Musicbrainz on Freebsd: postgresql-unaccent

Submitted by andrew.hankinson on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 13:54

If you’re installing Musicbrainz on FreeBSD and are getting an error:

"Makefile", line 9: Could not find 
make: fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue

Run GNU Make instead of BSD Make; e.g. “gmake” instead of “make”

Compiling libunac-1.8.0 on FreeBSD

Submitted by andrew.hankinson on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 13:36

If you’re having a problem finding iconv on FreeBSD when trying to install libunac:

  1. Make sure you have GNU libiconv installed from the ports collection.
  2. Run the configure script with the following linker argument
sudo ./configure LDFLAGS="/usr/local/lib/libiconv.so -R/usr/local/lib"

Consistency vs. Adaptability

In a recent lecture on Ubiquitous Computing, the lecturer talked about the foreseen future of ubiquitous computing. One of the primary tenets of this movement is that devices will be able to communicate to each other independent of human input, and essentially make decisions together based on observations of the human environment.

Much Ado about Time

In my readings on Human-Computer Interaction, the emphasis is usually placed on promoting time-to-accomplish efficiency measurements. This is not surprising, as these sorts of metrics are useful for cross-comparison of systems, and whether or not one system is better than another.

A Niche?

There are currently a few ways to search for printed music. The first involves learning a text-based representation of music, and using that to query a database of samples, also encoded in a text-based representation. Themefinder is a good example of this.

The second way is to have a piano keyboard, either real or virtual, and ‘play’ in a query using music notation. Typically, this is then converted to a text-based representation (XML or other), and used as a query against a database.

It's how you look at it

Recently I’ve found myself fascinated with what I’ll call the “what-if” world. This fascination is largely borne of two underlying thoughts:

  1. What if we could look at our environments outside of how we now know it, and
  2. What if we could figure out the solutions to major problems, just by looking at something differently

Code

I’ve been coding for three days straight. I think my coding chops are getting to a place where I can finally say that I know what I am doing.

And so begins day four.

Another shot at this

Ok; I’m having another go at this. I’m trying for the retro look, and I thought I’d start practicing what I preach, in terms of font choices.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

I’ve been wanting to get this site back up and running for a while. According to my own logic, this of course means that I should do it in the middle of term, when I have lots of work to do otherwise. But hey, everyone needs a distraction now and then.

I’m going to try to keep the theming and layout work to a minimum. Black on white, with a dash of colour courtesy of my good friend Jackie (thanks Jax!)