Dreaming Dreams

Just a few tiny pics of my journey so far (had to scale them down so the upload would go faster haha):

In orange you see my Baba (monk) friend Krishnanan with his Bengali friends and the girl next door from them.

These guys are almost everywhere. In this case, they where in my view while playing tabla during one of my lessons.

While walking through the Baba camps we went past these guys. They invited us in their tent and we had some delicious chai with them.

A very spectacular event which happens every night all along the Ganga (and other holy rivers) since hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

It is called the Ganga Aarti and in this case there where thousands of people present for the ceremony.

First, I have to excuse for not posting any pictures yet. Atm I haven’t found a single cybercafe that has any descent upload and some don’t allow usb-connections and such. When I get to a proper internet connection/computer I will try and give some previews.

Now, some of you knew already that I was planning to go to Haridwar and experience some of the Kumbh Mela. For those who don’t know about this: it is the biggest religious gathering of people in the world! Feb 10 I took a bus via Dehra Dun to Haripur where I stayed with Rajesh, an Indian Astrologer and couchsurfer. With him there where another 2 Indian surfers staying, Ronita and Ajit. That night, Ajit and I went to have a look at the main site, Har ki Pauri (Step of God), where Lord Vishnu is said to have left a drop of the sacred Amrit elixer. Every twelve years, for the past hundreds (if not thousands) of years, people have been going to this place for a series of processions which last a few months. These are marked by particular bathing days where the masses come to cleanse themselves with the sacred waters of the Ganga river.

The 11th we then went again in the evening to be part of the daily Ganga Aarti, a procession where people lit small leaf-boats with flowers and incense to drift downstream. This was truelly a beautifull sight. Unfurtunately, I didn’t bring my camera, since Ajit had trouble getting in that afternoon because of his. Ofcourse there were lots of people with cameras now and we did bring a small one of which I might be able to get some pictures from.

On the 12th there was the First Royal Bath, which marks the main start for most religious people (although, as you can read on Wikipedia ™, the Kumbh starts on 14 Jan). I must say that the organization was very well done! Even though there where LOADS of people EVERYWHERE, there was never a sense of pressure or too much of a crowd. However, we didn’t go to the Har ki Pauri this time since it gets closed off during the official bath, since then all the Saddhus, babas and other saints have first attendance with their sects and groups. Instead, we went upstream at a local ashram where there was a nice gath (bathing site) and not so many people. And yes, I did went into the Ganga and have a bath! Luckilly this was a nice side-stream of the Ganga with amazingly clear water. I didn’t fully emerge into the water, because I didn’t want to wet my dreads but it was actually very nice and refreshing (read: damn cold!).

The next day a friend of Rajesh that lives in Berlin came with his family to spend the afternoon. Soumitra is a professional tabla player and he showed his skill together with a local harmonium player and singer for a private concert in Rajesh his living room. I also had the chance of trying out these wonderfull instruments. After this the family and I took an auto/taxi to nearby Rishikesh where I am currently staying at an ashram.

I am still debating if I want to stay in Rishikesh much longer and maybe take up some music and/or yoga lessons. During my morning breakfast I had a talk with a Belgian fellow and long time Indian traveller that my plans of going south might not be such a good idea because of the weather. It seems there is going to be some blazing heat coming in the following months so maybe it’s a better idea to stay in the northern region and explore the south on some other journey. Another problem is my visa. Recently, the Indian government has changed some visa laws that mandate that all double/multiple entry visa holders must stay out of the country for at least 2 months when they leave. I was planning on going to Nepal for a few weeks, up to a month. But 2 months out of my 4.5 month trip seems way too much really. I will contact the Dutch Embassy when I get back to Delhi and see what they recommend, because this is very inconvenient.

Until the next stop! (and possibly a better connection with some pictures -_-)

Lately I’ve been playing a lot more with audio. Here a list of the applications I’ve been using:

• JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit) - Low Latency Audio Server (read: connect audio apps to each other)
• Ardour - most complete DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) I’ve ever seen anywhere, it’s the center of all my productions.
• Hydrogen - drum-sequencing. Still has some quirks, but I’m getting the hang of it.
• Patchage - nice frontend for JACK to hook everything audio up to each other (mostly for the line-in and hydrogens outputs into ardour).
• Xjadeo - I’m making a score for a video of a friend. This enables me to sync my audio to his video.

Maybe I’ll post some schematics how I exactly use all this later on. I will also be playing with JAMin for mastering, which will be an art in itself.

I’m also still trying to figure out how to work with an RT-kernel and what the main advantages are when doing this. Any tips are greatly appreciated!

And another awesome collaboration between Puik. and Dyne.org!

This weekend we are working on an interactive installation for the yearly Museum N8 festival at the Dutch Institute for Media Art (NIMK).

There will be an 8bit/acid themed VJ set that can be interfaced with 3 gamepad-controllers including force-feedback! All implemented through javascript using the FreeJ software.

See n8.nl for more info.

Very cool stuff. We are rounding up the scripting now and will setup the installation this afternoon.

I barely made it, but finally it’s done \o/

You are looking at a new Molecular Scientist. Bsc

The past two weekends have been magnificently nerdy again. Both weekends I was visiting Jaromil of Dyne.org and Rastasoft in Amsterdam.

The first weekend (2, 3, 4 October) there was TCPC (Troppo Cafe’ Poco Cerbello)

Every year for the past 9 years a bunch of Italians come together somewhere in Sicily for a weekend of drinking coffee and nerding (hence the name: Too Much Coffee Too Less Brain). Since Italy is much too far to go to for one weekend (imho) we had our own hub in Amsterdam to nerd around.

We spend most of the time there organizing their hack-lab, which was a mess and was used by various residents as storage. After we where done there was much more work-space, a few extra desks to work at and of course network.

Another activity for me was the introduction to language translation in gui applications. The major focus of this TCPC was one of Dyne.orgs finest pieces of software: MuSE and most coders where doing a spree on it’s development. Me on the other hand, a complete and utter noob with coding, could hardly help with this. But the dutch translation for MuSE was lacking, so I started to work on that as my contribution to the project, which meant playing around with poedit and pulling my best dutch language skills out of my head. For more info see http://dyne.org/tcpc/

The second weekend (8,9,10) I went with buZz for some more hackery at Jaro’s place. Actually, we where helping out with the second Celluloid Remix FreeJ-workshop on Saturday, which was held at De Balie, right at the Leidseplein, in the center of Amsterdam’s party district. There where some presentations on the Celluloid Remix concept and FreeJ specific and it’s new OSX client.

I personally got started on revamping the beginners tutorial for FreeJ. Hopefully soon ready for it’s 1.0 release!

So all in all these have been relatively productive weeks, nerd-wise. Now all I need is to finish my bachelors …

Signing off from the weekly NerdNight at cafe The Draak, dreamer

Our beloved company recently showed concerns about Google’s new Chrome Frame plugin for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. This plugin enables the use of HTML5 for the widely used browser, which in turn enables users to make use of new web-technologies such as Google Wave and others that use the new standard.

Microsoft highly objects to this plugin, because according to them it undermines the integrity of the browser and supposes it features new security risks.

Of course this plugin is not enabled automatically and it needs a special tag in the website featured to be activated. [more]

But, as some may remember, Microsoft has the same dirty (probably even dirtier) tricks up it’s sleeve to “cripple” someone else’s product.

Using Windows Update they install a plugin for Firefox which enables some extra .NET functionality. The big difference is: the plugin of Google needs to be installed manually; while the one from MS is included in this update and can’t even be removed from within the browser! [more]

So please Microsoft, stop being such a hypocrite.
(not like this blogpost will change anything..)

So, it has been quite a while since my last post, which was back at HAR2009. Since then I have lost and retrieved the password of this blog, but also neglected to post anything at all because I had too much other stuff on my head (among others, finishing my Bachelors, which I’m still working on).

Right now I’m sitting at the 2nd of weekly “nerd nights” we are having in one of the local pubs here in Wageningen. This concept was conceived by loupgaroublond and right now the nights consists mostly of drinking beer and sitting behind our laptops: GREAT FUN!

Today I’ve been mostly trying to get my first package build (Flowcanvas, one of the dependencies for Patchage, which I really want to see in yum). This made me run into a number of road-bumps. Which is OK, since making mistakes only helps the learning process.

Myx0r made princess-cupcakes for us today. They where much too sweet, but we are nerds, so we like sweet stuff.

Hopefully she will surprise us next week with some other sweet bakery-stuff \o/

So, today me and Yaakov (loupgaroublond) had another meeting on what to bring and how to bring it.

We are definitely going to bring 2 party-tents to set up a barcamp one of the days and to have a general space for us and some CentOS people to maybe do a presentation/workshop or two.

I got a projector from buZz, which has some serious issues. It seems to have it’s own ideas on when to turn on and function properly, so tomorrow I’ll have to do a stress-test in the kitchen (aka, watch a movie with my housemates ).

We still need to figure out how to get tables and chairs set up at our camp, but we have some contacts among the dyne.org people, so it will probably work out in the end. (and else we’ll just sit on the ground if we have to)

Our village will be a giant mesh of other smaller villages. Most of them focussed around playing with multimedia in the areas of vision (FreeJ), sound (DJing) and other cool stuff like lighting. So if anyone else is coming to HAR, be sure to meet up with us!

You can find more information on the HAR wiki: https://wiki.har2009.org/page/Village:Dyne.org