ACU with the Hillard Ensemble in concert, Wollongong

From time to time I take my kids to various concerts that in our household is categorised as "dad's music", because, let's face it, the stuff that I love is in minority and often causes discomfort amongst people in social settings. I do this not to torture my children, but because we (that is, me and the wife) recognise the value of a diverse education. Why should we let our children only learn about fun stuff when we weren't allowed to? No, they should be tortured just like I was when I was a boy, only I wasn't tortured with great music. Sorry, did I say torture after all? I meant, educated. There, fixed it.

So, off I took Lilje, age 8, to Wollongong and the Town Hall for a concert with the Australian Chamber Orchestra featuring the Hillard Ensamble a couple of weeks ago (I had an accident of late, so some time passed before I could even write this down). Neither of these two art music groups need no real introduction; they are world class acts, and they are awesome.

Going to this concert was thinking that this was a guaranteed good time for me, and hopefully an enjoyable evening for Lilje. But as the world turns and proves itself stranger than what we can imagine at times, it turned out that something's afoot in the playpen. I didn't actually read the program before we went, and the first time I glanced at it was going into the thing, and I remember my reaction very precisely; "Huh?"

First up, the Town Hall, a dreadful hall with crap acoustics, built in depressing 70's wood-panel, all floor seating on a flat floor, meaning Lilje had to sit on my lap for most of the concert to see anything at all. And these were cheap plastic-in-a-row seats guaranteed to be a pain in the arse from beginning until end, and needless to say, that guarantee was more than fulfilled.

Ok, the program. Since the Hillard Ensemble would be present I had thought that the ACO had brought out their finest silver. First out was Elgar. Now, I'm the first to admit that Elgar bores me more than thrills me, but I thought that surely ACO couldn't go too terribly wrong here, they could choose some of Elgars really wonderful stuff, snippets from his symphonies, or the more obvious Violin Concerto, or even Introduction and Allegro for strings. But no, they had chosen the mostly pleasant but boring Serenade in E, Opus 20 (of 1892) that reeks of conformity. What was up with that? Some unwanted due diligence towards the Hillards' English heritage or something? Looking at the audience, however, confirmed my other suspicion; it was played because it's a popular piece, especially with the, ahem, older demographics. However, it was played well.

Next up, the Hillard Ensemble did "Ah, gentle Jesu", a medieval romp by Sheryngham (around 1500), and they did what the Hillard Ensemble does best; they sang like no other group could do, and it was wonderful, if not draped in some weird dullness by the rotten acoustics. Although I think David James was out of this world awesome to not let the dullness kill his amazing singing!

And then, the final piece of the first part, was the only piece in the whole concert that the ACO and the Hillard's actually did together; Raskatov's "Obikhod", a piece you don't want to take normal people to at the best of times; a great piece for those with patience, difficult to perform, impossible to master, chuck full of idiosyncrasies, discordance, flat harmonies, fuge-like patterns of non-melodic music ... it was, eh, kind of overwhelming, and I thought to myself that this wasn't perhaps the best concert to take an 8-year old to. I can't say I enjoyed this piece, but I certainly appreciated it. It was wrapped up by a lyrical repetitive but thematically interestingly "Most Holy Mother of God" by Pärt, sung by the Hillard's.

Then there was a break in which me and Lilje a) tried to get a drink, b) gave up and went to a kiosk across the street to get a drink, c) racing back because Lilje had to go to the toilet, d) race back across the street to get the drinks, e) race back to get seated again.

Second half was the Hillard's doing Gregorian and medieval French chants, strangely without the awesome David James, a section of 6 songs, with the highlight of the concert in the middle; Ross Edwards' "Veni Creator Spritus", a string octet in two movements. The first was nice and polyphonic and templetative, but the second more lively and full of interesting bounces, melodies and harmonies. But then again, it was Ross Edwards, so it couldn't really be bad. And the ACO, again, played it to what I can only assume was flawless. Wonderful stuff.

Last piece out was Arensky's "Variations on a theme by Tchaikovsky", probably his most famous piece, but not all that know to people in general. And it was, well, nice and all, like a romantic more likeable Tchaikovsky, short and sweet and more to the point. Lilje recognised the Tchaikovsky patterns she plays in her own ensemble, which, I think, was for her the highlight. Hmm.

All in all, the ACO played wonderful. They have such a wonderful tone (and a little bird has whispered baroque tuning in my ear, which might explain some of it), some times so perfectly delicate that it's easy to forget that there's fallible people up there. And the Hillard's were great singers as usual. The problem was the program itself, and I also had this feeling I get when two great entities come together in a concert; "you do a bit, we do a bit, then you do a bit, then we do a bit" rather than making music together, with the difficult Raskatov an honourable exception. And the bits they had chosen weren't the best of bits, either.

At the end of the night I promised Lilje to take her to a better - or, perhaps, a more accessible - concert some other time.

Quickie

Hiya. Just thought I'd pop in an explain the lack of posts. Again, too much to write about (and I've got a concert review coming in the next couple of days), but most of my silence was due to an accident I had a couple of weeks ago; a massive beam with nails in it rolled over and slammed into my left arm (and I'm left-handed), the nail puncturing a main artery, blood and gore everywhere, doctors, hospital, now arm in sling for over a week, more tests and scans, complications, etc. I'm writing this post veeeery slowly.

I'm slightly better today, first day of improvement in a long time, so I'm hopeful, and I'm sure I'll get into some more details later on. I'll return to work soon, but I suspect my drumming career is on the blink. On the positive side, I've had plenty of time to read (like the awesome "Don't sleep, there's snakes" which I'll review a bit later, too), especially starting and finishing Sam Harris' "Free-will" during casualty on Saturday (which I'm sure I'll write more on later as well) waiting between doctors and scans.

All in all, this latter subject points to what I'm doing a lot these days as well, dipping into philosophy a lot, mainly dipping into Aquinas and history of doctrine, and Wittgenstein the elder, epistemology as usual, with a strong focus on philosophy of science and determinism as a vehicle for the illusion of free-will (and implications thereof).

I shall talk more on that on my other blog, so here I'll push xSiteable as it shapes itself into a publishable form, and a new project I've been involved in called KTV (but I'll shed more details on this later; basically a local "tv" channel for the Kiama area, only online, and an organisation that helps to create content for the local community we live in). I'll update about our family life a bit later, too, since the girls are doing very well with their music (Grace just won a scholarship), but more details later.

Toodles!

Something inspired me between coffee and office today ...

Blargh, so I haven't updated here in a while. It's not because there's nothing to say, but simply too much to say, gagging me in the process. I usually dump a few good tidbits to my Google+ stream, but my good ol' rants and raves have taken a hiatus. And I'm not quite ressurecting them yet, I'm not ready to have a strong opinion on a lot of things of late. Well, correction; I have very strong opinions on a number of things, I'm just not sure I'm right. I'm trying to unlearn a life-time of being full of bluster.

Life is full of surprises, which, in itself, is not surprising at all. For some of us, it's even a welcome change. I've ... changed lately. Not in a sudden way, but I suspect my move to a quiet town with a kinda country feel, surrounded by serene and spectacular scenery (and, no doubt, gorgeous beaches) has put my mind into a strange place. One would think it would have calmed down, relaxed a little more, taking in the scenery and let itself be soothed by the looks and sounds of this thin slice of serenity between heaven and earth, but no, it's racing harder than ever! There's so many other things I can squeeze into the time I now have available, so much more to ponder!

For those who have known me for a while knows the certainty with which I stated my bold stance on pretty much any opinion I cared about. No more. The older I get, the more steeped in the ultimate scientific quest for origins I become. I gulp down many buckets of science and scepticism every day, and try to make sense of it all as it slushes - erodes away beliefs and builds up embankments of facts - over my framework of thought. Where in the past I had knowledge and opinions, I now have facts and uncertainty, proud uncertainty! I'm starting to love all the things I don't know, licking up the sweet, sweet tears of frustration that people show me. It seems, on average, that most humans can't deal with not knowing.

I'm starting to suspect that all of humanities problems lie hidden behind the fear of not knowing, and not just not knowing what's for dinner tonight, but not knowing the meaning of life, universe and everything! Behind not knowing something is that awful, horrible, disgusting habit we have of making stuff up in the place of knowledge. We try to fill those gaps in our understanding this universe with something - anything! - quick, before someone sees us! We can't stand the gap, it is empty and repulsive in our mind. It's a pothole in our perfectly flat road to knowledge, fill it, fill it! Quickly, put religion in the spot for origin and purpose! Hurry, slap down some homoeopathy and acupuncture on that disease we don't understand! Look, you missed a spot of telekinesis in your quantum entangled deepism!

The distrust of anything you don't understand should stand in stark contrast to what you believe to be true, however it seems epistemology isn't a very prioritized field amongst normal people. Heck, even specialists and experts can't tell their ontology from their oncology on any good day, even if they depend on the former to really explain - and often cure the source of - the latter.

If that last sentence didn't make much sense to you, then you're part of the problem, too, just like me, but hopefully - if I dare suggest - getting to know the science of philosophy (as opposed to the profession of being a philosopher) and why epistemology matter, you can tatter along with me to the sound of people making bad decisions for us all on faulty grounds.

So, that's where I am right now. Soon, I shall seep through the groundwater of this blog, and become that weed in the garden of knowledge I aspire to be.

Update-ish

Hi Folks. Sorry for the quiet, I have too much to say, deterring me from being able to make a coherent sentence, little less a whole blog post. There's plenty of stuff in the woodwork, and it will come out fairly soon, I promise, including a book I'm writing. However, I've been doing lots of smaller stints at my Google+ channel with drips of ideas and good stuff found elsewhere. I think that that will be my platform from now on, where here on the blog I'll do the bigger and more serious stuff, while the Google+ channel a more constant drip. I've given up on Twitter as the noise was unbearable, and Facebook is ... well, I can't really use that kind of language in front of you good people.

Here's a quick update; family doing good (and my girls exceptionally so, with grades through the roof, talents earning them rewards), we're more settled these days, plodding along with our various more or less interesting projects. I'm taking a bit more pictures which I'll showcase later, a few videos, art, music, etc. The girls are really getting good on violin, and we've started up a string ensemble (if you're in the Kiama area and play either strings or classical, come and have some fun with us! There might be a oboe-player nearby). Works fine. Life's normal.

in more technical news, xSiteable - my latest project that mixes Topic Maps with all sorts of event-based plugin fun using PHP - is that I've spent a lot of (possibly too much) time on the database side of things, creating a common xPath-based simple query language that is SQL, NoSQL and XPath compatible, and a host of ready-made plugins for it (PDO, SQL Topic Maps, LDAP / AD, session, array). The way to describe various parts of your data then becomes a cached layer of reusable nuggets of data, like " $data->get ('some-identifier' ) ", no matter where in the application it gets called, will always refer to the same data, cached or create based on definitions elsewhere (so, using a rather declarative approach in which, I feel, you can define what your application does better than any other approach I've used before.

For example, each plugin can define data sources, queries (with or without parameters) using the global query language, or ask if it's allowed to use the native language (and mostly it is, but some times you may wish to not do that, for example in core modules and such). I use events for application flow, so for example handling of users are done through the events XS_ON_USER_BLANK, ..._CONFIG, and ..._CHECK which other plugins can hook into to provide user credentials or services back to the framework.

I'm also revamping the content management and document management / store aspects of it, making sure that I don't fall into pitfalls of persistent identification, nor that I cause trouble later. Every part of the application hooks into events, and each part of the screen are rendered through them, so you can inject snippets of GUI into various parts based on them using a layout module (for example, if the GUI renders a document, a button can be injected that does something, like add the ability to share a document, or whatever, you decide). Events, events, events. I've hence also made the event handler a bit more robust.

Finally, I've made everything even more RESTful, even internal services are done through REST. Want to add a menu item to the main menu? POST your item to the resource for the menu module. And so on. Every module and plugin has a resource assigned, and the "API" (I use that term loosely) is through that or a sub-set. I've even designed the data management back-end this way, so any data source you define will have an automatic RESTful API to it, if you allow it.

Security. Yeah, working on it, and I'll explain it better later, but it's almost done as well, where any object have a CRUD self / CRUD sub-elements RESTful model. More on that later.

Ok. It's the weekend. Have fun, and I'll see you on the other side.

Hi everyone. Things - meaning life, blogging, new projects, fun experiments - have slowed substantially over the last couple of years to the current standstill. But it's not a bad thing, as such, it's actually a nice break from the hectic life I used to have, and has been a good opportunity for me to re-group and re-think my life and what I should do with it. There's also been a tremendous amount of focus on the kids (helping them grow, school, etc.) and our family life, and in many ways you can say that my family is now my biggest and most important project.

It didn't used to be like that. I think I was just like every one else, balancing work with family life, compromising some things for other things in an effort to make life as easy as possible. Now I don't care about life not being easy. Well, what I mean is, I don't treat life as if it needs to be either easy or hard, but more as project that I mold and shape into how it best suits me and the family.

There's a few things going on, though;

- I'm still writing a book, but I've changed it slightly. The manuscript I had was a little bit all over the place, and I've focused it back a bit to relating to that shimmer between humanity and technology, and how we as social people could better use a great deal of human cognition and social science to solve our (software development) problems. The current title; "The well-tempered keyboard." (Classic music geeks rejoice!)

- My never-ending framework and enterprise application delivery system is getting momentum, but as with any other mention of xSiteable expect some delay before I release it. However, I'm doing interesting work in the back-end these days on modular data source integration between a disparity of systems (same API into SQL, filesystems, XML, JSON, key-value, NoSQL, caches, etc. controlled through a generic caching module) creating some funky business analysis and statistics opportunities. (If you can create a dynamic SQL statement, for example, we can now have time-based as well as real-time analysis and statistics, with drill-down, semantic linking to other statements [including non-SQL] and deliver them in widgets all over the shop) It's admittedly terribly fun, but I know a few of you are looking forward, so I'll try to speed up a bit.

Stand by for another installment, soonish.

What I did on the weekend : EJ12

Here's what I did on the weekend with Grace and some of her friends from school ;



Grace and a few of her school friends created this book trailer for "Hot and Cold: EJ12 Girl Hero" for some book trailer competition at school, and we're all proud of how well it turned out. EJ12 is a teen-age girl turned secret spy, and have all sorts of adventures. This one - "Hot and cold" - brings her to face the Ice Queen in Antarctica, among other things, and we mucked around with blue-screen for a long time trying to get proper icy special effects, but it proved too cumbersome, at least until we can get a proper blue-screen and some seriously good editing software.

I used to work in the movie world (many eons ago, before children) and taught Grace to script, story-board, convert, shoot, production, editing, the lot. It was a lot of fun, and I'm impressed with the girls; you did a fantastic job. I used a Panasonic Lumix G2 camera for all shots, a simple pancake lens, and only used the free and open-source OpenShot video editor (running under Linux/Ubuntu 11.04) for editing and post-production (which I probably should write a review of, now that I am intimately familiar with it ... I've got a few suggestions :) ).

Oh, and if you thought the school uniforms in the beginning looked a bit strange, it's because the girls used their bunads, Norwegian folk costumes. Don't ask me why they chose that and those high-heels, but I suspect the glamour of movie-making seeped in. Enjoy.

Update: I sent a link to the author of the book and she loved it, and she has just posted it to her EJ12 blog. How cool is that?

Australian Chamber Orchestra review

For my birthday my wife thought up a brilliant gift for me; two tickets to each of two concerts the Australian Chamber Orchestra was holding in Wollongong, so for each concert I would bring one of my two daughters so they could experience both the brilliance of ACO and that of going to a concert with a bit of pizzazz!

The first concert was called 'Baroque Virtuoso' and is, I think, one of the first times the ACO's newly aquired Stradivarius violin (price: just short of 2 million dollars) would be on display and played by the beautiful Satu Vänskä. The program for the concert promised a few Greensleeves baroque pieces but interspersed by a few contemporary pieces I knew nothing about.

First, here's Satu introducing the concert;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3PIv2w9OXA&list=UUYj5cJizFqEY

I brought Grace (11 turning 12) who's been playing violin for two years now, and she was excited, but did remark that the ratio of people to age was something bizarrely far above even my own age. Together we spotted about less than 10 people that looked anything less than 30 years old (or so, not counting me), and the concert was sold out (which means 515 seats, according to the Merringong website) with lots of older folks about. Not a bad thing in itself, but does perhaps say something about the state of classical music in this region.

I won't say too much about all the pieces in the concert, but I'd like to make a few general remarks and point out the highlights.

First the bad, and let me make it clear straight away that I'm a huge baroque fanatic; I study it, love it, live it, I have so many baroque recordings and have been to so many baroque concerts that it makes people worry about my sanity, but I love it from the sheep gut strings to the various baroque tunings, and unless you try to be as HIP as you possibly can be, I won't be pleased. And as such, I wasn't pleased. The baroque pieces in question - Handel's 'Concerto Grosso in B minor', Vivaldi's 'Concerto in B minor' RV580, Teleman's 'Viola Concerto in G major' (!!), Tartini's 'Devils Trill' G minor violin concerto and Corelli's 'Concerto Grosso in F major, op.6 No. 2' - all had the same tokens of baroque pieces played for modern chamber orchestra in modern tuning on modern instruments.

However, within that framework there was lots to love, so don't get me wrong, the playing was at times quite sublime, with the highlight for me perhaps Corelli's because I love it so (but they could have put a bit more gusto into it). Satu's solo work on Tartini's concerto was of course brilliant; she's very, very good, and has a lovely playing style and touch, not to mention that remarkable timbre in the Stradivarius (first time I've heard one live, I believe). But for me, the music lose their soul in the sharpness of the modern instruments, and cry a little in modern tuning. But that's just me.

The best part of this baroque concert was the music that wasn't baroque, starting with probably the highlight of the evening for both me and Grace;

Stuart Greenbaum's "Moments of falling" is a gorgeous Aeolian fantasy that falls off a cliff, dragging other motif's with it on the way down, rumbling lyrically until its timely death. Lots of people around us, too, were stunned at this one, and the applause, I think, captured our surprise and delight quite well, an applause that wouldn't be repeated again until the big solo pieces and the bug finish. It was a wonderful piece, and one that the ACO just nailed; this is their true domain! This is what they do best, there's no doubt about it.

Colin Brumby's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" was up next, of which I found the first movement just as wonderful as the Greenbaum piece, coming and going in and out of similar motifs, circular developments and sharp constraints that really don't constrain much. Absolutely lovely stuff, and really well played. Second movement was somewhat different from the first, and didn't quite capture me, but still good.

James Ledger's "Johann has left the building" was Grace's favourite, a delightful romp through Bachesque brilliant motions without the genius. I wasn't quite into it as I was the others, but perhaps the promise of Bach had me looking for something it wasn't trying to be. Probably. My bad.

Peter Sculthorpe was the only contemporary composer I had actually heard of (from my years at the National Library of Australia and the Music Australia project, I think), and they played his "Port Essington", a remarkable piece and perhaps the most abstract at times as well as being the most complex composition, going from ensemble, to trio, to abstract, to trio, and back to ensemble, all interspersed with various degrees of overtones (six movements in all). The bush and the life around Port Essington came alive on stage, and it was quite remarkable. I could tell some of the audience didn't quite know what to do with this music, but I loved it! The playing was simply astounding, from the syncopated abstracts to the trio cadences (on which Mr. Cello, Timo Valve, did some fine fiddlin' indeed) to some people-giving-eachother-looks discords. I sucked it all up and was enthralled in it all, and was definitely the second highlight of the evening for me.

I can't say enough how wonderful it was to hear these Australian contemporary pieces, an area I'm completely ignorant of. However, this crash introduction have me wanting more (lots more!), and that is a testament to the brilliant playing of the ACO and the pieces they chose for this concert. Every player bounced off the next, and the timing was impeccable. I'd however advice them to stay clear of the baroque period (especially when you mix it like this, because you're forced into modern tuning and playing which doesn't suit baroque music, in my snobbish and faulty opinion), and do what they otherwise do so brilliantly.

I can't wait for my next concert next month with their take on Schubert.

Upcoming book

Well, a little time ago I asked your opinions on how to publish a book, what to do, what to expect and directions to take. I didn't get too much feedback, but some, and I've at least had some interaction with my good old friend Slobodanka which I worked with at the National Library of Australia.

I've come to a realization; my book is pretty much unpublishable by any sane publisher, so I'll publish it here, free in PDF form, when it is reaching publishable shape. I know there's outlets like Lulu or Balboa Press where I can do it through them (and I might still consider that), but I kinda like the freedom of tinkering with my own book at my own leisure as well. I know that these things take time, and that a good editor is a must, however I'm thinking three things ;

• My wife is a school teacher with strong academic background, and shall be editor
• Some of my friends are literate and damn smart, and they could be editors, too
• I used to work in publishing (technical side), so I can set my own book reasonably well

One of the most difficult parts of this whole thing is that I couldn't explain to anyone what the book was about. It's somewhat eclectic, binding together my years of experience in software development, working with information architecture and usability, my life as a film-maker and professional musician, my fervent scientific outlook on the world coupled with a penchant for epistemology and other nasty philosophical terms, my love of ideas, language and people, and all the little things I've crashed into while stumbling through life.

What's it about, again? How about I quote from the introduction instead, and you tell me ;

The wrong book

Oh, I'm sorry, you probably thought this book was about software development or some-such, maybe a framework, or at best how to deal with hard computer problems. Maybe you thought this book was about how to be a better programmer, showing you slick tricks and fancy algorithms. Maybe you wanted me to help you design better applications, or take you gently through various middle-ware stacks on offer. Or maybe you thought – silly you, looking at the title like that! - it had something to do with being a nicer developer. It's not.

Well, what I mean is, not really, not specifically, but perhaps rather that I won't talk about such things; they are, after all, what I do for a living. But talking about all of that stuff up there sounds really boring. Why would I write a boring book? That's right, that would be a bit silly of me. However, I can't guarantee that this won't be boring for you, especially if you expected any of those things listed at the top. All of that stuff are general problems that really are manifestations of other, deeper and more troubling problems. Like people.

I like people. I'm a people-person, and I thrive on being with people. Humans. Human beings. Folk. Crowds, big and small. Opinions. Feelings. People. You see where I'm going with this? Therein lies the solution to anything we can ever think of; interacting with other people, sharing our ideas, let thoughts simmer and talk about them, written down, talked about, discussed, shouted, ranted. Words. People.

At this point you're probably wondering if you wandered into the library and got the wrong book or something. And perhaps you did, but wouldn't it be grand if you wandered into the library to take out a book, and ended up taking out the librarian instead?"