f i c i a l

Thoughts on a notation for djembe rhythms March 24, 2009

Posted by ficial in brain dump, drumming.
add a comment

About a year ago I started taking djembe lessons from the wonderful Lara and Yael of RootsHeartPulse/. This is the first instrument I’ve played, and in fact the first musical thing I’ve done. I really enjoy it, though it eats my brain a bit. Lara and Yael learned from Babatunde Olatunji and so teach using the vocables he invented: Gun (base), Go and Do (tone), and Pa and Ta (slap). That works OK for me, but I think in sounds much more and better than images, so I made up a notation that I could write and use to help me remember the various rhythms. However, it’s only hand-writable. I’d like something I can type with out resorting to making my own fonts first. With a bit of fussing, I think I like this as a starting point:

N = GUN
O = GO and DO
\ or / = PA and TA

Timing is indicated simply by spacing. The above doesn’t indicate handing, nor beat / emphasis. It’s easy enough to put additions marks when writing on paper, but types needs a more fixed syntax. So, I need to modify that a bit, and ideally make the characters a little more meaningful. My next idea is

N = GUN (main hand)
n = GUN (off hand)
\ = GO (main hand)
/ = DO (off hand)
( = PA (main hand)
) = TA (off hand)
, (on line above, as needed/desired) = emphasis

Plus, I’d like to be able to denote pauses, where/when that need to be clear. Also, there are a few strikes that need additional notation:

, = tiny rest (used when spacing isn’t clear enough, e.g. in proportional fonts)
X = GO/DO played together
O = PA/TA played together

Spacing is still used for indicating time.

So, Fanga second part would look like N,N,n\/N,,Nn\/.

I’ll play with it a bit more, and if it works for me I’ll post a set of rhythms.

NERCOMP Event: Edu Wordcamp: Small Group Discussion March 24, 2009

Posted by ficial in Blogroll.
add a comment

This is a continuation of my report on the NERCOMP WordPress gathering on Feb 02. Yes, I’m a little behind…

After the keynote the organizer had us break into small groups (6-8 people, basically 1 table), with the constraint that we try to get into a group with out people we came with. Then we were to introduce ourselves and talk about our experience with wordpress (or lack thereof), and generally to get to know each other a bit. Then we were presented with a specific topic to consider: what would be a good framework / system for a higher ed WP community.

The group I was in spent a lot of time talking with each other and asking about institutions and situations during the intro phase, so we didn’t have a lot of time to talk about the specific question, However, I think that was fine. It was really nice to have time explicitly devoted to getting to know other attendees, and to have something of a framework to get discussion going. Making that connection with people was more useful than any specific info we’d exchange. I’m not going to go through who was in my group, but there were some common threads that came up in the course of our introductions and discussion: .

there’s not much demand for blogs as such
there is a lot of demand for small, easy-to-maintain web sites
as much or more demand in communications offices as in academics
lots of people tie it to Active Directory or LDAP
- wpmu-ldap – plugin for LDAP auth for wpmu install
some interest academically among early adopter instructors
- especially those looking for more communication / interaction with / among students
- some interest in WP as a communication channel to and from the larger world
ease and speed of implementation is a key point to adoption
- low initial investment makes it possible to deploy for otherwise marginal projects
great internal communications / publicity tool
- RSS feeds especially nice
- saves a lot of money on printing
- good viral marketing tool; URLS spread easily

One interesting thing about our group (and about attendance in general, as best as I could tell) was the groups represented. We had an even mix of academics, IT, communications / public affairs, and libraries. WordPress is a product with broad appeal and acceptance.

In terms of the what would be good for the higher ed WP community, there were a few relevant points:

There’s a significant functional divide between WP and WPMU implementers. Generally trying to do different things and they have different support challenges.
Face-to-face meetings are important because they force interaction. On-line communication can be dominated by the most active people, with less active people being largely passive. In live gatherings, especially small ones, more people participate more fully.
General open source community listservs can be intimidating; a list serv with participation limited to higher ed people would be more readily adopted / used. There may be such a list already, but if so it’s not well publicized as no one in our group had heard of it.
The content looked for falls into 2 main camps:
- technical info / support
- lots ideas, examples, and evidence of pedagogical use
  - demonstrated / supported effectiveness
- examples of how far you can push the tool (themes and plugins)

ruby on rails – getting error messages, authlogic email validation March 15, 2009

Posted by ficial in techy.
4 comments

I’ve been working on a RoR project for a bit, and it’s going slowly. The big problem is that I spend so much time fighting the system, especially in the testing framework. Just now I spent about 2 hours tracking down the cause of an error. The heart of the problem was not the error itself, but getting any info beyond “an error occurred”.

The problem was that a save on a user object was failing, but I had no idea why because the log files had no useful info. I finally found something useful at http://dizzy.co.uk/ruby_on_rails/cheatsheets/active-record-validations#low_level_validations. It turns out that ActiveRecord objects store their errors, and you can use logger methods (see http://www.martyandrews.net/blog/2007/09/logging_in_ruby_on_rails.html for more details) to put them in your log file. Thusly

if @user.save flash[:notice] = "Account registered!" redirect_back_or_default account_url else @user.errors.each_full { |msg| logger.debug("ERROR: "+msg) } render :action => :new end

I was able to see that the problem was with the email attribute of the user object. I’m using AuthLogic, which has generally been a fantastic user / session / authentication system (I found it much easier to use than restful_authentication, and the Authlogic tutorial and example app are really good). However, in this case it was a real pain. The problem turned out to be non-unique email addresses.

It turns out that Authlogic by default makes sure the email is unique. While this is described in the reset password tutorial, it’s not in the setup one. Not knowing this landmine was waiting, I’d added an email field to my user object, and then had the create user test fail with out any explanation. The above code finally showed me the error message explaining that I had a non-unique email. From there I did a bit of research and found that on the user object I can use
acts_as_authentic :validate_email_field => false
to disable that check, and voila, problem solved.

NERCOMP Event: Edu Wordcamp: keynote by Jane Wells February 23, 2009

Posted by ficial in NERCOMP, NERCOMP20090202wordcamp, conference.
1 comment so far

On February 2nd I went to a NERCOMP event about WordPress, and found it quite interesting. It started out with a brief introduction by the organizer, Randall Rode. He talked a bit about his impetus for putting together the event. It boiled down to two main things. First, he feels that WordPress is a good tool, and even a good model of good tools. Particular points of note are its extensible architecture (via plugins and the customization that an open source product allows), its accessible technology (it’s very easy to use, even for people who normally find technology intimidating and/or challenging), and its very active and engaged user community. Second, he felt that the existing WordPress gatherings / conventions are very blogging oriented (e.g. with topics like How To Monetize Your Blog) rather than focusing on the ways higher education might use the tool.

The keynote was by Jane Wells of Automatic (Automatic is a company founded by one of the original creators of WordPress as a way to monetize it, and thus let him work on it full time). She gave an overview of WordPress and talked about the relation between Automatic and the WordPress community. This talk had a lot of very useful information. I’ll cover a few of the high points:

the relation between wordpress.org, wordpress.com, and WordPressMU :
- .org is the original, self-hosted version of WordPress
- .com is mostly the same product, but hosted by Automatic (base is free, advanced features cost money/month)
- WordPressMU is the multi-user version of WordPress that Automatic uses to run wordpress.com.
WordPressMU is likely to be especially useful to universities : WPMU can run millions of blogs
WordPress has 5 core developers, three of whom are employed by Automatic. It also has 100s of contributors, and 10,000+ active beta testers.
Automatic has about 35 people, and no central offices (interesting – it’s a true distributed company). Automatic are the people behind Akismet (anti-spam plugin). Automatic also has these features / plugins: Stats, IntenseDebate (a comment platform), and PollDaddy.
- In addition to it’s hosting service revenue stream, Automatic has deals with some universities (if any in particular were named, I missed it).
WordPress is quite secure : many security-conscious government agencies use it
two good places to look for wordpress info / idea:
- wordpress.org showcase – sites taht do interesting things with wordpress (and you can submit sites here)
- wordpress.tv – a repository for videos related to WP (conference presentations, how tos, etc.)
two new features / products to look at/for
- BuddyPress – “facebook-in-a-box” – a suite of social networking tools for WordPress
- bbPress – forum software that integrates with WordPress

An especially interesting aspect is that WordPress is presenting itself (to this crowd) as a possible Learning Management System. This gets an appreciative laugh from everyone in the audience “All distance e-learning / online course systems are terrible, and BB is especially terrible”. This general topic was covered a bit more in a later presentation.

Then some audience feedback:

? Where do ideas come for as to what to work on, and who decides what’s done next and how?

2.5 was designed by a hired company, but Automatic didn’t do indep testing
there very polarized feedback from users on 2.5, much of it negative
they did a lot of usability testing for 2.7
they got good feedback (itracking (NOTE: check this out!), user surveys, word camp discussion)
for 2.8, often surveys on WP development blog, as well as discussion/conversation at cons, and standard open source approach
no one makes a decision on their own. Things go through the open source community. Lots of dev conversation via public IRC – look for WP dev channel

A comment from someone: “one of the great things about 2.7 is the great customizeability of the admin interface”

Jane notes that a guiding principle behind the screen design was to let people create their own UI instead of trying to create the one, perfect system. She also drops this nice tidbit : “The future [of software] is towards self-designed design.”

? What are the new features and when will we see them?

the typical WordPress release cycle is typically every 3-4 months
they’re trying to put more hooks in for plugins
they’re very concerned about bloat; a big focus is making it possible to have a plugin rather than adding everything to the core