Pictures from home II
As promised in this post, I added scanned photos to my photogallery. Therefore I bought a scanner: the Epson Perfection 2480, which works like a charm on linux. With thanks to the sane project, installation was easy (for people living in my strange universe):
find /cdrom -name "*.cab" -exec cabextract -l {} 2>/dev/null; \
| grep -B 10 Esfw
cabextract -F Esfw* -p ./ESCAN/ModUsd.cab > /etc/sane//Esfw41.bin
I also promised a mod_rewrite patch for o.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. which is now finished. I will release it when the slideshow feature is ready. Also I wrote some mod_rewrite voodoo for the main site, which enabled me to provide proper permalinks, instead of the previous erroneous ones.
Only two todo's left:
- Complete slideshow javascript for o.r.i.g.i.n.a.l
- Buy a digital camera
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux] [photos]
Erbarme dich, mein Gott
Today I went to the Mattheus Passion, composed by a fellow named Johann
Sebastian. It was performed 100% acoustically by the Hague Residence orchestra
and the Residence Bach Choir under the pulse of Arnold Ostman. Since Rammstein
became popular in the Netherlands a few years ago, there is a real revival of
german music. So it was not surprising to find the concert hall almost full.
Public from all ages was present to listen to this great piece of music and
perhaps to meet old friends or flirt a little with their neighbours.
Originally the Mattheus Passion is a concept album, not much unlike Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. It is a sad story about a man, who is discriminated (and later even crucified!) because of his unusual religion. This theme is very old and loosely based on a true story.
Lots of covers were incorporated in this piece. Especially the theme from Hassler's 'Haupt of Blut und Wunden' was used in more than one choral. Besides this, Bach also stole some music from his other works. This is not negative, this passion is the best ever written: super harmonies, impaling contrapuncts very balanced orchestration, lovely flute- and other solo's, Bach's thoroughly thought out bass lines and some of the world's most famous aria's. And then I even don't try to bother you with all the mathematics and tricks that are involved in Bach's music (read Godel, Escher, Bach for a start). So this part was absolutely right. But what about the performance?
The orchestra, choir and director were absolutely professionals. Not much more to say about them (OK one thing ;-), the start was a bit unenthusiastic). The boy's choir made some mistakes here and there, but hey I wouldn't be castrated for this task either, so I guess we have to live with that.
The soprano Lenneke Ruiten was a real charming, but also a bit nervous, young lady. Her voice was amazing and lent perfectly for the aria's. If she learns to better interact with the audience (perhaps visit a rock concert to learn the trick) , she will become very famous. I really have no idea if the bass Robbert Murray is a good bass singer. He is very entertaining however and I found his parts a pleasure to listen too. The alt Cecile van Sant and the tenor (?) were just right. The star of the evening was the evangelist. He was able to built a nice tension and was really acting the story (and sung well too). A welcome surprise and unlike any recording I have ever heard.
A small note about the tempi: This piece is performed by different directors in between the 2 and a half and 4 hours! This performance was relatively fast. Sometimes too fast in my opinion ("Ich wil dir meine herze schenken"), sometimes just right (the recitatives were very nicely timed). Most of the time I found the tempo in this performance the right one for modern instruments (some of the flute solos are (in my opinion) impossible to play on a baroque traverso this fast). Personal taste can differ (but yes, Ton Koopman really needs to get some pepper....)
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music] [concert]
Pictures from home (and further)
As you
perhaps have noticed, I added a new link under journal in the right
menu, called photos. Finally I have consolidated my
photo albums Before I had several albums on topic (njbg, travel, korvezee,
etc.). The main njbg album is now at the
njbg site, the korvezee albums are in my album and the travel albums from
other peoples deleted...
Although the gallery is popular software, I do not like it anymore. It has too much code and features I do not need. I prefer to provide comments and do all resizing etc. myself with vim and image-magick and have the gallery software only do the display work. Luckily jimmac wrote a nice piece of software called o.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. It works and is very hackable. I do plan to port the gallery's mod_rewrite (providing useful url's) and slideshow features to my new photo album, but at this moment I think it is good enough to link.
Now I have a real good excuse to buy a nice digital camera and a scanner. I have lots of good old analog pictures to be added and it is weak to have stolen (but credited) so much pictures from people who do already own a digital camera.
The dark color is a bit in contrast with the rest of my site, but photo's look just better on a dark background.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux] [photos]
Angels fall first
I went to the concert of After Forever and Nightwish in the Heineken Music Hall
yesterday. Both bands I saw for the third time, so time for some observations.
After Forever is considered an one in a dozen gothic-metal band by a lot of metalfans. I do not agree with this vision, especially their last album, Invisible Circles, has some very strong songwriting material and I do really like it. Floor is a talented singer with a lot of possibilities, the band decent at least.
Their gig was a very special one, they played with old gorefest drummer/Arjen Lucassen' companion Ed Warby. After one number Floor announced their own drummer has cancer and has to stay in the hospital. This was quite a shock for the audience. The rest of the performance was delivered in a special, strange atmosphere, with an "Andre"-shouting audience, a crying (not disturbingly) singer and a different really powerful drummer. The band was good though.
Compared to the (light, fireworks and water) show from Nightwish, the lightning for After Forever was in my opinion too shallow. I understand that they were the support act, but this was a bit embarrassing, some more nice light effects and darker hall would have added a lot, while they definitely would not outshine Nightwish in show. Sound was good though, especially compared to the other halls of this size (Brabanthallen, Ahoy, Jaarbeurshallen, Statenhallen).
The headliner Nightwish is professional. No really, they make less mistakes then Marco Borsato (I guess). Perhaps too professional. A bit more jamming would have been nice. Tuomas, the keyboard player is the composer and writes almost all music. In previous gigs, he was also (after Tarja), the most visible element on stage. Yesterday he was not. This is a shame, because the rest of rather weak. His (very small) improvisations sound weird and his timing is rather a-musical at times. On their albums, you do not hear this (his guitar parts, written by the keyboard player, are nice and original, thus sound fresh on CD). Playing a Pink Floyd cover (High Hopes) however, is not very smart if your guitar player does not play equal or better than David Gilmour. Since the Century Child album, there are some additional vocal parts for the bass-player. On CD these parts work really well, live they were always false. But not this night! Despite the vodka, Marco sang really well.
Perhaps I am nitpicking. Nightwish is a world-class band and they gave a very good show. However, they are doing this for a long time already, so it is time to raise the bar a bit :-). I had a very nice musical evening!
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music] [concert]
I cover the waterfront
In a few days, I will be on holiday in Tignes. So no e-mail will be
answered, phone probably neither. If I recover quickly ;-), I will come back to you after
February 6th.
In the past weeks I have been working on a cleanup of the NJBG site. Some people volunteered to maintain the site. Since we are talking about a youth association, this is probably a good thing.
One of the lasts hacks I did was a mailing list. Actually multiple mailing lists with a web frontend. Although it is not really solid yet, it basically works. With PHP, programming is actually too easy these days. I needed only one procmail line (to redirect the incoming mail to PHP) and about twenty lines of PHP code. That is it. After working with python for some projects, it struck me again how good the PHP documentation is. Associative arrays (called dictionaries) in python still are a small mystery for me. Where PHP has a lot of nice array_ functions, python provides me with .keys(), .items() etc. methods, which make live hard. I really prefer handling with the keys and values in the same abstraction depth. Perhaps this is the reason mailman is such a monstrous beast...
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [personal] [holiday] [linux] [web]