• "I’m not asking for the world here. I really don’t think I am. I would merely like to suggest some manners, no different to those used by anyone out there who wouldn’t walk in front of someone engaged with a painting in an art gallery, or emit a loud noise during the crucial speech in a play. Music needs a certain environment and respect to have full effect. And no – that is not, not, elitist." I, too, could have punched the man – it was clearly a man – who, in what seemed like an attempt to show off about just how much he enjoyed the performance, was early to the gun. Why not let it breathe? Why not let it sit? Currie's description of applause as a train you get led onto is particularly good, as is his point about how applause-whenever can have its place. But there were only two people who should have been making Contacts with things at that point of the concert, and they were both on stage.
    (tags: music applause colincurrie stockhausen kontakte )
  • Nice article from Tom Phillips on a potted history of graphic scores – with a rather good gallery "attached", buried in the Guardian's IA.
    (tags: music scores tomphillips graphicscores notation )
  • "I was no boy naturalist, unlike Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri – whose collecting habits earned him the nickname Dr Bug among friends. And yet I vividly remember catching my first tadpole in a Golden Wonder crisp packet, then cradling this sloppy pouch all the way home to a sluiced-out jam jar. When you know Tajiri wanted to make a game to communicate his joy in catching insects as a boy, and look at Pokémon, it is impossible not to feel how powerfully he succeeded." A really lovely piece of games writing, about breeding and trafficking Pokémon as an adult – but, secretly, about the appeal of the series to players of all ages.
    (tags: pokemon games writing surprise charm gottacatchemall )
  • "…the 808 is such a storied instrument in electronics. It casts a large shadow. There's whole genres based on just the kick or the snare or the cowbell sound. As soon as you turn it on and start working, you hear every single gesture that's happened in electronic music since its advent. It's this crazy machine of history, and it's really hard not to be beholden to it in that way." Daedalus on the history embedded in instruments, as part of an interview about his use of technology for Resident Advisor.
    (tags: daedalus music technology history 808 drummachine )

OSX Migration Assistant and symlinked disks – some notes

30 September 2013

I upgraded my Mac recently, and moved from a laptop with two internal drives – an SSD and an HDD – to a single, large SSD. I wanted to note down the aspects of this transition I’d have like to have known beforehand, and also want to know for

My old computer placed various core user folders – Documents, Music, etc – onto the HDD, whilst storing the System and Applications on the SSD. I symlinked the User folders into my home directory, and OSX was none the wiser.

As far as backing up goes, I used to use the excellent SuperDuper. When I moved to my symlinked setup, I went to Time Machine, which can back up multiple drives to a single Time Machine volume. I told it to back up both the SSD and HDD; it backed up the symlinks themselves from the SSD, and the directories they referred to from the HDD.

When I transfer data to a new Mac with Migration Assistant, I do so from a backup or bootable clone of the original computer – never from the computer itself. I chose to restore from Time Machine. This will only restore from a bootable drive – so I was only given the option to restore from my SSD, which contained Applications and my Desktop, but not my Documents. This unnerved me a bit at the time.

However, this is because the Migration Assistant only offers to restore from bootable (system) drives. Once I’d restored, I booted up the new system, mounted my Time Machine drive, and dragged everything over from the “Latest” directory symlink inside the HDD’s backup folder; I soon had my documents and other files back in the original locations they should have been.

So that’s the main note I wanted to make: restoring from that kind of setup works entirely fine, but you musn’t panic when your HDD isn’t offered as a volume to restore from.

I’m always impressed with Migration Assistant – it holds onto my system preferences, my eccentric Unix setup, my MySQL and Postgres databases, everything like that. What’s worth remembering is the stuff it doesn’t:

  • I use Caps Lock as my Control key, and vice versa. (Blame Vim). I had to re-specify this preference, and frequently, it would get overwritten on wake-from-sleep. A reboot (which presumably repaired permissions fixed this).
  • For a while, I noticed git wasn’t working. This was because it was not installed through homebrew, but directly into /usr/local/bin – and that was no longer in my PATH. Adding it back to my PATH re-enabled it. (All my homebrew binaries were working fine).
  • My /etc/hosts had been overwritten back to default; I need to copy that across manually. As had all my Apache config (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf), my vhosts config file (/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhost.conf), and /etc/php.ini . Nothing we can’t recover quickly, but it did mean the usual dance of setting up vhosts for sites that already existed, and pointing php.ini at the correct MySQL socket file (/tmp/mysql.sock on OSX).

I think that’s it – everything else transferred entirely seamlessly, and there was nothing to fear about my unusual setup – you just have to make sure you’ve been backing up correctly, and everything will work.

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  • "The compass knows the map, son, it knows when the map is near. Let the compass direct you to the map but whatever else you do in this stained forsaken world keep them apart. Else there won’t be sufficient salt water in the oceans to quench the soles of yr burning heart."
    (tags: mjohnharrison writing )
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