Metablog

I just bought a MacBook. OS X is a pretty neat operating system, but compared to the hype I’ve been hearing about, I’m underwhelmed. Still, I’m happy with my purchase—I’m dual-booting with windows, and I’m going to use it as a work laptop. (I have to work in Windows, since I develop Windows applications using Windows-specific libraries and development tools.)

But I’ve found myself booting into OS X a lot more than I would have thought, because of one application I found that came with the system: Omni Outliner. Oh, man, I love this thing! For a long time, I’ve tried various ways to use outlines to help me organize my thoughts, using various sorts of outlining tools, including notepad, wordpad, Word, Emacs, and Keynote. All of them sucked. But this, this. This is what I need; it’s what I’ve always wanted! It’s what I would have written for myself at some unspecified point in the future.

I want a windows version. I need a windows version. I might be able to use OS X at home, (it would involve switching a program I’m working on to the other platform, and finding a good development environment for the mac and learning it,) but I simply can’t at work, and I want to use it at work. And, wouldn’t you know, there’s nothing like it for Windows. Well, there’s Keynote, and there’s the defunct, but now freeware, Ecco outliner. It’s too bad I have no idea how to do good text rendering and editing with C#, or I’d totally write my own.

So far I’ve used it to do a todo list, based on the whole 43 Folders, Getting Things Done type system. And so far I’ve had the same problem I’ve had with every other organization system I’ve ever tried—while it helps me get organized, it doesn’t help me fix my actual problem, which is not having the energy and motivation to actually do the things I need to do. I can sit there staring at the list of a fairly complete list all the tasks I think I have on my mind, and look at the next thing that I’d need to do on each, and still not find it in me to work on them. Well, at least having it all organized helps me feel a little less anxious about not doing it.

People can only tell sarcasm from seriousness if they already share the viewpoint and ideology of the speaker. If they are sufficiently separated, ideologically, from the speaker, they won’t be able to tell the difference. Thus, sarcasm in a blog insulates it from outside opinion. It insulates it from anyone who would disagree. You can’t disagree, because if you do, you’re missing the point.

Now, sarcasm can be deployed selectively. For instance, a blog that genuinely tolerates dissent, but only within a limited range, can deploy sarcasm only on commenters that express viewpoints that fall outside that range. When it’s used like this, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But blogs that thrive on sarcasm, like The Poor Man and Sadly, No, pretty much use sarcasm to deride anything outside of the extremely narrow viewpoint of the authors’.

I’m not criticizing these blogs, just elucidating their techniques. Sarcasm has its place. I would criticize them if there weren’t more tolerant blogs. And I think it would be just as well if this type of blog didn’t have comments, because the comments tend not to be interesting. (Fafblog was an exception.)

Does it not*?

* I’m getting psychiatric help, in case you haven’t been reading. So far it’s not working well.

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That’s what I think I’m gonna call my new piano program. I have written it! A first version anyway. It’s enough to let me practice with it! Hooray!

A quick summary of its functionality: You hook up a MIDI keyboard to your computer. A lot of keyboards nowadays support USB MIDI connections, and for the ones that have only standard MIDI connections, you can buy a converter. If you’re using a laptop, you put it on or next to the keyboard, and if you’re using a desktop, you put the monitor (or a second monitor) on or next to the keyboard.

You feed it a MIDI file.* You tell it which measures you want to practice. You press a key to tell it to start playing, and after it counts off a bar with the metronome you either just listen or play along with it. If you’re playing along, it will tell you after it finishes the measures how well you did–how close you got to the notes in the MIDI file. Based on that score, it will automatically adjust the tempo of the playback so that you’ll settle in at about a score of 90%, which is usually where you’re comfortable, but not too comfortable, playing the music.

* It has to be made in a particular way to work well with the program–it needs to have its notes on the correct beats, and notes at the beginning of measures can’t be just a few ticks before the start of the measure. I’ll look into making it more tolerant of the latter in the future. Also, if you want to do hands separate practice you need to have each hand in a different track.

You can press other keys to adjust the measures you’re practicing, or to change which hand you’re practicing. You don’t have to interact with a keyboard or a mouse during your practice. I’m planning soon on adding some more neat features, too, which I’ll update you on when I implement them. It’s probably too unstable to release right now, and I’m not sure how I want to release this thing anyway—I need to think about licenses and obfuscation and such.

There’s something I want it to do, though, that I don’t know how to get it to do, because I don’t know enough statistics. I want it to adjust the tempo in a smarter way, so that, given your previous scores on the section, there’s a X% chance that you’ll get a score of N%, (where both of those are configurable,) when practicing at tempo T. Now the difficulty is in the fact that your other data points each have their own tempo, and that less recent data points are less relevant. I’m thinking that you’d assume that scores are normally distributed (or maybe a skewed distribution—I need to determine that) around a mean that rises over time, and that lowers as the tempo rises at a given point in time. So to solve this, you’d need to know approximately how the mean changes over time (but this can probably be fudged), and the exact relationship it has with the tempo. To be even more precise, you could even try to model and adjust for practice effects. But that might be going overboard.

So, are any of my readers interested in helping me with this little math problem?