Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

Musical vagaries

Wednesday night, at the SACS Speech Night, I was reminded of how much I’ll miss the sound of St. Andrews. I don’t even think the music at Speech Night was that great (and stage movements were certainly leaving something to be desired, but that’s another matter), so comment is not being made on the basis of the quality of that… it simply presented a catalyst for entropic ruminations that occasionally (or perhaps more than occasionally) take place in the mind of this particular individual, focussing “random reflection upon the nature of SACS” on the sound of that space. We are bound to the senses, and it is that of aural perception which, at this present moment, defines St. Andrews.

I’ll miss going to some lunchtime concert Tori has been roped into performing at — though secretly she enjoys it, I infer from nervousness and an enunciated indifference to the opinions of any aside from that of her mother: something which I certainly take no issue with, being along simply for the ride and offering perhaps as much eloquent and applicable criticism as the piano stool on which she had sat and played something from another world — hearing music that is undoubtedly beautiful and meaningful and of value, but it speaks in a tongue (spelt correctly) apart from my own. The words drift over, though, and its essence is often (if not always) captured. At least in part.

These chance encounters with Babel are a near-inescapable facet of the life of a not-musician at that school. There is music to challenge. It incites thought, violently. There is something more buried here unseen. But what? No matter, let it speak in its own language. The tongue, of course, varies. Some do not take the mind to task. Others are guttural, cutting: they haul the mind to consciousness and set it to task unseen… and almost certainly not understood. There is a desire, however, to resolve this, such that these velar enunciations might become understood. Then, harsh sounds launch into an eloquent refrain of unparalleled beauty, if it could only be understood!

Comprehension spawns creation. Eloquence is a sign of vitality, whether seen and comprehended or glanced upon and passed over: it needn’t bear understanding the first time. Ever? One would dare to hope. Though it must be said that the work begun by one may, at another’s hands, give way past the precipice of cognition into that dexterity of the mind that comes with a piece falling into place, one last cog enabling a whole series of gears.

And when will this come? Uncertainty pervades this point. With listening. To what, and for how long? Wrong questions. Impatience here is senseless, though some music may encourage it. [Grating sounds of post-modern composition break over the speakers] Yes. Senseless. For what else do you wait? Another piece to similarly rush through? And another? Finite achievement is erudite compared to the superficiality of infinite experience. Such that ‘infinite’ is within this life, within this understanding. Pitiful. Why, in asking ‘when’, the request is put forth: “how long until I may progress, forget this and move onwards?” Thus, that which meanders should be seen as a luminary force, bringing to light impatience, the race towards an unenvisaged goal. The goal, of course, is achieved: being defined only as progression to the next thing. Macro-experience never comes into play, nor perhaps should it. Music is… of the now? And the now is transient, ephemeral, diaphanous. Without clarity even in that instant… or especially in that instant, forming behind once again as the water subsides once a body has been removed from it.

Soundtrack/progression/value-added nothing. More ideas float, but I feel no compulsion to detail them here. Ideas, like music, may continue to exist in the mind. Some will grate, others will linger, still others will drift away when you most desire their company: and triumph against the reticent ones will occasionally come, though not always. Some things are meant to float in the mind, around the consciousness. Uncalled, yet without any desire to push them away once experienced — Evidenced here, you will observe, as I drift from speaking in the first person to the disconnected murmurings of consciousness, and then return once again to analysis. Which, it should be said, is not anathema to music… another way in which it is a great accomplice of the idea. Both are art.

Asterisk

Actually got an Asterisk server functioning today at work. It’s pretty straightforward when all the packages are there… Asterisk@Home goes some way to doing all that for you. For those fervently partial to any particular distribution — or morally/ethically opposed to CentOS’s packaging tactics… I can see why people may be, but don’t have those reservations myself –, let your fury be abated. There is a plain tar.gz file that has a script and some other stuff that basically means you can install it on whatever platform you like, dependencies aside.

Dependencies, incidentally, were the main reason it didn’t get installed on a Debian system as originally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repository seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were missing packages and packages in the database but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get something to install from CPAN because of lower-level dependencies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started downloading Asterisk@Home. That was yesterday. I cancelled the download because Pacific was being too slow for my liking (Telstra Cable has spoilt me with downstream), and this morning before heading in I downloaded the distribution from Sourceforge in about 10 minutes. Bad checksum. Downloaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to download at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burning CDs etc, and had a functional system calling between PCs and with voicemail, reception message, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a seminal moment in my personal VoIP-using history, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged version!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Australia, install the OpenVoice IVR prompts and recordings. It’s much better than listening to that American voice which was driving us nuts even whilst testing :P Having said that, you may need to restart the server when changing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voicemail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Australian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflexion (falling “one” or neutral “one” instead of rising “one”), but I didn’t think they had particularly concerned themselves with that when writing most PBX/voicemail systems… could be wrong. Anyway redialing the voicemail extension a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Asterisk box, to borrow a term (Hi Steve :P), is running with 256MB of RAM — but is sitting perilously close to swap whilst running. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 running in the background for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seriously, who’d use that on a telephony server? If you need to backup voicemail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a handful of other crap. Anyway, it’s probably going to get more memory before it moves into production use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Anyone seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Asterisk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need kernel recompilation for chan_capi stuff… and recompiling kernels has never struck me as particularly fun. (The few times I have tried, bootloaders have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

Carols DVD

I just finished watching the DVD we recorded and have to say I’m actually pretty happy with it. Which is saying something, because I’d never used a vision mixer for a whole production before, even if I had a pretty good idea how they worked from incidental usage/exposure. Thanks God! Sound is a bit patchy, but Audio were recording and I’m gonna see if I can patch things up a bit (a lot) from that version, and then I’ll probably make use of Google Video once more (because Ourmedia sucks) to share it with the world.

Expect that up (there’ll be two versions for the bandwidth-challenged/indifferent, don’t worry) in the next day or two, along with a handful of photos of gear and other geeky miscellany.

Carols at Matthias

Matthias carols title graphic

Come along to St Matthias tonight at 5pm for a free BBQ followed by Carols from 6pm to celebrate what Christmas is all about!

Map: How to get there

If you’re coming and are thoroughly lost or whatever, gimme a call on 0425 808 469 and we’ll send out a search party or something :P

UAI

85.65

It’ll do.