Communication is the process of attempting to convey information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality.

There are the first two sentences about the subject from the Wikipedia article on Communication. The article goes on to say that communication can even take place between earthworms and fungi. One would therefore think it ought to be a piece of cake for human beings.

I prefer the first sentence, especially the word attempting. The drawing above shows the same Tree leaving the emitter and arriving in the sender’s mind. Copy, paste. Sometimes that works at the level of approximation we need. “Pass the salt, please.”

Often the communication remains an attempt that does not quite make it, or does not even sort of make it. Such as when people have something that bears discussion, but is not quickly reduceable to something mechanical like passing the salt.

Part of the trouble arises during codifying. The Greeks developed the field of rhetoric to address the problem of codifying into words. Another part of the trouble happens during the sending phase. You can easily handle a pass the salt request, but listening to me especially if my codifying leaves something to be desired as I communicate something more meaningful… well, unless you really care about me, you no doubt have better things to do. Finally you may find decodifying a pain as well. Like with this blog entry. What the heck is Mark driving at?

Does it matter? Will it end like Lem’s Fiasco story? Or simply like 4-year-olds who play alongside each other without playing together?

Perhaps the first musicians sought to communicate the amorphous contents of their psyches, but could not do so in words.

My last entry does not make sense directly. I forgot to say the entry hinges upon the unipolar measurement system of a depressed mind, where greatness lies off the scale, a scale starting at zero and running to negative infinity. Greatness is positive, hence not possible by definition. How, therefore, can depression fuel greatness?

Even in a healthy mind the conversion of thoughts to words can end up disappointing. Maeterlinck seemed to say that when he wrote the paragraph quoted at the outset of Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, where the treasures found deep under water turn out to be worthless shards when brought to the surface.

I gave up on a book of essays by George Steiner a couple of years ago, putting the book down right as he suggested thought without words is not really thought. Steiner has a knack for bringing thoughts to words. His polyglot active vocabulary goes beyond what most of us can recognize without a dictionary. He manipulates shades of meaning like Monet manipulated colors of paint.

At the time I told myself I was dropping the book because of an allergic reaction to the claim of no thought without words. No doubt I felt jealous, but would not admit my jealousy to myself. No thought without words looks similar to no science without logic. Science could not proceed without scientists experiencing emotion, inspiration, boredom, confusion. Yet without logic science would lose its reproducibility. The shards would be worthless when brought to the surface.

Do I understand? Babel, Plato’s cave, struggle with words… struggle with anything mechanical, including a guitar: Sunday Afternoon Blues.

In August I read Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk. Shenk investigated Abraham Lincoln’s life. Shenk found Lincoln lived with depression since sometime in his 20s until he got shot.

Wikipedia defines, “Clinical depression which is marked by symptoms that last two weeks or more and are so severe that they interfere with daily living.” Melancholy: “Great sadness or depression; gloom; black bile; Affected with great sadness or depression.”

I figured maybe the book would hold some of the keys of how Lincoln coped. Lincoln seems to have learned to deal with his melancholy. Lincoln used everything from friendship to Laudanum to humor to get through life, though an unmistakeable portion of his time was spent ill. Nevertheless he held down some difficult jobs, including President of the US during the Civil War.

Mom later said it seemed to her Lincoln wound up in his position because he stood in the middle of the road, whereas others around him were seen as too politically extreme. At that point Lincoln started to appear more like a character combining the subheroics of Philip K. Dick protagonist with bad luck out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Then I read Les particules élémentaires by Michel Houellebecq. To what extent did depression fuel Lincoln’s greatness? Maybe I should read Shenk’s book again. (Shenk’s short answer to the question lies at the bottom of http://www.lincolnsmelancholy.com/feat_back_1.html.)

Telecommunications makes those of us in software feel like we speak mostly plain language. Perhaps medicine, finance, or the military manages to have even more.

The above screenshot is from the TeleManagement Forum section of the Operations Support Systems article at Wikipedia. Basically it’s not possible to get an introduction to the topic until you have absorbed a bunch of jargon about how the industry works.

Today for the second Friday I went swimming instead of running.

Matt gave me some exercises to try so I can learn to crawl. The first one is to hold an arm out with the other arm at the waist, and just propel by kicking. This exercise helps me to learn to lean on one side, which is essential to moving forward effectively. Yet had there been any snails in the pool, they would have been angrily passing me while I blocked the lane. You put your head along your arm breathing out in the water, then roll your head to the side to breathe. Not only am I slow, but also my legs tend to sink. Feet left, head right, I’m like / in the water, when I should be like –.

The second exercise is the same as the first, except you take two strokes with the arm that would be at your waist. This way I move a bit faster. The problem is that I also inhale enough water to start drowning after about 15 meters.

At least it cannot get much worse.

Well, it seems that a few String.replaceAll() method calls to replace reserved and unsafe characters in the links fixed most of my problems. Feels like a bad hack, though, since I am sure to have missed a few.

I have tested on Mac, Solaris, Windows so far with Chrome, Firefox, IE7, Safari.

Some files seem to hang, at least in Chrome, with YMP. Not sure what’s going on there. QuickTime manages to play the files that hang in YMP.

Update: I think I have more or less fixed the first two problems from Yahoo! JavaScript Media Player, part 2. The third, regarding what to do with non .mp3 audio files, remains a real problem, however. YMP does not seem to handle .m4a or .wma files for example.

Today I wasted some time writing a Java utility to populate my uploaded .mp3 audio collection with HTML pages letting me use Yahoo! Media Player. The songs are organized on disk as <Collection>/<Author>/<Album>/*.mp3.

If you want the code we can share. I’m still basking in the glow from SFD yesterday.

There are at least three bugs I’ve noticed in the last 5 minutes of using the results online:

1. Songs with special characters in the names are not handled properly. For example, Mark Knopfler’s song Rüdiger does not play (or download, despite my attempt to make the links potable to a browser) in Safari at least.
2. The links in the pages on the <Collection> and <Author> levels are not necessarily sorted.
3. The program still adds directories for stuff not encoded as .mp3s.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Yahoo! Media Player screenshot

Yahoo! bundled some JavaScript into a Media Player. Thanks. That was easier than creating a JavaScript thing to play mp3s myself.

The nice thing about the Yahoo! Media Player compared to the Delicious one is that it does it’s own playlist of all the songs in the page. So if you do not care that your playlist comes out in automatic sort order, you can just chuck a .cgi in the directory to build the HTML page. Here is an example that you can see in action at http://mcraig.org/lltt/:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo
echo "<html>"
echo "<head>"
echo "<title>LLTT songs in progress</title>"
echo '<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script>'
echo "</head>"
echo "<body>"
echo "<h3>LLTT songs in progress</h3>"
for song in *.mp3
do
        anchor=`echo $song | sed -e "s/^/<a href=\"/" | sed -e "s/$/\">/"`
        echo $anchor $song "</a><br />"
done
echo "</body>"
echo "</html>"
echo

Not that you would actually want to listen to any of my stuff. But one might use this thing to store one’s music on the web. Behind password protection, of course, to avoid posting it to someone other than oneself.

Last week it rained heavily when I was out running up to Rochasson from work. My shoes were too soaked to dry in 2 days inside. They stank wretchedly. So I took the laces out and washed them in the machine this weekend. So far so good.

Monday noon I laced my shoes for a run. I was not in a great mood anyway, and the laces were too short (as always)! I thought, “Why skimp on shoelace length? Is ASICS so focused on their margin that they cannot afford to put full length laces in their shoes?”

But as I got up to run it slowly occurred to me that I have an unusual way of lacing my shoes. Notice in the above image that there seems to be an extra eyelet.

An athlete named Seb explained to me that runner who need as much stability as possible (most normal humans?) should run the lace first through that eyelet, then through the second-to-last eyelet, creating a loop. Then run each end of the lace through the loop on the opposite side. Finally tie the shoe.

If you do that, you really could use some extra shoelace. I can barely tie my running shoes. Yet I do not have wide feet. I don’t know what people with wide feet do.

If you run more than 20 miles per week, you will notice the difference tying your shoes the right way though. When you start tying your shoes properly you will wonder what you were doing running around before with your shoes practically untied.

ASICS and other shoe sellers engineered, however, for the common case. The common case is probably people running a few miles a week. Or even buying running shoes to loaf around in. If the laces were long enough for me, all those people would be wondering why they have to tie double knots and keep stepping on the ends of their shoelaces.

If software were running shoes, much of it would come not only with extra long laces but also with features like holes cut around the toe box to relieve pressure, odd orthopedic inserts that belong to someone else’s foot, and standard cushioning designed for people who change shoes every 4 months or 1000 miles, which ever comes first.

Today I started recording a song with mostly 4/4 but some measures of 3/4. I had not been too surprised to find no drum loops in 7/8. But GarageBand does not come with any drum loops in 3/4, either.

That I find disappointing, since even a loop that does not quite fit sounds better than me trying to play MIDI drums with the keyboard. Of course I could shell out for more drum loops somewhere on the Internet. Hmm.

Maybe I need to think about learning to put a drum part together.