Normally I'd just read these political articles and move on, but one that I found today is so succinct and logical that I think it deserves a note in the margin. Incompetent Design, the premise of how Bush and his buddies manage to make their dealings seem incompetent whereby they're point by point achieving exactly what they want to achieve.

It's a sobering perspective on the situation, certainly similar views have been expressed in the past, but I haven't come across a theorem equally elegant, logical and complete.

It's interesting how the assumption of "things aren't going the way we want them to" has been made into fact without actually being established anywhere. Meanwhile, sock puppets and figureheads like Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Rice come out and say the most outlandish things and the only response is mockery. Fine way to deflect real reactions. Underestimating idiots sure can be dangerous.

As with a lot of things, the theory of music intervals is complicated enough to require a little bit of maturity. The division of the octave into different tunings has evolved with the times, and while the concept is simple, there are many nuances.

An easy way to illustrate is by observing the piano keyboard. The most fundamental scale is C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, and that's an octave, of course. Each of the scales (or collections) built on these successive pitches has its own fancy Greek name, so if you want to understand what the heck people are saying, you better know these as well.

The problem is a typical memorization exercise, tie 7 different pitches to 7 Greek names. There is no obvious way to do this, match one set of numbers with another set of names. Except when you're a football supporter. We can memorize lineups and shirt numbers like nobody's business, linking them to faces and positions on the pitch. So why not leverage this ability.

There are 7 players, so we're going to play a 2-2-2 formation. The numbering is standard, ascending from right to left. C is our fundamental pitch, so that's where we start counting.

You're going to look at this formation, and the next time someone mentions Lydian mode you're going to think "Lydian... right midfield, shirt number 4, so that's... C, D, E, F. The mode is then F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F".

If only we could get this team into Football Manager, everyone would know this.

It's almost as if no one dared to say it before. But here's the statement that says more about hip hop music than anything else.

People fail to realize that hip hop first and foremost is a musical art-form. Right now, hip hop just isn’t living up to musical standards. It’s just plain bad.

From an opinion about why hip hop sales are plummeting.

I would go much further than this. To me, hip hop has always been bad music, with a few exceptions. I believe that any musical genre must always be about the music, otherwise it's pointless. And while there are certain things that have always attracted me to hip hop - the energy, the bold form of expression, the rhythm, and sometimes the lyricism - I have always found it profoundly lacking in the music itself. It's a genre that wants to be loved, but I just cannot find enough reason to embrace it, the music is so lacking.

Meanwhile, there have been exceptions. Songs that have the kind of musical quality that make them mainstays in my listening (most have previews on last.fm).

• 2 Pac - Changes
• 2 Pac - California love
• Coolio - Gangsta's paradise
• Coolio - C U When U Get There
• Public Enemy - He got game
• Public Enemy - What you need is Jesus
• Will Smith - Black Suits Comin' (Nod Your Head)
• Will Smith - Potnas

But these are exceptions, not the only ones, but taken out of a small set. When I do like a hip hop song, it's usually because of the melodic/harmonic/rhythmic value, not the lyrics, whatever they may be.

Perhaps melody and harmony just don't square with the core values of hip hop, but as long as it is music, it will always be judged on those.

So how can you tell if a hip hop song is worth its salt? Here's one thing to try. Remove the vocals. Vocals are very important in hip hop, so removing this will make the music feel very empty. But here's the question. Does what remains offer anything at all?

Stephen Wright once said something to the effect:

I have a huge collection of sea shells. It's spread out on all the beaches of the world.

That's an exact description on the state of latex documentation. Sure, here's probably the most powerful typesetting language known to man, well probably just the one man who actually knows it, the rest of us know bits and pieces. But, when you actually need to do something that you haven't done before, or you've done but you can't remember, bon voyage.

Safe trip on that extensive google search, finding ancient web pages describing good old techniques (latex hasn't changed much over the years decades), 404 links to packages that once were in use, and a great deal of tips & tricks that seem useful, but are nothing like what you need to do right now.

Sometimes you'll find the answer. Sometimes you'll give up. Sometimes you'll conclude it's not possible (or at least, not unless you're a latex wizard). In general, it is possible. But because latex is used and abused by so many in so many different ways, over so many years, it's naturally hard to keep track of who accomplished what and how.

But, there is no centralized documentation at all. Latex is so huge that it needs to be extensively documented, but what you find instead is some professor who wrote a tutorial for his students for that particular assignment, or a list of all symbols you can use, or all kinds of bits and pieces, but nowhere can you find the whole. Not how the different programs are related to each other, how to write a fairly general Makefile for them, how to actually construct a workflow out of it. For that you better hope there is someone willing to guide you through it in the beginning.

One of the things I've wanted to do for some time is enforce a pagebreak before every section, because in some cases it just makes sense. Thrilled that I am that today I stumbled upon one of those ancient pages that has a working recipe for it. When you look at the solution, it's ridiculously simple, but when you don't know it... well.

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{pagedsections}[2007/05/11 Adding pagebreaks before sections]

\let\oldsection = \section
\renewcommand{\section}[1]{
	\pagebreak
	\oldsection{#1}
}

Then, of course, include it into the document as usual:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{pagedsections}

\begin{document}
\section{first}
blahdeeblah
\section{second}
blah
\end{document}

This lack of documentation is common for applications that predate the age of the internet, or at least the "modern" internet, not including usenet and whatever other deprecated forms of communication. For instance, bash suffers from an acute lack of in-depth documentation.

This only affects you if you have some source of RAW images, typically a camera would be that source. Then the RAW images need to be post-processed (which of course is something that's already done if you extract JPG's instead of RAW images from the camera) and converted to a target format, like JPG.

Viewers/browsers

The best one I know so far is showfoto, a component of digikam. digikam itself is fussy about images having to be part of albums, but showfoto has an adequate image browser with exif data display and some statistics about the image. It's also worth noting that digikam itself has been given a lot of attention, and has recently developed into a much better and more useful program than it was a few years ago.

Rawstudio also has a rudimentary image browser.

Converters

For this I would advocate ufraw. It's a standalone program, but it's also a plugin for the gimp. The interface is straightforward and quite handy.

showfoto/digikam also has features for conversion, but they are somehow tucked away in the menus and harder to find.

Rawstudio aims to be the tool of choice for this, but for the moment is seems rather immature and the interface could use work.

I think I read somewhere that Krita is supposed to convert its inner colorspace to be 16bit, which would make editing RAW images native, without needing to convert them first. That would be awesome. For the time being, I can't say anything for Krita, because it crashes the moment I start it (probably a bug in the koffice ebuilds).

Status

So the support for RAW images is quite encouraging. Not as nice as in Photoshop CS3, and this applies principally to the conversion options and the types of adjustments that can be made, but decent all the same.