gnome neoengine photos
Sun, 15 Jul 2007

Moving my blog..

I'm moving my blog over to http://blogs.gnome.org/bratsche/. I will stop using this one.  

Fri, 27 Apr 2007

Rostropovich

The New York Times is reporting the loss of Mstislav Rostropovich, one of the great musicians of the past century. He's one of the greatest cellists of all time and will be missed.  

Tue, 17 Apr 2007

Console

I've been using Windows a lot more since I went to work at Medsphere, and the one thing that bothers me most frequently is the lack of a very useful terminal. I've got the Cygwin rxvt terminal installed, and it's been pretty good except that I sometimes have like three or four of them open and Windows doesn't have virtual desktops like I have on Linux, so it's a pain to find the terminal I want. But now I ran across this open source terminal app called Console. It supports tabs and works with any shell program, like the default crappy Microsoft shell or with Cygwin's bash. It also lets you customize the colors and the opacity of the window, which is not as big of a deal but possibly still of interest.  

Martinu Rhapsody-Concerto

Last week we played the Martinu Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra, and our principal violist Ute Miller played the solo part. She's always a great musician, and so of course she was fantastic. I wasn't very familiar with this piece before, but now I'm sort of unsure about it. It's really beautiful, but the ending of the piece is very strange and just doesn't make sense to me. There's a snare drum that plays with the viola solo and it sounds really out of place. The rest of the orchestra is holding some long chord, I think an F chord or something, and then for some reason we play a beat of repeated 32nd notes on that chord. It's just weird and out of place to my ears.  

mkestner++

So Mike Kestner was awesome enough to fix gtk# bug #79993 the other day. Everyone at Medsphere is so excited!  

Mon, 26 Mar 2007

Viola concertos

Before I went to El Paso I had the opportunity to hear Paul Silverthorne, principal violist of London Symphony Orchestra, play the Walton viola concerto here. It was a really fantastic performance, and I feel like I understand the concerto better than before. It's still not my favorite viola concerto, but I do have a new appreciation for it.

I just learned today that Roberto Diaz is coming back here to play the Bartok viola concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony in October. I can't wait!  

El Paso

I went to El Paso last week to see Lesley and to play in the orchestra there. She's running the El Paso Youth Orchestras along with Ben Loeb, a conductor we went to school with in Baltimore. He is also the associate conductor for the El Paso Symphony, and they had a side-by-side of the symphony and the youth orchestra together with Ben conducting. The symphony played The Three Cornered Hat suite by Manuel de Falla, the flute concerto by Jacques Ibert, Ravel's La Valse, then the youth orchestra played Marquez's Danzon No. 2, and then the symphony and youth orchestra did Bernstein's West Side Story symphonic dances together.

Ben and Lesley have been working really hard with the youth orchestras and the symphony, and it sounds like things are going really well there.

Me and Lesley from this morning.

Photo of Ben and his wife that I took last night when we went out for Italian food.  

Wed, 14 Mar 2007

Verdi Quartet

I've been listening to my awesome new CD of the Hagen Quartett (my favorite string quartet these days) playing the Verdi String Quartet. It's a fantastic recording, I'm glad to have found it. It was discovered on Amazon, being sold by some seller in Germany.. however, that seller wouldn't ship the disc outside of Germany! But Mirco Müller was kind enough to let me send it to him and he shipped it to me. Hagen Quartett disc

Thanks Mirco!  

Sat, 03 Mar 2007

Icky Thump

Very cool news from the White Stripes today. They've finished recording and mixing their sixth album, which will be called "Icky Thump". Okay, whatever. But I'm excited because the White Stripes are completely awesome. More info about the album.. some of the songs are:

  • Catch Hell Blues
  • Little Cream Soda
  • Monkeys Have It Easy (discarded)
  • Rag and Bone
  • Clicky Bump (retitled into something pleasant)
  • Blue Orchid (relocated to previous album)
  • You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)
 

Tue, 27 Feb 2007

Medsphere OpenVista CIS Open Source

Yeah, I know Pete and Brad have already posted about it, and both of them have said more about it than I really could, but I want to post anyway! The place I work, Medsphere, has released the source for the OpenVista CIS client. It's very exciting for me to be a part of this project and team, and it's great to get to work on open source software. I've had the privilege of getting to work with really awesome hackers (Anthony, Bailey, Brad, Cesar, Jon, and Pete), getting to work with Mono and gtk#, and being able to do some hacking on GTK+ itself (next release should have some noticeable improvements for Win32!). Of course, as much as I've been learning and hacking GTK-Win32 internals, I would love to see all the hospitals using this software use it on Linux. :)

As Pete already mentioned, Medsphere is interested in hiring more gtk# hackers. As a fairly new person there, I think it's a great place to work and I think everyone there is really awesome. If you're interested in working somewhere in a Gnome/GTK/Mono type environment, email Pete or Brad.  

Wed, 21 Feb 2007

Visiting California

I went out to California last week for work. We had a good time hacking, watching movies, eating, and hearing music. Cesar, Anthony, Amber (Anthony's girlfriend), and I all went to hear LA Phil play on Thursday. They played Brahms 3 and Brahms 1, which seemed like a little bit of a strange concert.. but it was really good. Whoever was sitting principal viola was playing on an Iizuka viola like mine, which was sort of cool. Walt Disney Concert Hall was fantastic. On Tuesday we went to see The Departed at the dollar theater. Very cool movie.

Pete and Cesar hacking  

Fri, 09 Feb 2007

Philip's recital

On Wednesday I went to the university to hear a cello recital by Philip von Mahltzahn, who was a friend of mine back in high school when we played in a string trio together. It was a cool recital, with a Boccherini sonata, George Crumb sonata, sonata by György Ligeti, Astor Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango, and what cellist could do a recital without a Bach suite.. so Philip did the third one. It was cool to meet him again after the recital and say "hi". Philip plays in the Degas Quartet now. I hope I get a chance to hear them sometime.  

Gerry and Shannon

I saw Gerry and Shannon the other day, and had a nice visit with them. They have a new dog now, Louie. Very cute dog. We talked about a lot of interesting things, went out for pizza, watched some rock DVDs. It was very fun. I wish I could see them more often.  

Mon, 15 Jan 2007

GTK is certified clean of adware/spyware!

Yes, I'm sure to everyone out there this is the great news you were waiting on the edge of your seat for the past few years. GTK is finally certified free of adware/spyware by Softpedia!

Tim Janik received an email from them, which he kindly posted to gtk-devel-list for us all to enjoy. 

Your product "GTK+ 2.10.7 Rev A" has been tested by the Softpedia labs
and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.



We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to
keep this high standards in the future.

To assure our visitors that "GTK+ 2.10.7 Rev A" is clean, we have
granted it with the "100% FREE" Softpedia award. Moreover, to let your
users know about this certification, you may display this award on your
website, on software boxes or inside your product.

 

Tue, 02 Jan 2007

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a fun and safe New Year! I went over to Valerie's house and hung out with people from Dallas Symphony and other friends of theirs. It was fun, and I got to taste many delicious wines. Pam's son was playing Destroy All Humans! on Ralph's PS2. It's pretty amusing, but when Pam saw that it involved anal probes she took it away and made him switch games. :)  

Sun, 31 Dec 2006

Megan

I went over to Megan's parents' house tonight to visit for a small wedding reception. I got a call from Megan on Thursday telling me that she was getting married on Friday, which was kind of a surprise since she had never even mentioned that she was dating anyone before. But it turned out she is pregnant, so I guess it sort of makes sense. So I went over today and hung out for a bit and met her new husband, Scott. He seems like a good guy. He works as a web designer somewhere in Dallas, so we chatted briefly about that kind of stuff.  

Sat, 30 Dec 2006

New Year

Everyone have a happy and safe New Years Eve this weekend! I'm going over to Ralph and Valerie's house that night. Should be a fun time. Maybe next month I will finally get around to reading Perilous Power by Noam Chomsky. I bought it back in November, but the copyright date in the front of it marked as 2007 for some reason so I'll use that as my excuse for having not read it yet. :)  

Chamber music

As always, I'm looking forward to starting some new chamber music soon. I ordered a copy of the Piston duo for viola and cello to play with Amirosh and a copy of Mozart duos K423 and K424 for violin and viola to play with Jason. I just found out last night that Jason just came back from his long gig in Florida, but he's going to Colorado in a few days to play a couple concerts. So hopefully by the time he gets back I'll have the Mozart duos. Also, I am itching really badly to start a new Beethoven quartet.  

Hacking

I've been trying to do some Win32-related hacking in GTK. I got a couple theme patches for notebook rendering approved, and I've got a patch up for review that fixes an issue with windows not receiving enough expose events when they're being resized. Now I'm trying to understand and fix some issues related to modality and transience of windows. That's a pretty difficult bug though. Somehow I've managed to get Windows XP to have multiple titlebars highlighted as though the windows are focused, although only one of them is focused in the taskbar. I hate Windows.

I've also been fooling around with Ruby a little bit, and I installed Rails yesterday. I was initially deceived by its inclusion in Ubuntu's apt repository. Apparently if you want to use Rails on Linux, it's easier to just install RubyGems and install Rails and its dependencies through gem. The instructions on the RubyGems site was a little bit inaccurate for installation to your home directory, though. You need to make some environment variable adjustments: 

export GEM_HOME=$PREFIX/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
export RUBYLIB=$PREFIX/lib/ruby:$PREFIX/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8

There are some problems with using the version of Rails that's included in Ubuntu's apt. Like missing very important features, like ActiveRecord and Initializer.  

Thu, 21 Dec 2006

Benefit Recital

Last night I played in a benefit recital for Valentina Mengjesi, an Albanian woman who lives around here and who has breast cancer but not much money to pay for the medical expenses. I have never met her, but she is a friend of some friends of mine, Amela Koci (who is a very close friend) and Tonda Sykes.

The concert went well. It consisted of the Corelli Christmas Concerto, Beethoven Op. 18/6 string quartet in B-flat, Vaughan Williams Rhosymedre, Mozart Horn Quintet K.407, and Saent-Saens Romance in F. Brian Brown played horn, Arthur Busby and Amela Koci played violins, Paul Palmer and I played viola, and Amirosh Issa was the cellist. At the end Amela's husband Gjergji joined Brian for a horn duo, but I forgot the name of the composer.  

Raconteurs CDs

So, as I last reported I had ordered some live CDs of the Raconteurs from some of their live shows in the UK but the package was open and empty when it arrived. So I talked to the company, Concert Live, about it and they were kind enough to send me a replacement set. I just received that today, and I'm very happy.  

Mon, 04 Dec 2006

Music and stuff

I got a DVD a couple weeks ago of Alexander Markov performing the Paganini 24 caprices for solo violin. I saw this years ago on a bootleg VHS when I was at Peabody, and I blogged about it on Advogato. Apparently there were a number of people who wanted to see it, because I had four or five different people email me since that time asking me how to get the video. Some offered to pay me to make them a copy of the bootleg of the video, but it wasn't mine.

I watched the whole thing, and it's the same one that I saw back then. It's sort of cheesily done, and it looks like the director/editor got some video editing software and wanted to try all the goofy effects out. It's like when you open GIMP for the first time and you think it's a good idea to try to use all the pre-built effects or something. So, the DVD is pretty funny to watch because it's so bad. But Markov's playing is very good, and it's nice to see (when you can actually see.. there's a whole section where they thought it would be a good idea to just shoot his shadow) and hear.

I got my Aluminium CD in the mail. It's sort of an orchestral arrangement (supposedly avant garde, not not really in my opinion) of White Stripes music, which sounds sort of dumb but ended up working pretty well. At least, better than any other orchestral version of rock music I've ever heard. I think they tend to have more tunes than the bands that I have previously heard orchestral arrangements of.

I also ordered a set of CDs of live concerts of The Raconteurs from their UK shows, and I was really looking forward to getting those. Well, it turns out that the package was really poorly sealed or something because it opened up during transit and all the CDs spilled out of it and an empty package was delivered to me. I'm really sort of pissed about that. I contacted the company that sent it, hoping they'll send me another set. I feel like it is sort of their fault for not packaging it very well. I'm not really sure how else to deal with this right now, but I noticed that the shipment was insured.. although not for as much as I paid for it, so that is a little worrying.  

Wed, 15 Nov 2006

Germany Invaded

We all remember when Germany was invaded by a giant insect not too long ago. Well, it looks like this time it's Flying Spaghetti Monsters!  

Thu, 26 Oct 2006

Quartet

So, we ended up not reading Faure or Schumann or Mahler today. Instead we did the second movement of the Dvorak quartet that I don't love that much.

We're going to meet on Saturday to read through the new music instead. I can't wait! I'm very excited about it.  

Peanuts

I got this from Lesley today. Maybe this is why I'm not married yet. :)