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I watched a fantastic documentary called Alchemists of Sound about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I’ve long admired the Radiophonic Workshop—-both for the quality of their output, and because they seemed to embody the same kind of ‘high innovation on a shoestring budget’ ethos that also typified the British rocket industry of the same period. I’m in awe of the skill and patience required to record and manipulate sounds on to analogue tape, and then cut, splice, speed up, slow down and re-record those loops until you have something that sounds completely unearthly.

The workshop had some—-for the time—-expensive and ground-breaking kit, but they also made a lot of stuff themselves from old tobacco tins and components scavenged from skips, as well as testing lots of everyday objects for their potential to generate interesting sounds. One thing that made me laugh out loud for ages afterwards was an archive shot that wasn’t even commented upon in the commentary. It showed a box with lots of interesting looking knobs, dials and buttons. Attached to one knob was a handwritten label in stern capitals which read, “DO NOT FIDDLE WITH”.

Another reason for admiring the Radiophonic Workshop is that several women played a very influential part—-something that was unfortunately unusual for a technical field at that time. The most famous of the workshop women was Delia Derbyshire, who was a mathematician and musician, and was turned away from Decca Records in 1959 because they said that they didn’t employ women in the recording studios. Their loss. Delia’s most famous piece was the Doctor Who theme, which she arranged from Ron Grainer’s composition. Every time I hear her arrangement, I’m astounded by how modern it sounds. Plenty of people have tried to ‘update’ it, but I think that the best you can hope for is not to mess it up too much. Perhaps it should have a “DO NOT FIDDLE WITH” label on it. Her version sounds grittier and weirder than any of the subsequent synthesised arrangements, and I like the tiny variations in timing that you get with edited tape loops. Sometimes synthesisers are just too regular, and it makes the music seem cold. I also didn’t know before I watched the programme that the bass line in the Doctor Who theme was produced by plucking a string; not a musical string, but just an ordinary bit of string.

They featured some of Delia’s other compositions on the programme, including the slightly creepy ‘Ziw-zih Ziw-zih oo-oo-oo’ and the utterly haunting and evocative Blue Veils and Golden Sands. I must try to get hold of some of her recordings on vinyl.

One of the people interviewed made a very interesting point about technology. He said that in the early days, the imagination of the composers outstripped what the technology was capable of. People had a clear idea what they wanted to achieve, and would work away until they got as close as possible to their vision. However, as technology improved, the possibilities outstripped the imagination of the composers. So now, there’s a tendency for composers working with electronics to try out buttons randomly until they find something they like, which isn’t the same thing at all.

Tiger gave me another pleasant surprise today. I’ve got an external Iomega SuperDrive CD/DVD-RW at work, but due to a slight glitch in communication with the person who bought it for me, I ended up with a USB2 unit rather than a Firewire one. Under Panther, the drive wasn’t recognised by the system, so I couldn’t use iDVD or the Finder to burn discs. There were ways around it, so I didn’t return the drive, but it was irritating.

Today, I had to burn some footage to a DVD and switched the burner on. To my surprise, Tiger fully supports the drive now, so I could use iDVD to burn the disc without any problems. It’s great to see more hardware being supported by Mac OS X.

[Apologies are due to Mr. W. Blake for abusing his poem in pursuit of a Sun-style punning headline. Sorry, William.]

Here’s one for the academic geeks… After many years of using Endnote, I’ve finally switched to using BibDesk to organise my references. This will probably make me sound prehistoric, but when I did my PhD I used 3 x 5 index cards in a box to file my references. This had certain advantages—-you could pop down to the library with a stack of blank cards and fill the details in as you did your reading—-but they were hell to search. Things were fine if you could remember the first author, but if you only knew one of the authors, or part of the title, you were sunk. And then there was the whole dropping the entire box on the floor and having to resort the references thing—-not a good use of time.

So, when I switched to Endnote, it felt like a huge step up. There has always been a bit of a reference manager divide between the Physical Sciences and the Biosciences. Physicists, mathematicians and engineers tend to use LaTeX to write their papers (because of the all the equations, for one thing), so naturally use BibTeX to organise their references. Biologists tend to use Word (ack), and so use Endnote. I wish that this wasn’t the case, because BibTeX has a lot to recommend it. The files are just structured plain text, so there’s no fear that years of research will be locked into a corrupted, proprietary format. For the same reason, it’s easy to send colleagues snippets of text that can just be pasted into their *.bib files, already in the right format.

I’m writing in LaTeX much more now, so I felt that the time was right to switch. Endnote has felt more and more elderly, bloated and unloved over the years, and I’m happy to see the back of it. BibDesk is Open Source, and has great Applescript support, so even if you’re not using LaTeX, you can fairly easily knock up a script to print out your reference list nicely.

While I’m on the subject of references, I’ve also really got in to using CiteULike. It’s similar to del.icio.us, but geared towards academic references. It has tags, and the social nature of the system means that you often pick up interesting references by surfing other people’s tags. We have a reading group at work, and it’s really handy to list and tag the papers we’re going to read on CiteULike, so that everyone has the full information. As a bonus, it’s really easy to import or export references as BibTeX (or Endnote, but I haven’t tested that).

Merlin has—-as ever—-some great tips for getting those stubborn, been-there-forever tasks off your list. As well as containing the glorious phrase “plane some cringe off of your hated tasks”, which would look great on a T-shirt, he suggests identifying the tasks that make you cringe then trying to work out why.

I’ve had an embarrassing number of those kinds of tasks that manage to linger on the list for ages, which was the main motivation for planning a feature in Tracks to flag them up. It’s weird but I often find that when I do eventually get around to doing those ‘cringe items’ they turn out to be easy and trivial, and I don’t have a clue why I was hung up on them for so long.

On a semi-related note, there was a great Dilbert cartoon today about the work-life balance.

I spent a bit of time at the weekend finishing the main work of updating Tracks to use Ajax to edit, create and delete items. For those of you who don’t know what Ajax is, it’s basically some clever Javascript that allows you to make changes to the database and show those changes ‘live’ without having to refresh the whole page. It makes the whole thing much more like a normal application, rather than a web application.

For those of you keeping up with Tracks development, I’ve put a couple of silly movies showing me editing projects in the new interface here. You can have a good laugh at my typos—-typing while recording live is surprisingly tricky.

On a side note, I’m using Snapz Pro to make the movies. It’s incredibly good, and while I’m just using a demo version at the moment, I think I’ll pony up for a licence.

You might have noticed the white band at the top right of the page, linking to Make Poverty History. It’s a very worthy cause, so pay them a visit and do what you can.

I love Futurama. We got given a box set of Season 3 at Christmas, and we’re slowly working our way through the episodes, helpless with laughter. In many ways, I prefer it to The Simpsons. I’ve just watched A Pharaoh to Remember, in which Bender has a bit of a hissy fit because he thinks no-one will remember him. His friends try to cheer him up by organising a surprise funeral for him, but he criticises all the eulogies from his coffin (“Loud-er and sad-der”), and eventually storms off (“This is the worst funeral ever!”). They all get captured and forced into slavery when delivering a block of sandstone to Osiris 4. While they are in the slave ship, in chains, Fry complains to Leela,

Fry: You know the worse thing about being a slave? They make you work, but they don’t pay you or let you go.

Leela: That’s the only thing about being a slave.

Priceless.

It’s the craze that’s sweeping the planet. Today I’ve been passed the musical baton by fellow TextDriver Justin French, and by Alnisa Allgood so here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer?

PowerBook: 5.5 GB, 1168 songs, 3.4 days of playing time, but that’s just for my elderly iPod. The real stuff is on the iMac (15.9 GB).

The last CD I bought was?

I bought a batch of three last time (whadda ya mean, that’s cheating?): Disraeli Gears by Cream, Talkin’ Honky Blues by Buck 65 and Guero by Beck.

Song playing right now?

‘Tabula Rasa’ by the composer Arvo Pärt from the album Tabula Rasa

Five songs I listen to a lot/mean a lot to me?

Five? You’re kidding, right? Well, I’ll do my best to restrict it to five, but I’m not promising anything. In no particular order,

1. ‘Intoxicated’ from the album Night Song by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook. Nusrat had such an incredible voice, and on this album he and Michael Brook bridge the hemispheres. This is velvet and sweet and bitter, and his voice soars away ecstatically. I listen to this a lot.
2. ‘Wild Nights’ from the album Harmonium by the composer John Adams. The words come from an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name, and this is a wild ride. It starts very softly, with the chorus making almost wordless sounds that appear from nothingness, peaks with a huge, dramatic and orgasmic crescendo, and then slides back down to serenity and peace again. If this doesn’t make your heart thump, you’re officially dead.
3. ‘Plastic Factory’ from the album Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. This has a stomping, hob-nailed beat with The Captain growling out “Factory’s no place for me/Boss Man leave me be” in his lupine howl. Even if you don’t work in a factory (or for that matter, have a ‘Boss Man’), play this on the way home from work and your mood will improve exponentially.
4. ‘Song of Solomon’ from the album The Red Shoes by Kate Bush. Kate Bush has produced so much high quality music over the years that I find it almost impossible to pick just one song. She may not be fashionable, young or ‘street’, but I keep coming back to her music time and time again. That must mean something—-possibly that I’m not fashionable, young or street. I love the mixture of words from the Book of Solomon and the astounding backing by the Trio Bulgarka. There’s a slight pause around the middle of the track before both Kate and the Trio come soaring in, and it’s then that every single hair on my body stands on end. Every time.
5. ‘Revelator’ from the album Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch. I haven’t had this very long, but I already know that it will stand the test of time. Beautiful acoustic guitar playing accompanied by lovely harmonies. It’s beautifully melancholic.

I’m passing on the baton to…

Let’s see… How about David from fuddland, Pliable from On An Overgrown Path, Sarah from not you, the other one, Lyle from D4D and Mr. D. from Aprosexic.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been trying out Backpack. It’s rather difficult to describe exactly what it does, and the best way to learn is by trying it yourself (you can sign up for a limited free account). However, by just saying “Go and try it”, I feel that I’m failing in my duty to the geek community, and being pretty lazy into the bargain. So here’s a slightly more informative discussion.

Backpack allows you to create and link together a number of web pages, which can contain text, check lists, notes (blog-like entries with a title and a date stamp), links to other pages and tags (like del.icio.us tags). In addition, if you have any of the account plans other than the free one, you can also upload images and files. Backpack uses Ajax extensively to handle creation, deletion and editing of elements, so it feels very snappy and smooth to use as you rarely have to refresh the page to see your changes.

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I can’t tell you what a delight it is to finally have a real garden especially now that summer is on the way. I spent a while today just sitting in the sunshine outside and letting the warmth seep into my bones. One of the things I love about living in a drizzly, temperate country is the sheer joy you experience the first time you feel real warmth and sunlight after the winter. Warmth and sunshine all year round would be nice, but it wouldn’t be anything special. It’s part of my philosophy of life that—-no matter how unpleasant it is—-you have to experience the ‘downs’ to really appreciate the ‘ups’.

Anyway, sitting outside today—-looking at my newly planted flowers, watching the butterflies chasing one another around, the blue tits visiting my bird feeder and enjoying the smell of growth—-was definitely one of the ‘ups’.

We got a mysterious cardboard package in the post from The Guardian newspaper today. it looked a bit like an Amazon package, and we were trying to remember if either of us had ordered any books or CDs from the paper. On opening it up, were were amazed and baffled to find—-carefully shrouded in bubble wrap—-a sheet of lasagne (uncooked) printed with the following text:

THE ESSENTIAL ITALIAN INGREDIENT

The new book, River Café Two Easy20 pages of gourmet Italian recipes exclusively revealed this Saturday

The Guardian

And—-just in case any of the lucky recipients suddenly thought, “Oh, I’ll make a very minimalist lasagne tonight!”—-the bubble wrap was printed with the warning, “For promotional use only and strictly not for consumption”.

I’ll concede that it’s probably the most unusual junk mail I’ve ever received, but how much must it have cost to send carefully wrapped sheets of pasta out to thousands of households, not to mention the waste of cardboard, plastic and fuel? It was certainly unsolicited, unless we failed to uncheck an obscure box somewhere which read:

Please send me promotional but functionally useless Italian comestibles.

The world gets weirder by the day.

Yesterday night I was making a comment and found that I’d been blacklisted as a spammer—-on my own blog! I un-blacklisted myself, but it was clear that Spam Karma (the plugin I use to stem the flow of comment spam) was having some issues. I took a look at the Spam Karma page, and it confirmed that I needed to upgrade to version 2.0, which I’ve now done.

I found a few of legitimate posts that were in the digest (and Phil emailed to let me know his comment had been swallowed), so I’ve tried to manually enter the ones I’ve found. However, there may be others which have already disappeared into the black hole—-if so, I can only apologise. Let me know if you have any more problems leaving comments, but it should be back to normal now.

It’s that dreaded exam marking time of year again. In universities all over the country, academics can be heard pacing around their offices and muttering things like “Come on! Just one more script, then you can have a break.” to themselves. I don’t know what it is about marking, but it’s one of the most severe procrastination generators that I’m faced with in my daily life.

There are a number of things that make almost anything more attractive than the prospect of marking scripts:

1. There are so many of them. I don’t have as many as some of my colleagues, but even so the ‘unmarked’ pile seems to get bigger rather than smaller as you progress.
2. My handwriting is pretty bad, but trying to decipher the scrawl of stressed students who are trying to write as much as possible in three hours makes your eyes go funny.
3. If you’re marking one question, you see more or less the same essay with minor variations over and over again.
4. It’s really important that you get it right.

The last one is the real kicker: the students have (mostly) worked really hard, and you want to be fair and give their efforts the attention they deserve.

While I was marking¹, I came up with a ‘procrastination index’ to apply to unpleasant tasks. The idea is that you think of the everyday task that—-under normal circumstances—-would be the very last thing that you would want to do. Mine was cleaning the oven of burnt-on fish pie. Then you compare the current task and see if you would rather do this baseline task or your current one. I decided that I would rather clean the oven twice than mark scripts, so the procrastination index was +200. Fortunately, I was in the office, so I didn’t have the opportunity to take that way out. I just had to grit my teeth and slap myself every time my mind or body strayed to any task not related to marking. Roll on the end of the pile…

¹ I’m sure that some of you will have spotted that this was a form of procrastination in itself.

I read the first part of this series (‘The Sparrow’) a short while ago and loved it, so I was keen to read the sequel—-particularly as the first part didn’t exactly have a happy ending. ‘Children of God’ follows Father Emilio Sandoz back to the planet of Rakhat, several years after he returned as the only survivor of the first disastrous mission. I think that the author was trying to cater for people who hadn’t read the first book, so there’s quite a bit of scene setting and recapitulation at the start which is a little tedious if you have read the first part. However, the pace soon picks up, and it becomes completely riveting.

The story ranges widely over the themes of religion, atheism, morality, politics, but I think that it was the biology that gripped me most (for obvious reasons). Doria Russell seems to have put quite a bit of thought into the biological and ecological aspects of the book, and as a result, the Rakhati ecology is at least plausible. True, it’s impossible to guess what life on another planet would be like, but the ecology of this fictional planet is at least internally consistent and biologically believable. Rakhat has not one but two sentient species, one of which is more or less domesticated as food for the other. Imagine being able to go to a planet and not only be able to study entirely new forms of plants and animals, but also learn about the thoughts, behaviour, language and culture of two sentient species! I got pretty excited by that idea, and there’s plenty of detail for the biology nerd along with missing facts so that you can speculate on the possibilities.

One difficulty with this book was that the story is fragmented over a large number of characters and also over time. The ships taking people to and from Rakhat travel faster than light, so that there are relativity effects on the passage of time. This obviously makes the chronology of events on both Earth and Rakhat rather difficult to untangle, and there are sudden discontinuities as you jump from one story to another. It’s not a huge problem, but I did find myself racing through some parts to get back to threads about my favourite characters.

Which brings me neatly to discussing my favourite character. But I _can’t_ actually discuss her because it would be a big fat spoiler if you haven’t read the book. I will say that she gets all kinds of grief, doom and disaster heaped upon her which I didn’t think was adequately resolved. I wanted to know that she was at least content at the end, but her fate was rather summarily dealt with. This sounds like a really big criticism of the book, but it’s really just a result of having so many engaging characters—-it’s impossible to concentrate on them all. The whole thing revolves around Emilio Sandoz, so he gets most of the attention.

In the end, the main question raised by this book is how do we know that we’re doing the right thing? You can do something with good or bad intentions, and both can end in disaster. When do dramatic results justify draconian means? It’s a very thought-provoking book (don’t be put off by the title if you’re an atheist like me), and it’s well worth a read.

BBC4 has been running an animation season recently, showing old and new animations and running documentaries about them. I caught one about Smallfilms—-a tiny animation studio run by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin which produced classic animations like The Clangers, Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine. For any Brit of my generation, these programmes were an integral part of our childhood. They were simple, beautifully drawn and with whimsical, delightful stories. Even as a child I thought that they also had a deliciously melancholy air as well—-particularly Noggin the Nog.

Smallfilms was literally a cottage industry. In fact, it was a stable industry, as all the films were made in an empty stable attached to Peter Firmin’s cottage. Peter did all the drawing and backgrounds and made the models, while Oliver did the narration, wrote the stories, did the stop-motion animation and the editing. Their budget was minuscule, so everything was handmade, picked up in junk shops or lashed together with sellotape. In the film, Oliver proudly showed off a piece of apparatus he made to dim the lights, which was made of junk and rotated one click at a time. When you wanted to raise the lights, you just had to move the elastic band—-ingenious! I also love the fact that the Clangers had Meccano skeletons.

The Clangers—-for the uninitiated—-were small, knitted pink creatures who looked like a cross between a mouse and an anteater. They lived inside a moon which had a core of soup, tended by the Soup Dragon, and populated by orange blobs called Froglets and an Iron Chicken. The Clangers’ dialogue was provided by swanee whistles. Amazingly, they actually wrote full scripts and then ‘spoke’ them with the whistles. Apparently, they got told off for one ‘line’ which went, “Sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again”. I still love the Clangers, particularly Tiny Clanger.