Got around 4000 guitar pieces in MIDI... should be busy for a few months!

Today I just received the MIDI Classics Catalog Package Deal, which according to their web-page it has "Over 1500 pieces in all! [...] music to keep you busy for years!". Together with the ~2400 pieces gotten from Classical Guitar Midi Archive page this should certainly keep me busy for many years. My intention is to concentrate only on the duets and ensembles, so the number of "useful" pieces will be much smaller for me, but hopefully still a decent number to keep me entertained for quite a while.

Switched to Opera Mail and Gmail...

Until now I managed all my e-mail with Thunderbird and our corporate e-mail server, but the searches were too slow, it was tedious to access the server from outside the company and the space in the server was a bit limited, so today I decided to switch...

And I went for Opera (with its integrated Opera Mail client) and Gmail. So all my mails are stored (after transferring about 8000 mails) in Gmail servers (although keeping my corporate e-mail address), and I use Opera Mail to access them (though I could use the Gmail web interface if I ever need to). The main reason to switch to Opera Mail is that it does away with folders, and it has the concept of views (searches in the Inbox, so mails can end up in different views, which is very convenient: similar to storing bookmarks with folders vs. storing them in something like del.icio.us where you assign tags to each bookmark). This way I find that I save a lot of time since I don't have to be careful about filing messages, and the searching capabilities of Opera Mail are very good. So far I have been using the new setting only a few hours, but I'm pretty convinced that I'm not going back...

Basic flying and guitar...

A week ago or so I spent some time learning how to record a "game" with the flying simulator (FlightGear), and how to use the Video Editing Software "Pitivi" so that I could put together a basic landing with a guitar studio played by myself. The result is not great in any way, but here it is.

Turning my netbook into a music partner...

Recently I bought an Acer AS1810T netbook, and I have decided to tune it so that it can become a music partner (artificial accompaniments for when no human partner is around :-)). I just started toying with Ubuntu Studio, but some things didn't quite work. I will persevere and will post here about my progress...

...

and the whole thing was a lot easier than I thought. Basically I went first for a Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) install. Almost everything worked out-of-the-box (sound, wifi, webcam...). And after that I just consulted this guide, which just involves downloading loads of stuff, adding myself to the audio group and modifying the file limits.conf

Then, I installed Rosegarden and then I changed a line in the file /etc/default/grub (and then run update-grub as root):
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 becomes # GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 (so that I have the option of selecting the Real Time kernel, otherwise it goes into normal kernel and Rosegarden and friends will not work OK).

Then configure QSynth to include the soundfonts available at /usr/share/sounds/sf2

And at last I run Jack, QSynth, and Rosegarden, and I can get to play beatifully (and with no Xruns) a basic MIDI file. Good stuff....

(By the way, I also get GNU Solfege, a great aid in training my ear for the quickly approaching music exams...)

Step by step guide for the installation and configuration of a cluster (with Rocks) to run ParaView

We have recently installed a small test cluster to run ParaView visualization software in parallel. The configuration was not trivial, and I put a detailed step-by-step guide in SIEpedia, in case it can be of interest to someone else. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.