Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Show Wednesday (Tomorrow)!

I will be playing tomorrow night at 21:00 at the Plantage Dok in Amsterdam. The show starts at 21:00. Admission is free and the beer is cheap! I’m be playing “electronic noise that you can almost dance to.”
The address is Plantage Doklaan 8 tot 12. See the venue’s website for more information.
I’ve been trying new methods to make fun music. I’ll be using a MiniModular synthesizer, but re-sampled to 8 bit and silly 8-bit nintendo-inspired drum sounds. Hopefully, It will be exciting and fun. I don’t know if you will be able to dance to it, but I hope you try.

Live Blogging ETC – makeITfair presentation

Donna is speaking about the history of rubbish collection. This has to do with how electronics get recycled or not. Good Electronics is an organization that looks into this. MakeITfair is linked to the Clean Clothes initiative.
The makeITfair guys are now talking about the story of stuff: where do things come from? This is an awareness raising campaign working with NGOs through the world. Raw materials, production, distribution: what’s the story?
They’re giving us a quiz, with a prize! (ooh) But first a movie. Maybe.

Extraction

Things start with “extraction.” Raw materials. Aka, exploiting the environment and killing the planet. People who live in the way of extraction are screwed.
Every phone has 65 different elements. 25% of a phone it metals. The IT industry uses a lot of metals. They come from mines, of course. Largely mines in the third world.
MakeITfair did research about three kind of metal: platinum group – used in hard disks, motherboards and screes, cobalts and tin. Oh, and is it bad. Forests cut down. Nasty pollution. Weirdly colored snow. Child labor in the Congo. 50k kids working in cobalt mines there. The workers are sub-contracted. Migrants. Untrained. Uninsured.
The Congo is not the happiest place on earth politically. Mine revenues end up in the hands of armed groups: rebels and military, both of whom use it for weapons. The local communities get screwed and shot at. “Social Disruption”
makeITfair asked electronic companies about this. They said, “oh, it’s untraceable. we can’t find out where things come from.” and “We hardly use any of this stuff. Nobody cares what we say about it.” MakeITfair countered that they could trace stuff and the companies do buy a lot of stuff. The companies changed their tune. “Oh, maybe we should do something. huh. But what? talk to us for a long long time in many many talks.”
NGOs care about these issues. Investors also care. The ones that are accountable to anybody. Investors are sometimes now setting criteria and conditions.

Production

Toxic chemicals! We use it in products, it ends up in the environment. It ends up in us. Breast milk has super high levels of toxins. Factory works get doused in it. New urban arrivals live in slum and get to work in toxic factories. Toxins also end up in waste, aside from products.
Donna won the quiz!
Phones and computers are not made by the brand, obviously. They’re made by huge western multinationals with factories in the developing world. Seagate. Up to 80% of factories workers are young women from rural areas but now in urban ones. Low wages! Factory workers get fined often which lowers their wage further. They have long hours and non-voluntary unpaid overtime. And they get to work with toxic materials with no protective gear. And they don’t get to unionize. Unions are illegal in many places, including China.
Brand companies say they can only they can only talk to their direct suppliers. makeITfair says, the whole chain is your problem. In China, it’s hard for NGOs. There’s one national union which is not very effective. NGOs that exist are based offshore and underground.

Distribution and Consumption

Selling as fast as possible. Low prices. Costs are externalized. Who pays for stuff then? Workers. By not getting benefits. Only 1% of stuff we buy in the US lasts longer than 6 months. (Including food?)
European consumers (age 16 – 30) say they’re willing to pay 10% more for fair trade electronics.
What can we do? Recycle. Longer functional part of life cycle. Complain to brand companies.

Live Blogging ETC – Cuisine Interne

Brussels Organization and feminism and creative commons. They have a patchwork approach weaving many themes together.
They do women and FOSS days every 6 weeks
Also a wiki about linux and audio, tinkering with trash hardware, wiki about publishing with foss tools (all in French), parties. Also working on a mapping project with Open Street Map and also hand-drawn maps by people as sort of subjective impressions. Open Source video, and a million art projects and parties. Artistically engaging public spaces.
Wrote some audio software for doing interviews. In python. Runs from command line. looks for a text file which holds questions. Starts with a test of the audio. The questions for the program are decided on by consensus of everyone involved in the project.
we are writing down questions now . . .. We all have post it notes. I can’t think of a question. Um . . . art and technology . . . um . . . .. Wow somebody else asks, “How do you connect art and activism?”
Ok, so we’re writing questions on postit notes and then putting them on butcher paper that’s been attached to the walls. We’re going to pick 16 of them.
The questions from previous versions are for working artists. (paraphrased) “How do you make a living?” “Who owns your work when you are finished?” “What is your price structure?” “How did you determine your prices?”
Now all of us are going to pick our three favorite questions.
(To be continued)

The last on BrumCon

My previous post is apparently coming off as much more whiny than I intended. I get very nervous on stage, in general. So I always think I’m crashing and burning, no matter what’s actually happening.
Why play on stage even if you get stage fright: it gets easier when you do it a lot. It impresses chicks. It’s even more annoying sitting in the audience watching somebody else play your music wrong (which gets you no chicks, they all go for the performer). Nobody wants to go to a show of tape music. It’s almost always worth it. Audience reaction is the best way to figure out what parts of pieces are working and what parts aren’t.
In the art music scene, we brag about playing in front of hostile audiences. One time, in Connecticut, I had a friend who ran a folk music open mic night. She invited me to come play a political piece I was working on, with the voice of a shrill, horrible far right political pundit. Just about everybody got up and left and the ones who remained tried to give me unfriendly, helpful advice including things like the definition of music, since I was obviously unclear on it. That was a hostile audience. BrumCon? That was mixed.
That was surprising for me: playing in front of a mixed audience, since it was a new experience. And then there were musical problems where I was kind of fighting my gear. That happens sometimes. I now know what changes I need to make before my next show. It’s somewhat stressful, but not like, say, having a tuba that you’re playing suddenly fall apart on stage.
I would totally be into playing in front of the same or a similar group again. And next time, I’ll have a better idea what to expect. I’m glad I added in the 8 bit FX, as that seemed to go over really well. I’m also glad I didn’t get my piece with samples from BNP politicians together. (The British National Party is allied with the French National Front (Le Pen’s party) and other National Socialist parties around Europe. They’re bad people.)
After I packed up, I wandered into the bar next door, where a bunch of the attendees, including the next speaker who was supposed to have started already, were having pints. One friendly guy bought me a Guinness. I chatted a bit with people and then went to the next talk which was on web security and how to hack social networking sites. And how to prevent those hacks. It was interesting and would have been way useful were I still a web developer. You can’t just check IDs against permissions. You need to have some logic in there also. There are permission sets that are impossible. Like a Admin should also have the Moderator bit set, for a hypothetical example, and if they don’t, they got to be an Admin through abnormal means.
Then, I chatted with more people, including one guy who books gigs for a series in London. 🙂 I looked at the clock and it was 17:30. I’d left Xena, my dog, locked in a crate since 10:00 so I decided to bike home with my gear, give her a walk and then bike back to catch the end of things. It was such a lovely day in the park! So bright and sunny and warm! We had a lovely walk and then I sat down for a moment on my bed . . . and woke several hours later. Ha! I can only drink half a pint, or I get totally non-functional. It’s so pathetic. I need to start going to the gym to put on some weight!

BrumCon 07 – Gig Report

And then I was on. And incredibly nervous. The thing about hackers and geeks is that we don’t tend to be polite. Even British hackers. It’s an international identity, really. We’re all zitty, perhaps having some trouble with puberty, awkward, weird and rude. I’m not a technically a hacker, really, since I just do audio and my interest in breaking things has mostly faded. But socially, yeah. So when I started to play, some people were clearly not impressed and not hiding that.
The bass was way too boomy. My computer out was not going through an EQ, so I couldn’t turn up the treble. A bloke in the front row got out a newspaper. The sampled voice was way too low in the mix. The first piece runs on a timer. I wanted it to end, but it goes for at least 5 minutes. I tried to add in as much variation as possible, with the limited controls I gave myself. It’s a poppy tune, without really any dynamic variation. I felt like I was crashing and burning. Finally, after an eternity, it ended.
Immediately there were questions, “were you controlling that with a joystick?” “were those sounds generated live?” “could you plug in a projector so we can see what you’re doing?” Wow. So half the people were interested. Some number of them were actually fascinated. And half the people hated it. Wow. This was the most mixed group I’ve ever played in front of.
I went on to do my live sampling, this time with the projector plugged in. I’d gotten it finally working very late the night before after numerous problems, most of which were extra annoying because the failures happened silently ARG! That should never happen! If something goes wrong, it needs to alert you! Anyway, they saw my screen projected, complete with the many curse words that had worked their way into my source code over the previous 48 hours. The debug window regularly told me to go fuck myself. There was giggling.
Normally, when I’m using a controller, I have it post notes reminding me which button does what. I didn’t do that here. Nor did I regularly post which samples were playing. This combination was not so good, since I completely forgot what button did what. It’s clear now that I had them all wrong anyway. I need to be able to use the major functions in the controller with one hand, preferably, my right hand (unless I’m playing tuba). It kind of didn’t matter, because the projector changed my screen resolution such that I wouldn’t have been able to see my notes anyway.
So the set was fairly confusing and stressful. About half the people in the room left. I still feel ok about it, though. I made some music and possibly some connections.
Some of the local FOSS types are trying to get a free culture group together. I would really like to teach a class in SC. It would be super cool to have an SC users group where people could do demos of their projects or how to do things, so people could get help from each other. We could all build SC cluster computers. It would be teh awesome. Beginner instruction at 7. Regular group at 8. That sort of thing.
Anyway, I have a mental list of fixes for the software. Also, I wonder if I could sort of glue a wiimote to the bottom of the controller. I like the dual sticks and all the buttons, but it would be nice to have positional data too.

Edit

This is apparently coming across much more negatively than I intended. So I’ve published a clarification. In short: I would do it again, no question.

BrumCon 07 – Thin Clients

The first afternoon talk was on thin clients. You remember those tiny Sun Java Boxes? Or other weird, little, expensive boxes with no disks, that just ran on the network? Those are thin clients. But they need not be overpriced. An ancient pentium can become a thin client. It’s recycling and with no disks, it’s pretty energy efficient. Ergo, this is a green use of tech. And anything that resurrects useless hardware into a tool is fucking cool.
I forgot to save the notes I took. Um, ok, so thin clients obviously depend on a server. They do something called a PXE boot, where they ask for their OS across the network via DHCP and TFTP. After they figure out what servers they needed, they do some more TFTP until they get an adequate OS running on a RAM disk. So the operating system and an X server are running locally. (The terms “client” and “Server” are reversed in X, which is annoying. The server serves the graphics. (Don’t think about this too hard.)
When you launch an application, like OpenOffice, or firefox, that runs on the server, but is displayed on the client. These apps don’t have a lot of extra overhead if more than one person is using them at a time. There could potentially be security issues, because every keystroke is being transmitted across the network. Part of what you want to do is make sure that nobody bad can get between you and the server. Therefore, it’s best to run wires rather than wifi. Also, you want the thin client to have access only to the server. The server can get to the internet, but the clients cannot. Finally, risk is mitigated through ssh tunneling, which is now standard in many thin clients.
Edubuntu, an ubuntu distro does thin clients out of the box and is an easy solution. This whole setup is really great for NGOs since a lot of the hardware is findable via freecycle. Every edubuntu release gets three years of security updates, so you can set this up and not have to upgrade the server for three years. I want to help put together an NGO-ready-to-go set, and I think this model makes a lot of sense.
I wish I hadn’t lost my notes . . .
You can also do slightly thicker clients, where some apps are sent across the network to run locally, on the client. This is related to my plan to get cheap multi-channel audio for installation. What I want to do is get a bunch of motherboards that all have on-board audio. I want to stick them in a box together, with a giant power supply, where one of them would have access to a disk and the others would not. The disk-enabled one would be the server. I would hookup a screen, mouse, keyboard etc to the server, because in this case the clients are providing only the audio. They would PXE boot from the server, but instead of loading and starting X, they would load and boot the SuperCollider audio server (now you can see how the X windows stuff got to be backwards). The server would load the SuperCollider language. It would access all the clients (aka SC servers) via OSC. It would tell them when to play and what to play, load SynthDefs and Buffers, etc. Every client motherboard in this scheme is 2 channels of audio. So three motherboards is 4 (or 6) channels. Four provide 6 (or 8) channels. Etc. Ideally, all this hardware would be free (as in beer). I think I’m going to wait until my lease is up to start combing freecycle in earnest. But it would be so brilliant being able to drag a free box into a gallery or something and have all open source and a load of speakers. It’s not the most gigable solution, but yeah, brilliant for installations.
Um, anyway, if you want to get rid of p400 or better motherboards with on-board audio, drop me a line. I’ve got £0 budget, but I will generate a howto, so think of it as giving something to the FOSS community.

BrumCon07 – lunch

. . . continuing in too much detail . . .
After the first talk, came the Break for lunch. I took advantage of the gap to do my sound check. While I was trying to do it, three teens, two boys and a girl, approached me to mock me for using a mac. About half the computers that were used on the stage were macs, actually, a number that surprised me. I was somewhat annoyed with the teens as I was trying to do a sound check. They told me that they liked to spend their free time going to the Apple store to start arguments. Part of what was especially amusing / annoying is that I had exactly the same attitude at their age! I also liked getting into arguments with mac users! Gah, karma!
Mac users are fun to argue with because they’re so religious about their computers. But, of course, it was completely different when I used to do it. Because it was me and anything I do is justifiable because I do it.
When I was a young’un, PCs ran DOS and Macs ran MacOS. If you liked to do strange things to the operating system on your computer or to type rather than mouse around and generally try to cause small disasters, DOS was way better. Really. It was so clear at the time. Looking back, though, I’ve lost a lot of certainty. But, now Windoze is the hugest piece of crap ever excreted from a software company and OS X is unix.
I explained that when I started doing Pro Audio, linux’s support for it was not adequate and it’s gotten better lately, but I’m still on a mac. I also said that I was born and raised in Cupertino, California, so it was the home team for me. And anyway, it’s unix, it’s not like I’m running windows or something. “It’s BSD” the girl said, as the boys seemed confused by unix != linux. And I wondered why the right speaker was silent. They regrouped, it was the BSD that nobody wanted, shoved out the backdoor. I became satisfactorily annoyed and they wandered off. I went to find food ASAP, to become less peeved.
This was too funny. Anyway, for the record, there are some pieces of software which are not implemented well in FOSS, including score notation. I need to run mac or win to run Sibelius. And I’m sure as hell not going to run windows. Unix is better than Windows. Any Unix is better than any windows.
OS X does have a kind of reject history, though. It started out life as the Mach Kernel, invented at Carnegie Mellon. That kernel was not BSD, but was faster because it emulated BSD in an efficient manner. NeXT used it for NeXTSTEP, their weird operating system. This OS was used in some minor advances in Information Technology, like the invention of HTTP (aka, the World Wide Web). The first web server ran on what would become on OS X. MAX was invented on NeXTSTEP. Along with many other things. It’s hard to overstate how fucking cool NeXT boxes were when they first came out. By the time I got a job being a sysadmin on a NeXT cluster, though, the glory had faded completely and NeXT OS was about to die. It had such obvious faults. Like the totally proprietary windowing system. Why didn’t they just use X windows like everybody else?
Steve Jobs founded NeXT, so when he came back into Apple, he killed the plans to use the (far superior) BeOS, and switched directions so that the new OS would be NeXTSTEP. It’s fortunate that this did not turn into a disaster, since it certainly looked like one from the outside. Anyway, OS X is a respectable OS with a respectable history. Although it still has a propreitary window manger. bah.

BrumCon 07 – Morning

Yesterday was BrumCon07(.5). It was supposed to be in October, but was delayed. They plan to also have a BrumCon08 next October. So, when I arrived, I expected complete disorganization, but this was not the case at all. I plugged in all of my cables in the morning, but didn’t get to do a sound check right away as they were showing Pink Panther cartoons, which were the cause of much hilarity.
The room would probably have been slightly too big for my monitor speakers. But, during the Pink Panther cartoons, it was clear that something was deeply amiss with the PA. The MGM lion roar was deafening, and the incidental music and dialog was barely audible. The bass levels might have been perfect for a dance party. But then when people started talking, later, with a mic, it was ok sounding. I was concerned, but not alarmed.
The first talk was about hacker stereotypes and hacker ethics. The speaker had been famous when he was a teen for being Britain’s youngest (arrested) hacker. At 13, he was committing credit card fraud to feed his family. He didn’t divulge too many details, but it sounded as if his parent(s) had drug problems and neglected him. He had a computer, though. At 13, he couldn’t get a job, but he could use stolen credit cards to get groceries delivered to his house. He got arrested and tried for that. I think this would have been a really good time for social services to step in. I know we English speakers are very keen to punish everybody and make sure that people who do wrong suffer harm. But really, in this case, a kid stealing money for food? That’s a good time to look at food stamps (or whatever they’re called here) and foster care and whatnot.
Incidentally, this is why it’s not entirely unfair for Americans to think of the UK as being set in Dickens novel. (Just like you lot think we’re a cowboy movie.) Because leaving a kid in that situation is Oliver Twist like. Really, everybody, social services are good things. They help people get their lives together. They give a smart kid a future. But no, the British state sent him back home, where he kept doing credit card fraud, eventually getting less altruistic about it, until the point where, as an adult, he stole £750000 ($1.5 million) by breaking into unsecured e-commerce servers and now has an adult prison record for hacking.
Alas, he fails to distinguish between his actions at 13 and his actions at 18. Anything he did was justified simply because he did it. Now tech companies are reluctant to hire him and this is totally unfair!! Right, step 1, lose the attitude. The banks he broke into, let him fix their problems for them. The movie Catch Me If You Can was based on the memoirs of a kid who did a lot of fraud and then started working for banks. That’s probably the best future for this kid. But seriously, what’s putting people off as much as the prison record, is the whiny, self-righteous attitude. You don’t have to actually be sorry about breaking into wide-open servers. But you could perhaps try to create that impression?
I think morally, there’s a big difference between ripping off a bank and ripping off a person. Breaking into a server hosted in somebody’s living room is different than breaking into a small company’s colo, is different than breaking into a big company’s server farm. The bigger the target, the less moral trouble, imo. This didn’t come up at all, even in a discussion about the morality/ehtics of breaking in. I would think the Robin Hood model would be fundamental to such a morally murky area.
So the speaker was whining about how his juvenile record is permanently available via Google. Which is why newspapers shouldn’t reveal the names of minors convicted of crimes. It’s meaningless to seal juvenile records if it’s going to be so easy to find them. The speaker seemed to think he was special in this regard. Imagine a group of people whose private business and embarrassing past was so easily available to anybody with a computer! Why, that’s never happened to any sensitive minority group ever before! I can’t think of a single other highly obvious example!
Yeah, I’m starting to have mixed feelings about search engines. Google has taken over a lot of government functions in the Silicon Valley. But this particular function is one that has more home in a police state than the benevolent, Medici-esque system that California and Google seem to be blundering in to.
More later . . .

NHS Mental Health Trust Shrink

In order to ration care treat trans patients, the NHS wants shrinks to be involved. Specifically, you can’t get a referral to an endocrinologist without a psychiatrist. Also, importantly, nobody wants to pay for anything unless you jump through all the proper hoops like a trained circus dog. So this morning I arose bright and early to go see a shrink.
The letter informing me of my appointment told me to go to the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital (QEPH), which is right by school. It always struck me as highly convient, having the mental hospital right next to the Uni. I also often wonder how the queen feels about having a mental hospital named after her? There must be a great number of strange things named after her. The Queen Elizabeth Car Park. The Queen Elizabeth Strip Mall. The Queen Elizabeth Home for Rabid Puppies. Does she get any say in it? “Oh, thank you for the kind offer, but I was really holding out for a suspension bridge?” (Or can there be multiple Queen Elizabeth Bridges? Would that be too confusing? Could there be both the Queen Elizabeth Bridge and the Queen Elizabeth Suspension Bridge?) I mean, personally, I wouldn’t be picky, but I have many fewer people asking to use my name for their construction projects. Nevertheless, I think I would balk at a mental hospital. What are you trying to say?
Most Brits probably have odd ideas about America. I think they imagine the shootout at the OK Corral as being highly symbolic of the country as a whole, which is not an entirely unfair assessment. Similarly, I have various stereotypes floating around in my head about the UK, many of which come from Victorian novels. High school English classes typically spend one year on American Literature and then one year on British literature. The Victorian era seems to have been a golden age of writing in England. Or, at the very least, it’s the one most enshrined in American highschools. Costume dramas made by the BBC are also a major cultural import into the states. We all imagine a dark, smoky gray London with a polluted fog overhead, women in petticoats, Dickensonian beggars, murderers left and right (with Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple on their tail) and hulking brick asylums, filled with suffering upperclass women who can’t accept their station in life. Women who want to read too much. Women who want to be men.
Fortunately, I have managed to avoid being committed. I woke at an extremely early hour and managed to spill every drop of my morning coffee on the floor before I left for my appointment, alas and woe. The QEPH is in a typical largish medical building. They have automatic doors, which, unlike mental health centers in the Netherlands, are actually automatic. The reception was separated only by a normal counter, again, unlike the Netherlands which was behind glass. Maybe they think I’m crazy, but at least they don’t think I’m dangerous. That was nice.
The doctor asked me when I first knew I might be trans. I should have a set answer for this by now. I should write out my official narrative and post it to my blog. Then, when somebody decides that I need to see a shrink, I can just give them the link. I don’t fucking know when I first had gender issues, ok? sheesh. I really don’t want to draw any kind of line anywhere. I don’t want to validate all the homophobic bullshit I used to be subjected to. I don’t don’t want invalidate decisions of other butch women not to transition. When did I cease just being a butch woman? When I started taking hormones and told people to call me he. Not before. It happened then.
Lack of coffee, up early in the morning, strident (formerly) lesbian feminist, so very very american. I must have seemed a bit like Hillary Clinton. But, you know, if she were a bloke. I was confused by the questions and gave confusing answers. I’m pretty sure I annoyed the doctor. Nevertheless, I have successfully jumped through this hoop.
He explained that there were evaluations and waiting lists and whatnot. We don’t just give out hormones on demand to people who ask for them, he explained. Why the hell not? What terrible harm would befall the commonwealth is trans people had easy access to transition? None!
Alas, this is just one hoop. This doctor is not a gender specialist. I’m to keep seeing him while I wait to see the one specialist for the region. Who is not in Birmingham. The second largest city in the UK has no gender clinic. The waiting list is apparently months long. In the mean time, I can keep taking T – and I can keep paying for it.
I am so very, very, very glad I started on hormones while I was back in the states. Sure, we’re all cowboys and it’s the wild west and all, but that’s not all bad. The social worker in San Francisco explained that the city had no vested interest in saying no to trans people. What purpose would it serve? The city pays for it’s residents to get this service if they want and need it, like the NHS pays for Brits (and foreign students). And San Francisco found it was coming out ahead when it got rid of all its hoops. People who come in for hormones also get the other health services that they need. Happier people tend to take better care of themselves and are healthier. Does it save tax money to say no to trans people? No, quite the opposite.
I left my heart in San Francisco. Sometimes, I think it’s the only place in the world where anything makes any sense.
I felt good about myself when I left QEPH. I got through this round. I was treated more or less like a normal person. When I got back outside to the bike parking, somebody had left a nice, new, red mountain bike leaning on my bike. With no lock on it at all. You’d have to be crazy to leave that bike out unlocked like that! . . . oh right . . . I wish my issues weren’t treated as mental health issues.