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.

A Ghosty Adventure

Or, “Why I use Linux”.

So, it started off the way any other good story does, I decided to backup my computer, popped out a Norton Ghost CD, and installed it.  It all seemed very nice in windows, and the way it rebooted to the DOS part wasn’t too bad either.

That was, until I decided to boot back into normal computer mode.  (Note how I avoid saying “Windows”).  It turns out to boot into DOS mode, Ghost tried to overwrite both my windows partition MBR and my main harddisk MBR.  So, to reinstall GRUB on my main harddisk MBR was dead easy – boot up a gentoo livecd, run grub-install, and I’m done.  However, now I needed to reinstall my windows MBR.  First I had to go and find an XP install CD.  After finally getting into the recovery console, I realised it hadn’t detected my RAID.  Then I had to go to the gigabyte website and download a floppy image, which for some reason was an EXE file.  So I had to go find another windows computer to install the EXE onto a floppy, then get the XP installer to load the RAID drivers.

So, I finally get into the recovery console, and it has detected my windows partition.  It asks for administrator password.  Oops.  After trying three passwords I thought it was, the installer decides to reboot my computer.  So, in an attempt to try again with some other passwords, I boot back into the windows installer.  But this time, the second I get to the recovery console, it reboots, instantly.  Bugger.

So, after trying to reset the password a number of ways and failing, I give up.  Gentoo and debian it is.

Wobbling Debian Etch

In other news, Debian Etch rocks!

Recently after having some friends ask me what’s so great about linux on my desktop, I decided to pull out the big guns and really impress them.  I decided to install beryl.

Now I’ve tried this procedure before with some sucess – I installed compiz and XGL on my main PC with a Radeon 9600.  It was hell to get DRI working with the binary drivers, setup XGL, hack up GDM, and finally get compiz to work, and it didn’t look or feel that different.

This time was completely different.

My laptop (The wonderful Sony VAIO PCG-TR1mp) has an Intel i810 (I think, it might be 830, 850, 915, or something weird like that), which has open source drivers in the kernel and in Xorg.  I had previously rolled my own kernel (To get my Wacom tablet working, I needed newer than the 2.6.18 builtin to Etch), so it was dead easy to compile in the DRM module for the graphics.  I hit upon a slight problem when Xorg refused to use DRI because I had selected the i810 driver – one quick dive into menuconfig to change this to 915, reboot, restart X, and I had DRI.  From there I configured xorg.conf (Using the gentoo instructions of course) for DRI and AIGLX.  Restart xorg, glxinfo / glxgears, and it’s all fine and dandy.

I hit upon a slight snag when I noticed beryl wasn’t available in etch, only compiz – one quick google search and adding a new repository (Don’t have the URL handy at the moment, will add it later), then I could apt-get beryl and emerald-themes.  Restart Xorg, start beryl-manager in an xterm, select WM as beryl, and we have wobbly windows, jelly on the desktop, and desktops on a dice.  Wahoo!

In other (again) news: GCSE mock exams start next week, therefore I will be mentally scarred for the remainer of my life.  It’s been nice knowing you.  Lucky bastards with the modular GCSEs.

Debian!

Well, as anybody who sort-of knows me knows, I’ve been using Gentoo linux for a long time, and have been strongly against anything else.  But recently my Gentoo install died on my laptop, due to suspend2 getting rather confused and completely corrupting up my root filesystem – it seemed quicker and easier, instead of trying to restore all the files from /lost+found etc. to just reinstall (Yay for /home on a different partition).   As this laptop is (only) 900MHz, I didn’t want to do a full gentoo reinstall, and I needed to be up and running quickly to get back to work.  So I decided to try debian…

I’ve had a long history of being bad with distro installers – they hate me.  They crash, mess up, and generally give me the finger and every possible oppertunity, which might be one reason I settled with gentoo’s “Lack of installer” install method.  But this time, I decided to try Debian’s actual installer, instead of playing around with debootstrap

One rather small netinstall download and a trip downstairs to the cd burner later, I had my CD.  The install went rather well, except for one little thing – I love LVM(2).  I’ve started using it on all my machines.  Now, the Debian installer (This is Etch I’m talking about, BTW), claims to support LVM2, however in the partitioner I couldn’t figure out how to actually create LVM logical volumes – So I just dropped to a TTY, fired up the built-in busybox shell, and created all the volumes manually (Following the gentoo instructions, of course ).  Strangely, once I had actually created the logical volumes in LVM2, the debian partitioner saw them nicely and allowed me to setup all my partitions on them, dead easy.

So that’s certainly the smoothest install I’ve had in a *long* time.  Thanks Debian.

Actually using the system wasn’t too bad either – once I had figured out the /etc/networks/interfaces syntax, I got my ethernet working.  My laptop’s built-in Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 was a different matter though – It never seemed to be properly recognised.  Eventually after routing (rooting?) through dmesg, I located the error message – ipw2100 was complaining it couldn’t find the firmware.  It seems that debian included and installs the ipw2100 driver, however not the firmware, as intel has some funky restrictions on the license of the firmware.  However they didn’t think to create a nice warning box or actually tell you, they assume you already know or dmesg is your bedtime reading…  Even now I found and installed the binary firmware, I still have to modprobe -r ipw2100 && modprobe ipw2100 before I can use my wireless, I have no idea why.  But once I’ve done that, it works perfectly.

To get widescreen working with Xorg I had to use the same VBIOS hack I used on gentoo previously, I simply hacked the GDM initscript to run it before X, that now works nicely.

Getting my touchpad working was also a bit of a pain – it “worked” on debian by default, however it was mind-numbingly slow – I had to add my touchpad configuration from my gentoo install to get everything working nicely (Decent acceleration+speed, tap-clicking, side/corner scrolling, double-tap-dragging).  But now that’s also working nicely.

To get my external wifi dongle (Netgear WPN111 – avoid like the plague) and my tablet (Wacom Volito2 – lovely) working, I had to ditch the debian kernel – I couldn’t get a kernel newer than 2.6.16 out of apt, so I installed my shiny new 2.6.20 vanilla kernel straight from kernel.org – I had to configure and install manually, but now that works fine.  My tablet worked perfectly once I copied my settings from my gentoo install, however, my dongle is still hell:

This dongle has an Atheros chipset, but the madwifi drivers don’t support USB yet.  Oops.  So, I tried ndiswrapper: Bad, bad idea.  Every time I send a decent amount of data over the wifi, my kernel segfaults.  If I unplug the dongle or even wiggle it: Kernel segfault.  If I look at my laptop in the wrong way, yup you guessed it, kernel segfault.

So now I have my shiny new Intel Pro Wireless 2915A/B/G sitting on the desk in front of me, waiting to be installed this weekend – hopefully it will support higher speeds and WPA without horrific drivers (Yes, the intel drivers aren’t perfect, with their binary blobs, but I’d prefer that to ndiswrapper any day).  Updates coming soon.

</waste of bandwidth>

A linux success story…

So, this christmas one of my dodgy aunts decided, instead of getting me the usual football quiz (I hate football), to get me a camera – A 15 quid digital camera at that, but still my best present from them yet.

After a bit of googling for the USB vendor ID etc. it didn’t appear linux supported it, so I had a play in windows – it was a pain in the ass.  I had to manually copy the driver files over, download a DLL off the intarweb, reboot a few times, then install the program that came with the camera – ouch.  But it finally worked, and I was quite surprised how well the camera worked, for 15 quid.

But then I got sick of booting into windows to check out my photos, so I figured, what the hell.  I had had a good experience with a similar cheap camera and gphoto2, so I installed gphoto2, ran gphoto2 -P, and whaddyaknow, there are my photos.  Nice one gphoto .

Energy Saving Lightbulbs

So, it might not sound like the most interesting title for a blog, but here I am, writing about…

Energy Saving Lightbulbs

Last time I tried one of these, I was really disappointed – it was extremely dim and annoyed me.  But I just got a new one, and it’s amazing.  80% power consumption of a normal bumb, equivilent lighting of a 90W bulb, and a really cool swirly shape too!  And the icing on the cake, it lasts as long as 8 normal bulbs. 

So, what are you waiting for?  Go out and buy these today!

In other, completely unrelated news, according to a news site… If we carry on at our current rate of carbon dioxide production in approximately a century a bunch of hydrogen sulphide will suddenly bubble out of the oceans causing mass extinction.

*cough* *cough*.

…updates…

Ok, so I’ve decided I want to go to Cambridge. Not really sure if I’ve actually got much chance of getting in, but it’s something to aim for… This would mean 6+ A*s at GCSE and the rest A, and 3 As at A2 level. I /think/ I can achieve this if I really work hard and get serious about the subjects. However, one thing I’m not sure about is which course to take… The main ideas I’ve had are, electronic engineering, and computer science. Got any suggestions, comment!

Back!

I’m back, glad to be back on my nice shiny connection, even though it’s currently so messed up, the wifi I was using was actually more reliable.  .

On the subject of ubuntu, I’ve decided to stick with gentoo on my desktop, since the ubuntu install messed up a bit.  But I will keep ubuntu on my laptop, since compiling kills the (already dead) battery, and I usually can’t wait when on my laptop.

Holiday!

So, here I am, on holiday. Phone’s GPRS connection is working nicely. I’ll keep blogging until my phone’s balance runs out, and keep leaving comments .