Tag: celesteh

On the radio in 5.6 hours

Hello, I will be live on the radio tonight at midnight in The Hague. That’s 16:00 for Californians and I don’t know about other time zones, as something very odd is going on with daylight savings or something in the US. There is a live stream on the web and information about archives also here.

I will be playing some laptop and probably some tape pieces including one not yet posted to my podcast and one that is not done yet, but will be by then.
In other news, I’ve got 3 commissions so far and have been mentioned in a few blogs (w00t), so in good capitalist style, I’m going to raise my rates – on Friday. If you want the lower price, act fast. A commissioned minute of noise can make a thoughtful birthday gift, commemorate a special occasion or just show off your impeccably good taste. And it might lead to international fame of some kind – the folks so far will get their names mentioned on 90.2 FM Den Haag in a few hours.

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/news.html for commission information.

Commission a short piece

Ok, so I live in the “center” of The Hague. This is a lot like an outdoor shopping mall. Everyday, I walk past mannequins. They used to freak me out, but no more. One of them is wearing a suit which I like. I pass it every day. Every day I like it a little bit more. I want to buy this suit.

Ok, so now that we’re clear that my motives are totally shallow, I’ve decided to start a commissioning thingee. I’m working on an album of pieces around 1 minute in length. I expect it to be done in two or three months. It is possible for you (yes, you!) to commission a piece on the album for the low price of 7€ ($10ish USD). You as the commissioner get to name the piece. Your role as titler and commissioner will be mentioned in the program notes for the piece whenever it is presented in any form. You will get a copy of the pice emailed to you in the audio format of your choice (MP3, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, AAC) and have 5 days in which to come up with a title (I reserve the right to nix titles that I deem offensive). I retain copyright, but will release the piece under a share music licence, which thus grants you the rights to make copies for your friends and share it via your website or whatever.
The first commissioned piece is up on my podcast already. You could be next!

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/news.html for commission information.

Blog against sexism Day

Today is blog against sexism day 2007. (Un)coincidentally, it’s also International Women’s day.

Blogging against sexism is as obvious as blogging in favor of breathing. Sexism sucks. I think all civilized humans can agree on that. But if we all agree, why does it still exist pretty much everywhere? And what exactly do we mean by sexism anyway?
I think a lot of people view sexism in much the same way as they misunderstand racism. (White) people have the mistaken idea that racism is an emotion. In this view, racists hate black people. But let’s look at Strom Thurmond. This guy had an affair with a black woman and had a daughter by her and made sure to look out for his daughter during his entire life. It’s possible that he loved his mistress and his daughter. Similarly, many sexist men love their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters too. Heck, I love my dog. For real. She’s great. The best dog ever. No where near my equal in anyway, and possibly an emergency food source in the case of horrible disaster, but I love her.
My mother loved me. She thought she was doing me a favor by giving me a bunch of chores (and she was, but she wasn’t doing my brother the same favor . . . nor my dad). I had to wash dishes and clean bathrooms and vacuum and do normal kid-level household chores. But I complained, because my chores were ongoing whereas my brother got to do fun things like mow the lawn – which only needed doing once a week. My mother explained that when I got married, I would be responsible for all the cleaning and cooking and she was trying to prepare me. Because men and women have different roles in life, or did when she came up, pre second wave feminism.
Obviously, emotions like love and hate are related to sexism only in extreme cases. So sexism isn’t an emotion. What is it then? It’s both personal and systematic. Both reinforce and propagate each other. Personally, it’s gender essentialism. The belief that women have some sort of distinct role. The lowering of their horizons. Binary oppositions invite ranking and comparisons. When you create an essentialist gender binary, you put one group over the other and then compare them. Women lose every time. That’s systematic sexism casting it’s ugly shadow. When you set women on one course and men on another, men win and women lose.
Systematically, it’s the organization of society in such a manner as to favor men at the expense of women. Now some of you might be thinking to themselves that not all differences between men and women are socially constructed. Cisgender men don’t get pregnant, but cisgender women do. Well, that’s true. But the huge life-time earnings hit that American women take from getting pregnant is a social decision and thus is constructed. As is health insurance not covering birth control. As is women doing most of the labor in the world but men owning most of the resources. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN states, “Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for half of the world’s food production . . ..” But “[n]ot even 2 percent of land is owned by women . . ..” and “[f]or the countries where information is available, only 10 percent of credit allowances are extended to women . . .” while at the same time “[t]wo-thirds of the one billion illiterate in the world are women and girls.” The list goes on, but it’s depressing. ( http://www.fao.org/FOCUS/E/Women/Sustin-e.htm )
In the US, women do most of the household chores and tend to earn less than men. Household chores are labor, although unpaid. But why do women earn less? Because they tend to be in fields that pay less than men. Why do these fields pay less? Because there are women in them.
More and more men are becoming nurses. The pay is rising. The prestige of the job is growing. When computers were first invented, software was an afterthought. The hardware was cool. The first programmers were all mathematicians who had to program extremely head-warping algorithms to compute stuff. It was much harder than it is today. But it was low status. Almost all of the first programmers were women. Gradually, engineers started to realize that the software was more important than the hardware. As programming became more socially important, the number of women declined in relation to the number of men. Now some folks wonder if maybe there’s a math-based biological bias that makes women unsuited to programming. Try again. It was Grace Hopper who invented the idea of high-level computer programming languages (and Cobol and Fortran).
Ok, so there’s a wide social bias that sees women as inferior, forces them to do more labor and yet keeps them in low economic rungs. And maybe the US isn’t “ready” for a woman president. And this is a worldwide problem. So what to do about it?
1. Make healthcare free. Cover contraception, abortion and prenatal care. Cover everything.
2. Paid maternity and paternity leave. Free childcare. Allow flexible work schedules. Shorter work schedules too. 40 hours a week is unreasonable. 2 weeks of vacation a year is absurd.
3. Free education. As high as you want to go and can go.
4. Mentorship. Match women, POC and other minorities with more experienced people in their field, who can help them navigate their way up. Also, start this mentoring early, maybe in college or even before.
5. Recordkeeping and outreach. You should know whether or not your place of business or university is reflecting the diversity of your region. If it’s not, then it’s time to do some outreach. Send out representatives from your company into the community, to job fairs to schools. Pick representatives who reflect the diversity that you are trying to mirror.
6. Consciousness Raising. How are things divided up in your own, personal life? Is it fair? Does it reflect exterior income inequalities? See your household income as joint rather than seeing incomes as separate. Separate incomes mean that the lower paid person might be pressured to quit or go part time in order to economize on paid services. This has lifelong repercussions on earning ability. (see http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/11/my-radical-married-feminist-manifesto.html) Do you see women as having different roles than men? What? Why?
These suggestions would benefit the majority of people in the US. Free healthcare helps everybody. Changing work-related penalties for having kids helps everybody. Free education benefits everybody. It’s an error to see this as a zero sum game. As our fearless leader says, we can grow the pie higher.
These changes create opportunity for women (and other folks) while removing penalties unfairly placed upon women. It moves childcare from the realm of chore to the realm of paid labor, thus increasing the economic participation of caregivers. This isn’t a complete list, but it’s a start.

Gender Therapy in the Low Lands

I’ve been putting off posting about this for a long while, so I’m hazy on the details. But how many Americans can give a first hand account of gender therapy in the Netherlands? I feel a duty to post. This kind of meanders into TMI a bit, though. Be warned.

Ok, so when I last spoke of my therapy issues, I’d seen a regular shrink who wasn’t sure what to do with me and who did not speak very fluent English. (I want to clarify that I’m not criticizing anyone when I say they don’t speak English well. It’s not like I speak Dutch well, which is the language of the land. When I mention that somebody doesn’t have high English skills, it’s just to clarify that communication was not overly clear. This is a sub-optimal situation to have with a shrink.) She asked me about going to see the gender specialists at the university in Amsterdam. There was back and forth. Finally, she referred me to a center in Voorburg.
Several days later, a letter came in the mail giving me a date and time for an appointment. Fortunately, my assigned time did not conflict with my class schedule. I biked the several kilometers to the PsyQ building there. PsyQ is some sort of organization that deals with people’s mental issues. I don’t know if they’re public or private or some mixture thereof. People seem to largely have private insurance in this country. Anyway, so I showed up and walked through an automatic door to an entry alcove. There was a large glass window with a woman behind it and a microphone. There was no opening in the window at all. It was solid glass (or whatever). I had to show ID to the woman behind the glass and also present my appointment letter. She pressed a button and the automatic glass sliding door to the lobby opened.
Of course, they deal with crazy people, so they need security to protect themselves. From people like me.
The woman took my insurance card (they only reimburse and don’t cover anxiety, which is specifically mentioned on my appointment letter, but whatever) and asked me questions so she could fill out paperwork for me. Because my Dutch skills are too low to fill out any of the forms by myself. People are generally very nice about my inability to communicate in their language. Anyway.
I went to the waiting room and a woman came to meet me and explained that she was filling in for whomever I was actually supposed to meet with. She asked me all the stereotypical shrink things while taking copious notes. How did I get along with my mother? My father? What was my childhood like? I told her about coming out in Catholic school. The first girl I kissed. blah blah blah. She wanted to know about my earlier childhood. At home, I played with boys. At school, I played with girls. My parents and grandparents always got me girl toys. I had a collection of Barbies, but found them to be dull. You dress them up? Who cares? Until, one day, my friend Christy from school came over one afternoon and wanted to play with my Barbies. She pulled off their clothes and a bisexual Barbie orgy ensued. Apparently, what you do with Barbies is make them have sex with each other.
“So she taught you how to play with Barbies?” the shrink asked, very seriously. Um, yeah, am I paying for this? Because I suddenly feel like I’m stupidly wasting everyone’s time.
She changed the subject. “So what makes you think you might be -”
“I don’t know.” I cut her off. I said “I don’t know” a lot. She asked me if I would rather talk to a man or a woman. Was this a trick question? If I say woman, then I’m really a lesbian? If I say a man, then, I’m really a man? Which way should I go? Ack. I asked for a fluent English speaker. Then I started coughing and couldn’t stop. I went home and felt crappy and got a fever and was sick in bed on my birthday (I’m 31 now, btw) poor me.
A week or so later, I went back to the same place, still feeling like I had a cold. I met a different woman, the head of the sexology department. She explained that the woman I had talked to previously was no longer employed by PsyQ and since they are having a staff meeting on March 5th to figure out what to do with me, somebody there should have met me in person. I was very careful the whole time not to say the word “transsexual.” (Because I am totally logical.) She asked me a few times the same question that the other woman had asked more than once. Did I have problems during sex? (Problems only in that the ladies can’t get enough of me. heh heh.) I asked her to explain herself. Well, my lack of a penis might make it difficult. (good lord) Then she asked me how I felt about my period. (um, well, questions about it make me feel uncomfortable.) I don’t think I dislike it significantly more than anybody else I know who has it. She asked me why I hadn’t stopped it with birth control. I explained that I really don’t like taking pills or whatever and don’t want to mess too much with things like that unless I have to for some reason. I’ve heard women talking about birth control side fx and stuff and always have felt glad I don’t have to mess with it. Emotional messes. Mojo killing. No thanks. “But it’s possible to stop it. Why don’t you do it?” she pushed. Yeah, but it can make your breasts bigger, I pointed out. She accepted that. She wanted to know why I hadn’t gone to Amsterdam to the university. Hey, I’ve just been going where y’all have been sending me.
I got the vibe that if I had asked for a referral for testosterone, she would have been willing to write one right then. (Actually, normally, they make you get 5 appointments in Amsterdam and then you carry forward. I don’t know if the appointments are to get a note for hormones or for surgery.) She clearly thought I was – that word that I was carefully shying away from. Which, I mean, what did I expect? A pat on the back and a “good for you being genderqueer!”? If I was fine just the way I am, why am I seeing a shrink anyway?
Then she talked to me about what she’s going to recommend they do with me. Anxiety therapy is the first priority.
god help me, I’ll get off Zoloft soon.
I’ve been off school for the last week. No classes! I didn’t go anywhere. I did an application for Birmingham (UK, not AL) and sat around. Today, I had a duo recording with a improv guy from the composition department. I took a deep breath and screamed “I don’t know who I am” as loud and as long as I could, though my tuba. (Metaphor, but not really.) Blat blat blat, I screamed, inhaled, bellowed improperly attacked breathy notes that don’t know where they’re going, what pitch they want to be, how they will resonate, where they are now, what valves are pressed or how much. Wail, blat blat blat.
Afterwards, I felt so much better. I didn’t even know I felt tense, but afterwards, I just felt so like I’d worked something out. so maybe the key to getting off Zoloft is playing loud, angsty tuba? I came home and actually mixed a piece of music. this entailed both me getting Ardour to work and having the attention span to mix something. Tuba is key.
I’m trying to be proactive. I used to tell myself to wait on things. I didn’t need to worry about my mental health problems as long as I could walk and eat and stuff. In the book Breaking Silence, I read about lesbian nuns developing stomach problems from stress and what I got form that was that I could wait until I had stomach problems. Yeah, last summer counted. I always wait like that. I went to a support group for FTMs once in San Francisco. One old guy there said that if you have to transition, eventually you’ll have to. In She’s Not There, Boylan writes of her experience at age 41, just being totally unable to carry on without taking action. I don’t want to be a mess in 10 years. I don’t want to delay and have my first stubble come in grey. I want to deal with this now and take action or put it behind me. I want to move forward from where I am now.
I know that’s it’s not a path of discovery, that it’s a path of creation. I have agency. I apply technologies of the self to create my own identity. It needs to be an identity I can make some peace with. that might require some more therapy. Or more tuba.

My letter to Michael Savage

Dear Mr Savage,

On the 26th of February, you stated on your radio show, “You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they’re men when they’re women. They’re not normal.” These comments were in regards to explaining to a child how it was that Melissa Ehteridge was thanking her wife.

I would like to comment to say that you seem to have confused lesbians with female-to-male transsexuals. While it’s true that some lesbians do eventually decide to transition to male, the vast majority do not. As Etheridge has given absolutely no indication that she plans to do so, I think you are in error regarding her gender identity.

Furthermore, while you are right to insist that transsexuality is unusual, “normal” is something of a loaded term and not one that’s easy to agree on. For instance, it’s more typical to be right handed than left handed, and for a long while it was considered “unnatural” to be left handed. Now it’s just considered to be less common. This word is even more in dispute when the “natural” (non-human) world cannot even be taken into consideration. As far as I know, there are no other mammals with the ability to change their sex and certainly none that have to power to do surgery or produce artificial sex hormones or even any that wear clothes. One could therefore conclude that since transsexuality as currently understood by humans is unavailable to animals, this somehow clinches it’s unnaturalness. But /all/ wearing of clothes is unnatural and I certainly wouldn’t use the nudity of animals to argue for general human nudism. Furthermore, as we do not understand the communications of animals, it could be quite possible that some have managed to transition from one gender to another within their animal communities and we would be completely unaware of it.

I hope this letter has cleared up some confusion for you regarding transsexuality and lesbianism. If you would like some recommendations for books that could clear this up further, please don’t hesitate to reply.

Thank you very much for your time,
Les

There are people who are not normal, who have a confusion in their head, and they think they’re a man even though they look like a woman.

SAVAGE: Portland, Oregon, [caller], KXL, you’re on The Savage Nation.

CALLER: My wife was sitting on the couch with our 7-year-old daughter when Etheridge got up and did her piece thanking her wife and four kids, and our daughter looked over at our — at Mom and said: “Was that a man?” And how do we answer our kids when we’re forced to [sic] — this homosexuality upon us?

SAVAGE: I will tell you how you answer it: You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they’re men when they’re women. They’re not normal. Normal people are not like that. Normal people are like Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy are normal. There are people who are not normal, who have a confusion in their head, and they think they’re a man even though they look like a woman. That’s what you have to say to them otherwise the child will grow up confused.

Previously on the same broadcast:

ETHERIDGE: I have to thank my incredible wife, Tammy, and our four children, Becky and Bailey and Johnnie Rose and Miller, and everyone —

SAVAGE: Turn it off. Get her off my show. I don’t care what her name is. I don’t like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. How’s that? I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it’s child abuse. That’s my opinion — one man’s opinion. If it’s illegal, tell me it’s illegal to have an opinion in America. Maybe I can be excommunicated for having an opinion.

I want to puke when I hear about a woman married to a woman raising children because, frankly, I think that it’s child abuse to do that to children without their permission. What does a child know? Ask them when they’re 16 whether they want to be raised by two lesbians or two men. What are the two men doing behind the other wall? You think the children don’t hear it?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200702270015
It’s fair to wonder why I am reprinting hateful garbage on my blog. Before I answer that, I’m going to add even more hateful garbage:
“The only thought that pops in ur head when u think ‘feminist’ is a fat, manly, tall lesbian who wants to take control over everything….” http://forum.armenianclub.com/archive/index.php/t-1386.html
” I don’t want this blog to be about the fact that I’m NOT one of those angry, hairy, lesbian feminists.” http://happyfeminist.typepad.com/happyfeminist/2006/01/index.html
“Maybe she had some notion that feminists are all lesbians, have hairy legs, and hate men.” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/22/20500/1686
“Despite how ‘feminists’ have been portrayed, most of us don’t hate men. We aren’t hairy, unwashed, bosom sagging, shrill harpies who want to destroy families.” http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/woman/entries/2006/10/12/is_third_wave_f.html

Well, that was fun

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a hairy-legged lesbian.
What’s the common thread here? Gender normativity. Lesbians want to be men. Feminist are lesbians and want to be men. None of these people are conforming enough to gender stereotypes. I’m not going to go dig up comments on the other side of this, but it wouldn’t be hard to find examples of men getting called “fags” regardless of their sexual orientation, but because the speaker feels they insufficiently conform to gender stereotypes. Men are men and women are women and people who seeks to redefine or expand those roles clearly want to change their sex and that’s a bad thing.

What started this

I heard the Michael Savage rant and I winced. Yeah, there are lesbian-IDed folks who do want to be men. Augh, it’s all true! But then, I thought of the lavender menace. Some feminists really are lesbians. Augh, it’s all true!
The problem isn’t that some feminists are lesbians or that some lesbians are ftm or anything like that. The problem is the insistence that there’s something wrong with this. The insistence that gender normativity is right and good and natural and all transgressors, no matter how small or minor their transgression are unnatural and bad and wrong.
Lest this all be too obvious to justify the mad amount of quoted text, I want to go on to address radfeminists. (Doesn’t it sound like it should be the “fun” kind of feminism what with “rad” and all. It’s not.) Some straight women thought the way to address the charge that all feminists were lesbians was to throw them out of their groups. The lavender menace had to go. Not that there was anything wrong with lesbians, just their experiences and socialization was so different, they should respect the space needed for straight women and butt out. This is why lesbians are not allowed access into the Michigan Women’s Music Festival.
The same reasoning is used to exclude mtfs from women’s spaces right now. When you classify trans people as their assigned-at-birth sex, you’re agreeing with Mr Savage. Because you are denying the legitimacy of transition. Saying that mtfs are men who want to be women is awfully similar to saying that lesbians want to be men. In both cases, the possibility of successful, intention transition is dismissed. In both cases, transition is condemned. In both cases, gender is seen as essential. And really, when Michael Savage and radfeminists are agreeing on something, there’s is something going woefully wrong. This guy makes Rush Limbaugh look moderate. I used to joke that if Reagan said that oxygen was important for breathing, I would start demanding definite evidence for the oxygen thing, because he’s wrong so much of the time. I can’t agree w/ him on anything. Double that for Savage.

Le week-end à Paris

Last weekend, Nicole needed to take the LSATS and the closest place that they’re offered is Paris. In a tremendous display of selflessness, I agreed to accompany her. I took over a hundred pictures, which I’ll be shortly posting along with a narration. Rather than replicate that, I will type here instead the unphotographed sections of my journey and, at the end, some useful advice.

Soldes!

It’s that time of year when Paris stores are allowed to unload their unsold inventory. If last weekend was not the end of it, next weekend will be. At this point, their goal is not make profit, but to minimize loss. This means cheap french clothes for me. I was all over the soldes like vinyl car seats and bare legs in the summer.
For the most part, buying clothes is a chore for me. I have a hard time finding my size, or something I like or a non-hostile place to shop. None of this is true in Paris. I can let my inner metrosexual run amok. On the train there, I read a copy of GQ, looking for trends. Of course, upon arrival, I ignored all of their advice. Loafers? No, I want shoes just like my old shoes, but less old or more functional. (Ok, my inner metrosexual isn’t very metro.)
I walked into a store that sells suits and tweed. They only had a couple of things in my size (which really is as small as certain tweedy shops in The Hague have informed me). Green tweed? I was leaning against it, but then the shop guys were gathered around. «C’est magnifique!» “Wow,” they told me. “Fabulous!” These were old, grumpy suit store guys. At that moment, I began pondering when I could next live in Paris. Sometimes, I kind of like capitalism. These guys wanted my money. Concerns about my foreignness or whatever were entirely secondary. Maybe I do look as fab as they say in the jacket. A distinct possibility, I think, as my self-esteem has climbed to it’s normal Trump-like levels from this encounter. (yeah, ok, see if I didn’t keep telling myself how great I was, hostility would squish me, but in the absence of hostility it over-compensates.)
Yeah, I got TWO pairs of shoes. Neither with goretex or vegan, but I don’t want to wait until I’m in San Francisco to get new shoes. Extravagant. Nicole says it’s reasonable to have many pairs of shoes. Also, two pairs of pants, two shirts, a bow tie (which either says gay republican pundit or high school science teacher. I hope for the former.). So I think I’m good for clothes until 2008.

Advice

If you are getting over a cold, don’t try to smoke a pipe, even if it makes you imagine yourself as Hemmingway-esque. If you do smoke a pipe, don’t accidentally inhale. If you do inhale, get plenty of sleep that night. If you don’t get plenty of sleep that night, at least get some the next night. If you are short on sleep and coughing, don’t stay up to all hours of the night, even if you are dreading an appointment early the next morning. If you do stay up too late, at least get up early so you don’t need to sprint 8 km to your appointment. If you fail all of these, skip having beer with your friend on his birthday that night. Even if you feel guilty about it. I can follow at least the last bit. bah.

Jacked

Yeah, so I can get Ardour to display on a remote machine, but forget about making sounds thus displayed. Run it in VNC and it’s fine. Run with ssh X tunneling, and there are problems. What kind of problems, you ask?

allocate_mach_clientport: can't find mach server port
Can't allocate mach port

For the longest time, I thought that error was originating within Ardour. So I downloaded the source. Man, you need a ton of libraries to compile it, several of which are either in Fink’s unstable tree or not present within fink at all. Ardour developers use Darwin Ports, I guess. Anyway, the fink version of jack absolutely does not work for me. So I was giving up on the project, when I looking at console logs revealed that the problem seemed to be coming from Jack.

Maybe if I could just discover the name of the jack sever, there exists an undocumented command line argument to pass to Ardour to tell it which server to use! Fortunately, there exists a utility for just such discovery: jack_lsp. So after learning of it’s existence, I typed in the command and got:

allocate_mach_clientport: can't find mach server port
Can't allocate mach port
jack_client_open() failed, status = 0x

aha! So I downloaded the JackOSX code and it was a terrible mess. So I downloaded the Jackit code, but it doesn’t play well with core audio. There’s some goofy thing on mactel computers such that you have to create an aggregate device or else in and outs are treated differently. There’s probably a command line argument to fix this, but I like the nice JackOSC GUI, so I went back to their messy, messy code and started banging away at the core audio driver, since that seemed like a possible culprit.
Several hours later, after learning about some macros in C that I’d never heard of and borrowing some code form JackIt and otherwise swearing, I got a new library for coreaudio to build and link. Hooray. That was way too much effort. And I fired up the JackOSC GUI and everything worked. Yay!
And then I typed jack_lsp and got the same error again. grrrr. The code for jack_lsp is not in the Jack OSX source repository, as far as I can tell. It is included with JackIt, but it’s clearly not the problem. The problem is some Jack library that they ship out as a binary. Perhaps using my special sekrit powers, I can build the JackIT kit to use my core audio library, since it’s got a bunch of jackit code in there now anyway. Or maybe I can give up and just use VNC.
Anyway, this is why I haven’t written any music the last few days, nor implemented a very, very fast pitch tracker that just uses the samples around zero crossings.
In other news, the weird mole on my back was not cancer. Wonder why it itched so much.

Securely Using a Macmini as a remote controlled audio workstation (or media center)

Let’s say you have a mac mini and a laptop and you’re too cheap and/or lazy to buy a screen, keyboard and mouse. You don’t need to! The answer lies with your laptop. It is possible to control a macmini (or any other type of mac) with another computer of nearly any variety. I happen to use a mac, but it is also possible with windows and linux.

VNC

To start off, you will need to borrow some peripherals, so you can do the initial setup. After you register and whatnot, You will want to setup VNC. This allows you access to the minimac’s desktop from your laptop. Open the minimac’s system preferences. Open sharing. Click the “Services” tab. Click the checkbox next to Apple Remote Desktop. After that, you want to set Access Privileges. This should open automatically the first time you turn remote desktop on, but if it doesn’t, click the “Access Privileges…” button.
On the left, you will see a list of users. Select yourself. On the right, you see a list of actions. If you want to allow remote control (which you do), select all of them. Below the line, there is a checkbox which says “VNC viewers may control screen with password:” Check that box and then give it a secure password. Click “ok”
You are back on the sharing – Services window. Check the box next to “Remote Login”. Ok, now click on the firewall tab to make sure your firewall is on. While you’re there, also give your computer a name that’s different from your laptop’s name then quit the user prefs.
Ok, now go to your laptop and get a VNC client. If your laptop is a mac, Chicken of the VNC is perhaps the most popular. It’s what I use. If you’re on another kind of computer, just search the internets to find a VNC client. Download and install to your laptop.

SSH Tunnelling

Ok, now it’s time to test this out. First, open a terminal on your laptop (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app). Then type:

sudo ssh -X username@macmini.local -L 5900/127.0.0.1/5900

(Use your username and the mane of your macmini.) It will prompt you for a password (and may quote Spiderman at you.). Type the password for your account on your laptop. (It may ask you if you’re sure you want to connect, etc. Yes, you’re sure.) Then it will ask you for a password again. Type the password for the account on your macmini. You should see a unix-type prompt. Hooray, you are logged into your macmini.
You are logged in securely, which is even better. Don’t dispair, the graphical connection is coming next, but first an optional, brief explanation of the command you just typed: Ssh is a secure way to connect with another computer. In this case, it’s also doing something called port mapping. This makes a secure connection between a port on your computer and a post on a remote computer. If you connect to that port on your local computer, it will actually, really form a secure connection with the remote port. What this means for you is that nobody can eavesdrop over your connection (an issue if you’re wireless). The reason you type sudo is because you need root privileges to tunnel on important ports.

Back to instructions

Ok, open Chicken of the VNC on your laptop. A login window will open and there will be a list of servers, hopefully with your macmini on the list. However, you are not going to click on it. Instead, click on the + button in the lower left. A new server name will come up. Type in something like “secure minimac”. On the right hand side, type in your password. Don’t change any of the other info. You want it to connect to localhost on the default port. You can tell it to remember the password if you feel like your laptop is not going to be “borrowed” by non-trusted people. Don’t click any other checkboxes. Click connect.
A window should open with a view of the screen of your minimac. If this doesn’t happen, try the following:

  1. Do you see the name of your mac in the list of servers? If not, make sure that you’ve turned on Apple Remote desktop on your minimac.
  2. Can you connect to the remote server directly, not via the secure connection? If so, you’ve got weird problems and will need to ask for help from somebody else, like your network administrator.
  3. If you cannot connect at all, the problem may be a firewall. Make sure that the firewall on your LAN allows connections on port 5900. You may need to talk with your network administrator.

Now that you have a window open onto the remote computer, try doing something. Start itunes. Play a tune! Your minimac can be a remote controlled media center. woot.

X Windows

I like free software. Therefore, I want to use Ardour, which is free. My minimac has a large, external disk. Therefore, I want to run it on the mini, but control it with my wimpier laptop. First, you must install X11, which comes on the operating system CD from Apple. Install it on your laptop AND on your macmini. Also, install the developer kit on both (or at least the mini). Then, install Ardour on the macmini.
Ok,you may have noticed that sometimes VNC has a bit of lag. Because Ardour is an Xwindows application, it’s possible to reduce the lag by not using VNC. Instead, you can tell it to run on the macmini and to display on your local machine. However, this requires a smidgen of additional effort.
Apple has a bunch of information on X. It’s a good thing to read if you’re having a problem or just want to understand what’s going on.
First, you need to tell your macmini what you’re up to. Go back to the terminal ssh connection that you made from the laptop to the macmini. (If you closed the connection, reopen it). Then cut and paste the following commands to the terminal window:

sed 's/#X11Forwarding no/X11Forwarding yes/' /etc/sshd_config > /tmp/sshd_config
sudo mv /tmp/sshd_config /etc/.
sudo chown root /etc/sshd_config

You will need to type the password for your account on the macmini. These commands tell the ssh daemon to allow X forwarding. You may need to restart the sshd (or, if you don’t know how to do that, just reboot the whole computer by typing “sudo shutdown -r now” (without the quotes)). It would also probably be a good idea to repair disk permissions at this time.
Now, reconnect to your computer, using the same ssh command above. The -X flag allows X forwarding. That one typed command enables all your secure communications! Open X-windows on your laptop. Type into the terminal connection to the minimac:

/usr/X11R6/bin/xeyes

If all is working, a pair of eyeballs should open on your laptop. If all is not working, you’re going to have to look at some apple documents to figure this out.

Remote Ardour

Ardour, by default,opens windows on the machine that launched it. This means that if you launch it on your macmini, you can control if via VNC right away. But this is not efficient. It’s better to close VNC and just use X for this process. There are a few ways to make this happen. The one I’m describing is not the best, but it does work (hopefully). Note that the following assumes that you put Ardour.app in /Applications. If you put it someplace else, you will have to modify the path below
On your macmini, type:

cd
mkdir bin
cd bin
cat > ardour
#/bin/sh -l

/Applications/Ardour.app/Contents/Resources/bin/exporter

type control-D. Then type:

cd
cat >> .profile

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

export PATH

Type ctrl-d again. What you’ve done is create a tiny executable file that uses the right path to open Ardour and added that path to your shell. You could also do this with an alias.
Logout. (type “exit”). Then log back in (with the long ssh command way above). Open X-windows on your laptop. Type “ardour” (without the quotes) at the terminal prompt. A window should open on your local machine.
Hopefully this all will save somebody else a lot of time.

Happy Dog

Xena has fully recovered from airplane trauma. Almost. She’s become incredibly obedient, which is strange, but she seems very happy, running around and sniffing at things. The only things that freak her out now are loud noises and hurricane force winds. I had kind of forgotten how cute she is, like when she runs her forehead into my feet to show affection. What a great dog.

In other happy news, I went to a film festival going on Rotterdam, but which is not the official city festival. It’s the Reject Film Festival and they’re showing a bunch of short films by my friend Nick. It was great last night. A bunch of films and a three course meal for 10€. It’s still going on, so everybody who can should check it out.
I will go to the official festival later this week, but tonight I have lab time.