Foucault's Pendulum
These weeks, with much pleasure, I have been reading
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The writer truly knows a lot about
history, philosophy, literature, different cultures and is very erudite. So
besides enjoying the good plot, reading Foucault's Pendulum learns me a lot. However,
on one thing the writer is a bit off. In the beginning of the book the main
person tries to break into a computer by writing a (inefficient) computer
program which generates anagrams of 'JHVH'.
Accidentally two weeks before reading this passage I wrote for my DND group a small program which solves a similar question in general. Since this group is too lazy to solve puzzles, I put the program on line; it is called rotx. Perhaps someone can make good use of it. It finds all rotx puzzles (with x = [1..25]) which deliver again a known word.
So, for example layout is the 'encrypted' version of fusion (rot6, so a->h, b->i, c->j, d->i, e->k, f->l, etc.), curly -> wolfs, arena - river, etc.
In dutch some solutions are urnen -> lieve, opaal -> hitte, knijp -> bezag and kerk->gang.To use rotx you need a wordlist, for example as generated by aspell:
aspell --lang=en dump master | ./rotx - > rotated.txt
The output (in the example above copied to rotated.txt) contains all rotated words which can also be found in the original wordlist..
The first incarnation of the program was in bash/sed/tr and awfully slow. (I had to try though, "No premature optimization!"). It should take two weeks to process a 1.5 MB English wordfile. (Eco's Basic script should take what, years??). Enter C++ and STL. The direct approach (rotating all words through the entire alphabet and looking all results up in the original list) should still take around 20 hours. So I cooked up an algorithm which uses more memory, but finishes in approximately 15 seconds on my old and crusty AMD duron 850!
The source can be found at /downloads/rotx.cc.html.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux] [science]
Ngingenwe Emoyeni
Yesterday I went to African Footprint, a south African dance/musical show, running
already from 2000. This month the show visits Amsterdam.
The show was nice, very good dancers, exciting choreography. It was a blend of modern and African dance in which gumbo, jive, eastern, tapping and even western dancing found its place. Besides the occasionally too heroic spoken moments (Africa is the most beautiful country etc., but no word on the problems between the different tribes, aids etc.). In theater I can handle the disney/hollywood setup of the show better than in movies, because I really appreciate the beautiful voices of professional singers and the proper balance of the sound, well-composed songs and good looking costumes.
The best part was in my opinion the jazz-piece. Why did the black people became so rap-obsessed, while they had the much better jazz/blues???
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music] [dance] [concert]
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]