Monthly Archives: June 2018
Concert
Our next concert is a week tomorrow: Sunday July 1st at the Guildhall, Plymouth. This concert presents three works, all of them new to me and one of them to all of us. Overall an exciting programme of some lovely works, and firmly recommended to those readers within evening-out distance of Plymouth.
The least-novel and least-exciting work is Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise. This is in a similar idiom to his much more famous oratorio Elijah, though less bloodthirsty (and less of an actual story). The music is similarly lovely, and if you enjoy Elijah you’ll like this. However, it’s not so well-written for singers, and is physically exhausting.
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Coleridge-Taylor’s setting of Longfellow’s epic poem, is a middling-level bucket-list work for me to sing in, and I’m thrilled to be doing it now. This is a long poem in trochaic tetrameter, which has always seemed to me fiendishly difficult to set to music. And though you couldn’t call the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s 9th symphony boring, it is undoubtedly very four-square, pushed into that mould by the shoehorn of a rhythmically-similar but much shorter poem. Yet there’s no hint of that in this piece: it flows effortlessly. That Coleridge-Taylor’s creative imagination with such a rhythm outshines mine is of course unremarkable, but that he should do the same to Beethoven is indeed impressive!
Tonally it’s also interesting. Premiered in 1898, it’s on the cusp of the 20th century. There’s no hint of C20 dissonance, but the tonality is constantly on the move, and seems to me to carry hints of what was to come, both in the English Pastoral and the Verismo movements. If you enjoy the gorgeous-yet-dramatic harmonic language of a Puccini opera or a Vaughan-Williams symphony, this foreshadows them both.
Finally, Bob Chilcott’s Dances of Time. Published only in 2015, I had never heard of this until scores were handed out. These five songs are pure pleasure. And if you ever thought modern music can’t be easy both to sing and to listen to without being trite “crossover”, this is a perfect counterexample: gorgeous yet always fresh. Though having said that, I think the virtue of brevity is essential to its appeal: it’s the perfect length for what it is.
Bad Law
News story: “upskirting” to be outlawed. Replaced by news story: “upskirting” bill scuppered by rogue MP. Cries of “shame”!
Background. This was a private members’ bill, motivated by a campaigner’s bad experience. The campaigner has clearly suffered a Bad Thing: an event that might be described as assault, with followup that looks like bullying or harassment. That she should have some remedy in law seems uncontroversial, even if two years prison seems disproportionate.
But does that really imply a whole new criminal offence? Looks to me like a cop-out. When we talk about Good Practice like one-in-one-out for new criminal laws, this is precisely the kind of thing we mean. Might it not be much more productive to review why existing laws dealing with assault, bullying and harassment had failed this victim? A proper review might do something for many victims whose equally-distressing bullying and harassment just hasn’t got media attention.
This stinks of Bad Law. And of Bad Processes for making law: it’s been cooked up behind closed doors without any opportunity for review by the representatives we supposedly elect to make our laws (so much for “democracy”). Perhaps if it had had proper (or indeed any) debate, someone would have pointed out that this was a Very Bad fix.
The campaigner is in the right: she should have some remedy. The backbencher who brought the bill is right-ish: a backbencher has no real remedies, and the outcome should have been to put it on the Government’s agenda. But for the Government itself to jump on this populist measure is a disgraceful failure in its obligation to deal with such obvious shortcomings in existing law. The hero of this case is the backbencher who stopped it and forced at least a debate. Must take courage to bring down the wrath of the Establishment and kneejerk media on yourself like that!
Gits
How come I’ve not yet commented on the announcement that Microsoft is buying Github? OK, pure laziness. Same reason so much else slips by unblogged. You’ve got me bang to rights there.
Actually I have commented, albeit elsewhere and not in public. The question posed to us was whether we had any reaction to it, and the answer was No. Or at the very least, not yet. A change to the terms and conditions would call for a reaction. A change to the user interface and APIs likewise, especially if it involved loss of functionality such as, for example, any tie-in to the new proprietor’s choice of tools. But a change in ownership doesn’t in itself call for a reaction.
Of course, this is not no-change. It is a change to the risk profile of using github. In the past it was VC-backed, and their business was to build a business of real value in the market. To do that, they had to develop a service of real value to its users (i.e. us), which they did over the years. But an eventual buyout by some bigco was always on the cards, and in retrospect Microsoft was indeed a likely candidate. With Microsoft the risk is that it could fall victim to a hostile or misguided corporate agenda.
Microsoft itself has assured us of its good intentions. I believe those assurances are meant sincerely: the value of Github is its developer community, and they have nothing to gain by alienating us. They know that a proportion of the userbase will abandon them in a knee-jerk reaction: I guess they factor that into their plans. On the other hand, no matter how good their intentions, a company the size of Microsoft inevitably encompasses multiple views and Agendas, both good and bad, and internal politics. I can’t quite dismiss the conspiracy theory that the intention of setting back the github community and a lot of important projects exists somewhere within MS!
On techie discussion fora (e.g. at El Reg), a lot of folks are taking a different view: MS will destroy github as we know it. They cite MS acquisitions such as skype and linkedin, and others going further back. Skype is indeed a troubling example, as they have abandoned so many platforms and users: a course of action that would certainly sound the death-knell for github. But skype was always closed and proprietary, and it’s likely the whole thing was also thoroughly unmaintainable long before MS acquired it. MS may have been facing an unenviable choice with no satisfactory options (abandoning the whole thing would also create unhappy users, though it would shorten the pain all round).
Taking the longer history, back in the 1980s I was reasonably happy with MS stuff. Word seemed good at what it did. MSVC had the huge virtue of decent documentation, in a world where the existence of TFM was a rare thing! They first really p***ed me off around the turn of the decade, in part with Windows, but much more so when I found myself the victim of proprietary and closely-guarded software[1]. The zenith of their evilness came later in the ’90s with “Embrace and Extend”, the deliberate breaking of published standards, subversion of the ‘net, and unleashing the first great wave of malware on their own users. Around that time they were not merely a company without innovation (they acquired new things by buying companies from Autoroute to Hotmail after others had proved an idea), they were actively smothering it. Some think they were also behind the world’s most preposterous software company SCO’s attack on Linux, although they weren’t the only company linked to that by circumstantial evidence. A track record that left them very short of goodwill or trust among developers.
But that was then. Again from uncertain memory, the first indication I had of the winds of change was in 2006 when a senior MS man gave a presentation at ApacheCon in Dublin. This was someone seeking to build bridges and retrieve something from the ashes of its reputation. Open Source was now on the agenda, and MS – or at least some within it – genuinely wanted to be our friends. Signals since then have been somewhat mixed, but it seems clear at least that MS is no longer the deeply Evil Empire of twenty years ago. Indeed, I’m sure that if it had been, such great people as my Apache colleagues Gianugo and Ross would never have joined them.
From that seed (one hopes) was born the company that is now buying Github. This will be a real acid test for their relationship with open source. I don’t think they want to fail this one!
[1] As I recollect it, an upgrade left me with some important Word documents that simply couldn’t be loaded, and even transferring to another machine with the old version was no help. I couldn’t even do what I’d do today: google for any discussion of similar problems, or for relevant tools.
niq's soapbox 