Still going after all these years.
I learn something different each time I perform the Brahms Requiem. This time, what I’ve learned is that singing hashed is wonderful in the chorus room and slightly scary on stage. But once you get past the fear of exposure, it’s still pretty darned glorious.
We’re singing this one with Thomas Hampson and Camilla Trilling. Some of us caught Ms. Trilling singing the sixth movement fugue with us, quietly, from memory. Some pieces are made to be internalized.
Gallant turns on opt-in end to end encryption in its flagship Messenger service.
Goofus builds a tool to search for CIA-provided keywords in its users’ email, then exfiltrates email with matching strings to an insecure externally facing intercept location—all without informing its CISO, who subsequently resigns.
Five Thirty Eight: Election Update: The Craziest End To The 2016 Campaign Runs Through New Mexico. There’s a scenario in which there’s a tight electoral college such that the electoral votes in New Mexico might decide the election, but in which Gary Johnson holds those votes. I don’t even wanna think about how that scenario plays out afterwards.
OSXDaily: Use Siri on the Mac! A List of Mac Siri Commands. I’m still one OS version back on my work Mac, so I’m looking forward to being able to try these out soon. I do wonder what sort of look I’ll get from my coworkers, though.
Alabama’s activist judge Roy Moore was removed from office for gross misconduct on Friday for his role in blocking same-sex marriage legislation. It’s all First Amendment until it runs into violations of federal court orders, folks.
Boing Boing has a pointer to information about Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, which lays out the degree to which Nazism in general, and Hitler in particular, grew dependent on meth and oxycodone.
New Yorker: David Bowie, celebrated by his friends. That’s a concert I’d love to have seen. I’m a huge fan of Blackstar and of McCaslin and his band.
Dave Winer: Blogging bloggers blogs. Dave asked last week for tech (and stuff) blogs to point to, and I answered—and now you can read this blog in the river at bloggers.scripting.com.
Dave inspired me to start blogging way back in 2001. It’s nice to still be reading his stuff, and the stuff of people who point to him, all these years later.
Two different reports came out in the last 24 hours about the costs and investments required for cybersecurity. The first, a paper from the RAND Institute’s Sasha Romanosky, claims that, on average, breaches only have a modest financial impact to organizations—but also notes that the real costs are mostly not born directly by the corporation:
while the potential for greater harm and losses appears to be increasing in time, evidence suggests that the actual financial impact to firms is considerably lower than expected. And so, if consumers are indeed mostly satisfied with firm responses from data breaches, and the costs from these events are relatively small, then firms may indeed lack a strong incentive to increase their investment in data security and privacy protection. If so, then voluntary adoption of the NIST Cybersecurity framework may prove very difficult and require additional motivation.
Bruce Schneier interprets this as meaning that there is a market failure requiring government intervention. That’s certainly one way to view it.
Another perspective: it’s a good idea to lower the cost of defending against breaches. That’s what is suggested by the second article, a study funded by my employer Veracode and conducted by Wakefield Research called “Bug Bounty Programs Are Not a Quick-Fix.” The research found that 83% of respondents released software without testing for or fixing software vulnerabilities; 36% use bug bounty programs; 93% believe that most flaws found in bug bounty programs could have been found and fixed by developer training or testing in the development phase, which 59% believe would be more cost effective.
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Duke Ellington Orchestra – Festival Mondial d’Arts Nègres, Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, Dakar, Senegal, April 9, 1966. I’m so ambivalent about this. I mean, on the one hand, yes, every bootleg or live broadcast recording of a long-dead jazz artist makes it that much harder for live, working jazz artists to sell albums and earn coin. On the other: DUKE ELLINGTON. WITH PAUL GONSALVEZ, HARRY CARNEY, and JOHNNY FREAKIN’ HODGES. LIVE IN DAKAR.
Five Thirty Eight: ‘Missing’ White Voters Could Elect Trump, But First They Need to Register. Fairly scary statistics about the numbers of unregistered, non-college-educated white voters and their propensity to lean Trump.
I’ve been living with iOS 10 for about a week now, or long enough to have gotten up the learning curve imposed by some of the UI changes. (This is starting to be my general rule of thumb. Any UI change, even if it’s for the better, can be jarring and disruptive the first time you encounter it, but the benefits take a while to perceive). The first week I tweeted a series of questions about the new Music app, most of which I’ve managed to resolve. But there’s one very important question left unanswered, about how iOS 10 Music handles smart playlists synced from iTunes.
Relocation of Shuffle/Repeat controls: Now that I’m used to the change, I actually like Apple’s relocation of the Shuffle and Repeat controls to the newly created “swipe up” pane, which also displays the “Up Next” queue. Placing these controls, which are used infrequently during a normal playback session, where they can’t be hit accidentally counts as a UX improvement in my book.
Relocated lyrics: Given the rights issues around song lyrics, I always was a little surprised that Apple provided a way not only to add them to your own tracks but also to view them in iOS. When I first experimented with iOS 10 Music, though, I thought this had been removed. Good news: they’re still there, just with access moved to a new option on the … menu (or on the Swipe Up pane). This is somewhat less cool than the move of the Shuffle and Repeat controls because the Lyrics option only appears if the file actually has lyrics, meaning I had to search through a bunch of songs before I could actually find one where the button showed up to verify that this actually worked.
Playlists syncing as empty: I have a few smart playlists that appear to sync but don’t appear populated on the iPhone. Fortunately it looks like there’s a workaround: plug in the phone, uncheck the playlists, sync, then check the playlists to select them and sync again.
Disappearance of star ratings: I’m less OK with this change. iOS 9 introduced “love” as a ratings option alongside star ratings. I didn’t use it because I don’t find “love” granular enough when you’re managing a library of 40,000 tracks. There’s a big difference between “desert island disk” level and “yeah, that track’s OK and I might put it on the right mix tape.” But it looks like star ratings are disappearing, even if they are still in iTunes (and accessible via Siri). Not cool.
Casey West: The Five Stages of Cloud Native. Lest we forget, you can’t be successful with cloud development if you’re cherry picking DevOps patterns.
We’re in the middle of a rehearsal run for the BSO’s upcoming performances of the Brahms Requiem with Andris Nelsons, Thomas Hampson, and Camilla Trilling. On the one hand, it’s a work we’ve performed quite a bit in the eleven years I’ve been in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, starting with our 2008 performances under James Levine (later released on CD), then at Tanglewood the following summer, then a few years later with Christoph von Dohnányi, and then again just two years ago with Bramwell Tovey. One would think it would be old hat by now.
But there is no such thing as a routine performance of this work. The emotional load alone is enough to make it an incredible experience each time, and the technical aspects of singing the work (as I’ve written previously) both demand and reward close preparation and work.
This time is especially interesting, as we are in the midst of what will hopefully be the second and final transitional season between the forty-plus year reign of founding TFC conductor John Oliver and the selection of his successor. We are working this go round (as we did during the Adams Transmigration) with Lidiya Yankovskaya, who has also been a member of the TFC and worked closely with John.
For this go round, she’s working closely with us on diction (of course), but also on the production of a rich, supported piano/pianissimo sound and on overall blend. Her tool for working on blend is a simple one: the 130 or so of us have been sitting “hashed” for the last several rehearsals. Each individual sits near someone singing one of the other voice parts. There are others on your voice part nearby, but not right next to you. The effect is immediate: you have to listen better to hear the others on your part; you immediately find the places where you need to own and improve your individual performance; and you quickly learn to adjust so that your performance complements that of the other vocal parts next to you. We sounded better in places last night than we have done for quite a while.
Apparently John’s chorus used to perform like this all the time; I can only imagine a conductor of Seiji Ozawa’s great musicianship managing to work with directing such an arrangement. I wish we could do it more often.
I’ve got a new health benefit from the Apple Watch to tout: it deflects canine teeth.
Our old neighbor hosted a garden party on Saturday, and one of the guests brought their dog, a rescue who is devoted to the family. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enjoying the chaos (eight kids, almost all under the age of 10) and was a bit jumpy. I thought it was trying to sniff me, so I put a hand out, and next thing you know it was trying to bite me. Not a play bite either.
I retrieved my now-tattered sleeve from its jaw, talked to the owner to make sure the dog had its vaccinations, and cleaned up. When I looked at my arm, I realized I had gotten lucky; the “milanese loop” band of my watch had slightly deformed under the pressure of the dog’s teeth. If not for the watch, I would have been far worse off than the slight scrape I got.
Apple Watch: like chainmail for your wrist.