Blake's songs

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

—William Blake, Songs of Innocence (5. The Little Black Boy), 1789.

Clarifications on Assembly

Over the span of the function’s execution, EBP is pointing to the current stack frame making it possible to access local variables and function arguments via EBP+offset. 

It is also possible to use ESP for the same purpose, although that is not very convenient since it changes frequently. The value of the EBP could be perceived as a frozen state of the value in ESP at the start of the function’s execution.

-- Dennis Yurichev, Reverse Engineering for Beginners (1.9, p. 68)

Mendelssohn

It was an easy step to associate Mendelssohn with those Victorian attributes from which the new century tried to distance itself—shallowness, hypocrisy, prudishness, and all the rest. And so, by 1911, for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Donald F. Tovey felt compelled to update the reprinted, eu­logizing Mendelssohn article from the tenth edition by W. S. Rockstro, a student of the composer in Leipzig during the 1840s, by noting that “Mendelssohn’s reputation, except as the composer of a few inexplica­bly beautiful and original orchestral pieces, has vanished”.

—Todd, R. Larry. 2003. Mendelssohn : A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Time and the River

 Zeus, who guided mortals to be wise,has established his fixed law--wisdom comes through suffering.Trouble, with its memories of pain,drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,so men against their willlearn to practice moderation. 

    -- Agamemnon (from the Oresteia), Aeschylus

These lines came to my mind immediately after a quick RMA brought back a fully functional, but completely empty laptop. It had decided to shut down and refuse to charge, and fear was all I knew from that point on. Bottom line; I had refused (by means of laziness) to properly backup my files, I lost them, and willed to never let that happen again.

My current backup solution is simple; a single online copy, hosted on Backblaze's B2 cloud service. It is a fantastic service, with extremely good prices and integrated in many third-party programs, for Linux users like me. I found out about rclone a while ago (written on top of rsync) and decided to give it a try: after battling over encrypted buckets, i managed to upload most of my important files.

The next step was to make backups automatic, otherwise I'd be missing the whole point. So i found out about cron (protip: use corntab to validate your time formatting) and its smart formatting:

00 22 * * * /home/scripts/backup.sh 

(this script runs every day at 22:00).

However, my computer is not turned on 24/7; there must be a way for the computer to run 'lagging' tasks. And here comes anacron, which deals exactly with that. By default anacron runs, and most importantly, runs scripts as root, so I had to create my own local 'anacrontab'.

mkdir ~/.anacron
mkdir ~/.anacron/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} ~/.anacron/spool
touch ~/.anacron/anacrontab

Now edit this new 'anacrontab' (replace 'your-user' by the obvious thing):

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/home/aszkid/bin
HOME=/home/your-user
LOGNAME=your-user
# period  delay  job-id  command
1  5   your-user.cron.daily    nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.daily
7  10  your-user.cron.weekly   nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.weekly
@monthly  5  your-user.cron.monthly  nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.monthly

This file will execute all scripts, at their due time, under each of 'cron.daily' etc. Protip: do not write file extensions! For some reason (it might be in the doc), anacron refuses to run files with extensions (e.g. '.sh' files).

And finally we edit our usual user 'crontab' to run anacron through 'crontab -e', and add the following lines:

01 * * * * /usr/sbin/anacron -t /home/your-user/.anacron/anacrontab -S /home/your-user/.anacron/spool
01 * * * * nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.hourly

Reboot (to be safe), and you're good to go.

Et c'est la Nuit

La lune est rouge au brumeux horizon;
Dans un brouillard qui danse, la praire
S'endort fumeuse, et la grenouille crie
Par les joncs verts où circule un frisson; 

Les fleurs des eaux referment leurs corolles;
Des peupliers profilent aux lointains,
Droits et serrés, leur spectres incertains;
Vers les buissons errent les lucioles; 

Les chats-huants s'éveillent, et sans bruit
Rament l'air noir avec leurs ailes lourdes,
Et le zénith s'emplit de lueurs sourdes.
Blanche, Vénus émerge, et c'est la Nuit.

L'heure du berger, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) 

Echoes of a conversation on tradition

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
  That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
  Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
  Where down the blind are driven.

-- Eros Turannos, Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Schoenberg y la evolución musical

Sin duda, nuestros antepasados consideraron perfectos los modos eclesiásticos, lo mismo que nosotros el mayor y el menor; el número siete tiene tanta fuerza simbólica como el dos, y en vez de las dos esferas de expresión que hoy admite la teoría ellos consagraron con su fantasía probablemente siete. Si a los antiguos se les hubiese mostrado el futuro --es decir, que cinco de sus siete modos iban a desaparecer, quedando solo dos, como hoy se nos muestra que nuestros modos mayor y menor se reducirán a uno solo--, ellos hubieran con toda certeza argumentado en contra de la misma manera que lo hacen nuestros contemporáneos; hubieran hablado de desorden, de anarquía, de carencia de caracterización, de empobrecimiento de medios artísticos y de cosas semejantes, como hoy hacen, lamentándose, todos aquellos a los que no gustan los resultados de la evolución musical actual porque prefieren quedarse sentados calentitos junto a su estufa, sin querer comprender que en todo progreso, si se quiere ganar algo en alguna dirección, hay que perder algo en otra.

Harmonielehre, Schoenberg (1910)

Capítulo V