F-barre-chorded my way into trouble and built it back up slowly. I have taken steps to reduce wrist strain while keyboarding emacs all day and that has helped too.
  
• emacs: I have grown nails on my left hand for fingerpickin' (a style that I am becoming devoted to). The long nail on my pinky was becoming a problem in emacs which is a
  pinky-intensive editor. Then it occured to me that I never pick a string with my pinky so I cut that one. My fingernail assymetry has now deepended but life in emacs is much easier.
  
• physics: The physics of harmonics (natural, tap, pinch) has provided an unexpectedly interesting detour. I found some pinch harmonics on the high E string of my acoustic. Now it has all the dynamic range of a deep space vacuum on my acoustic but come the glorious day I get an electric, I'm looking forward to outdoing the local felines with my sqealies.
  
• ear: My ear is changing and my ability to discern differences in pitch is definitely improving. I can tune my guitar to standard tuning given a correct high or low E and get the rest
  reasonably correct. A couple of months ago I couldn't to this.
• playing over a chord sequence My ignorance of music was such that I didn't really grok what that phrase really meant. I'm beginning to get a handle on the relationship between vamps and lead lines and how music theory can guide you as to what goes with what. I got a backing track for a 12 bar blues in A... I played random notes from the A minor pentatonic on top of it... The lights went on in my head. I cannot do it yet. But I get it now. I see where I'm going now.
  
• rag time finger picking:The zoo of fingerpicking techniques is completely fascinating. I can hobble a few pinch patterns and the odd hammer-on/pull-off. The bit that blows my mind at the moment is the rag-time technique of keeping an alternating baseline going with your thumb while simultaneously picking out melody notes on the treble strings. I don't have enough independent CPUs between my ears to handle all the independent - but synchronised - processes
  involved here. I need an Erlang upgrade for my head I think.
  
• metamodels, onomies and ologiesThe "I,IV,V" chord notation is a meta-model. Maybe even an SGML-style architectural form...I can see the beginnings of a taxonomy of fingerpicking styles taking shape in my head...With a little bit of Python magic I can create my own software-based effects box....Argh! Stop!
  
• useful online stuff: Mike Herberts, Justin Sandercoe, Next Level Guitar and Heartood Guitar all have great stuff available online. As well as oodles of great free stuff I have paid some real dollars to both Mike Herberts and Next Level Guitar for other stuff. A small amount of dollars well spent. My latest fave tool is Slomo Director from Mike Herberts which I can use to slow down and repeat segments of audio/video. I am using it a lot with Mike's videos at the moment but it will work with any wmv/mp3 source.
  
• "establish the possible and then slowly move towards the impossible": I think that is a Robert Fripp quote. I know what he means now. Every month I find a new impossible thing. Every now and then it ceases to be impossible (which is good) but it is instantaneously replaced by something else which is impossible. All evidence suggests that this pattern repeats forever. Perfect knowledge is unattainable, the more you know the more you know that you do not know. All of that
  stuff. Take a deep breath and survey the infinity that always stretches out in front of you. I like that. The journey is the only reward because the road never ends.
  
  Good.
  

Jython 2.2 beta 2 now available

Congrats to the Jython dev's who have made Jython 2.2 beta 2 available for download here.

Pat Helland is back in the blogosphere

Memories, guesses and apologies. If EAI is your bag, you gotta read Pat Helland.

A hardware/software inflection point

"In the beginning there was the digital machine and it was good. Very good. So good in fact that people flocked from far and near to gaze upon its wonders and ask that most challenging of questions, namely 'Now that it exists, how can we program this thing without our heads exploding?'

And thus began a journey on a long and winding road..." -- A hardware/software inflection point

Threads - ugh!

[via Joe Gregorio] Guido takes aim at a well deserving target - the industry's current fixation with the notion that threads are the right way to handle parallelism:

"Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Just Say No to the combined evils of locking, deadlocks, lock granularity, livelocks, nondeterminism and race conditions."

Amen to that.

This threading thing erupts regularly in the Python world because of the Global Interpreter Lock.

To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski on regular expressions: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use threads.” Now they have two problems.

Threading is the right answer in s/w dev in the same way that manual memory management is the right answer in s/w dev. In *extreme* nich areas you are gonna need it but if you use it day-to-day for everything you are in a world of pain - needlessly.

This issue is, I think, the biggest issue facing s/w dev in the early 21st century. The h/w folks are steaming ahead with bazillion CPU cores in the offing while us s/w folk are largely rabbits in the headlights.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

"I think there is an interesting relationship between this [IQ] curve and the tools that software developers choose to use in their work..."
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

...a standard set of clearly defined messages that all objects can respond to...

Ah ha! Now I see where this DLR thing is going. HTTP implemented by the VM :-)