Category: Uncategorised

there are some advantages to using CVS to manage your files. Not only does it provide a redundant copy, it keep track of previous revisions for you, which can be handy. also, if you find yourself generally using more than one machine, having your bookmarks in CVS could be handy so that you can have the same bookmarks across many computer and be able to change bookmarks on any computer and get the new bookmarks on every computer.
Obviously, you need to figure out what you want in cvs. Imagine that your computer’s disk is on it’s last legs. what files would you grab? those are the ones you want to backup and may be the ones you want in cvs
You need to install the developer kit on your mac, if you are using a mac. also, make sure that you have installed the optional bsd components of your operating system.
If your remote server is doing something weird, like running ssh on an unusual port, you will want to edit ~/.ssh config. Your file would look like:

Host host address
 Port port number

contact your sysadmin for more information on that.

You need to set an environment variable. If you run bash, edit ~/.bashrc and put in it:
export CVS_RSH=ssh

Ok, now ssh to your remote machine. you want to start a repository. you probably want to do this in your home directory, depending on what sot of permissions you have on the system. also, which filesystems are RAID? which are backed up? on my remote server, /home is RAID.
on the remote machine, type
cvs -d path to repository init
path to repository should be a full path name. for example, if your login name is brad, it might be: /Users/brad/Documents/cvs-repos . On my remote system, I used: /home/celesteh/cvsrepository
Ok, you’ve already got the list of files that you want to backup. Make a new directory containing all those files. Think about logical ways to break them up. I’ve decided to keep my library files in a separate distro than my documents.
tar cvf Documents.tar Documents/
gzip –best Documents.tar
scp Documents.tar.gz username@remote server:path to a temporary location
You’ve tar gzed the Documents that you want to save. You’ve copied that to your server. Now, log into the sever and re-expand:
cd path to a temporary location
tar xvzf Documents.tar.gz
Now cd into the directory where you have things to import and run the import command:
cd Documents
cvs -d path to repository import Documents vendortag releasetag
I don’t know what those tags mean. i used “backup” and “documents”:
cvs -d path to repository import Documents “backup” “documents”
You will have to enter a message describing your import. This is described further down.
The rest of this document deals with your local, personal computer and not the server. When you want to get this stuff back out, it doesn’t matter if you already have a folder named Libraries or Documents. On my local machine (the mac), those folder are just inside ~/ . We’ve set this up to run from within the bash shell:
bash
cd ~
cvs -d :ext:username@server:path to repository -z 9 co Library
The -z 9 compresses your data before sending it across the network, because network transfer is usually a major bottle neck. If your network is fast, you can omit the -z9 where ever you see it, or change it to less compression. 9 is most compressed (slowest processing, but fastest network travel time). 1 is least compressed (fastest processing, but slow network travel time).
Then, when you update your bookmarks or something and you want to make sure it gets backed up
bash
cd ~/Library
cvs -z 9 commit [ -m “change message” ]
The square brackets indicate optional arguments. It will look for changed files and prepare a list of them. If you use the -m flag, you’ve already entered a comment about what’s changed. otherwise, it will open a text editor where you can type in a comment. This text editor will usually be vi. Type a to start typing your comment. when you’re done, press the escape key and then :wq . that is: colon followed by w followed by q. Then hit enter. It may put you in emacs (after typing your message, hit control-x then control-s then hit control-x followed by control-c) or pico (after typing your message, hit control-x then y and then enter)
When you switch to another machine which uses the same cvs files, type:
bash
cvs -z 9 update

to grab all the most recent versions.
You can find out what has changed by doing a diff
bash
cd directory managed by CVS
cvs diff
It will give you a list of changed files and also of files that are in your local copy but not in the archive. expect to see a lot of cache files. However, say, if you log your ichats, each new log is a new file. you will have to add them:
bash
cvs -z 9 add newfile
you will have to do a cvs commit to actually get your new files into the archive.

Tags: Backups, CVS, Celesteh

I eat dinner, then I go to the concert hall, which is, thankfully, warmer than my home. and I sit in a relatively comfortable seat and am supposed to sit in still, rapt silence in the darkened hall and hold my applause until the very end. Often, I fall asleep. It’s hard to sit still in a dark room and stay awake. My co-students say that nothing in modern culture prepares us to pay attention to something for two hours. I’m going to disagree. In the past, we would never have been expected to sit quirt, darkened and disengaged for so long. Alex Ross has a great blog post about the history of applause. Music should not be like church. at least not like boring churches. We do music because it’s fun. fun means having a beer while listening. Or cheering at exciting parts. Or moshing. fun is not sitting still and trying to keep my eyes open even as a piece I love plays. If I wanted to sit in a perfectly quiet room by myself and listen to music, I’d stay home and put on a CD. I want to have an experience at a concert. I want to see somebody perform a piece really well, and to be there. Not passive.

Three semesters ago, I saw to clips from two movies which had the characters attending concerts. Both movies used the same piece of music. In both cases, it was intended to be romantic. In the American movie, everyone sat very still and stared without moving or blinking. In the Soviet film, couples that had gone to the symphony together smiled and snuggled. The US is in a culture war against all forms of art, especially high art, as evidenced by the eviscerating of the NEA. the Soviet Union encouraged art. Their movies reflect the political agendas.
We could all just start clapping when we felt like it. And snuggling with people next to us. We should not however, use a our cellphone rings as means to participate in the John Cage pieces, as that would be annoying as hell.
Tag: Celesteh

Your mac’s disk suddenly starts clicking really loudly or grinding and you’re suddenly getting IO errors or your system is crashing. What do you do?

1. Turn off your computer!!

Hold down the power button. you can cease all damage immediately by turning it off. It won’t get worse while it’s off. Off is safe. If only other life disasters had off buttons that could halt damage.

2. Panic, get drunk, etc

Call up your ex mother in law. Feel sorry for yourself. Cry. go ahead. Do all of this as often as you want and for as long as you need, but make sure that your computer is off whilst you drink, panic, make a fool of yourself, etc. You’re not thinking well while you’re freaking out. So take the time to do it, but don’t expose your disk to additional risk

3. Figure out what data is important

You are not going to be able to get an image of the disk. Your disk has errors. You need to figure out what you need to save. Generally, this is your home directory. Make a list of what matters by priority. Yeah, you want everything, but you may need to grab your bookmarks before you grab your 40 gigs of iTunes library. Things like your bookmarks, your apple address book and your apple calendar and in your home directory under Library. You may want to grab that.

4. find a computer with a lot of free disk space that you can borrow and a firewire cable
5. boot your computer as a firewire device.

hold down the t key while it boots. A firewire logo should appear on the screen. If it starts clicking and grinding TURN IT OFF. Try repositioning it and try again. You may find it works at a funny angle or on it’s side or upside down.

6. Connect the firewire cable between the good computer and the bad computer and start copying data

Get it by order of importance. When the disk starts clicking and grinding again TURN IT OFF. It may also just slow to crawl. turn it off in that case also.

7. Let the disk cool down

Let it sit off for a while to cool down. Then try getting more of your data. You can stick it in the fridge to cool faster if you can guarantee that you won’t get condensation inside the computer. Anyway, this just cools it down faster. Letting it sit will also cool it. cool is good. cool spins better

8. Repeat the grabbing and cooling cycle until you get everything or the disk completely dies
9. Take your computer to the store to get a new disk

If you have apple care, great. If you don’t you may want to consider it for next time. Also, ask the store about professional data rerieval, if you need it. Prices usually start around $500 and go up. The guy at the campus store told me the last two disks he sent off each cost $1200. Data was retrievable because the users turned off their computer when they heard loud clicking and grinding noises. Otherwise, disks and grind to death.

10. formulate a backup policy

Yeah, we’re supposed to the them. But we don’t. Who knew my disk would actually die? I haven’t seen that happen in ages. anyway, you need a backup plan and preferably, one that happens automatically. I don’t have answers here, but i think storing things offsite is good. Your data is just as lost by fire or theft as by dead disk. You need backups in a location where local calamity won’t destroy them.

Tags: Celesteh, Macintosh

1. Denial
I’ll just create an image of my entire hard drive.

2. Bargaining
I’ll just leave this running and it will, um, speed, up, right? I’ll call apple and if i plead with them they’ll tell me secret tips like freezing the disk drive (which may or may not work, as ipods seize up when frozen.)
3. Anger
I will never trust a laptop again!
4. Acceptance
Maybe it’s not worth $500 to save some diary entries, my address book and a few scripts. Maybe I could just rewrite my scripts.

The moral of the story

Maybe it’s best not to do tech work for something you’re personally invested in. I should have asked for help sooner, rather than drunkenly trying to copy the whole thing. Try to save everything. end up with nothing. thank god i had enough sense to grab my school work first.
also, it’s amazing how invested i’ve gotten with an inanimate object. in the future i need to 1. do backups. 2, not entrust my sense of self to a machine. 3, use paper more often.
Tag: Celesteh

Drinking will not solve your problems, no no no, but it certainly helps you forget what you’re thinking about.

No, it makes the fucking problems worse. Why didn’t I just turn the damn thing off and then wait until later and prioritize what I wanted to save? Now I’ve got a broken 12 gig disk image and no guarantee that i’ll be able to mount the physical disk again.
I feel real sense of panic when I think about this. My laptop is turned off. I will eat and do other stuff. then I will come back and try again. If it fails, I will go to the campus computer store and ask questions about disk repair. Maybe a new motor could revive it enough. Maybe there are some types of data recovery which only cost $500 or so.
The data I want: my diary, my scripts, my tax receipts, my frequent flier info, my addressbook. I can live without all that stuff.
I hate letting go. I am so not zen.
Tag: Celesteh

The last 12 hours of copying data:
-rw-r–r– 1 celesteh  staff 12368261120 17 Feb 13:34 laptop-image.dmg
-rw-r–r– 1 celesteh staff 12545871872 18 Feb 01:20 laptop-image.dmg
200 megs in 12 hours. not good. still just a quarter of the way done. i thought it would be a good idea to create an image of the whole disk. i should have just gotten my home directory. The 12 hours previous to that, I grabbed like 11 gigs. Things are clearly grinding to a halt.

What if I just gave up computers and went offline? How would my life change? I could write out things by hand. I could play tuba. I don’t have many offline skills. My housemate helpfully points out that I know how to read. It disturbs me how dependent I am on technology (I am aware of the irony of blogging this). I beleive in technology. Like a beacon of hope. Like a weird, secular religion. Maybe I should let go of it. Do I have to give up on everything that I rely on? Do I have to reorient myself in a more self-reliant direction? Should I remake myself into someone who is offline? It disturbs me to think of just how much my life would change. Which is why I think it might be a good thing. Being stuck in a mold is a prison. Needing a computer to do any work is a trap. They will not always be there. american hegemony will collapse. The oil will run dry and we’ll all be offline. So do I own my computer, or does my computer own me?
On the other hand, it would be mighty difficult to write a thesis on computer music without a computer. Is there a way to let go without letting go? It sounds like there can’t be. And what would I be throwing away if I walked away from technology? A valuable distribution system at the very least.
I let myself get too invested in technology. How could I just carry on without my data? Maybe it would be better to never do this again. blah blah blah. I need a support group. Is there someplace you can go for dealing with the sudden loss of data?
Tag: Celesteh

Well, I’m, um, creating a disk image. I wonder if maybe just the motor was burning out or something. It’s um, going slowly:

[whiptail:/Volumes/fw-1] celesteh% ls -las laptop-image.dmg
24156768 -rw-r--r--  1 celesteh  staff  12368261120 17 Feb 13:34 laptop-image.dmg
[whiptail:/Volumes/fw-1] celesteh% ls -las laptop-image.dmg
24157280 -rw-r--r--  1 celesteh  staff  12368523264 17 Feb 13:35 laptop-image.dmg

Uh, great. And it’s a quarter of the way through.
Do laptop screens get burn-ins? The firewire icon has ceased bouncing around on my laptop screen and is now just in the middle. it’s bright too. I don’t think there’s any way to dim the screen.
so how much does data retrieval cost, anyway? Can anyone recommend some place?
Tag: Celesteh

Drinking will not solve your problems, no no no, but it certainly helps you forget what you’re thinking about. also, me= lightweight. yes, so whilst i was sitting in the electronic music studio, preparing to create an RSS feed for podcasting (w00t) containing the reading or my firt symphonic piece, when suddenly, there was a loud clicking and grinding sound emerging from my laptop and i started getting IO errors. rebooting did not help. i booted it as a firewire disk and over the course of a much too long a time, i backed up my school data to Phillip’s computer. all throughout there was grinding and clicking and a painfully, mournfully slow data transfer. then i took it home and backed up my supercollider data. now i have it mounted as a frewire disk for my desktop and am creating a disk image. my hope is that i can take it to the compter store and that apple care will give me a new disk and then i can just re-image it and have the exact same computer as before. cuz disks do start to get full of crud and wiping them periodically is not a bad idea. but this is only a year old. and i like my disk. it has cool stuff like authorizations to run software that has obnoxious liscening control eneter code special key one computer at a time blah blah blah.

The image is going rather slowly, but not worrisomely slowly. maybe walking home shook everything back into place. if i take it to the computer store and it doesn’t show symptoms for them, i am still going to demand a new disk. my thesis. no backups. moment of panic. i had a moment of panic this morning when i communicated my thesis concert date to my advisor (April 5th) and he said, “oh, that’s just two weeks after spring break. pretty soon.” I looked stricken.
Readig drunk blogs is so great isn’t it. maybe i should halt drinking cognac before i float away from reality. i had a beer before office hours and then some jim beam from aaron’s hip flask when my computer started the click of deatjh. and now i just forgot that iw as not going to sip any more and then took another slip. it’s a slipper slope from here. i just did it again. goddamit. i have enough problems with relaity when i’m sober. do you ever have a feeling like you’ve sort of been out of the office for a while. what’s going on? so many of my reactions to people are not conscious. i’m much more alert when i’m typing. where alert = not dissasociated. i’m going to use that word even though i don’t know what it means. sometimes i giglle at things. if i’m giggling, i’m not home. it’s weird when i’m not home. ofdd times. times when i ought to be paying attention. and my computer is like, i dunno an umbilicall cord. it cannot die. my lif e is on there. i read a science fiction when i was a kid about an apple newton that attached directly to your brain so you ended up outsourcing your thoguhts to it until it became an extension of yourself. the author thought this was cool idea. but what about when the disk died:? what then? woudl you lose the memory of your 4th birthday party? would your thesis vanish into thin air? would you lose all the pices you had written in the last year? i’m thinking deep thoughts now. sense of self. what it means to interact with external stimuli.
My tuba broke durng class today too. i was having problems with my 4th valve sticking and was oiling it and pushing the rotar thingee up and down when sddenly the button disattached from the rotar. fortunately, my pocket knife is advanced enough to both take aparta computer and repair a tuba. you buy a tuba and it costs 2 – 4 imes as much as a computer, but it will last for a hundred years. you buy an analog modular type snth from MOTM for around the same price and it will last for about 30 years (maybe longer). you buy a laptop and it will last 5 yeard if you’re insanely lucky. otherwise. 2. maybe 4 years. what a tremendous waste of money. and here i am typing on my 5 year odl desktop (it’s still a fast computer, dsmmnit) about how computers suck and i need to experience life without mediation or more directly and while present and what not. i’m going to stop programming entirely and learn to meditate and go sit in trees o n the outskirts of yellostone saving buffaloes from wymoing ranchers who are legally empowered to kill them and be a diryt ippie activist luddite and pay folk musc on ym tuba. strating tomorrow. goodnight
Tag: Celesteh

what’s more fun that working on your thesis? How about putting a Creative Commons license on music from last Fall?
My political pieces have a limited shelf life, so keeping them to myself would be stupid. Download the, trade them, creative derivative works. Link

Tags: Celesteh, Music, Creative Commons

Friday, I started catching a cold and by Friday night I felt kind of ill. I set up webcasting for the Bill Dixon concert. It was the first official webcast from school. My computer was crashing with Quicktime Broadcaster, so I had to work out those issues, get a line out of the DAT machine, set everything up, all while feeling sick and the run and do a soundcheck and play in the concert. I felt dizzy after playing some notes. Cold medicine to the rescue. It is ungood to tech for a concert and then go play tuba in the same concert. However, I can now do webcasting and could teach it to others.
Despite a very harried set up, the concert went extremely well. It was a joy to play Dixon’s music. I felt like I played well. and the webcast was successful. So all was well. Somebody who heard the concert said they dug the tuba. Cool. I didn’t even know anybody could hear me.
Saturday morning, I woke up early, consumed caffeine and then set up a webcast for the Bill Dixon symposium. then I drove to the airport and picked up Cola! Yay! I dropped her off at my house so she could nap after taking the red eye and then I went to the rehearsal to my 5 minute symphonic piece. Aaron conducted it. the orchestra was sight reading. Aaron really pulled the piece together in 45 minutes of rehearsal. They played it very well at the end of practice. I wish I had a recording of that run through. I wrote the kind of tuba part that I thought I would like to play. The tuba often had the theme. The player was kind of timid. It seemed like he was thinking, “I could possibly be meant to stick out that much.”
for those of you just joining this feature, Cola = Nicole. She is but one person with a nickname and is my girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since winter break. I was extremely happy to see her.
I went to part of the afternoon session of the symposium. They were talking about identity and music and opportunities for musicians and racism and nationalism and many fascinating issues. I cut out early, though and went to wake up Nicole and consume more caffeine (it works as well or better than cold medicine sometimes). Then we went to the orchestra performance of three student works, including mine. Angel, the director, asked me to come up and say a few words. I had no idea that was coming. The piece was about my marriage breaking up (as much as pieces can be about anything), but the title was from a 15th century mystery play about Joan of Arc, so I talked about that. Then they played through it. It didn’t go as well as during the practice, but that’s to be expected. It was pretty good. There was a fair sized crowd there, including my advisor. I await his feedback.
Then I had some time off to spend with my sweetie. Then I webcasted a concert by Bill Dixon and Ran Blake. It was fantastic. I had my first symphony performance. I got to see my girlfriend and then I went to a great concert. All in one day.
Sunday was actually my birthday. I’m 29. I have mixed feelings about that. But my Saturn return is now over. Theoretically. I’m not into the self-examination thing anymore right now. Maybe I should re-do it periodically,
the grad women in the music department arranged a potluck brunch and “surprise party.” It was sooooo heterocentric. Little (like model train scale) plastic penises were handed out. Riiiight. This idiom is clearly aimed at Midwestern married housewives. One nifty thing offered for sale, however was a semi-programmable silver bullet. It was clearly AM modulated, by a sine wave, a ramp wave or a pulse wave. I want to write my synthesizer manufacturer to ask how many amps I can run through my VCA. I seems like I could have batteries on one side and bullets on the other and use a LFO or a laptop outputting a subsonic audio signal to control the speed and then put them on drumheads or something. I had a piece for vibrators and electric guitars at my undergrad thesis concert. I don’t want my dad to think my academic experience is all about vibrators or something. although, at 29, should I still care about that or am I old enough to stop worrying about it?
I remember going to a 29th birthday party as an undergrad and thinking of the birthday girl as an unqualified grown up. Totally a responsible adult who didn’t have much in common with us students, but who was fun. la la la
Everyone since Charles Ives likes to talk about grey haired women as the ultimately unhip concert attender. If your music appeals to gray haired women, then you suck and you’re not avant guard enough. However, time marches ever onwards and some proponents of this meme will find themselves a victim of it.
Today I took Nicole to class with me. It was Anthony Braxton’s seminar. I had been talking about him. Nicole didn’t believe me. Today, she learned that I am a more reliable witness than I seem. We watched Alien. Mostly, I think, because anthony loves the movie. But we talked about motivic material and sound design. there’s a cheesy symphony at the very end which really doesn’t belong. However, the main theme of the symphony is an inversion of one of the major themes of the movie. I hadn’t seen the movie before, so I was more aware of plot than of sound. Also, it was clear from the start that you had to kill the cat. As soon as they found the cat while searching for the alien, they had to have realized that they had no way of knowing if the cat was infected or all the paths to infection. Also, how did the alien get so big after popping out of the ill-fated crew member? Was it eating the food stores or what?
In the afternoon, Nicole sat in on Braxton’s ensemble. We played one of each type of piece that we play, so it was a good introduction to what we do in the ensemble. Then, alas, she went back to the airport and by now she in Dulles waiting for a flight to Oakland. I was so glad she came to see me. I miss her when we’re so far apart. And it was just perfect timing, with all this stuff going on at the same time. I think she got to see what my academic experience is like. She said this afternoon, “your life is weird.” It is indeed.
Tag: Celesteh