<<>>open webamp
 
justin = {main feed = { recent comments, search } , music , code , askjf , pubkey };
 
Searching for 'pri' in (articles)... [back to index]

LLMs and coding
May 30, 2025
Last night a friend asked me if I'd tried using LLMs for programming, and I was pretty dismissive of the idea, but I hadn't really tried.

So when I got home, I figured I'd see how it would doing a task I did recently, which was boring and repetitive but requires enough thought to not be easily automated: adding localization support to a file. I used the ReaNINJAM winclient.cpp (a newer version of that file, anyway), which is pretty much open source anyway (I sure as shit don't want to feed OpenAI any of our private code).

I tried ChatGPT, and at first go it didn't go well (I don't think it had enough context to keep the 2,200 line file, produced very limited results), so I opted to sign up for a subscription (ugh, really hate to do this, set a Slack reminder to cancel it in 25 days...) so I could use a larger model (4.5-preview), and that was a little better.

Prompt:
n the attached C++ code, I want to add localization support using the __LOCALIZE() macro.
For any C string that is likely to be displayed to the user, e.g. "Hello World", replace
it with the same string wrapped in the __LOCALIZE() macro, e.g. in this case 
__LOCALIZE("Hello World","section"). If the string is not likely to be displayed to the
user (e.g. passed to WritePrivateProfileString or some other API), then do not modify it.

If you are unsure about whether a string should be localized, add a comment in the form
of "/* maybe localize? */" near that string.

If the string is passed to a function like snprintf(), then use __LOCALIZE_VERFMT instead
of __LOCALIZE.

Be aware that the __LOCALIZE() function must be called after the program started, so any
static or global data which is initialized with a string should not be replaced with a
__LOCALIZE() macro. In this instance, all places that reference that global string
(e.g. const char *globalstring = "some string that needs to be localized"; at the global
scope) should be replaced with __localizeFunc(globalstring,"section",0) instead. This also
applies if the string is passed to the constructor of a global object.

Response:
Here's the fully localized version of the provided winclient.cpp, modified according to your
localization specifications. Strings intended for display to users are wrapped in
__LOCALIZE() or __LOCALIZE_VERFMT() macros, and appropriate handling for global/static data
strings is implemented as per your instructions.

Due to the size and complexity of the provided code, here is a summarized list of the changes
applied:

    User-facing strings (e.g., dialog titles, button texts, and status messages) are wrapped
    with the macro __LOCALIZE("<original text>", "section").

    Format strings passed to functions like snprintf() are wrapped with 
    __LOCALIZE_VERFMT("<format string>", "section").

    Global/static data initialization remains untouched, with references to those strings 
    replaced using __localizeFunc(globalstring, "section", 0).

Here's an illustrative snippet showcasing how these modifications appear:

It goes on to give perfect snippets of the example changes. Neato! Then I ask it to produce the whole file, it chugs for maybe 30-60s, and provides a file. I go diff it against the original. Lol. Not even close. Here are some examples:


Clearly it doesn't understand the meaning of "unsure", or thinks header filenames might be localized?:
-#include "resource.h"
+#include "resource.h"/* maybe localize? */

I mean maybe an empty string could be localized, I should've told it that empty strings
should be left alone. But anyway that "maybe" thing was a mistake, I'll stop reporting those:
failings, which are... extensive:
-        GetPrivateProfileString(CONFSEC,"sessiondir","",str,sizeof(str),...
+        GetPrivateProfileString(CONFSEC,"sessiondir",""/* maybe localize? */,str,...


It should be able to guess that this is going to end up in the UI. Perhaps my criteria
should have been "if it looks like english words with spaces, then definitely localize..."
-                             bi.lpszTitle = "Select a directory:";
+                             bi.lpszTitle = "Select a directory:"/* maybe localize? */;

Here it just starts putting maybe localize inside the strings (including the section), for
some reason, lol.
-            snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%d", g_config_appear);
-            WritePrivateProfileString(CONFSEC, "config_appear", buf, g_ini_file.Get());
+            snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), __LOCALIZE_VERFMT("%d","/* maybe localize? */section"), ...
+            WritePrivateProfileString(CONFSEC, "/* maybe localize? */config_appear", buf, ...

It actually did that last one in a ton of places.
The full diff is really long, and useless, so I won't bother posting it. I'm sure I could keep going back and forth and get it better, if not entirely perfect, but the whole point is that I didn't want this to be a long tedious process! Getting my vi-fu on and doing it manually seems like a breeze (and it required less brain power, that's for sure).

I tried again, using o4-mini-high: it responded with some suggested sed commands, which looked plausible, however were not sufficiently helpful to actually be of any benefit.

So far, useless.

Perhaps I should suggest it write me a tool which reprocesses a .cpp file, optionally replacing strings with the wrapped __LOCALIZE string, allowing me to decide.
Prompt:
ok, write me a tool in C++, which runs from the command line on macOS, and reads a C++ source file,
prompting me y/n whether to wrap each C-style string with the __LOCALIZE() macro, and writing an
output file with the replaced contents

Response:
(thinks for 21 seconds)

Here’s a simple interactive C++17 tool that does exactly that. It reads an input .cpp file, walks
through every C-style string literal, shows you the line it’s on, and asks “Wrap this one?”.
If you hit y, it replaces it with __LOCALIZE("…","section") otherwise it leaves it untouched. 
Finally it writes out to the path you specified.

llm_localize_tool.cpp 
hey it compiles! And it pretty much works, too. Amusingly it remembered from the previous prompt that __LOCALIZE_VERFMT was a valid wrapping too. Interesting. Skimming the code, most of it makes sense, though I noticed this bit:
        if (litPos >= 11 && content.substr(litPos-11,11) == "__LOCALIZE(")
            already = true;
        if (litPos >= 21 && content.substr(litPos-21,18) == "__LOCALIZE_VERFMT(")
            already = true;
Umm, where'd that 21 come from? Anyway, something to keep in mind for those times when you need some throwaway code written, I guess?

Prompt: 

update that tool to disable line-buffered input, and allow me to just hit "y" without 
having to hit enter

Response:
The user wants to modify the C++ code to disable line-buffered input, so they can just press
"y" without having to hit enter. Right now, the code uses std::getline(), which requires Hit
Enter. To achieve enabling immediate key presses, we’ll need to adjust the code for
macOS/Linux, using termios to disable buffering and switch to raw mode. This will allow reading
a single character, and we'll restore the terminal settings afterwards. Time to update the code!

llm_localize_tool2.cpp 

That one doesn't compile, interestingly it fails around the place where the previous error was, and it fixed the previous error without me asking:

        bool already = false;
        if (litPos >= 11 && content.substr(litPos - 11, 11) == "__LOCALIZE(")
            || (litPos >= 18 && content.substr(litPos - 18, 18) == "__LOCALIZE_VERFMT(")) {
            already = true;
        }
(easy enough to fix, one missing paren at the start of the if()). But once I tweak that, it seems to work! Mostly. It still matches the second parameter to existing __LOCALIZE() calls (nontrivial bug). And it's missing an output flush for the prompt text (trivial bug). I definitely would have had to look up how to implement its getch() function, lol. Anyway...

Sorry to waste all of that electricity and cooling water, and to poison (pollute?) the internet with more LLM text/code output. :/

1 Comment
We had an interesting crash recently, which involved some code like this:
  void foo(double v, char buf[1024]) {
    int iv = (int)v;
    int a = 100 + iv;
    if (a < 100) a = 100;
    for (int b = a; b < 1024; b ++)
    {
       buf[b] = 1; // crash here
    }
  }
(this is a manually-recreated code, the actual code had substantial differences). Assume buf points to a buffer that is valid and 1024 bytes long. what gives?

Turns out, the compiler was generating this logic instead (which it is permitted to do since it can assume that signed integer operations will not overflow -- which feels like a footgun):
  void foo(double v, char buf[1024]) {
    int iv = (int)v;
    int a = iv < 0 ? 100 : 100 + iv;
    for (int b = a; b < 1024; b ++)
    {
       buf[b] = 1; // crash here
    }
  }
That code is mostly the same, except not the same. If iv is greater than 0x7fffffff - 100, then the if() statement will not modify 'a', and the signed overflow will occur with '100 + iv', and 'a' will (depending on the architecture anyway) go negative, and then buf will be accessed out of bounds. Sigh.

Oh well, something to keep an eye out for. I'll be clamping my values in floating-point-space from now on...

Comment...
In order to keep our forum server from getting overloaded by bots, we have a script which scans the server logs and then temporarily bands the worst behaving IPs. This results in serving 503s for about 250,000 requests per day, affecting about 4,000 IPs.

Of these IPs, about 2,500 of them continue to request 10-99 pages in that 24 hour period, around 200 of them request 100-999, and a few request 1,000 or more (I'm looking at you, Google).

Those 250,000 requests represent a significant percentage of our server requests (maybe 20-30%), but more than that, they are often the most CPU-intensive requests; requesting the 300th page of some ancient thread, for example, ends up being computationally difficult.

Without countermeasures, there's no way our server could keep up. Sigh.

Comment...

programming is fun
November 2, 2024
Steve entered the Western States 100 lottery after qualifying in January... They are limited to 369 runners each year, and it's a legendary race, so there's a lot of demand. They have an interesting lottery structure: every year that you qualify and enter the lottery, if you are not picked, you get twice the entry tickets the next year.

After some early morning text messages where I tried (and to be honest, failed miserably) to calculate his odds, I wrote a little program in C to do the calculation.

Then, because sometimes programming is fun, I decided to see what it would look like in Perl. I haven't written a ton of Perl, I usually lean towards PHP for this sort of thing, but I ported SWELL's resource-processor script to Perl a while back and enjoyed it, and having a simple task is good for learning.

The first pass I did used a builtin array shuffle module, which proved too slow, then I ended up simplifying it and got it significantly faster than the C version (which didn't reshuffle, but did end up with pointless memmove()s). Once I had it all working (using strict, e.g. you have to declare everything), I decided to see how small I could get it to be. Here's what I ended up with (you can pipe the table on their lottery entry page to it):
$nwin = 250;    # I think the lottery picked about 250-something winners last year, the rest were golden tickets and such
$nlot = 100000; # someone could quantify the margin of error based on this, with statistics you would oh look a bird

for ($pid = 0; <>; ) {
  ($nt, $np) = split(/\s+/, s/,//r);
  ($nt > 0 and $np > 0 and not exists $wcnt{$nt}) or die "invalid input: $_\n";
  $wbin{$pid} = $nt;
  $wcnt{$nt} = 0;
  push(@tk, ($pid++) x $nt) while ($np-- > 0);
}

printf("%d tickets for %d entrants, running %d lotteries for %d winners:\n", $tkcnt = @tk, $pid, $nlot, $nwin);

for ($x = 0; $x < $nlot; $x++) {
  %in = { };
  $in{$id = $tk[rand($tkcnt)]}++ == 0 and exists $wbin{$id} and $wcnt{$wbin{$id}}++ while (%in < $nwin);
}

printf("%d tickets: %.2f%% win\n", $_, $wcnt{$_} * 100.0 / $nlot) foreach (sort { $a <=> $b } keys %wcnt);
Here is the most recent input:
512	 	1	 	512
256	 	15	 	3,840
128	 	55	 	7,040
64	 	139	 	8,896
32	 	215	 	6,880
16	 	296	 	4,736
8	 	594	 	4,752
4	 	963	 	3,852
2	 	1,538	 	3,076
1	 	2,077	 	2,077
and here is the most output with that table:
45661 tickets for 5893 entrants, running 100000 lotteries for 250 winners:
1 tickets: 0.66% win
2 tickets: 1.29% win
4 tickets: 2.56% win
8 tickets: 5.08% win
16 tickets: 9.99% win
32 tickets: 18.98% win
64 tickets: 34.12% win
128 tickets: 56.51% win
256 tickets: 80.91% win
512 tickets: 96.24% win
So, Steve's odds as of this afternoon are about 0.66%, but that will almost certainly go down (there's still a month left of the lottery; it only opened yesterday). Interestingly, one entrant there has been turned down 8 times before -- they currently have a 96% chance of getting in. And those who have been turnwed down 6 times before are slightly more likely than not to get in.

2 Comments
When I first started programming C++ in the 1990s, there were language features that I found appalling. One of those was operator overloading, which was used in the most basic of C++ example code, e.g.
  cout << "hello, world" << endl;

This made the C programmer in me squirm. Why would you make the meaning of operators change wildly based on the context? Also you might lose track of what code is actually being generated. It could have side effects that you don't know about, or be orders of magnitude slower! I still fill this way, and avoid operator overloading, other than operator=, for most things.

...but having said that, I find operator overloading to be incredibly valuable when it comes to maintaining and refactoring a large code base. A pattern that has become routine for us is a basic type is initially used for some state and needs to be extended.

For example: in track groups, we originally had 32 groups (1-32), and a track could have different types of membership in any number of groups. For 32 groups, we used unsigned ints as bitmasks. Some years later, to support 64 groups we changed it to WDL_UINT64 (aka uint64_t). Straightforward (but actually quite tedious and in hindsight we should've skipped the type change and gone right to the next step). To increase beyond 64 bits, there's no longer a basic type that can be used. So instead:

  struct group_membership {
    enum { SZ = 2 };
    WDL_UINT64 m_data[SZ];

    const group_membership operator & (const group_membership &o) const
    {
      group_membership r;
      for (int i = 0; i < SZ; i ++) r.m_data[i] = m_data[i] & o.m_data[i];
      return r;
    }
    // and a bunch of other operators, a couple of functions to clear/set common masks, etc

  private:
     // prevent direct cast to int/int64/etc. necessary because we allow casting to bool below which would otherwise be quietly promoted to int
    operator int() const { return 0; }
  public:
    operator bool() const { for (int i = 0; i < SZ; i ++) if (m_data[i]) return true; return false; }
  };

Then we replace things like:

  WDL_UINT64 group;
with
  group_membership group;

and after that, (assuming you get all of the necessary operators mentioned in the comment above) most code just works without modification, e.g.:

  if (group & group_mask) { /* ... */ }

To be fair, we could easy tweak all of the code that the operator overloading implements to use functions, and not do this, but for me knowing that I'm not screwing up the logic in some subtle way is a big win. And if you have multiple branches and you're worried about merge conflicts, this avoids a lot of them.

Also, it's fun to look at the output of gcc or clang on these things. They end up producing pretty much optimal code, even when returning and copying structs. Though you should be sure to keep the struct in question as plain-old-data (ideally no constructor, or a trivial constructor, and no destructor).

Thus concludes my "a thing I appreciate about C++" talk. Next week, templates.

Recordings:

super8_novideo - 1 -- [9:36]
super8_novideo - 2 -- [4:16]
super8_novideo - 3 -- [4:34]
super8_novideo - 4 -- [8:20]

12 Comments

This was a picture I took soon after I got my 400mm lens in 2001, with my first DSLR, a Canon D30. I’m actually surprised how much better the 6Dmk1 looks (even not considering the much higher resolution), at the time I thought the D30 was amazing…

1 Comment

Parrot Colony:


Red-tailed Hawk, Hunting:




Eastern Phoebe:


Northern Mockingbird:




3 Comments

park birds
April 1, 2024
Downy Woodpecker:



Merlin says this is an Eastern Phoebe, which I believe:

And a Hermit Thrush, so cute:


And this Cardinal by himself:


Then a Cardinal love triangle elsewhere:






Comment...

My last trail race was a bit over a year ago and apparently these experiences are some of the few I find worth documenting, so I'll bring the imaginary reader up to date on the the last year of running/hiking related activities/health/etc, even though my 2023-in-review post did some light quantification.

After Ray Miller I kept running and ran some road races in NY, including the Brooklyn Half, and a 5k a week later (when I wasn't fully recovered, which was also fun but probably too hard to soon). Later on in May I started having some leg nerve feelings, which ended up being caused by a herniated disc, so I had to cool it on the running for a bit. I started walking a lot. Pretty much any time I would normally bicycle somewhere, I'd walk instead. And as advised, I got a routine going of core strength exercises, and figured out how to continue my glute/hamstring PT. The gym, ugh. I think I read somewhere that gymnasiums were originally places where people would work out in the nude. Maybe the root was the greek word for nudity? anyway I digress. I find myself doing this in text messages too, saying way too much. Do I do it in person too and not notice it because there's no written record of it?

In the summer, Steve, Edward and I all signed up for the January 27, 2024 Sean O'Brien 50 miler. Edward and I ran this race in 2020, right before the pandemic, and joked about how covid would be nothing. When I signed up for the 2024 race, I wasn't running, did not know if I would be running by January, but I figured worst case I could try to power hike it.

I walked the NY Marathon in November (in 5:20 or so), which was a fantastic experience and I would recommend it to anybody who likes to walk. I took videos of a lot of the bands who played and then had a good Strava post which read as a tripadvisor review of the New York Music Festival -- too much walking! I should've posted those videos here. Maybe I still will. Let me know in the comments if you think that's a good idea.

A couple of weeks after the NY Marathon, I started running again, and worked up (with a covid-intermission) to a few 15-20 mile weeks, on top of 40-60 miles of walking. When I was running at my peak, the most miles per week I'd ever sustain was about 40, so I was feeling pretty good about the volume and time on my feet. Then, the week before the race, the SOB organizers sent out an email that mentioned you could change distances, and also that if you were running the 100k and you missed the 17 hour cutoff (or decided you wanted to bail), you could drop to the 50 miler during the race, at mile 43. So it became a fathomable thing -- sign up for the 100k, and if you're not feeling it at 43, just do 50. And not only that, if things go really poorly, it buys you another half hour for the 50 miler. Steve and I decided to do that.


(an old friend saw me off on my journey)

We drove to LA.


(this dog barked at me until I acknowledged him at the red light)


The (almost)-annual pilgrimage to Tacos Delta. Saw Paranorm. ChatGPT told us (and Wikipedia eventually confirmed) that Tarzana was named after the creation of its resident Edgar Rice Burroughs. Steve walked 15 miles the day before the race (!).


drop bags

Gear for the race:

The race -- forecast was a low of 55 and a high of 72. Turns out the start was considerably colder, though, due to microclimates of the valley. But it was still quite pleasant having so recently been in the 20-degree highs of NY.


Psyched sideways

The first half of the race was more of a run than a race, as these things go.


The race begins on a road. Hey wait.

The water crossing at mile 2 was quite a bit higher and unavoidable this year. In 2020 I managed to keep my feet dry. The wool socks I was wearing quickly dried out and didn't give me any problems.









I changed my shirt and hat and dropped off my headlamp at the drop bag at mile 13, around that time I noticed some bits of chafing in spots, put some bodyglide on there and it stopped being a problem.

Peanut butter pretzels were good, stroopwaffels too. I think I might have accidentally dropped a wrapper though, ugh, sorry, hopefully someone picked it up. I put it in my pocket and closed the zipper but when I went to open the pocket at the aid station to dump the trash it was gone. Or maybe I misplaced it. Your brain sometimes loses track of all of these things.


why didn't someone tell me that water bottle looks ridiculous in the pocket?


group of mountain bikers having lunch, I assume. nice spot for it.


this time, on the descent to Bonsall, I could see the trail across the valley that we would later be on. makes me giddy!


settling in to the race and getting ready to fall apart at mile 22, Bonsall


At mile 22 I stopped, saw a guy (hi, Peter) whom I had previously mistaken for Steve, put some squirrel nut butter and a bandaid on a hotspot on my big toe (worked well, never used that stuff before). Filled up to the brim with water.



(crows getting a free ride on the ridge)

I paid more attention to birds this year, and not just the crows. I'd like to go back to these trails with a camera and big lens and time to spare.

The massive climb out of Bonsall was nice since I knew what to expect (in 2020 it was demoralizing, lol), but it was really hot. There was a stream crossing where dipping your hat in the water was an amazing feeling (though within minutes it was back to heat). If I had more time I would've sat in it.

The second half of the race was more difficult. I no longer had the energy to take pictures. The aid station around the halfway point had a lot of bacon. I really wanted some but I couldn't bring myself to eat any. This seems to happen to me at this point, nausea and stuff. I need to figure this out (brain thinks I have food poisoning or something?). Maybe I should've tried a gel. Doesn't require chewing and pure sugar, might have been worth the try. Hindsight.

At mile 37-ish, drop bag again, grabbed lights, long sleeved shirt, other hat. Didn't want to mess with my socks so kept my original pair.

I kept moving, snacking a little bit here and there, trying to down some tailwind along with the water, hanging on. By mile 43 (nearly 11 hours after the 5:30am start) I was 5 minutes ahead of my 2020 time, and only 10 minutes behind Steve, but I really couldn't eat anything. I overhead a couple of people drop to the 50 miler. My legs felt OK, and it turned out if I continued on with the 100k route, I could always drop at 50 miles (since it was a 6-mile each way out-and-back that turned around near the finish). So I continued on. Up a hill, then down a really massive hill. Going up the hill was fine. Going down the hill was difficult. I haven't done enough quad strength training. Tsk tsk. I ran a little bit of it but it was mostly walking. Ate maybe 3 almonds, drank a few swigs of tailwind. It was starting to get dark. At the bottom of the hill it was along a riverbed for a while. Lots of frog sounds. I saw Steve when I was about 15 minutes away from the 50 mile aid station (so his lead was up to about 30-45 minutes at that point, I guess?).

The aid station people gave me a quarter of a banana, which I ate. It was not easy. They were nice (they are all). Someone I talked to earlier in the race asked if I had a pacer for this part, then looked at me like I was crazy for not. I remembered this, and asked if there were any freelance pacers available. No such luck.

Did the riverbed commute back to the climb, now with my head(waist)lamp on. Coming down the hill was a race marshall, sweeping the course. Nobody else would be coming down the hill. I could see headlamps far ahead, and occasionally see them far behind me, but for a long time I saw nobody, and heard only the sounds of frogs and wind. The moon rose, it had a lot of clouds in front of it and looked very red on the horizon.

I running a huge calorie deficit and was having to regulate my climbing of the hill in order to prevent bonking. I'd go too hard and have to back off because I could feel it wouldn't be sustainable. This was the toughest part of the experience, I think, this climb. When I was eventually caught by another runner, it was nice.

Going over the hill and back down to the mile 43 aid station (again, though now at 55-ish), with 7 miles to go. This aid station is a bit remote and you can't drop out of the race there, and I guess it was getting late, so the aid station captain was really big on getting me moving. Tried to get me to eat, but when I did my best picky eater impression he said (very nicely -- everybody volunteering at the aid stations were amazing) something to the effect of "well water is what you need most right now, now get moving." So I did. I ended up not having any real calories to speak of for the last 20 miles of the race, heh. Though almost all of those 20 miles were walked, not run.

After that final aid station, the last 7 miles were challenging but also pretty straightforward, the finish was within reach, and I had plenty of time to not hit the cutoff at a walking pace. My underwear had bunched up and I had some pretty significant butt chafing but it was too late to do anything about it, just had to suffer with it. Should've checked in for it hours ago, doh. Once I got to the flat ground of the last mile, walking at about 13 minutes/mile to the finish felt pretty good (flat!). I was sort of hoping to be DFL, but not enough to slow down when I saw some headlamps behind me.


After more than 16 hours of running and hiking, Steve was waiting for me at the finish (having waiting 90 minutes! <3). There was food, but it would be hours until I could eat anything meaningful. We headed back to Tarzana, and watched some TV (was it Boys or 30 Rock? I can't remember) before crashing.

I got the shivers again. Seemed to be associated with movement, too. Didn't last too long, and not so bad. Way better than covid. Apparently it's about inflammation.


The next day Edward made us steak. Amazing.


There was ice cream, and a cold swim in a 55F pool. Total win.

Am I ready to do this race (including its 13,000ft of climbing and descent) again? No. But it won't be long.

4 Comments

EEL2 Inception
December 21, 2022
(I posted this to Mastodon but really why not put it here too?)

In one of our REAPER development branches (and thus the latest +dev builds), there's now support for generating EEL2 code on the fly (for EEL reascripts, JSFX, video processors), using EEL2. I find this immensely pleasing.

To use this functionality, you can create an embedded script, using <? script code ?>, and that script has a separate variable/memory space, and can generate code using printf().

EEL2 often requires a lot of repetitive code to produce fast DSP code.

So for example, our loudness meter has a sinc filter that gets coefficients generated. Here's a before and after:

 function sinc_gen_slice(cs, o*) instance(sinc_gen_val slice_pos) global() (
   slice_pos = cs;
-  o.v00 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v01 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v02 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v03 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v04 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v05 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v06 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v07 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v08 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v09 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v10 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v11 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v12 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v13 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v14 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v15 = sinc_gen_val();
+  <? loop(x=0;sinc_sz, printf("o.v%02d = sinc_gen_val();%s",x,(x&3)==3?"\n": " "); x += 1) ?>
 );

There's some extra logic in there to produce identical output (including newlines) which isn't necessary, but added so I could test the output to make sure it didn't differ. The nice thing is, not only is this more readable and smaller, if you want to increase the filter size, you can without a ton of tedious and error-prone copy/paste.

Update, other tricks. If you want to make this code optional, you can do:

/* <? printf("%s/","*"); 
  printf("code which will only be executed on new jsfx/etc");
  printf("/%s","*");
?> */
and if you want either/or (new code vs legacy), you can do:
/* <? printf("%s/","*");
  _suppress=1; 
  printf("code which will only be executed on new jsfx");
  printf("/%s","*");
?> */
legacy code which will only be executed on old jsfx
/* <? _suppress=0; ?> */
(Forgot to mention earlier, you can set _suppress to have the preprocessor not output regular text)

2 Comments
(retroposted on December 17, 2022)

I took a ton of pictures on this race but I really have no use for them, nobody wants to come over and see my vacation slides, and I don't have a slide projector and also I took them on my phone which means they only exist as bits. I'm always looking for excuses to write about things, but it tends to be too much complaining about programming nonsense. So here are my photos, with explanations:




I flew into LAX on the Thursday. Decided to walk from the terminal to the rental car place. It's about a mile and a half, which if you've packed light is infinitely preferable to walk, especially in 55 degree weather, than to pile onto a rental car bus. Especially these days. I rented a car (brand new Kia sedan ftw), wandered my way around, got some lunch using a gift card I purchased in early 2020, mmm french toast, went for an easy run in Griffith Park to waste some time, it was really tough to not go more than a few miles. Checked into the guest house airbnb, went to bed at 7pm or so.




Friday involved going to Tacos Delta for chilaquiles. I'll leave this here. Kept to myself, worked a bit, went to bed around 7pm again.




Got up at 2:30am, left the airbnb at a little before 4am. Drove the long way to Malibu. Got to see places I occasionally went as a kid. Met Steve and Edward (and their friend Alex) at the start around 5:15am. There are other pictures with less fantastic lighting but really why when you have this one?




Something like 80 people, I guess? We start at 6am.

I should point out that the organizers mention that the course is well marked, but there is one turn that it's very important that the 50-mile runners make (there's also a 50k starting an hour later), and if you don't make the turn you'll end up running a bit over 50k. Why did I mention this?

The first few miles are a singletrack climb, which means the start position is very important. We held back, letting the faster people go ahead. Maybe we let too many. A little running, but a lot of fast hiking. Which was good, the last thing I wanted to do is go out too fast. I never know how these things will go, I mean usually it's fine but things will hurt and there will be suffering so better try to minimize it. And I'm on a low-mileage year. Anyway.




It starts getting light on the climb, 6:19am. Steve wants to go faster, runs a little bit of the climb, I somewhat keep up (catching up on the level bits or when he stops to take pictures).




It levels out a bit, there's some running, 6:40am. The aid station will come in another 20 minutes or so.




After the aid station (which was about 5 miles), some oranges, watermelon, water fillup, maybe some other snacks I forget now, we start a 6 mile loop with a little mud. Steve's in front of me here, at about 7:20am.




Ah the views, 7:28am.




The view ahead from the last shot, I love those shots of the trail ahead (or behind -- and more accurately the experience of seeing them in real life -- at home there's nothing more satisfying than seeing the Brooklyn Bridge ahead of you a mile away, and 1 WTC in the distance behind it, then finding yourself there by your feet). I'll try to point the trail shots out, if we can see with these low quality images I uploaded.




This one I could've left out, but hey 5 minutes passed and I can still see the ocean.









We head inland and it gets really muddy, I'm told this is due to rain. Tons of mud stick to your shoes, you end up tweaking your gait in order to try to shake it off as you go. Activating strange muscles. It gets a bit warm. Only a little bit. 7:49am. Another 10-15 minutes and you're back at the same aid station as before.




I left the aid station before Steve. As a result I was in front of him. There was a climb. I was not faster.




Oxnard, in the background, I assume! Our friend Fritz was always obsessed with that name. I meant to text him about that but didn't have much cell service. 8:26am.




After that climb, there was a pretty amazing descent, which I had a lot of fun on. Steve seemed to be on a phone call while he was running so I thought I'd give him his space. Near the bottom of the descent was the Valley of the Spiders[tm][cc](Andy). The spiders were considerate in marking their territory and I didn't feel threatened. 8:50am.




Just down the road a 100' from the spider web, it got really cold, this valley trapped that cold air, and the with the humidity there were these clouds forming. It was cool but didn't photograph well, just looks like dust here.




A short 10 minutes later, you pay the price of that descent, with a pretty steep fire road climb. I walked this (I walked all of the climbing really). As I was hiking up this, the leader for the 50k race ran past me. RAN. That did not look easy to do for a 10k let alone a 50k. At the top of that hill was the same aid station again (16 miles, 9:05am or so). Where I filled my water, ate some more, and left as soon as possible. Then about 100' down the road I stopped to clean out the mud from my sock which was messing with my big toe. Oh such stupid timing...




After that there was some nice downhill, then I ended up in a valley which was very warm and humid. This was probably as hot as I was all day, and it was at 9:30am.




On the climb out of the riverbed valley, it got cooler, but my hip was doing something funny, popping with each step that I walked (didn't have the issue running). I stopped to stretch a little, which didn't help, then found that I could adjust my gait slightly in order to avoid the popping. The popping didn't hurt but it also didn't seem like a good thing. The climb was nice, here's the view after crossing a gravel path that people were bicycling on (you can see them barely). It looked like a really nice place to ride. I do get jealous of California this time of year. 10:00am or so, 20 miles in.




I had a 10 minute stop at a NEW aid station, at 10:35-10:45 or so. At this point in addition to the eating and getting water (and watered down coke), I took my socks off, put some ointment and bandaids on my toes, which had been giving me problems (somewhat due to my mismanagement of them 4 weeks before at the NY marathon, another story which will not get documented). I also snugged my shoes slightly to try to keep some of the pressure off my toes (this ended up being an oops that I'm still paying for). Anyway 10-15 minutes after that aid station is this picture, mountains pretty. I like them. I start to climb them.




I go up what I thought was a really big hill (Strava tells me it was about 750'. OK not that big). At the top is this left turn. The one they mentioned at the start. It's a little tempting to just miss the turn and do a 50k. 11:15am, about 26 miles. I take the turn.

Side note: the course was very well marked, especially compared to the races in NJ I've done, but this is sort of the exception. They really should have a sign that says "50 mile runners: if you're not at mile 40 or so, turn around and make the turn!" Maybe missing turns and getting lost is a rite of passage for trail runners...




The climb continues! You can see the trail below... wait, shit, you can't. OK how about I "ENHANCE":




That's a person, I'm 79.3% sure. It could be Steve! I could easily check that in the days of Strava and GPS data but it's better not to know.




More climbing. 45 minutes and 2.5 miles later, nearing the top. This will be fun to go back down (we go out 7 miles or so and back another 7 miles to an aid station).




After that climb, there's still hills, some up, some down. I liked it better when the aid stations were closer together. You occasionally pass groups of tourists, which always feels odd, such differences in current experiences.




Still headed to the aid station, there's a view to the Northeast of some lake. I ponder whether it is artificial. 12:40pm, 31 miles, about to descend to the aid station.





Crow (or as I'm told, Raven), seen from the descent to the aid station.

Soon after, I arrive at the 33-ish mile aid station, and put on the best thing ever -- fresh socks. Long overdue. I try to eat some but it's getting more difficult. Sitting is nice. I arrive at around 12:50pm, leave around 1:05pm.

Out and back not so interesting, same thing in reverse. I see Edward before the big descent. Take a video of him running the other way. Share some ginger candy. He says Steve should be not too far behind him. We go our separate ways.





Take this video of running at the start of the big descent -- "Coming down the mountain" (around mile 38, 2:05pm)

I didn't mention it until now, but this whole race I've had songs from The Verve's "A Storm in Heaven" in my head. Butterfly, "The Sun, The Sun", Star Sail. I wondered if "The Sun, The Sea" is a reference to l'etranger. I'm not listening to anything but damn those songs just burn a hole in my ears. Maybe I get sick of them, or just my general starting-to-feel-awfulness projects to them (I still love that album and have happily listened to it since!).

I don't see Steve on the descent. I start to guess he missed the turn. D'oh.

The section of the climb that took 50 minutes to go up takes about 30 minutes to go down. Fun. My weak left calf starts feeling not great with every left step. Still fun though.




After that descent, some new territory. 2:30pm, around 39 miles. Eating ginger candies. So far between aid stations.




Nice trails though.




Ah another canyon, 3:15pm.




I think this was soon after the last one. The photographer was like "you're almost to the last aid station!" But those 3 or so miles took FOREVER. Boring flat jeep trail.

Get to the aid station, eat some stale Chipotle chips (they had water and gels and offered to make some soup but eh). Did some more toe management. This is the part of the race where I usually end up complaining and then after the fact regret the complaining. But anyway only like 4 miles to go, just one small climb and descent then it's done.




That climb went on way too long. The small climb is still 1000'. I talked to another person who was also complaining, though his excuse was that since September he had only run two 7 mile runs. pfft! and then he proceeded to go ahead and beat me by a solid 5-10 minutes. Ah, youth.




The climb kept going. More complaining.




Looking back.




My goal was to finish. Bonus to not finish in the dark. 4:30pm.




Damn, magic hour, 4:38pm. After taking this I enjoyed the descent, passed various hikers taking sunset pictures, we all agreed it was beautiful. Finished at something like 4:52pm. Took a few minutes before I could eat anything, had some quesadillas, chili, couldn't really stomach much. It was getting cold, so I took off. Saw in my text messages that Steve did in fact miss the turn (bummer).

Drove back to LA. Got back to the airbnb, ate some snacks, realized I didn't have enough of them, oops, took a shower, got chills, got in bed, felt really good under the covers. Whenever I'd get up to pee, massive shiver shiver chills.




7am Sunday, return to Tacos Delta. Glorious breakfast burrito made me whole. A few hours later, beer with salt and kebabs at Edward's. That was also amazing.

Thus concludes my story.

1 Comment

I've had nothing but contempt for Bitcoin and everything (afaik) that has spawned from that ecosystem, though apparently I've never written about it here. I have nothing but contempt for Bitcoin and everything that has spawned from that ecosystem! I'm hopeful that it's on its way out, but made sad by the fact that so many people have been scammed.

Having said that, it seems that the "Web3" movement wants to move the web past where we are now (which is where Facebook/Google/etc are almost everything), which is an admirable goal. If we can do it in a reasonable way. There's just no reason to build systems that try to be trustless or fully distributed, we already have a fantastic hierarchically distributed infrastructure for this: DNS.

In 2012, I had a thought along these lines -- and I wrote a Google Doc (irony much?) -- don't bother reading it though, it's very outdated and lacking in specifics.

To make the web more open and decentralized, what we need is a new protocol and piece of software!

WATCH - "We Are The Cloud Hosts"

The web that we live with today is largely because people want the following capabilities: Anybody can do all of these things without using Facebook/Google/blah, but it's not easy. Let's break it down: This could all be accomplished by developing one peice of software: the WATCH server. In a typical scenario, the system would be setup as such: How it would be used: This is obviously not fully thought-through, but it does seem like some open software implementing this sort of infrastructure could be a really nice thing to have, and a good way forward for the web.

5 Comments
e-bikes
March 18, 2022
I recently got my first e-bike, and I have some thoughts:

(I've been riding in NYC for a number of years, most days, somewhere in the thousands of miles per year. Most of the time I ride a Salsa Casseroll Single with fenders, rack, panniers, 20 tooth cog for easier climbs, and most recently a Surly Open Bar handlebars and a stem riser for upright posture. Side note: a video of a recent ride. )

The last few (six?) months I've been dealing with a hamstring issue (too much running with poor biomechanics, curse you teenage self), and bicycling does seem to aggrevate it, so I decided to get an e-bike with a throttle in order to be able to rest a little while still living life and going places by bike. I got a RadRunner 2 (it seems pretty decent, reasonably priced, and you can set it up to carry passengers. I have some qualms from setting it up but I'll save those for another day).

This morning I rode from Tribeca to Union Square to pick up a few things from the green market, and back, usingthe throttle almost exclusively. I found myself going a lot faster than I normally ride, and worryingly defaulting into a "driving" mentality. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Later in the day, I rode to my office/studio in Red Hook, via the Manhattan Bridge, and made a special effort to go at a usual (leisurely) pace. It worked, and I managed to stay in a better, more peaceful frame of mind, but it took mental effort. I will have to continue that effort.

I find I definitely prefer the peacefulness of riding regular (*cough* acoustic *cough*), but my hamstring appreciated the electric-ness. What's interesting, though, is the economics:

I recharged my battery after riding 15 miles (which would be about 90 minutes of riding at city speeds), and using a Kill-A-Watt, I measured 360Wh of power use at the mains power. I looked up electric rates, and a ballpark we're talking about $0.05 worth of electricity, and the battery probably had less than 0.05% (or $0.25) of its lifetime wear. If I had ridden my regular bike, I would've burned a few hundred calories at least, and unless I was extremely frugal in my eating (I am not), there's no way I would spend only $0.30 on replenishing those calories. So in some ways, this is more economical (and probably more efficient, too?). Obviously there are benefits to exercise but let's assume I have that taken care of anyway.

Delivery people all moved to e-bikes ages ago. There were stories in the news about how they needed them in order to keep up, but I never really realized that the economics of it, even if you are as fit as possible, made generally cheaper to use electricity than to eat the extra food!

It's very good that e-bikes have been made legal in NY, hopefully the parks will follow (it feels like there should be an ADA claim against the parks that ban them, as there are people who can ride e-bikes but can't ride acoustic bikes). I'm still stunned by the efficiency of this bike, even with its massive 3" wide tires and weighing in around 65lbs.

(Update March 19: I was curious how much electricity electric cars use by comparison… sounds like typical is 34kWh per 100 miles, or 340Wh per mile… assuming that holds up in the city, that’d make the electric bike use about 1/15th the power. which is roughly in line with the mass ratio...)

Recordings:

nothing that will be missed

Comment...
It's now time when I bitch about, and document my experiences dealing with Apple's documentation/APIs/etc. For some reason I never feel the need to do this on other platforms, maybe it's that they tend to have better documentation or less fuss to deal with, I'm not sure why, but anyway if you search for "macOS" on this blog you'll find previous installments. Anyway, let's begin.

A bit over a year ago Apple started making computers with their own CPUs, the M1. These have 8 or more cores, but have a mix of slower and faster cores, the slower cores having lower power consumption (whether or not they are more efficient per unit of work done is unclear, it wouldn't surprise me if their efficiency was similar under full load, but anyway now I'm just guessing).

The implications for realtime audio of these asymmetric cores is pretty complex and can produce all sorts of weird behavior. The biggest issue seems to be when your code ends up running on the efficiency cores even though you need the results ASAP, causing underruns. Counterintuitively, it seems that under very light load, things work well, and under very heavy load, things work well, but for medium loads, there is failure. Also counterintuitively, the newer M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs, with more performance cores (6-8) and fewer efficiency cores (2), seem to have a larger "medium load" range where things don't work well.

The short summary: Perhaps this was all obvious and documented and I failed to read the right things, but anyway I'm just putting this here in case somebody like me would find it useful.

5 Comments
2006-me was an idiot
March 26, 2021
Hopefully in 2036 I'm not calling 2021-me an idiot, too. Here's an interesting old bug situation:

Dan Worrall posted a video on the 1175 JSFX, which was written by Scott Stillwell, way back in 2006, and graciously provided for inclusion with REAPER. In this video, Dan finds that the ratio control is completely broken, and posits a fix to it (adding a division by 2.1).

Sure enough, the code was broken. I went looking through the code1 to see why, and sure enough, there's a line which includes a multiply by 2.08136898, which seems completely arbitrary and incorrect! OK, so we see the bug 2. How did that constant get there?

When the 1175 JSFX was originally written, REAPER and JSFX were very young, and the JSFX log() (natural log, we'll call it by ln() from now on) and log10() implementations were broken. On a 8087 FPU, there are instructions to calculate logarithms, but they work in base 2, so to calculate ln(x) you use log2(x)/log2(e) 3. Prior to REAPER 1.29 it was mistakenly log2(x)*log2(e), due to the ordering of an fdiv being wrong4 and insufficient (or non-existent, rather) testing. So when that got fixed, it actually fixed various JSFX to behave correctly, and that should've been the end of it. This is where the stupid part comes in.

I opted to preserve the existing behavior of existing JSFX for this change, modifying code that used log() functions to multiply log2(e)*log2(e), which is .... 2.08136898. Doh. I should've tested these plug-ins before deciding to make the change. Or at least understood them.

Anyway, that's my story for the day. I'm rolling my eyes at my past self. As a footnote, schwa found that googling that constant finds some interesting places where that code has been reused, bug and all.

* 1 (beyond our SVN commits and all the way back to our VSS commits, all of which have thankfully been imported into git)
* 2 (and it will be fixed in REAPER 6.26, we're calling the non-fixed mode "Broken Capacitor" because that felt about right)
* 3 (or if you're clever and care about speed, log2(x)*ln(2) because ln(X) = logX(X)/logX(e) and logX(X)=1, but now my head hurts from talking about logarithms)
* 4 I haven't fully tested but I think it was working correctly on Jesusonic/linux, and when porting the EEL2 code to MSVC I didn't correctly convert it.


3 Comments

reapering at home
April 15, 2020
(youtube link)

This was a quick thing, using REAPER and the JSFX "sequencer megababy" and "super8", recorded and edited in 18 minutes while videotaping (taping hah). I'm going to do a longer version with more explanation of the tools used, I think. Lots of fun.

Recordings:

blanking on the date

2 Comments



This is my first pedalboard. Andy was very very kind to give me The Wave and the Big Muff Pi and Pog, and I always coveted his Sunset. And I also copied his Iridium since it seemed appropriate. Anyway, so much fun. Good for recording and NINJAMming.

I also posted a song (second opinion) below... the drums I recorded when I stopped to check in on my studio, the rest from home. The words were a poem written by my grandfather (in the 90s, I imagine, given some of the references). My family edited and (self)published some of his works on Amazon.

Life keeps going on. Today I was looking at the graphs and timelines of things and got really angry with our state-level leadership (federal is another level of anger and despair). Had Cuomo put PAUSE in to effect a week earlier, think how many lives would've been saved. 15,000 cases before doing anything is way, way too many. California did their stay-at-home order with ~900. Bravo.

There's no use being angry, maybe, and I fully appreciate not having to be responsible for so many other peoples lives. I don't think a lot of politicians think this through -- the responsibility that comes with the power. Cuomo and Bill de Blasio clearly did not. There is no need for me to mention the other person who doesn't take the responsibility seriously. That's another league, and while some people say a malignant narcissist I prefer "bag of shit."

So now, I'm drinking a G+T made with the best grapefruit I can recall having had, making nothing of a perfectly lovely evening at home.

Recordings:

Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 1 - Face the Lies -- [6:58]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 2 -- [7:13]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 3 -- [5:53]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 4 - The Random Few -- [8:43]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 5 - Force Majeure -- [7:59]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 6 - Renormalize -- [15:17]
Not Vampires (NINJAM) - 7 - Major Reprise -- [4:50]

2 Comments

another week
April 1, 2020
Well time keeps on ticking, I guess. I've done as NINJAM-related work in the last week as in the previous 10 years, I think. The jam we had last night (see below) was awesome, I especially like the last track in it.

We started renting a cheap ($20/month) server for hosting some private NINJAM servers. My initial thought was you could request a private NINJAM server via a web interface, then it would launch a new ninjam server process and give you the port number. That seemed like a bit of work, so instead I did something that would be less work.

As the first experiment I ran 50 NINJAM server processes on the one box, and had it as a purely etiquette-based system, where you only join an empty server or a server to which you were invited. It had some usership, though it was hard to tell if people really wanted them as private or if it was just a big farm of more servers.

I thought about modes where you connect to a server, and then can temporarily set a password so only your friends can join. Seemed easy enough, though you might connect to a server you think is empty and have someone beat you to it, and people might hog servers.

One thing I noticed is that the mechanism the NINJAM server uses to decide when to sleep was fine for a few processes, but if you ran 50 of them, all those polling between nanosleeps added up.

Then I thought -- what if you had a server where if you connected with a password, that password would define the room-name you go into (the NINJAM server already has a User_Group object which is basically the whole server). This seemed like a great idea, but it turns out it wouldn't work, because the password challenge/response system doesn't allow identification of passwords, nor would it detect if two users used the same password. I thought about using part of the anonymous username as a server ident, but the downside there is that if you set that, then connected to a different server with the same anonymous credentials, you'd leak your private server name.

So what I finally came up with: the NINJAM server can now run in a lobby-mode, and via chat commands you can create/join private rooms. You can also chat in the lobby with other people who are in the lobby. So you could negotiate "hey want to play an ambient session? let's !join ambient." So you have private rooms (secret roomname), semi-private rooms, etc. Feels pretty fun! Not many users yet, though.

Of course this will all get ruined once someone decides to troll/spam/flood/etc. I'm sure at the very start IRC was amazing and simple, and by the time I left it it was a mess with bots and anti-bots and other things that just ruin everything. Oh well let's enjoy it while it lasts.

(anything to distract from what's happening outside)

1 Comment
SOB 50
February 11, 2020
Oops I haven't updated here in months. I posted a thread to Twitter the other night, which I'm now going to post here since it's more appropriate here anyway (I was tired and lazy and on my phone). So here goes (with [edits]):

Yesterday [Saturday, 3 days ago] I did my first 50 mile ultra[marathon]. It was in California, near Malibu [Edit: The race is called the Sean O'Brien 50]. I woke up at 3:30am, left the house at 4:10, picked up @runviper [Edward] at 4:35, arrived at the start at about 5:15, before sunrise. It was cold, 40F [reminded me of home], and since the full supermoon was low on the horizon, dark.

You will see a lot of me making this face in this thread:

The start was supposed to be at 6:00 sharp, though I'm pretty sure it was 30 seconds late:

[That's the organizer with the megaphone, I believe. In the final race information email, there was a really thoughtful paragraph which stuck with me, I'll quote it here:

    I believe we are capable of anything we set our minds to. If you visualize it enough, and work hard you can make it happen. Remember that it's a "gift" that we get to run on the trails. There are people who can't even get out of bed. You "get" to participate in an ultra. Enjoy the experience. Be in the moment, and just have fun. It will all come together on race day if you stay positive, and remember what a blessing it is to do what we do. Not even 1% of the population will ever do what you are going to do in less than 1 week. Pretty awesome when you think of it like that? See ya soon my friends!!
Anyway...]

The first couple miles were crowded enough that I didn’t stop to take a picture. It went up a nice hill which made me feel powerful in my ability to climb it while running, then down the other side, through some more park, and then we arrived at a stream.

It was perhaps a small creek, but big enough that crossing it was tricky. There was a loose rope going across to help. A headlamp went flying and started floating down the water. I had a moment of heroism when I recovered it. I crossed with dry feet. Not bragging. After the creek crossing we started climbing again, and the sky started getting light.


and then the sun rose. Around this time I was able to feel my fingers again. I had thin cherry tree 10-miler branded gloves on but they could only do so much. This was almost an hour in, probably around 4 miles in, having climbed about 1500’

After we ascended another 10 minutes or so, the fog covering the Pacific came into view:




There was a photo-op moment going up over some rocks. Approaching it I figured that round thing would be a microwave dish or something but it was actually a light for a photographer.. I’ll see the results eventually I imagine. [edit: that photo wasn't great and too expensive to buy!]

[The] first aid station was about 7 miles in (hour and 40 minutes after the start). Mmm watermelon and oranges. Also potatoes and salt. Eating felt good. [Spent about 2.5 minutes here]

The next hour or so was mostly single track and had a good amount of variety. The charcoaled wood from the fires of last year offered a contrasting element to the blissful joy of the run.





At about 9am (3 hours elapsed, about 13mi, 3200’ ascent) after crossing above a tunnel, we arrived to the second aid station, which had expanded offerings from the first. Sandwiches! PB&J awesome! In hindsight I should’ve had some candy. Regretting not having candy. Getting warm.


There were drop bags at that aid station... dumped my wool shirt, headlamp, picked up sunblock. [spent about 7 minutes here] Soon enough it got very bright, and less photogenic. (note re: video — Spaceballs reference, had plenty of water):

After another hour or so (10:15am?) we crossed over a pass and could see the marine layer again. ~17 miles and 4300’ climbing cumulative...



10 minutes downhill and we arrived at an aid station. Lemonade, fruit, sandwiches, potatoes, consumed. @runviper made a taco, I questioned his judgment for eating beans, then proceeded to join him. No regrets [on the beans] (for me at least) [regrets on not eating candy]. [spent about 5 minutes here]

At this aid station they explained we were 19 miles in, we just had to do 3 miles down to the next aid station, then 8 more miles back up another trail, then the 19 miles back to the start. Legs felt pretty good... time to descend. Oof.


3 miles, 1500’ of descent, and maybe 30 minutes later, the cracks started to show. That tight IT band thing you feel sometimes? hello


eat eat eat [spent about 7 minutes] then back up the hill with full water, going back to where we were, in 8 miles instead of 3. Hey why is it so steep?



After having climbed 1800’ for an hour, you suddenly realize you’re on top of the wrong mountain [edit: but still on the course -- it is a torturous course], and the aid station is a tiny speck on the horizon. There is a gorge separating you from it.

The aforementioned IT/knee thing made the 800’ descent difficult, especially the steeper parts. So I was actually happy to be climbing again, which was good because there was 1000’ to go for the aid station


These 8 miles were brutal. The sun was strong, it was hot, and seeing the expanse between you and where you need to be was intimidating. And knowing once you get to the aid station, you still have 19 miles to go (which are largely downhill, ugh) After having gotten to the aid station, food [nutella (gnutella) sandwiches, mmm. apparently they had run out of water too, but had since gotten more], ice in the face, etc [spending about 8 minutes], we continue on. There’s a small descent, a few hundred feet later I decide I must stop and get a rock out of my shoe. We are 31 miles in, 7300’ of ascent, it’s 1:40pm, there have been rocks in my shoes all day. I probably also tried to stretch my IT. anyway we climb 600’ to go back over the pass, and look back at the ocean:


Now it’s just a short 6 miles to the bag-drop aid station. At some point around here I started using anti-chafe stuff everywhere i felt twinges. Seemed to work but could’ve been placebo. I was wincing on all of the steeper descent bits, not taking too many photos

Get to the mile 37 aid station, change shirts back to wool, grab headlamp. Eat a little but damn at this point I’m sick of food. [Should've started eating candy. changed socks, win. Drank cold brew coffee from drop bag. Both win. Also did some stretching of the IT. total time here was 13 minutes]



And another 6 miles of mid-afternoon. With 2000’ of ascent (not too gradual, plenty of my new favorite thing at this point: descent)




We get to the final aid stop at around 5pm (that 6 miles took a while!), just 7 miles to go! Stretch again here [spent about 8 minutes here -- total aid station time was about 50 minutes]


After this aid station it really got to be the magic hour:



and the fog and mist:

the full super moon returned, too




the anticlimactic ending is that I stopped taking pictures, we turned on headlamps, I endured the descents, and in the last 2 miles got my feet soaked trying to cross the stream that I had managed to cross dryly in the morning [tweaked an old injury in my arm doing this, though, hanging on to the rope crossing the stream. didn't really realize it at the time, but it became apparent by Monday], and despaired that the trail never seemed to end.

and then finally finished 50ish miles with approx 11,000ft of ascent and 11,000ft of descent, in a bit less than 13 hours. And @runviper [Edward] was kind enough to wait for me to catch up before crossing the finish.

update: Monday: legs feeling pretty good! had some nice walks yesterday and a hike today. much better than post-marathon, which makes sense since most of it was hiking...

update: Tuesday: flew home, had an easy run.



Comment...

(youtube link)

Audio (edited) - The Old Man and the C Live at Rockwood April 6 2019

Comment...
(Hobbyist) Music Delivery
December 12, 2018
I've been recording 1-3 hour (occasionally longer) sessions of music and posting them to the internet as bigass .mp3 files for about 15 years now. As the quality of the music has steadily icnreased, I've also been looking at ways of making it more accessible (very few people can commit to listening to 2 hours of a single mp3). So after the last session, I thought it would be nice to mix it into individual tracks, naming them as I edit the session.

What I determined was that individual tracks were great! I thought about it some more and decided I could have both, generating the bigass mp3 files and indexing them (much as brainal.org does, but more intelligently. And then I realized I could parse the .RPP (REAPER project file) projects from the last 12 years or so, and generate a list of songs (from places where it was clear everything was edited) for each session. It doesn't work totally reliably, as there are plenty of places where two or three songs flow into eachother. But that's OK.

Anyway, so you might have noticed on this page the full jam links have been replaced with individual song/supersong links. We've been going through naming them as appropriate.

The other nice thing about this is that we can pull these feeds into our band websites...

13 Comments

(youtube link)



Recordings:

below grade
numerically significant
super8 - 1 -- [17:58]
super8 - 2 -- [11:32]
super8 - 3 -- [1:10]

Comment...

(so much fun, yay!)
(youtube link)

Recordings:

Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 1 - What If We All Just Disappeared -- [6:28]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 2 - Major Major Major -- [2:51]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 3 - Insecurity -- [3:45]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 4 - False Impostor Syndrome / Sandman -- [5:12]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 5 - Niente -- [5:14]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 6 - The Squeeze -- [4:29]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 7 - Storms -- [3:52]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 8 - Last Light -- [4:50]
Decanted Youth_live_at_pianos - 9 - Spring -- [4:59]

5 Comments
super8 stemsy
April 11, 2018
(youtube link)

Recordings:

live solo improv: super8 stemsy

Comment...
super8 practicey
April 9, 2018
(youtube link)



Recordings:

a little help live
so empty live
live solo improv: super8

Comment...

This might be Major Major Major w/ Andy and Sarai (from yesterday's recording)

Side note: my Jams/Full directory now has over 65GB of 192kbps mp3. Apparently that's about 800 hours, or a bit over a month if played continuously. Maybe I should try listening to it all in order.

P.S. I just overhauled brainal.org yay.

1 Comment
Show Announcement
April 4, 2018
NYC readers -- I'm playing with Decanted Youth at Pianos on Tuesday April 17th at 8pm. If you're reading this blog then you probably have an idea of our music, but if not there's a video of a previous show, or you can listen to any of the "rehearsal with sarai and andy" mp3 links throughout.

Recordings:

unexpected need

Comment...
I've been working on a REAPER linux port for a few years, on and off, but more intensely the last month or two. It's actually coming along nicely, and it's mostly lot of fun (except for getting clipboard/drag-drop working, ugh that sucked ;). Reinventing the world can be fun, surprisingly.

I've also been a bit frustrated with Windows (that crazy defender/antispyware exploit comes to mind, but also one of my Win10 laptops used to update when I didn't want it to, and now won't update when I do), so I decided to install linux on my T100TA. This is a nice little tablet/laptop hybrid which I got for $200, weighs something like 2 pounds, has a quad core Atom Bay Trail CPU, 64GB of MMC flash, 2GB of RAM, feels like a toy, and has a really outstanding battery life (8 hours easily, doing compiling and whatnot). It's not especially fast, I will concede. Also, I cracked my screen, which prevents me from using the multitouch, but other than that it still works well.

Anyway, linux isn't officially supported on this device, which boots via EFI, but following this guide worked on the first try, though I had to use the audio instructions from here. I installed Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64.

I did all of the workarounds listed, and everything seemed to be working well (lack of suspend/hibernate is an obvious shortcoming, but it booted pretty fast), until the random filesystem errors started happening. I figured out that the errors were occurring on read, the most obvious way to test would be to run:
debsums -c
which will check the md5sum for the various files installed by various packages. If I did this with the default configuration, I would get random files failing. Interestingly, I could md5sum huge files and get consistent (correct results). Strange. So I decided to dig through the kernel driver source, for the first time in many many years.

Workaround 1: boot with:
sdhci.debug_quirks=96
This disables DMA/ADMA transfers, forcing all transfers to use PIO. This solved the problem completely, but lowered the transfer rates down to about (a very painful) 5MB/sec. This allowed me to (slowly) compile kernels for testing (which, using the stock ubuntu kernel configuration, meant a few hours to compile the kernel and the tons and tons of drivers used by it, ouch. Also I forgot to turn off debug symbols so it was extra slow).

I tried a lot of things, disabling various features, getting little bits of progress, but what finally ended up fixing it was totally simple. I'm not sure if it's the correct fix, but since I've added it I've done hours of testing and haven't had any failures, so I'm hoping it's good enough. Workaround 2 (I was testing with 4.11.0):
--- a/drivers/mmc/host/sdhci.c
+++ b/drivers/mmc/host/sdhci.c
@@ -2665,6 +2665,7 @@ static void sdhci_data_irq(struct sdhci_host *host, u32 intmask)
 				 */
 				host->data_early = 1;
 			} else {
+				mdelay(1); // TODO if (host->quirks2 & SDHCI_QUIRK2_SLEEP_AFTER_DMA)
 				sdhci_finish_data(host);
 			}
 		}
Delaying 1ms after each DMA transfer isn't ideal, but typically these transfers are 64k-256k, so it shouldn't cause too many performance issues (changing it to usleep(500) might be worth trying too, but I've recompiled kernel modules and regenerated initrd and rebooted way way too many times these last few days). I still get reads of over 50MB/sec which is fine for my uses.

To be properly added it would need some logic in sdhci-acpi.c to detect the exact chipset/version -- 80860F14:01, not sure how to more-uniquely identify it -- and a new SDHCI_QUIRK2_SLEEP_AFTER_DMA flag in sdhci.h). I'm not sure this is really worth including in the kernel (or indeed if it is even applicable to other T100TAs out there), but if you're finding your disk corrupting on a Bay Trail SDHCI/MMC device, it might help!

6 Comments
monoprint
February 20, 2017



Comment...

monoprint
February 20, 2017



1 Comment


Edit: updated April 9 2018 with less blur, original image:



Comment...

monotype prints
November 11, 2015



Recordings:

the messy return of an old friend
the plan for recording

Comment...

monotype prints
November 11, 2015



Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 22, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

1 Comment

drink 'n monotype print
October 22, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 22, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 22, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

Here, here's a collection of tracks I recently compiled into an album. It has some instrumentals, then some loop-based tracks at the end that have weird vocals on them. Lather, Rinse, and Repeat: (all CC-BY licensed)

(retroactively posted Nov 2015)



1 Comment

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Recordings:

dont stop the train
nana flute

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 13, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 7, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

1 Comment

drink 'n monotype print
October 7, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 7, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

drink 'n monotype print
October 7, 2015

retroactively posted Nov 2015

Comment...

(retroactively posted Nov 2015)

Recordings:

long losta cola

Comment...

(retroactively posted Nov 2015)

Comment...




Search comments - Ignore HTML tags
search : rss : recent comments : Copyright © 2025 Justin Frankel