Monthly Archives: January 2006

Nebraska Photos

General

I’ve uploaded our photos from our trip to Nebraska. Don’t worry, I’ve limited it to 43 items.

In this fantastic collection, you will learn such immeasurably useful morsels of knowledge, such as:

  • Why people think Nebraska has more trees than Kansas
  • The shocking encroachment of nationwide department stores onto rural areas
  • Traffic congestion in rural Kansas
  • Nebraskan vowel usage
  • Silo painting tips

Click here to start, and make sure to hit “next” so you see all the different photos.

Haskell #1 in the Shootout

Programming

Wow. Some Haskell hackers have started paying a small bit of attention to the Great Computer Language Shootout site, and the results are impressive.

Haskell now takes first place in the lines of code competition. In the CPU time competition, Haskell is also doing quite respectably: it beats out OCaml by a small margin, and defeats Java, C++, Python, Perl, Erlang, Ruby, Mono, Tcl, etc. by significant margins.

These links are all using the Shootout default weightings for individual tests.

The only downside to the Shootout is that the programs — for all languages — are not really idomatic and don’t show off a language’s natural beauty. Sounds like it’s time to gather up some Haskell hackers to rally around the PLEAC effort as well.

We need better audio support in Linux

General

Yesterday I had the frustrating experience of trying to configure a machine so I could use the internal soundcard while simultaneously recording sound from a USB iMic.

While ALSA appears to fully support this setup, I discovered quite a few annoyances about what should be trivial:

  • There appear to be no GUI sound recording apps that support ALSA directly.
  • KDE’s artsd normally provides good ALSA support, but it provides neither a systemwide nor an app-specific way to select either the recording or the playback source with ALSA.
  • Some apps appear to use Jack, but configuration of it is extraordinarily complex and it seems to die in subtle and odd ways from time to time.
  • ecawave segfaults on start, every time.
  • audacity doesn’t even support anything other than OSS! (A shame from what’s otherwise a great program)
  • The mechanics of OSS support in ALSA are anything but clear. There is the aoss LD_PRELOAD wrapper, and then there is also a kernel module, which appears to be rather under-documented. For whatever reason, ALSA is managing only one PCM device under /dev, despite having two PCM cards in the system.

Now this is probably no worse than the situation in Windows, but it is certainly not where we should be, and isn’t where MacOS X is either.

Note that most of these problems are with the apps not supporting the second audio source *at all*.

New Mic Equipment

Entertainment / Arts

I wrote yesterday that I’m looking for a nice microphone.

I decided to go mostly with the setup suggested by The Roadhouse:

  • MXL 990 Condensor Mic ($50)
  • Behringer eurorack UB802 Mixer/Preamp ($50)

After assorted accessories (mic stand, XLR cable, pop filter, etc.) I wound up spending $143 at Musician’s Friend. I just need a 1/4″ to 1/8″ adapter cable yet from RadioShack to hook this up to the audio input on a sound card (or my iMic USB gadget).

Librivox sounds great and I look forward to volunteering.