Agronesia

After a very long wait, finally the cool Mono guys released Mono 2.0! It is the open source implementation of the core .NET platform which of course includes the C# compiler. My litmus test is no other than FractalSharp which uses PropertyGrid and quite some System.Drawing stuffs. (Actually since 2.0 beta FractalSharp can be run without problems)

A C# 3 compiler is included there. Oh LINQ and lambda functions… I haven’t learned any new C# language features since the 2.0 generics.

Kudos to the Mono team (read their blog aggregator here). Now go get it! (I myself won’t rush, limited Internet quota here)

When I was having a walk yesterday morning, I found this praying mantis:

She didn’t try to run when I took him up. Closer examination revealed that both of her eyes seemed to be damaged. She was injured and probably blind. A disease? Poor little thing.

So, rather than let her have a tragic face of being crushed by mechanical whatnots, I took her home. I just let her stand on my hands along the way. After photographing her, I put her on a bush on my back yard.

The latest stable release of Gnome, version 2.24, has been released. Read the release notes for feature highlights and screenshots. I think the focus in this release in Gnome mobile, which enables developers to roll out application on mobile devices.

I prefer the Gnome to KDE. Quite a lot… The look is elegant, and the user interface is simple but very functional. (The looks of KDE is a bit too gaudy for my taste :)) Also, internationalization and accessibility has always been their top priority. (I do dislike the detached-windows model of The GIMP, but hey it’s just one naughty app)

I don’t mind the KDE fans, but I kind of despise the state of Indonesian Linux media in which Gnome is bashed a lot with full sentiments, thinking that the whole Indonesian population are all KDE fans. They use inappropriate words and always try to brainwash potential new Linux users claiming “KDE is superior technologically and visually, GNOME sucks hard” in every chance. I think both are great and its just a matter of preference. Linux journalists and writers, please rewrite your sentence so that it won’t be insulting. We’re all supposed to be friends, not enemies, you know…

When I tried decoding the 10th measure of Beethoven’s Fur Elise (sheet) by keyboard, I realized that it sounds just like a cover song by the disbanded Japanese idol duo W, Jounetsu no Hana!

Well, I do remember reading Jounetsu no Hana’s lyrics at the Hello! Project lyrics collection archive site projecthello.com, and it was written there that the composer is Ludwig Van Beethoven. However I couldn’t figure out what song it was at that time.

Now it’s glaringly obvious. The melodies are just Fur Elise, which is in 3/8 time, adapted to 4/4 to conform with the norm of pop songs. This time adaptation makes them not 100% same tune by tune, which is why I didn’t realize it the first time. To make the chain look more tangled, the song W is covering is a 1959 song by The Peanuts (a very old Japanese duo), which is actually a cover for an American song Passion Flower.

To compare the songs, listen to Fur Elise and then Jounetsu no Hana.

Oh, and don’t complain that I wrote Fur Elise instead of the fancier Für Elise. Jounetsu no Hana is also actually 情熱の花 :)!

This is a question of paramount importance to me. If I sleep too much, that’s a waste of time and productivity. But sleep too little and you will easily get sick. How much is this baffling ideal time?

According to NSF (National Science Sleep Foundation), it really depends on your age. And even within an age range, it can vary significantly. Here’s a hint if you’re seeking answers:

Image from NSF

But basically, the optimal sleep time is an individually unique value. If you feel you need more sleep, then you probably need it. Read the multi-page article for more details.

I’m going with 7 hours per day. So at this fasting season, this translates to sleeping at 8 PM and waking at 3 AM. Another option seem to be sleeping like the usual months at 10 PM but getting an extra sleep at daytime.

(and here’s hoping that you don’t break the sleep schedule… again…)

PS: I heard that Indonesia’s first president Soekarno sleeps only 5 hours (IIRC) per day. If he can really endure that, I envy him very much…

Following the recent meme on Planet Ubuntu (like this post), I’ll tell you what my laptop’s name is: agro-314159

Obvious one part is my name, and the random numbers are actually something you can eat.

IIRC, my old desktop’s name is agro-271828 which has the digits of e. What’s so special about e? Well, I like the fact that the derivative of e^x is itself.

Let’s spread this meme out of the planet. Make a similar post on your blog, and link back to this post (or any such planet post).

Steve Pavlina mentions on his various blog posts about batching. (There was actually one post specifically discussing it, but I couldn’t find it) Basically, it’s grouping related tasks and doing it in one session instead of spreading it the whole day.

For example, lets talk about checking emails. People who are always connected to the Internet usually have a compulsion to check their email at random intervals. That is a productivity loss, because most probably you are actually in the process of doing something else important. With batching, you say to yourself: “OK, I’ll just check all new emails every morning. Other emails arriving throught the day can be checked the next morning”.

I’m now in the process of applying it. Other than emails, there are RSS reader and various SNS that I use which can really waste time if you get into the habit of checking them periodically. Batching gives me extra time which is a luxury in our 24-hour day.

Yes, Google will release its very own new browser! If you have time, do read the entertaining 38-page comic licensed in Creative Commons illustrating it.

The highlights are:

• It will be fully open source. It’s not surprising, being Google which uses lots of open source technologies itself and supports open source through means like Google Summer of Code.
• The rendering engine will be based on WebKit which also powers Konqueror and Safari. Why not Gecko, the one powering Firefox? Google claims WebKit is fast, easily runs on mobile devices, and is very easy for new developers to learn.
• Each tab will run in its own separate process. Therefore, one tab crashing won’t affect the whole browser. The Chrome UI will also allow you to analyze the resource consumption of each tab which is a very sweet feature. Closing a tab will completely release all resources associated with the process just like closing a normal application, preventing memory hog.
  
• A JavaScript engine designed from scratch designed by the Google V8 team at Denmark. It will be designed from ground up to run big demanding applications like GMail with blazing-fast speed.
• Google Gears will be included by default. This is the JS component that can make web applications run in offline mode and other stuffs that are supposed to make apps easier to develop.
• Address bar will be below tabs. Well, it’s kind of logical but… Well, big deal…
  
• Privacy mode like IE8 in which nothing of your browsing activity is recorded. Aka pr0n mode.
• Address bar, or Omnibar as they christened it, autocomplete like Firefox 3 but with additional entries like popular sites based on what you type.
• Opening a new tab shows the list of 9 sites you open most just like Opera, with the addition of search engines you might want to immediately use on its right.
  
• Pop up blocking and anti malware/phising features. the browser will continually download list of malicious sites. Kind of a must have in today’s browser anyway.

It’s nice to see Google playing nicely by making it a free software. What I have high hopes most is in the JavaScript engine. The comic actually goes quite a great length explaining many of its technical details in comparison with other engines with simple languages (for a programmer of course), so again read it :).

As a (would be lazy) JavaScript programmer, I’ve got IE7, FF3, Opera, and Safari installed anyway (I believe I have Amaya installed at one point too). Another one in the neighborhood won’t be such a shock.

PS: www.google.com/chrome should have a content appearing soon.

On a previous post I discussed about the results of a Windows BPM finder program MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It sometimes produces values that are 2 times or half the seemingly actual value. And then the doubt grew on me, “Is that program even accurate at all?”. So, I was set to program my own BPM finder.

But I don’t know any sound programming stuffs, so I went for the easy path of a human-assisted program in which the algorithm is very intuitive. A human would tap the beats while playing a song and the program will do the simple mathematical calculation (it’s “beats per minute” for a thing, so it’s basically just a division).

Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking for information about the chord F#m7-5. I know the basics of intervals already, so I just need someone to tell me what this chord type is (e.g. major triad, dominant seventh) and the components of this seemingly-bizarrely chord (e.g. root, major third, and perfect fifth for a major chord).

A cursory browsing around Wikipedia’s music theory articles didn’t bear any fruit. I actually expected it to be in the chord articles which has a handy list of chord symbols/notations with their components.

And then I found this Complete Chords site which has chords for guitars and piano. But to see it we must download a hefty 20+ MB pdf file! The file probably has chord diagrams for C, C#, D, D#, etc. I don’t need that bloat! If I know what Cm7-5 is, I can get the others (just shift all the notes to the left or right by the same amount, though in guitar finding a convenient configuration by oneself might be quite challenging).

And finally, accidentally, by Googling with “only Japanese pages” currently set, I found a convenient Japanese site which provides just the info I need! Go visit the site (shoshinsha, which means beginner). It shows the piano keys which needs to be pressed for a certain chord, some with its inverted chords. Just regard the kanji and stuffs as a beautiful graffiti. With the chord sidebar on the left and the image, you can easily get the chord you need.

So, when you find yourself asking “how do I play this chord?”, you know there’s a handy reference around. I’ve downloaded all the chords with C as its root, which will be a convenient chord cheat sheet.

Btw, it turned out that F#m7-5 is just F#m7 with the perfect fifth component replaced by a diminished fifth. Now I know that the -5 part means “diminished fifth”. So in other words it is an F#dim chord (diminished chord) with the added minor seventh component.