Schmid blog 2005 jan-jun

Schmid 20:24, 26 Jun 2005 (CEST) Dödsbo Collective


Yesterday, I was at the Dödsbo collective at Kirkegaardsgade in Aalborg, the neighbour of the Kling Klang Studio for a going-away party for Trine Raaschou and Olafur. The party had a massive turnup of electronic musicians and DJs, including Mads Weitling/Kiloton, Bo/SilentBoom, Gregers/DJ Strangelove :) and my good friends Yngve/DJ Stonecases and SuneP.

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I'm watching the movie Strange Days with Ralph Fiennes. It's not brilliant, but OK. Michael Wincott plays one of his usual psycho characters. He had the memorable line:


 * "Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale."



Schmid 12:42, 17 Jun 2005 (CEST) Gonzo
I just remembered one of my favourite quotes from Muppet Show:


 * "And next: The Great Gonzo directs "Liebestraum" whilst duelling a giant crab"

You've got to love that show!

Schmid 21:29, 16 Jun 2005 (CEST) Post-Exam Laziness
I have reached new levels of laziness. Actually, I think a new term is required to describe my state. Today, I was sitting by my laptop, using a paint program through Remote Desktop Connection (which is SLOW), because I was too lazy to walk 1.5 metres to the computer, on which the paint program was installed.

...

Yesterday, I passed the Software Engineering exam at Aalborg University. It proved that the method of preparation, used by me and my groupmates, was sound. It inspired me to write an article containing my extremely pragmatic Study Tips.

Schmid 21:40, 5 Jun 2005 (CEST) The Wassmanns
Yesterday I visited BirkumgÃ¥rd, an old mansion on GjÃ¸l, for a 60th wedding anniversary for my father's foster parents, Birgit and JÃ¸rn Wassmann. They are the parents of the painter Bo Wassmann.

...

Today I played a few hours with my band BjÃ¶rnocator. We played a few new tracks, "The Number of the Beast" and a track by Slayer, I can't recall the title right now... We got them down pretty quickly, even though "The Number of the Beast" was in 5/4 and had some pretty crazy breaks. Later on, the band went and played pool, where I was brutally clobbered by Jacob Froberg :).

Schmid 12:55, 31 May 2005 (CEST) VectorRace


Finally! I've handed in my article for this semester. I think it turned out OK, even though I was making corrections up to the last minute before I handed it in... It is about the game of VectorRace, which is a pencil-and-paper game, that models the problem of finding the fastest path through a 2D-track for an accelerating vehicle.

I have typed so much in the last few days, that the tendants in my arms are switching between pain and cold numbness. I imagined how it would be if my fingers simply stopped working a day before handing in the article. The horror! Especially my little fingers are troubled. I have to have a few typing-free days... From now on, the only thing I am allowed to do is play Pacman with a PlayStation-controller (that only requires the left thumb, which hasn't been used at all for typing :). Not bad, actually! 

Schmid 21:08, 21 May 2005 (CEST) TWEAK, MAME and other Acronyms


It's been a while... My webserver has been down due to my router committing Seppuku after updating the firmware. Nice going, D-Link!

I was advised to use iptables as a software router instead, which I got to work after some chinscratching and with much appreciated help from Lars and Daniel.

Check out the pictures from TWEAK May 7th at 1000fryd in Aalborg. There's also a few random pictures from the next day.

I have hacked MAME a bit, and was able to compile a small mame.exe with support for pacman only. A few incisions in the code enabled me to output info on the game screen and control the little dude automatically. If I could somehow read the positions of the ghosts, I could make a pacman-playing AI from hell... Later I would also like to make a Capcom fighter-AI. If someone is interested in joining this silly project, don't hesitate to e-mail me (see the front page for my e-mail adress). 

Schmid 17 May 2005 Cosy


Here's a bunch of pictures from my cosy weekend, May 16th and 17th. 

Schmid 12:34, 4 May 2005 (CEST) Aesthetics of Computer Science
So, my essay on aesthetics of computer science is finally done! I finished it at 5:30 AM and it almost killed me :). Anyway, I think it turned out alright, although it might be a bit vague in the conclusion. It is really my first essay, so that's OK, I guess...

Schmid 14:30, 2 May 2005 (CEST) Foofle
Man, I spend a lot of time updating schmid.wiki. I think a have to go cold turkey, or else I will surely fail every single exam this semester :). Anyway, I have made pages about BitTorrent, Firefox, including a patch to use Vim for editing textboxes.

...

Try this search for 'feedtitle' on google.dk and look what it comes up with under 'Mente du:'... So funny :)

BTW, google has a lot of funny domains redirected to it. Here's a few of the better ones:


 * http://www.goolge.com - dyslexic
 * http://www.gewgle.com - phonetic
 * http://www.466453.com - cryptic
 * http://wwwgoogle.com - missing the point?
 * http://www.foofle.com and http://www.gppgle.com - good old typing errors
 * http://www.gooogle.com and http://www.gooooogle.com - but not http://www.goooogle.com

Schmid 00:44, 1 May 2005 (CEST) MAME Kaillera


Last night I tried running a Kaillera Server and playing the same arcade game on two different PCs at once. Great fun! All my friends were sleeping, so there wasn't anyone who could play with me... I made a page about setting it up.

I have made pages about Metal Slug and Guwange today. The Metal Slug page is actually a walkthrough of the first couple of levels. 

Schmid 20:15, 30 Apr 2005 (CEST) Søbygge / Schmid Collaboration
The SÃ¸bygge/Schmid collaboration is over for now, we recorded a few really weird tracks with 4-channel improvisations. The tracks didn't turn out that well, but the process of recording them was quite fun. We used a 4-track tape recorder, which sat some interesting limits for the recording process.

Yesterday I went to see Mads Weitling. I was invited to help him with an interesting 3D-simulation music generation project. After some analysis of the problem, which was mapping the coordinates of a mouse pointer to 3D space, we figured out a solution. He used Blender for the simulation, and programmed it using the Python interface. Very nice - I look forward to seeing the finished version...

I have made a schmid.wiki page about Music Programming. Right it contains frequency calculation, the formula I never could remember... It also contains a link to my report on Development of Intelligent Music using a Hierarchical Composition System (PDF).

Schmid 23:38, 25 Apr 2005 (CEST) New Laptop
So ... finally my new laptop arrived! I won't go into details about the transaction here, save but a note to myself never to buy from Dell again. The service was not satisfactory at all. But all is well that ends well, and the Inspiron 510m seems to work very well. It runs for an adequate period on the battery, the screen is good - nothing to complain about, really. I think that is how it is with Dell: the hardware is good, but the service is awful. I'll try another company next time.

I spent the evening installing my survival kit on it, plus a bit more stuff.

These days I am "camping" with my good friend [http://www.rockdoc.dk/10134.html Michael SÃ¸bygge]. We're going to record some music the coming days, and I'm looking forward the collaboration.

...

cableman told me that I should try the SDL library for multimedia programming. I will do so soon... I hope the audio interface is more powerful than the Java applet audio interface, because that one sucks!

Schmid 01:30, 24 Apr 2005 (CEST) Regular Expressions


My father asked me about searching and replacing in Vim, and I told him that he needed to learn regular expressions. So I created a regular expression tutorial on schmid.wiki for reference. Took me all day, but what the hey...

Last night tried to sit through Evil Dead without falling asleep, and right now I'm trying to watch a movie called Gargantua, but it's to crappy... Better go to sleep than watch big crudely animated bathtub animals scare talentless soap actors (what a strange sentence). 

Schmid 12:46, 20 Apr 2005 (CEST) Amiga, SuneP, Music Page
I have two Amiga-related wishes:


 * I would like to copy the contents of my A1200 HD to a virtual partition to use with WinUAE. How can I do that?
 * I would also like to convert my collection of MODs, XMs, S3Ms to MP3s for listening on my iPod

Today, I helped SuneP create a blog for his site. And I got a big load of pictures from him... Very nice!

The music page on schmid.dk needs an update. I have decided to put all my music up for download as soon as possible. I want to make a few pages, each with a "cover" image and a few tracks with a common theme. For instance, "Bad Ash" and "Stop Whining" would be on the same "record". Of course, the ID3 tags should represent these "records" as well...

Schmid 02:29, 20 Apr 2005 (CEST) Sheepy Layout
Oh boy, I'm tired. I have just converted schmid.wiki to the grey layout of the rest of schmid.dk and made the new sheepy logo. Looks nice though :). And now ... must sleep!

Schmid 20:22, 19 Apr 2005 (CEST) Blogging ... The Final Frontier


This is the first entry in my blog. My intention is to keep a diary of sorts, although it might not contain the really personal stuff. We'll see how it evolves. The idea of creating a personal blog came from SuneP. Check out the ugly picture of me on his blog.

I thought about using a blog tool like b2evolution or PolarBlog or perhaps write one in PHP, but decided that it would be easier and quite obvious to just use mediawiki, which is already up and running, I know how to use it, and it is being backed up regularly. For now, at least, it seemed obvious to just put it here.

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Sometimes, I feel like I live on a sharp edge of time, the future being a unpredictable chaos, and the past being a inpenetrable haze without shape or form. Due to bad memory and distractability (is that a word?) interaction with other people, my activities, and my discoveries are in danger of disappearing forever. A record like this provides a frame and some structure in the haze. Eventually, I would also like to add some photos. I hope SuneP has some photos of my life in the last couple of years.

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Today, I created a dynamic info-page for my father containing documentation for Fjerritslev Skole. The page contains basic grade school tutorials, mostly StarOffice/OpenOffice files (I have written a few of them :).

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I just heard Helge Kragh in a DR2 special on Albert Einstein say, that Einstein disliked the cosmological constant ($$\Lambda$$)


 * $$R_{ab} - {R \over 2} g_{ab} + \Lambda g_{ab} = {8 \pi G \over c^4} T_{ab}$$



for aesthetic reasons. This point of view is relevant for my software philosophy (SF) essay.