Performance at Wiregrass Shops - January 19, 2013 (Videos)
Ory's Creole Trombone

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

Battle Hymn of the Republic

St. James's Infirmary

South

Amazing Grace

Posted by Tim Jones at 21:02 2013-01-19 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)


Merry TUBA-Christmas to you, too! (General)

I just had myself a whale of a great night in Zephyrhills, Florida (according to my wife, our local version of Mayberry (from the Andy Griffith Show). Tonight, Captain John Wheeler organized the 3rd successful TubaChristmas in that charming gem of a town (in Clock Square), and I had the great fortune to be able to participate with 22 other Tuba players (my idea of "heavy metal"). Afterwards, my family and I walked the downtown streets, which, although closed, were still wonderful due to the elaborate old-time display windows with animated figure and falling (fake) snow.

I got to meet some cool musicians I hadn't met before, some that I hadn't seen in a few years (like Mary Harvey from Wesley Chapel HS who graciously stepped in our as conductor at the very last moment). A new friend of mine, Glenn Weatherley, who I am playing with in a new brass quintet, also came and played. I am proud to say that I got my father, Jack Jones to dust off his tuba skills and make a respectable showing too! Finally, I got to answer some questions about the Sunshine Brass (mostly to prospective new players). Capt. John took a picture that I will post here in a day or two when it arrives.

Really special nights like this remind me how lucky we are to be alive, healthy, employed and with friends and family. Sometimes all the bad news can cloud that up, but remember, we're all better than that. Chin up!


Posted by Tim Jones at 16:11 2012-12-18 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Disabling Laptop Trackpad vs. Eraser Head/Stick (General Linux)
So, tonight I sat down with my trusty Dell D600 laptop, which has a touch pad AND an eraser-head/stick pointer between the G and H keys, and I noticed that the stick pointer seems to be stuck towards the upper-right corner and makes the mouse damn near impossible to use.

The touchpad is fine.

So, I switched to the F1 text console and started poking around the /dev/input directory. There are several entries. I determined that mouse0, event5 refer to the errant stick pointer, and that mouse1 and event4 refer to the touchpad.

I ran 'chmod 000' on the mouse0 and event5 devices and restarted X. Strangely, enough, X still seemed to be able to read from them. So I removed them completely, and restarted X again.

This time, I got what I was looking for: working touchpad and disabled pointer-stick. Never liked that damn thing anyway.

Final fix was to add this to /etc/rc.local:
chmod 000 /dev/input/mouse0 /dev/input/event5 /dev/input/mice rm /dev/input/mouse0 /dev/input/event5 /dev/input/mice
Posted by Tim Jones at 18:22 2012-12-17 | Trackbacks (3540) | Comments (3742)


About (About)
Well, honestly, as far as I know, Tampa Bay Brass only exists in my mind. That is, I would love to be in a brass quintet based in Tampa. There are a few around, but they go by other names and already have the required five players.

So, since 2000, I have been paying for this domain in hopes of meeting the other four members of a FUTURE Tampa Bay Brass quintet.

Drop me an email (tim at thissite dot com) if you think you might be one of the other four!
Posted by Tim Jones at 12:05 2012-12-08 | Trackbacks (3069) | Comments (3500)


We're back...! (General)
This blog is now powered by a minimalist blog software called Poster!

I had to migrate all my sites to a new VPS, and I didn't want to hassle with moving multiple WordPress sites, because each one has a MySQL schema. And MySQL is now owned by Oracle. (RIP, it was nice while it lasted). This one stores everything in simple text files, meaning a simple rsync operation is all I need to track.

I expect to re-post my old content over the next few weeks.
Posted by Tim Jones at 11:53 2012-12-08 | Trackbacks (2525) | Comments (3072)


Audio (Audio)
Here are some of the tunes we recently played at The Acting Studio.
Posted by Tim Jones at 10:22 2012-12-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (4237)

Origami Videos - collection 1 (Videos)
I hope you enjoy them.

1A Sampling of the Models

1B Sampling of the Models 2

2A - Starbox 1

2B - Starbox 2

3 - Yakko-San

4 - The Candle

5A - The Daisy Pendant 1

5B - The Daisy Pendant 2

6 - The Pig

7 - The Goldfish

8 - The Nautilus Shell

Modular Origami 1

Modular Origami 2

Posted by andrea at 09:08 2009-12-09 | Trackbacks (3962) | Comments (17386)


Surprise! RentACoder.com ranks me in the top 3%. (General Linux)

Well, no, maybe you shouldn't be surprised. I have been programming computers since age 11, and I really love the work, especially when it's all about Linux!

Here's the surprise: I have only done five jobs on RentACoder. Five jobs in four years. Not a lot.

Why so few? Because most experienced software developers in "mature economies" like North America, Europe, Japan and Austrailia get brutally outbid by people in extremely low-cost countries. Or put another way, small-time outsourcing. Or instead of 10,000 full-time jobs all at once, thousands of little one-off projects going overseas individually.

I don't spend much time on RentACoder, obviously because I have an easier time finding fun side work elsewhere. RAC has a feature where a buyer can "invite" developers to bid on something, but most of those invitations are worthless to me. They want me to do something with Windows (me, hahaha!), or search engine optimization, outright scams/spams, and stuff that at least twenty million Indians have already been trained to do.

What surprised me was that after such a small track record, RentACoder has ranked me 7,025th out of 273,839 coders, or "higher than 97.43% of their peers". This results in my RentACoder profile being adorned with the TopCoder badge.

And they never told me. I just stumbled on it, because someone actually sent me a rare interesting-looking bid request.

Maybe RAC is worth a little more attention.


Posted by Tim Jones at 14:32 2009-11-14 | Trackbacks (2654) | Comments (0)

The best way to type in Spanish (General)

As a student of the Spanish Language, this topic keeps coming up. Forget all the Alt-XXX stuff: Life's too short!

On Windows, the best way to type accented characters is to change your "keyboard layout" to US-International. See Microsoft's Guide to Keyboard Layouts. Then you use the single-quote key before your vowel to make your accents: 'a=á, 'e=é, 'i=í, 'o=ó, 'u=ú. Then you can use ~n to make ñ.

There is a similar setting for Linux (both KDE and Gnome) under Regional/Languages that makes the keyboard behave the same way.

On a Mac, you use Option-E, then a vowel to make á, é, í, ó, ú. For ñ, you use Option-E, then n.


Posted by Tim Jones at 21:02 2009-09-18 | Trackbacks (1797) | Comments (0)

Have you ever crashed Javac? (General Linux)

I did -- tonight...

I didn't know (until Eclipse's QuickFix feature suggested it to me about a week ago) that this is valid:

        for (@SuppressWarnings("unused") String fieldname : fieldnames) {
            // some block where I didn't use 'fieldname' --
            // I was more interested in doing it the right number of times, but without a counter variable
        }

This works on Java 1.6.0_10-b33 as provided by Debian/Ubuntu.


But on Solaris Java 1.5.0_06-b05 (where my product has to be built every night) this was (apparently) an invalid place to put a @SuppressWarnings annotation. Makes the compiler barf:

    [javac] An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.5.0_06). 
            Please file a bug at the Java Developer Connection 
            (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport)  after checking the Bug
            Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following 
            diagnostic in your report.  Thank you.
    [javac] java.lang.AssertionError: {unused}
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker$AnnotationBuilder.visitArray(TreeMaker.java:634)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.code.Attribute$Array.accept(Attribute.java:124)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker$AnnotationBuilder.translate(TreeMaker.java:637)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker$AnnotationBuilder.visitCompoundInternal(TreeMaker.java:628)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker$AnnotationBuilder.translate(TreeMaker.java:641)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker.Annotation(TreeMaker.java:649)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker.Annotations(TreeMaker.java:570)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker.VarDef(TreeMaker.java:554)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Lower.visitIterableForeachLoop(Lower.java:2892)
    [javac]     at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Lower.visitForeachLoop(Lower.java:2755)
...etc ...

The bug is described here and it's been fixed in a later version.

This is the fix (since there's no way we're going to push out the fixed compiler on dev/test AND production by March 31, which is when I would need it.

        for ( String fieldname : fieldnames) {
            // same old block
        }

All that over trying to suppress a warning...


Posted by Tim Jones at 04:49 2009-03-14 | Trackbacks (2586) | Comments (0)

First | Previous | Next | Last