Word of Nathan

Just a quick note to mention that I finally posted my second novel (finished right at the end of 2005!) on this website under my writing section. FourWar is a bit (okay, a lot!) less fantastic than Alice, trading off the dreamlike qualities for something best described as a sort of sociological cyberpunk scifi blend, but I’ll let my readers tell me exactly what it is.;)

Additionally, I’ve posted a reformatted version of Alice, which should be somewhat more readable than the first version (single-spaced now, Verdana instead of Courier, etc.).

Enjoy!

I’ve decided to go ahead and make all of my completed (and one mostly-complete) tracks available here under a CC-BY-SA License. There are 13 tracks so far, all trance-influenced electronica, some with female vocals by Naomi. Any and all feedback is appreciated, but mostly — enjoy!

On a related note, I’m making decent headway on a new track which I’ll hopefully release before the end of the year if I manage to get enough breathing room around my upcoming web-based game project which is now running a private alpha. I’ll convert that project to public alpha shortly, so keep an eye out for a post announcing this!

I’ve had occasion to play around with FreeSwitch lately and was looking at implementing a directory of extensions on the main menu, and so I set up Brian Snipes’ example Lua directory from the FreeSwitch wiki. I didn’t like the fact that the extension list was hardcoded, so I replaced the names{} table with the following bit of code. It’s ugly, but it’s my first 2-3 hours of messing with Lua. Anyway, it basically makes a system call to “grep” to pull the extensions out of your FS directory XML files using the effective_caller_id_* values which you may or may not have in each listing in the directory. Maybe this will help someone avoid having to reinvent the wheel completely.

Note: this presumes that each entry in the directory lives in its own users_[firstinitial][lastname].xml file. For example, I have users_nsimpson.xml containing the following two lines:

<variable name="effective_caller_id_name" value="Nate Simpson"/>
<variable name="effective_caller_id_number" value="1000"/>

You can hack the following code to match the particulars of your own installation. Also, I think string.gfind() has become string.gmatch() in Lua 5.1, so you may need to tweak that as well.


-- NS: build the names table from grep
directory_path = "/usr/local/freeswitch/conf/directory/default/"

names[reversename] = thisextension
end


I’ve recently been playing around with the SIMILE Timeline visualizer for XML data, which is pretty neat. I had one minor little gripe with it, which is that I wanted to be able to use data from an XML string in certain cases where I already was working in the context of an XSL stylesheet instead of hitting the server again just to present the same data in a different XML structure for the timeline. So I downloaded the code, told it NOT to use the bundled code in timeline-bundle.js by editing appropriately in timeline-api.js, and started experimenting with the sources.

What seems to have worked for me is the following modification [I added it just before the line starting: Timeline.DefaultEventSource.prototype.loadXML = function...] to sources.js (pardon the messy formatting here – you can correct the line breaks in the text editor of your choice ):

Timeline.DefaultEventSource.prototype.loadXMLText = function(sometext) {
return Try.these(
// For Firefox, etc.
function() { return new DOMParser().parseFromString(sometext, ‘text/xml’); },
// For IE
function() { var xmldom = new ActiveXObject(‘Microsoft.XMLDOM’); xmldom.loadXML(sometext); return xmldom; },
// As a last resort, try loading the document from a data: URL. This is supposed to work in Safari. Thanks to Manos Batsis and his Sarissa library (sarissa.sourceforge.net) for this technique. (NS: – got this from timeline-helper.js in the GWT Timeline build)
function() { var url = “data:text/xml;charset=utf-8,” + encodeURIComponent(sometext); var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open(“GET”, url, false); request.send(null); return request.responseXML; }
);
};

and in your calling script, replacing the line:

Timeline.loadXML(“example1.xml”, function(xml, url) { eventSource.loadXML(xml, url); });

with the following:

eventSource.loadXML(eventSource.loadXMLText(xmlstring,), “http://path.to.script/goes/here”);

Replace “xmlstring” with either a quoted string of XML or a string variable, and edit your path accordingly. Hope it works for you – it seems to be working fine for me!

I finally got around to finishing up a new track with Naomi. We both have vocals on this one – “Waking Alone” – so if you’re at all into trance or synthpop or some strange fusion of the two, check it out!

Yes, as you can see, I’ve been reading both the highbrow and the low. A little of everything for the win!

To start: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a pretty fun read. A large mix of history, science, the occult, and Pynchon’s very odd brain, this one took me a bit longer to read through than usual due to its near-800 page length. An interesting jaunt through Europe and elsewhere set largely in the culmination and aftermath of WW2, laced with original songs, intricate descriptions, silly stories, myriad external references, and obscenity to rival Team America, it’s easily one of the best books I’ve ever read. Recommended, but only if you have a strong stomach and aren’t easily offended.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an interesting dystopian story that seems a bit like the anti-Anthem (Ayn Rand) to me. Lauren Olamina is a girl gifted with quite a bit of foresight, paranoia, and a special talent which is also an Achilles’ heel of sorts, and she copes with the destruction of her family and everything she’s known. In the course, she comes up with something of a new philosophy/religion aimed at a more communal and earth-friendly existence. Interesting read, pretty violent at points. I’d read other novels by this author, to be sure.

And finally, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and its sequels are fun reads aimed at kids. They read a bit like tame versions of ground trodden by Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton (less sex and violence), with more science fiction thrown in. Still amusing if you can get past the technological implausibilities (tracing an MPEG through analysis of radioactive properties??) and focus on the characters. I won’t read them again, but it wasn’t an utter waste of time. Evil child geniuses with a touch of conscience are fun!

First, I’ve finally bothered to add some of my artwork, so it’s in one place instead of spread out over a buncha blog postings.

Which brings me to a related update – I’ve started pencilling a basic comic-type storyline which I expect to be a bit of horror-comedy, or so I’m thinking now. These things never turn out the way you plan them, though. I’ve only drawn a page so far, so after I have 5 or 6 of them, I’ll throw them up here for feedback.

And I’ve finished another track, I think, which I’m putting some final touches on. Hopefully by next weekend I’ll have something to show.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled mundania…

I have no idea who Don Lapre actually is – he’s some sort of infomercial vitamin-selling scammer dude according to wikipedia. Anyway, somebody left a hand-crafted spam comment on my SORBS post today which actually referenced the content of the post, but the format of the signature was a bit strange so I jumped to the linked website (donlaprewilliams.com) before I even knew Don Lapre existed. The site is pretty strange, as it seems to be leaching content through an iFrame from carpeaqua.com and the only actual content on the page is a couple of header tags mentioning Lapre and some sort of salad dressing blurb that makes no sense. There are no actual outgoing links from this page, so I can’t figure out what the s[p/c]ammer is hoping to promote by doing this.

A bit of searching reveals another domain registered on the same day (donlaprejones.com) which is leaching content in an iFrame from sashafrerejones.com (some sort of musician, I think). This site contains the same salad dressing nonsense and no outgoing links. Whois checks don’t reveal anything useful, other than that they’re Go Daddy domains (what a stupid name for a company).

Maybe the s[p/c]ammer is intending to build up the pagerank of these pages and then use them to promote some stupid vitamin-selling scheme? Anyway, nice try, but that comment is history. And perhaps the webmasters at carpeaqua and sashafrerejones might want to do some creative rewrite rules to block the leaching.

Moral of the story: I fucking despise sleazy advertisers.

Not that I really expect more out of a site like MySpace, but as it seems to be ever more a necessary social evil these days, I have a profile there. Anyway, I want to add my University of Toronto time to my profile for networking purposes, but the only school it will allow is “University of Toronto Schools” which is a real institution that is NOT the same as the actual University of Toronto.

I first noticed this almost 2 years ago and submitted the actual University of Toronto as a school, but to no avail. A few months ago I emailed them about it and was told that “they’d look into it” and that in the meantime I should submit the UofT as a school.

A bit of googling and talking to my UofT friends says that most people gave up and just used the UTS school instead, but I’m too stubborn for that.

I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to complain, but it feels good to vent this minor frustration. And yet, MySpace is clearly beneath my 1337ness and I don’t know why I have a profile there to begin with…so torn!

Cass and I went to see Blood Diamond this evening. It was a tossup between that and Casino Royale, but when she heard that the former starred Leonardo, she was significantly more excited about that than about seeing a new Bond who has apparently been referred to as “James Bland.” So Blood Diamond it was.

Violence and misery and hopelessness, oh my. While I’m still trying to digest all of the imagery that I just took in, I have to say that it was certainly one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. *cough*gotchokedupeven*cough*. I’ve read enough about African-style civil war and conflict diamonds in the past to have an idea of what to expect, but I found myself simply stunned at points by the sheer brutality of the conflict. All I can say is that we in North America have no idea how soft we actually are. And while I realize that Sierra Leone has been relatively peaceful of late, one can’t say the same for Somalia and the Congo* (DRC) so the film’s core issues are still relevant.

Dramatization though it may be, the film’s central question is a challenging one. How can a man commit these sorts of atrocities against his brother – and by extension, how can we do things like this to anyone in the family that is humanity? I think I’d like to run with a simple idea from the movie, adapted for my own personal use: TIE. We’re born here, we die here – it’s a fucked up place, but maybe one day we’ll prove that we can make something better out of it (and ourselves in the process).

This is Earth.

* Note that cassiterite and coltan (columbite-tantalite) are both used in much the same way as diamonds, being sold illicitly to fund weapons and supplies for ongoing wars. Coltan apparently is used in capacitors and there is suggestion that Western consumer electronics may contain such “conflict goods.” Apparently other things are smuggled as well, such as timber. Still, nothing is so especially galling as diamonds, especially when you can get perfectly good man-made diamonds which are molecularly and chemically indistinguishable from “the real thing” by any means other than their sheer perfection.