On Thursday, October 16, 2014 4:01:29 AM UTC-4, AndyW wrote:
On 15/10/2014 19:29, Lostgallifreyan wrote:

Lostgallifreyan wrote in

:



Perhaps we need some organic chemists to compete,

or a writer of a German operating manual...





Belay those. No-one beats the Welsh!

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychyrndrobwllantysiliogog ogoch

I pulled that from memory, I kid you not, but I won't vouch for flawless

spelling. There might be whole syllab;les missing...



The New Zealanders do with a hill called

"Taumata�whakatangihanga�koauau�o�tamateaï ¿½turi�pukakapiki�maunga�horo�nuku�pokai �whenua�kitanatahu"



"The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of

mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute

to his loved one".



... and no it's not from memory, I had to google it to get it correct.



Andy

Wow, that's longer(?) than Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, in Webster MA.

On 16/10/2014 16:33, n1ald wrote:

Wow, that's longer(?) than Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, in Webster MA.

It's like someone asked the name of the lake and wrote down anything he
heard next... sounds like instead of replying he just tried to start up
an old outboard.

n1ald wrote in
:

Wow, that's longer(?) than Lake
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, in Webster MA.


Not bad. The welsh one beats it too though. (I checked my version, it
lacked only one W and two L's.. Should be 58 there.)

Oregonian Haruspex wrote:

snip

Writing software is generally one of the most frightfully boring tasks
that one can possibly do. I will say, though, that since I finally
bought Mathematica I am having more fun than I have in years with
software. This is mainly because it's easy to get from point A to
point B without screwing about with finding libraries, accounting for
memory allocation, and all the crap that traditional software
development entails.

I would say that it highly depends on what the code is for and does.

The code for the Philae lander comes immediately to mind.

--
Jim Pennino

On 2014-10-16 07:08:04 +0000, Lostgallifreyan said:

Oregonian Haruspex wrote in
:

Writing software is generally one of the most frightfully boring tasks
that one can possibly do.

True, but the payoff is amazing at times. I'm coding a phase modulation
synthesiser based on Yamaha's DX7, with months full on, then slightly less
months full-off, as the only way to get free of it, and to come back at it
and see it as another person would, because I work entirely alone. Now, it si
tough, for sure, never mind 'Doctor's hours', try 'Edison's hours', sometimes
missing out whole days and nights of rest to see somethign through. Nothing
has ever imposed discipline on me like my want to make this happen, I taught
myself more than a childhood of schooling, by magnitudes, not multiples.

Now, the payoff... WHen I got past basic principles of audio and MIDI on a
PC, logarithms and bitshifts and lookup tables foe speed, etc, designed my
own realtime interpolator for MIDI data and got the pitch control engine
taking linear signals for log domain calculations, the response of pitch over
ten octaves is swift and clean, NO digital zipper noise whatsoever despite a
mere 7 bits avalaible to direct the sweep, regardless of speed. MIDI is
usually scorned for failure to acheive this, but I did it, and you'd be hard
pressed to find a commercially available synthesier that can do this. I have
a good 'analog' simulation, and a realtime variable non-linear compression
and expansion method capable of extremely realisting imitations of horn and
string sounds. This instrument has polyphony and multitimbrality enough to
allow composition for a small symphony orchestra.

It's too off-topic for me to go on here any further, but I hope this is
enough to convey the reality: that writing software, while almost
insufferably tedious at times, can lead to long moments of exhilaration like
orbital flight, it feels like achieving the building of a space shuttle in a
back yard. To be able to play a moderately realistic piano, knowing that
every part of its existence except the host machine and the coding language
used, is beyond parallel, at least for me. I think if Bach or Beethoven had
been sent a time machine with a message to the effect that they could have
had this, they'd have got in and things might have been very diferent for
music. On the other hand, it is because of what they did do that this is
possible at all...

I appreciate the sentiment and I have in fact been excited about
writing software. I am enjoying myself tremendously now, though with
Mathematica the goal isn't exactly to create self-contained
applications, but is more akin with exploration. I am an amateur
musician myself and I really enjoy tinkering with MIDI. To my ear the
zipper noise as you change envelopes and whatnot is quite
synth-dependent. Anyway good luck and have fun!

Oregonian Haruspex wrote in
:

To my ear the
zipper noise as you change envelopes and whatnot is quite
synth-dependent.

True, some are ok with it. Kurzweil for example. There's usually a payoff
though, a sluggishness in response that can be treacly or even intolerable if
wanting the kind of response to glide a violinist wants. Mine's not perfect
either, but I got a better compromise than anything I'd heard in anything I'd
owned since 1983 when I first got one. (DX7). I just tried to eliminate
every vice that ever irked me in an instrument, note stealing in voice
allocation, for example... it has to happen, but making it sound less
conspicuous turned out to be a demanding puzzle to solve efficiently.
Likewise the non-linear slopes in just about everything, that is at the core
of why a DX7 is inherently 'natural' when so many others are not. That is fun
though, very interesting discoveries there..