Never been one to let the carrier drop

I no longer believe in evolution as the sole force that created my genome.

Now wait. I am not necessarily saying that I believe that some aliens or God has swept down and created my DNA by compiling a few libraries (although I do think the reuse of code in DNA is suspiciously library-like) – I think that there’s a viewpoint that we’re not hearing from in defense of intelligent design.

The most likely source of intelligent design that I see is the organism that is running the code.

No, I’m not aware of any way I can edit my DNA. On the other hand, I’m not aware of any way that I can do any number of things that my body does and I take for granted, and I certainly don’t know what the limitations of individual cells in my body are. A cell is a very complex thing, far more powerful than I think we usually give it credit for.

I really have to wonder why we find it more believable that we were either created by a external force or evolved by flipping bits at random and seeing what happens than that we – a species who has shown the ability to understand machine language, write and debug programs, and research the world around us and use that information to make decisions – have been improving ourselves.

The idea of being evolved by flipping bits at random sounds kind of awful to me. What happens when you have a design implementation that accidentally sets the gain too high on pain receptors? One can imagine all sorts of random bits one would rather not experience being flipped. On the other hand, if we were designed, that brings the question up of who designed us? Some religious adherents would say we were created by God and God was, is, and always will be but we’re different somehow – okay, but how did God get to the lofty position of knowing how to code? (Face it, writing DNA and writing code are not that different..)

Lately, I think that I miss out on a lot because I don’t believe it’s possible. I have experimentally verified that what you believe controls what you experience. I have a feeling that if you have a completely unshakable faith in *anything*, you’ll experience it as true.

This isn’t that surprising, given that we really live in a world of information. Us I.T. guys understand intuitively that a arbitrary string of data could turn into a sound or a image – it’s not a big leap to see that it could also turn into a touch, or a smell, or a taste. Even the kinesthetic ability to know what position our bodies are in can be looked at as the exchange of information. While the physicists talk about matter and energy and the quantum guys talk about particles, to a I.T. guy it soon starts to sound like the most fundamental thing in the universe is not matter or energy, but information. This may just be a case of “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail..” – but I don’t think so.

We are in Plato’s cave. Our minds have sets of rules that turn information streams into things we can map into our higher experience, like a blue ball or a furry puppy. Some sources of information behave like objects (like a blue ball) while others clearly have minds of their own (your coworker who keeps beating you at Quake). I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I have no way to know how that information is being mapped into the experience of anyone but me. For all I know, I might look like a dog in your view. Or the sky might be green. Or any number of similar things. All I can experience is my own reality. I don’t think this is built entirely out of my mind (I’m not a extreme solipsist) but I do think that my mind takes the data coming in and puts a spin on it based on my beliefs in order to build the experience I’m having in the “real world”.

In defense of my earlier comment, whether or not our genome is being edited by us to improve upon our current situation – and I have no reason to think it’s not – clearly the evolution of the way our minds think is something that is under our conscious control. When I was just coasting, doing whatever it seemed to make sense to do at the time, my life either stayed the same or got worse. Now that I’m constantly trying to improve the functioning of my mind and my experience, my life has been improving in all sorts of measurable ways.

Now, I’d like to bring out a side point here. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone ignore data that did not agree with their personal beliefs. I think that at times there are things that are happening that we just can’t experience because we don’t believe in them. I am sure that the adherents to top-down creationism and to evolution find all sorts of data to back up their beliefs. I’m sure I’ve said before on this blog that every adherent to every religion finds data to validate their choice of religion – experiences it as being true. This explains why so many religions are convinced they are the one truth and everyone else is going to hell. You are deluded, but I am perfectly correct.

In my particular case, what I have is a meta-religion. I think that what I believe affects how I experience the world, and I’m in search of the best things to believe. I do not want to put my own experience above the happiness of others, so I don’t want to believe I’m the only person that matters – so I need a belief system that successfully integrates with the world I’m experiencing while giving me the flexibility to have the experiences I want to have.

Now, at times parts of me – especially the parts of me programmed from childhood with Christianity – argue with this view. However, it seems to me that if I am a top-down creation by God (and I’m not ruling that out, it’s just not my current working hypothesis) God granted me the freedom and handed me the experiences to learn all this, so *e must approve of the idea of me figuring out what I need to believe in order to have the life I want to have. *e has all sorts of opportunities to communicate with me the error of my ways and I am open to communication. However, I am skeptical that any message that appears in front of my eyes or in my mind comes from God – God is going to have to authenticate *self pretty carefully, because I have lived for a while in a universe that appears to have beings with hostile intent, not all of which are immediately visible and apparent.

What I find improbable in the extreme is that God created me to be *s slave. If you do postulate a top-down creator with omnipotence and omnicience in this frame, that creator would have any number of ways of communicating that concept to me, and *e does not seem to have done so. I do not see any signs that I am being discouraged from my current lines of spiritual inquiry. (This is not inviting all you out there to join in the fray by trying to convince me that I am – please, let’s keep this simple. Trust that if God does exist, *e can communicate with me without needing you, whoever you might be who are inclined to do so, quoting scripture of various religions at me.)

Looking at the Bible, it does not stand up for me as a source of sole spiritual enlightenment. There is signal there, but there’s also a awful lot of noise. I’m convinced one needs to be somewhat crazy to read it as the word of a supreme being. (Not that I’m saying I’m not crazy, because clearly from time to time I am)

If we were a top down creation, there’s one thing that stands out: Whoever created us must have been *very* patient. Even assuming that DNA is a compiled (binary) output and we are written in a high level language, *e still would have had to find or create the compiler for it. And whether we’re creating ourselves, or a top down creation, I hope we can all agree we are a work in progress. If you can’t imagine a life much better than this one (or much worse, for that matter), your imagination’s broken from lack of use.

Anyway, back to my original thesis. I think we are a product of intelligent design – and the intelligent designers were our progenitors, and are us. This does not mean I don’t believe in some sort of diety – the model I favor for this at the moment is that life sums – that together you and me are more than we are separately. But I’m also open to the idea that there are other types of beings than us humans and cats and dogs and dolphins, and that some of them might be much more powerful – both in a affecting-reality and a information-processing sort of way – than we are.

So, from time to time I tell people this, and I’m trying to work out a really good way of putting it for a upcoming album.

Our minds have, according to wikipedia, 100 billion neurons. A typical high performance computer, capable of producing very-nearly-real experiences, has about 2 billion transistors – our minds in fact have 20 times more neurons than the most powerful microprocessors made. In addition, a neuron is not a transistor. A more accurate approximation for a neuron might be a small microcontroller, or about 50,000 transistors.

This leads us to conclude, without even discussing things like synaptic interconnections, that our minds are vastly more powerful than the computer systems we use. If you believe the above approximations, the amount by which our brains could hypothetically outperform a computer system are astonishing. And yet, while the computer in front of me has no trouble simulating any sort of reality, my mind has a very hard time feeding me anything other than nightmares when I am asleep.

What is missing – or wrong – is the software that I am running. It is completely reasonable to think that my mind should be able to handle the day-to-day business of survival (work and the like) as a background task, while leaving my conscious foreground experience free for whatever adventures I would like to have, and should in addition be able to give me experiences that are not consistent with, for example, the physical laws of this universe (since my mind is trading in information)

I have recently started to use lsyncd to support automated replication of data for web servers. Because of the particular requirements of one of my customers, I needed to set up bidirectional syncing between two servers on two different coasts. This presented a good deal of trouble initially because the lsyncd on one coast would react to files being written to it by writing those files back to the other coast. This was fine for writes that happened quickly, but for writes that happen slowly, like large files being FTP’d, it would lead to file truncation and file permission issues.

The solution I found was to update to the latest lsyncd (2.1.4) which permitted specifying the rsync binary, and then provide a “wrapper” binary written in perl that would verify that all of the files to be synced were not currently being written to (via lsof). Below is the perl script (placed in /usr/local/bin/rsync-wrapper):

#!/usr/bin/perl

$args = “”;
while($arg = shift) {

        $args .= $arg . ” “;

        push(@z, $arg);

}
slog(“args: $args”);
$dest = pop(@z);

$src = pop(@z);

slog(“dest: $dest src: $src”);
if($args =~ /–force/) {

        # exec

        slog(“delay list”);

        $delay = 1;

}
$list = “”;
while($in = <>) {

        $list .= $in;

        if($delay) {

                $file = $in;

                chop($file);

                $filepath = $src . $file;

		if(-f $filepath) {

                $count = 0;

                	while(0 == ($result = system(“lsof $filepath”))) {

                       		slog(“$count – result: $result path: $filepath”);

                        	$count++;

                        	sleep(1);

                	}

		}

        }

}
slog(“Exec rsync”);

open(LIST, “|/usr/bin/rsync ” . $args);

print LIST $list;

close(LIST);
sub slog {

        my $msg = shift;

        open(LOG, “>>/var/log/rsync-wrapper.log”);

        print LOG $msg . “\n”;

        close(LOG);

}

and the config file for lsyncd:

settings = {

   logfile    = “/var/log/lsyncd.log”,

   statusFile = “/tmp/lsyncd.status”,

   maxProcesses = 5,

   delay = 0,

}

sync {

        default.rsync,

        source=”/home”,

        target=”www.east.omitted.net::home”,

        excludeFrom=”/etc/lsyncd/exclude”,

        rsync = {

                binary = “/usr/local/bin/rsync-wrapper”,

                owner = true,

                group = true,

        }

}

Note that this is only one of several solutions I identified for this problem. If you are having similar problems and this doesn’t help, feel free to contact me for a list of them.

I’ve been asked by a couple of people what I want for christmas. This list isn’t serious, because some of the items on it cost as much as a used car, but here’s my current wishlist:

(Side note: I am just fine with used gifts / re-gifts of things I actually want-need. I have no need for new merchandise and I would rather my friends not spend the money.)

(Side note #2: Please don’t feel that you need to send me anything. Most especially, don’t send me “filler” gifts i.e. gifts that you would buy at a drugstore because you hadn’t gotten me anything and felt like you needed to – seriously, I have enough of a problem with hoarding without help 😉 If you can’t think of something that specifically fits me, your best gift is to not send me something. I hope this doesn’t sound harsh or mean. )

(Side note #3: In the vein of #2, if you’re trying to think of a gift that won’t add to my hoarde and have to be at some point gotten rid of, think of things like software or movies / media, which are always small and eminently regiftable if I already have a copy, or things like experiences.. a trip somewhere with you or a jam session with you.. which take no physical space and add to my treasure trove of memories)

*) A 12″, 300W RMS or more subwoofer module with a line in for my office
*) Amiga Forever
*) Blu-rays of the following movies:
Who framed roger rabbit
The matrix
Hackers
Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound or Pulse tour
Any minds-eye-esque eye candy 😉
*) Kindle books.. anything you think I’d like to read. (Don’t bother sending Heinlien, Asimov, Prachett, or MacDonald though, or any of the Callahan’s series by Spider.. I already have them)
*) A copy of the basic ($1000) version of Vienna VST strings
*) A 61-key varient of the Access Virus
*) A basic six-string accoustic guitar (used is preferable but it must still be possible to tune it ;-))
*) Donations to any charity feeding the homeless or taking care of our four-footed friends which does not spend all the money on mailing repeated requests for more money. [Lately I feel like when I donate to a charity I’m wasting my money because they use my entire donation to spam me repeatedly asking for more money]
*) A Alesis AI-4
*) A small 4-track USB (OSX compatible) audio interface with two XLRs with phantom power and two 1/4″ inputs
*) A gig bag or light case for a low-profile 88-key keyboard
*) Double-layer jeans (now, if only I knew what size I was .. ;-))
*) For musicians: The best gift you can give me is a jam session.

So, as part of thanksgiving, Gayle made a thanksgiving tree where we put leaves for all the things we are thankful for. I found that I had rather a lot of things that I’m thankful for, and I didn’t even scratch the surface of putting them all up on the tree, and I still had a lot of leaves up there.

I’m very glad that my life is getting better – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but for the last few years, things have been getting continuously better. I’m thankful for all the people in my life that help to make it a good life, and for the freedom to explore my inner space and increasingly the knowledge of how to do so safely. I’m thankful for my band, and for having my own studio, and for my friends (you all really are a great bunch of people) and for Gayle and Rebel and Allie. I’m thankful for having a job that I usually like, and for having a bunch of coworkers who are also my friends, and who I genuinely enjoy working with. I’m thankful for having bosses that don’t ask me to do things I can’t do, and who give me the flexibility to work the way I want to, and who assign enough work that I have enough money to keep the bills paid and then some. I’m thankful that I seem to have finally found out how to not go crazy every six months (at least, it looks that way so far.. there was no insanity in August which traditionally would have included some. Once we get past march/april I think I can truly call this mission accomplished.) I’m thankful for the people I talk to on the inside, and all the progress I have made in getting past my paranoia, my self destructive tendencies, and my tendency to not do the things I want to do. I’m thankful that I don’t have to live the way I was living a few years ago, constantly miserable and knowing what needed to change for me to not be that way, but completely powerless to take action. I’m thankful for the freedom to set my own hours.

For this and many, many other things, I am thankful. I hope you all had great thanksgivings (although I know most of you don’t read this blog ;-)) and that we all get what we want out of 2013 and beyond.

So, as many of you who know me are aware, I am a big fan of e-cigarettes. I’m not sure I understand how I managed without them. I’m one of the people who likes the mildly psychoactive effects of nicotine, especially when combined with caffeine, but I don’t like conventional delivery systems of it very much – I’ve never tried chewing tobacco, but just looking at it makes my stomach do a slow roll to the left. I like the taste of clove cigarettes, but smoking more than a few a week makes my lungs feel like they’re being used for target practice. Regular cigarettes have a whole long list of down sides, including that they smell awful and that repeated use of them makes me feel even more like death when I wake up than I already do.

Enter the e-cig. Repeated use doesn’t make me feel sick, they don’t smell awful, and with my newest vendor they’re even available in lots of fun flavors. And they’re about 1/4th the operating cost.

Technologically, they’re very simple devices. A lithium battery, a pressure-sensing membrane, a small microcontroller that does battery and thermal management, and a cartridge with some liquid and a small heating element. You still get the same gesturing-and-oral-fixation fun of a regular cigarette, and the sense of something moving into and out of your mouth, but they taste good. No, really. And you never have to light them, a big safety plus when you’re smoking while driving. They’re instant-on-instant-off, so you can just drop ’em in your pocket when you step indoors.

For a long time, I used Mistics, but they have been having serious supply chain management issues lately – first they were no longer available on the web, and then you couldn’t buy them at any of their listed local retailers. So I’ve switched to South beach smoke. I have to say, their product is a big step up. It’s somewhat more expensive, especially for the battery packs, but it’s better designed – the air doesn’t draw all the way through the battery, making a much easier drag, and the end cap is captive instead of plastic that can come off. (I assume in case of a battery runaway it would still pop off to vent). Their chargers are better designed – with mistic, you must plug the charger into power first and then screw the cig in, with south beach, the charger repeatedly drops the charge current in order to ‘poll’ the battery to see it’s stage of charge. Way safer, too, if you think about it. And they have flavors. Lots of them, and they never seem to be backordered. My favorites are Chocolate, Cherry, Pina Colada (even though it keeps getting that song stuck in my head), and Peach. So far I’ve only found one flavor (Tobacco Gold) that I didn’t like.. it’s awful in a chemically, artificial sweetener sort of way. But their blue and traditional flavors are quite nice.

I’ve also found the folks at South Beach to be very helpful – while I did have one battery arrive DOA (it would trip the overcurrent limit on the USB charger, and on a AC charger would just sit at ‘charging’ forever), they sent me *two* replacements for it, no questions asked.

So, if you’re a smoker (if there’s anyone left in the world that will admit they are), you ought to try ’em out. All of the nicotine, none of the cancer. 😉

I do have to wonder, with WA’s new marajuana legalization, is a THC e-cig in the works? 😉 I wouldn’t use one if it did exist – I already have enough trouble with paranoia without adding chemical help – but it would be a neat product to see.

So, recently I decided to upgrade my music computer to a SSD, because as the root filesystem has gotten fragmented, it’s been having more and more trouble recording 16 tracks at once.

Thanks to Dan Spisak and a great video on Youtube, I was able to do the disk upgrade with a minimum of fuss. However, when I fired up the new mac, suddenly Digital Performer had forgotten that it was licensed.

I looked in the front of my DP 7 manual, and discovered that it had no keycode. Not suprising, since it was a upgrade edition from DP4. But I have no idea where my DP4 manual is, or if I even still have it.

I was very sad, because DP is a $500 piece of software and I don’t have a spare $500 right now, and I *really* didn’t want to be unable to record anything multitrack until I had the money to buy DP again. However, when I popped up my MOTU account, I discovered that in the process of buying the upgrade edition, I had registered DP4. Sadly, the MOTU page had the serial number but not the license key.

So, without a lot of hope, I sent a email off to MOTU support asking if they could regenerate my license key from either my serial number or the Auth-DigitalPerformer file on my disk.

I didn’t have a lot of hope for this, and in fact was already composing in my mind my second email where I pointed out that I was using MOTU for all my audio IO, all my MIDI io, and had several pieces of MOTU software and are you sure you don’t want to help me..

However, and I do feel very chagrined by this and make a mental note to be less pessimistic in the future, they responded .. in less than four hours.. with my license keys.

In general I have been very happy with MOTU. Their MTP AV is a rock solid MIDI router and MIDI IO appliance, I’ve never had a problem with my pair of MOTU 896 interfaces except once when I upgraded OSX (back in the PPC days) and their driver caused a kernel panic – and they had exact, detailed directions on their web site explaining how to fix it. Digital Performer meets my needs well as a MIDI sequencer, virtual instrument plugin host, and multitrack digital audio recorder. I’ve recorded three albums with it, and I’m working on recording three more right now. I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t help me recover a lost license key – I guess I was expecting them to look at it as a opportunity to make a sale.

So, I’ve deployed many a application to EC2 (amazon’s cloud service)

I think that the good things about it are well covered on Amazon’s pages talking about it. There are, however, some bad sides they don’t mention:

1) Amazon is not subject to Moore’s law. In the time one of my customers has been on there, CPU power has quadrupled for the price and so has memory, and disks have improved by two orders of magnitude thanks to cheap and reliable SSDs. However, Amazon continues to charge the same price they did three years ago, and does not offer a SSD at all. They offer the option to purchase a specified number of IOPS, but the price is awful – you could buy a SSD every month for what they’re charging for a mere 1000 IOPS.

2) Amazon is not as reliable as one might like. Several times we’ve had instances get wedged in ways that required filling out a ticket and waiting several hours to repair. And today, every single EBS volume went down at 11 AM, and half of them are not back and it’s already 3:30

3) There’s no one to call. With managed hosting or colocation there’s usually someone you can get on the phone when everything is breaking. At amazon, all you can do is fill out a feedback form, and you don’t even get a ticket # or a response.

4) If a disaster does happen, everything gets very sluggish because everyone is trying to get into the web interface to fix things at once, and everyone is rebuilding their servers from AMIs at once.

5) Disk space at amazon is *expensive*. You basically buy the hard disk every few months.

For those of you who don’t know, wshr is a internet radio broadcast I do a few times a year (sometimes more often). It contains a mix of covers and originals, and sometimes involves other musicians and sometimes doesn’t. This particular broadcast was just me (with the occasional help added by Allie the cat)

http://sheer.us/stuff/wshr/wshr-100712.mp3

Includes:

House of the rising sun
Sound of silence
Scarborough fair
Love You
Starshine
Fading like a flower
My poor allie-cat
two unnamed original tracks
Ode To Joy
City of new Orleans
1%
Rainbow Connection
Galileo
Winter
Walking in Memphis
Sympathy for the devil
Southern Cross
Dry County
Who’s going to ride your wild horses?
Angel from Montgomery
Joy To The World
Over the rainbow
Brahm’s Lullabye

I will be performing with Mike, Bruce, and Art at Cafe Racer (http://caferacerseattle.com/) at a benefit concert for the friends and family of the victims. The show is on Saturday, Sept 15th. We go on at 9p. Door is $5, but I have a few guest list entries if anyone is feeling broke but still wants to come out.