OnSight

OnSight is my newest programming project.  It is intended to help me practice sight reading – it is a small utility to generate random snippets of music – I got the idea off a website which offered a similar online tool, but theirs was only for treble clef and was not very customisable.

OnSight uses lilypond as the backend for generating music – it just spits out a temporary lilypond file and then executes lilypond.  It is intended to be fully customisable – you can change the length of the snippet of music, the key signature, the time signature, the shortest interval of note it will generate, or all of those options can be randomised.  It will then generate random music in the key and criteria selected.

Another planned option is random slurring of notes, which is common in most string music (Well, not random), and for more intensive practise, atonal music with no key signature, using random chromatics.  Also, there will be an option to vary the range of the music, by selecting the highest and lowest notes generated, and possibly an option to focus the majority of the notes on higher or lower strings for more specific practicing.

Currently it’s just me working on this project, and I would welcome any other developers, testers, or help of any sort (I am pondering if it’s worth creating a sourceforge or other project hosting account for this).

Cheers

(Also, Edexcel, you suck.  Look carefully at GCSE Music 2007 question 1, parts e and f I believe.  )

“Linux is no good for gamers”

I just thought I’d go through a few things about gaming under linux.  I recently built myself a new main gaming machine, with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, gig of RAM, and an nVidia 7600GT XXX (Factory overclocked).

Linux support for this hardware has been brilliant – I have previously had to struggle with ATi binary drivers, and have found the nVidia ones to be so much better.

Once I got gaming, I was amazed by the performance.  Playing at 1600×1200, with all settings at the highest, in UT2004 (Not the latest and most demanding game, but it could bring my old system to it’s knees at a higher resolution) and I was getting consistantly 200FPS at least on large outdoorish maps (CTF-FaceClassic).  Now, what really amazed me was when I compared this to my friend’s results – he runs Windows XP (32 bit), has a gig of RAM, a dual core opteron (64 bit though the 32 bit OS…), and has the GeForce 7900 GLH (Goes Like Hell).

In pretty much every regard it appears his system should perform better than mine, but he gets a peak of 100FPS on most maps.

As far as I know the reasons for this probably are -

• He only runs 32 bit windows, therefore not utilising the 64 bit processor.  I use 64 bit linux (Gentoo, so everything is optimised too.  Ricer, I know ).  I don’t know how much of a difference, if any, this makes.
• Linux doesn’t have all the gunk of windows.  Windows XP isn’t as bad as Vista in this regard, but it still runs a lot of unnecessary stuff and has a much bigger memory footprint than a carefully put together Gentoo Linux system (I mention the distro, since I have found Ubuntu with GNOME can sometimes take more memory and be slower than a fresh XP install).  In addition, Windows tends to collect spyware, background processes and other general gunk, meaning your PC that seemed snappier than, well, a clothes peg, starts becoming more like a wet towel just days after “general usage”.

Also, enemy territory ran perfectly smoothly on 1600×1200, though I haven’t managed to benchmark it under windows on a similar system.

Now I await the release of Unreal Tournament 2007/3.  From everything I have heard this will have full linux support (Hopefully UnrealEd will do linux too – previous versions need wine, not native), and should utilise my shiny new system.

Cheers.