Author: matthew

Periodically, in discussions with friends or online associates, I run across what I call “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” questions. These are questions which are phrased as a yes/no, or either/or proposition, yet that proposition doesn’t apply since the assumption underlying the question isn’t necessarily correct.

Often, this is called ignoring the “excluded middle principle”, or a “false dilemma”. In the classic example of an excluded middle, you can take the proposition, “Joe is bald”, reverse it, and end up with “Joe is bald, or Joe is not bald”. A true statement.

Yet often, we misuse it. Some examples I pulled from the Wikipedia:

• Either you go to college, or you will wind up flipping hamburgers for a living.
• You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.
• Either creationism is true, or evolution is true. Therefore, if it is shown that evolution is false, creationism must be true. (or the inverse: if it is shown that creationism is false, evolution must be true…)
• There are two kinds of people in the world…

I hear it from the radio every day. It’s the heart of strong demagoguery, and a way to really rile people up against the threatening hordes of vile “not-us” people. I hear it from the right and the left though, admittedly, far more from the right than the left. Maybe it’s just an artifact of established right-wing radio.

Nevertheless, it bugs me. 50% of the U.S. does not read more than 1500 words in a given week. How can you appeal to logic adequately and try to frame a question in terms that actually make logical sense, yet not look weak compared to the guy that’s good at presenting nice sound-bite-sized logical fallacies for the non-reading public?

They may not read, but the non-readers listen, watch, and vote.

What other false dilemmas do you encounter regularly?

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity. — G.B. Shaw

I recently have become involved in some newsgroup discussions regarding digital recording. Inevitably, someone asked “what microphone should I get?”, and received several responses of consumer-oriented dynamic microphones such as the Shure SM-58.

I replied: Although the Shure is a fine microphone for what it is, it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a good vocal mic for a studio setting.

It’ll get you by, though, if you can’t afford better. And it’s a great stage mic. However, the frequency cutoff on it is 15,000Hz, which doesn’t even capture the full sound of a voice in a studio.

A large-diaphragm condenser microphone using Phantom Power will set you back about $150, but the difference between a condenser and a dynamic mic is night and day as far as recording quality. In general, dynamic mics are only used in the studio for instruments with extreme transients (such as drums) or where feedback might be a concern (live performance).

That said, what you pick is up to you. If you go with a condenser, you’re going to need some way of providing phantom power. I use a small mixer, but many I/O interfaces provide their own.

Anyway, if you want really darn good vocal response, don’t use a dynamic mic. They work fine when you are getting started, but their lack of high-end reception starts to wear thin after a while.

I’ve been using a pair of (relatively) cheap condenser microphones for about a year now, and the difference in clarity of my mic-based recordings is astounding. The ironic thing is that, as much as I love the greater “air” in the recording due to using a condenser microphone, it is precisely this “air” which is lost when compressing to my preferred distribution formats of MP3 or OGG.

Of course, inevitably I received the follow-up question, “What is Phantom Power?” I’m fairly certain there are a lot of us in recording who don’t really understand the differences between dynamic and condenser mics (other than “condenser mics sound better”). I know I was fuzzy on it, until I bought one and desired to learn how microphones actually work:

Dynamic mics (the type you usually see for school assemblies, outdoor concerts, and such) function by using a barrier with a magnet attached. The barrier/magnet (generally referred to as a diaphragm) is next to a coil of wire. The movement of the magnet with a wire nearby produces a small electric current. This current is fed into a “preamp”, which makes that tiny signal much louder (bumps it up to what is called “line-level input”), and then you can record or hear it.

Ribbon microphones function by a similar principle. However, rather than a robust circular diaphragm, they use a small ribbon with a magnet on either end. This makes them more sensitive to sound than a traditional dynamic mic, with some pleasant natural compression, but they are also extremely delicate and expensive. That ribbon can break easily. However, they produce very rich vocals, particularly for female vocalists. Generally, it takes much less air pressure to produce motion in the relatively large, flat ribbon. However, the ribbon is also quite sensitive to location; you’ll have a steep decibel dropoff with a singer singing at the side of a ribbon mic.

Now, so far, these microphones require no power to run them. They generate their own current through the movement of the sound waves you’ve created.

Enter the “condenser” microphone.

Essentially, the diaphragm in a condenser microphone is a capacitor. That is, it’s an electrical apparatus which holds a charge. One plate of the capacitor vibrates in response to sound waves. The second plate is steady. The capacitor’s capacitance (farads) changes depending on how far apart the plates are. The plates in most decent quality condenser mics are gold, in order to resist corrosion and provide a longer useful lifetime for the microphone. (Well, they’re actually gold dusted onto a plastic diaphragm). Some of the cheaper ones, like the ones powered by AA batteries that you buy at Radio Shack, use steel or silver instead of gold, and are only useful for a few years before their frequency reponse diminishes.

Savvy so far? A capacitor stores electricity. The amount it can store varies based upon the materials used for the two capacitor plates and the dielectric (the stuff between the metal plates). In the case of microphones, the “dielectric” is just air between the two nearby plates.

The net result of measuring a capacitor’s capacitance changes, versus the small electric current changes created by a moving magnet in a dynamic mic, is that the condenser microphone is far more sensitive to smaller and shorter sound waves. In other words, you can play softer sounds and they’ll be picked up. You can also play higher-freqency sounds which a dynamic mic misses because the sound wave isn’t large or long enough to move the magnet noticeably.

In the case of the condenser mic, the electric charge to the capacitor is provided by a “phantom power” source. Without phantom power, condenser mics simply don’t work, because the capacitor has nothing to charge it. Phantom power is provided right along with the regular signal. It is extremely small, and phase-cancelled if your input is balanced.

Phantom power is only needed for condenser microphones. Turning on phantom power will not harm dynamic or ribbon microphones. However, startup order is important: you will want to turn on your mixer, turn on phantom power, and THEN turn up your master volume level if you value your ears.

Here’s hoping this actually explained it for some of the musicians on our board!

I’m currently hosting this web site, and others, with a company that was really reliable. It was a one-man shop, very personable, advertised with grass-roots marketing. I liked it a lot.

And then at some point, it changed. I had to cancel a web site, and instead of the usual prompt, courteous service I had come to expect, I got the run-around from some woman I’d never met before. I called to complain, and talked to some man I’d never spoken to before and, worse yet, he didn’t know what I was talking about. As far as he knew, I didn’t seem to exist as a customer. Apparently, this was the case with a lot of early customers. Paypal wasn’t enough information for them, and they wanted me to fill out this massive, time-consuming information form about myself before they would give me back any of the money I’d already paid for the web server.

I was extremely busy that day, and what I was getting paid to get the job done that I was working on outstripped the money I’d lose by not getting a pro-rate back. Ultimately, I gave up on getting any pro-rated fees back, cancelled that PayPal subscription, and just chalked up my lost twenty bucks to experience.

Recently, I had a similar experience. I needed some technical support, and instead of getting the knowledgeable guy I usually did, I got some flunkie who had no idea what I was talking about. The dude obviously didn’t know FreeBSD (the operating system which hosts barnson.org). Eventually, I got to talk to the guy that I knew well, and he resolved the problem in short order.

But recently, there have been outages. LONG outages. Hours. I can see the ones that last more than just a few minutes by looking back at my logs, because I have “cron jobs”, or automated processes, which take care of some housekeeping on this web site every 20 minutes. The site was unavailable for almost 3 hours in the middle of the night last night. And yesterday, during the day, there was a one-hour outage.

These outages aren’t documented or explained. I suspect that the “boss” that I used to always talk to when there was a problem has moved on to better things, and the business is now in the hands of incompetents who, worse yet, don’t care about the quality of their service.

So I’m thinking of moving webhosting providers. My budget is $30.00 per month. I strongly prefer a UNIX-like environment, and preferably one where I have “root”, or equivalent access, so that I can set up new services. Although I liked the “small shop” feel of my current provider, they’ve lost it. It’s not a priority; uptime and courteous, professional customer service is. I need about 3GB of storage for all the MP3’s and photos I keep here. Who do you recommend?

Rather than starting a tradition of running our own lame April Fools gags here at barnson.org, I’d like to see what funny things you’ve managed to collect from around the net on this special day. There are a zillion out there. What are your favorites?

This is a basic, rough outline of how to detect rogue wireless access points on your network. It’s how I’ve done it before. If you’re not technical enough to understand what switches, routers, and APs do, you may not get it. But, like many of my other articles, I’m posting this one as a reminder on how network security professionals do rogue AP hunts.

And heck, maybe it will be useful to you if you want to run a rogue access point…

On a mailing list I subscribe to, one subscriber suggested that you simply turn off SSID broadcasting to hide your rogue access point. I disabused him of the notion that merely hiding your SSID would protect you from rogue AP hunters…

---

I’m a UNIX and network admin for a living. SSID scanning is only the first thing you do in finding rogue access points.

With the right software (well, the right network adapter in your laptop), you will see the wireless networks that are not advertising their SSID, too. Then you do some basic triangulation, or as I liked to call it, “hot/cold” checks. Buildings frequently reflect signals weirdly, but you can normally figure out what floor a rogue AP is on, which wing of that floor, and the location within 10-30 meters or so.

The next step for checking for a rogue access point is to do some log analysis at your switch(es) for that wing. Look at the MAC addresses connecting. Most access points have well-publicized MAC ranges they use. You can also do this at your DHCP server, if you have access to it. Just grep through the MAC log and look for the octets which likely indicate an access point. They are very easily recognizable, and since most people just plug their rogue AP into a wall jack, they’re about as obvious in the logs as an elephant in your living room.

OK, so you know the wing. You know the floor. You know which switch they are connected to (maybe). Hit your port wiring diagrams, and you’ll find the cube (or room) they’re coming from. Walk over and have a quiet chat with them, if possible. Discuss it with their manager (if corporate; I’d guess their RA if it’s a college) if that is what your security policies require. Go on with life, and keep a close eye on that infringer for a few months.

People can be sneaky, though. For instance, they can hide their access point behind a legitimate computer acting as a proxy gateway for their wireless network (usually, Windows connection sharing). Well, at that point, WEP-cracking becomes kind of important. Crack their WEP key.

I’m not entirely sure how to crack a WEP key and sniff traffic when I lack the SSID for the network. However, I’m pretty certain I could Google up an answer in short order.

See if you can sniff the traffic. Hop onto your firewall or intrusion-detection system, and grep through the log for some keywords from the traffic log you got from cracking the WEP key and sniffing the traffic. Normally, this will net you some positives; you can see the IP, run an “nmblookup -A” (if using SAMBA) to see the hostname and currently logged-in user of the Windows box, and then track down via DHCP logs or the username (if recognizable) where the machine lives.

Of course, you can also just block that IP from going through the firewall, and wait for the support call, too…

If they’re really savvy, it will be a Linux or BSD box. That could be more interesting 🙂

Now, the really sneaky people would use WPA behind a proxy legitimate box. Can’t crack WPA yet, and you can’t tell by the MAC that there’s an access point there since it’s either being proxied or NAT’d. So you’re stuck with only being able to roughly triangulate the location of the rogue access point to within about 100 square meters or so. At that point, it comes down to hunting and figuring out whether it’s worth your time. You might be able to find it, or you might not. Signal strengths indoors are not a reliable triangulation method, because strength drops off irregularly due to structural blocks. But you can sometimes find it.

It’s even more frustrating when they’re a person who only turns on their access point when they’re using it, and they turn it off when they’re done. You can’t hunt late at night, and you don’t have unlimited time to figure out where the rogue AP is. However, if a user is using WPA, proxies behind a legit box, and shuts it off when they’re not using it, then I just chalk up a victory for the security-mindedness of the individual who set up the AP. Because that’s the same way I’d use it if I wanted to run an AP on a network that didn’t allow it, and it’s an exercise in frustration trying to track it down.

It’s basically professional courtesy at that point. I tip my hat, think “good jeaorb Homer”, and move on to the next project. Unless they get lazy and leave it running for a few days…

As far as locking down my personal access point in my home in suburbia? I just did 40-bit WEP and a MAC address filter. I monitor everything that happens on my network, so I’d know if someone happens to connect and push some data through. Most folks aren’t tech-savvy enough to try to crack a WEP key. If they are, well, I know all my neighbors and know who the one guy is that would be savvy enough to try it. Yeah, I know that some potential malicious person could sniff my traffic. Fact is, we run anything important that could be sniffed through SSL. My family doesn’t use file-sharing and any copying I need to do is done through SSH.

Of course, my printer is kind of hanging out there. That’s sometimes a worry, that someone would connect and send a few thousand pages to my printer. With its high-capacity bins, that could cost me some money 🙂

Or maybe they’d sniff my traffic to my printer, which frequently includes receipts. Really, people digging through my garbage bins for destroyed credit card applications is a bigger worry.

In this kind of low-security-environment, though, I think it’s all that’s needed. People respect WEP like they respect windows and door locks. Sure, they can get in if they want to by breaking a window or knocking down a door, but that’s not neighborly.

At work, it’s another story. WPA, dynamic key assignment, registered computers only, set up behind a firewall from the rest of the network, fascist logging, you name it. And you can also detect NAT being used on your network if you analyze packets closely enough. But who has that kind of time for a casual or school campus LAN?

Book Review: Godless, by Pete Hautman

As a kid, I always loved Judy Blume books. Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Freckle Juice. Double Fudge. Superfudge. Blubber. Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing.

Eventually, though, I transitioned into a new world of Blume books. My brother, Jay, had a book by Blume called Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. At the tender age of 10, and my brother at 14, I was told in no uncertain terms by him that the book was too “adult” for me. He promptly hid it somewhere in his room to prevent me from reading it.

Of course, being the nosy little brother I was, I rooted around through his room one day while he was gone until I finally found it, buried in the bottom of his closet. I read it from cover to cover, carefully replacing it exactly where I’d found it a few days later.

I pondered what I’d read for a few days. On one level, it was a kind of weird book, talking about things I hadn’t experienced yet and didn’t really understand. On another level, I was starting to get really interested in girls, and I understood the kid’s fascination with watching his friend’s sister through the window. I understood that eventually I’d have wet dreams, and it made that kind of stuff much easier to deal with when I ran into those situations. Throughout the remainder of my adolesence, it was a book I’d steal regularly from my brother when in need of a novel to read, and as time passed and I understood more of what the book was about, the more I thought “Wow, this Judy Blume lady sure understands what it means to be my age.”

Overall, it was not only fun to read, but also helped me understand life a little better when I ran into similar situations. I didn’t make the same choices the protagonist did, but I could understand where he was coming from.

Blume continued with this tradition, writing several more highly controversial volumes, including “Forever”, a book dealing very frankly with teenage sex and commitment. It was widely banned from public school libraries due to some “graphic” portions. But when I read it, I saw it much more as being about friendship and love. How it starts, how it grows, and how it ends. Not only was it fascinating and entertaining for me as a young adult, but it was pretty critical in giving me some sense of perspective on relationships.

Yeah, I’m a guy. And I read “Forever”. Get over it!

Pete Hautman’s book, “Godless”, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Young People, struck a similar resonating chord for me. It deals with the struggles of Jason Bock, a tall, fat, nerdy kid with a snail-collecting best friend called Shin.

Jason, upon getting knocked out by the scrawny, enigmatic Henry, has an epiphany about the nature of water towers while coming to underneath the town’s structure. Given his atavistic relationship with both his parents as well as their religion, he invents his own religion: “Chutengodianism”, or the worship of water towers.

I can’t give away too much more without spoiling the plot, sorry 🙂 Suffice to say that as honestly as Blume dealt with adolescent sexual issues in Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, Hautman deals with adolescent religious issues in Godless.

The book deals with the questioning of faith common to young people. And, as I discovered in my late twenties, these questions are common in older people, too. Jason is subjected to weekly meetings at his local church, where his constant questions about faith which are out of the experience of the instructor go unanswered and met with stern disapproval. He discovers that, as he suspected, despite the assurance of the instructor that all that was said within these meetings was confidential, his parents know of his responses and many details of the weekly faith meetings.

I had a similar experience as a teenager. I remember discussing something intensely personal with my ecclesiastical leader (referred to as a “bishop”, in LDS parlance), that within a few scant hours, had resulted in a lecture from my father on the same topic.

There are many coincidences in life.

This was not one of them.

My experience instilled in me a deep distrust of the “word” of authority figures, and I found Jason’s reaction remarkably similar. Pragmatism overcomes ideology, and quickly Jason finds it more convenient to lie to preserve peace and his personal freedom than to be truthful and face censure from disapproving parents and peers.

I also found Jason’s experience of a zealous father overloading him with religious materials to be strikingly familiar. As a young adult, my father regularly handed me books dealing with faith, Satan, the Last Days, and various metaphysical “events” which, frankly, bored me. I guess the main difference between the protagonist and me is that I felt duty-bound to read them cover to cover.

By the book’s end, Jason’s snail-collecting best friend, Shin, has taken his bogus religion too far. Like many of those slightly unstable teenagers we all knew as kids, he’d gotten far too involved to make reliable judgments, leaving Jason to clean up the mess, wondering how he can possibly control the spiralling effects of his brief sojourn into religiousness. But Shin said one thing that has stuck with me, and will probably end up in my little file of important quotes.

“How do you know it’s not true if you don’t believe in it?” asks Shin of Jason. “How can you understand something you don’t believe in?”

“Shin, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s like saying you can’t understand leprechauns unless you believe in them.”

“Do you understand leprechauns?”

“I don’t believe in them.”

“There you go.”

It’s a deep thought. How can you understand something you don’t believe in?

As many readers of barnson.org know, I’m an agnostic Mormon these days. Who knows where I’ll actually end up. I’ve found the scientific method, and a large dose of healthy skepticism, to be a pretty reasonable method for figuring out the truth. Last night, while at a friend’s house playing cards, we got into a discussion of evolution. I laughed along with everyone else about scientists sometimes seeming to just “add an extra zero” to timelines to make things fit.

Then I mentioned that radiocarbon dating is actually quite accurate in dating historical artifacts, and that tree-ring analysis has supported radiocarbon conclusions.

The response of my conversants was interesting.

“What?” they replied. “No, the dates are wildly inaccurate, because they don’t take into account major historical events.”

In the back of my mind, a little voice was telling me, let this topic drop. Unfortunately, I ignored it, and pressed on. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, the dates are way off, because they ignore the fact of a worldwide flood.”

“Umm,” I began, my jaw dropping in incredulity that one of my neighbors actually believes in Young Earth Creationism. “And how…” I began.

I was cut off by the timely intervention of my friend, Paul, who understands my position regarding such anti-scientific theories. “And that’s the signal to say let’s talk about something else,” he interjected. Realizing the wisdom of his words, I chose not to press the issue with my friends.

I guess questioning religious and scientific assumptions isn’t just a teen issue.

The book is a slender read; at 198 pages, even with four children climbing all over me and interrupting me this past Saturday, I plowed through it in a scant two hours. Yet, like Blume’s books, within its short binding it deals frankly with adolescent religious behavior and questions, and ends with little fanfare. No cheering crowds, no conquering hero. Just a boy who’s a little bit changed, a little more grown up, bearing a few more scars, and a bit more skeptical about the world than when the book started.

I really liked it. I think you might too.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: I don’t know if it’s what you want, but it’s what you get. 🙂 — Larry Wall in <10502@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>

Two of my earliest childhood memories are of breaking the law.

I’ve had a long, intimate relationship with chewing gum, you see. I discovered it as a toddler, and I’ve chewed it ever since. Just ask my wife! I think our yearly chewing gum budget is in the hundreds of dollars. Well, for a moment, consider these factors:

• Three-year-old who loves chewing gum.
• Three-year-old knows where Mommy buys chewing gum at the counter in the store near the apartment complex
• Mommy tells 3-year-old “no, you can’t have any chewing gum”.
• Mommy sends 3-year-old outside to play.
• There are no fences around the apartment complex.

Though you can do the math, I’m certain, let me lay it out for you. I trotted down to the nearby convenience store. I opened the door. I looked the cashier right in the eye, reached up high, and grabbed a package of Hubba-Bubba from the counter display. I walked out the door, opening the package and shoving two pieces in my mouth at once.

The cashier was one of my mother’s friends. Apparently, before I even got home, she’d called my house. My mother was awaiting me at the door, “stickered switch” in hand (a small sapling off a tree).

I received a stern lecture. The part of the lecture that stuck with me, however, was the part involving the stickered switch.

My second experience breaking the law occurred at the tender age of five. We lived in a brown rental home on Rhame Drive in Fort Washington, Maryland. My mother, a few months earlier, had married a gentle, law-abiding Mormon man, and we’d been quite active in the church and community.

One of my favorite features of this home was the generous wooded area immediately behind it. I would spend long hours walking alone in the woods. I remembered being able to walk all the way to the large, green water tower nearby without ever following a man-made path.

I was returning from an exploration one day, and heard an unusual sound from our neighbor’s fenced yard. It was sharp, explosive, and interesting. I climbed the outside of the fence and peeked over. On the other side, I saw one of my blonde, pre-teen neighbors holding a large rock, preparing to hurl it at an upstairs window of the home.

“Whatcha’ doin’?” I asked, genuinely interested. Nobody had lived in this house as long as I’d lived on Rhame Drive (two years). Nobody lived there, therefore I didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing; I was just curious why he was doing it.

“Breaking some windows. It’s fun. Want to try?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said. This looked kind of exciting. I’d been bored, anyway. I knew the woods forward and backwards, and had long ago stopped encountering anything new in them. So young, there were few things to keep me interested besides reading books and the beginning of kindergarten.

He demonstrated good throwing technique. My initial efforts were pitiful. I’d never been much of a rock-thrower. I couldn’t even reach the lowest-floor window from the rear fence of the small quarter-acre lot. However, within a few minutes of pecking hopelessly at the side of the house with my stones, I finally discovered that I could throw reasonably well using a “sidearm” technique. I eventually managed to hit the remains of an already-shattered window with my rock. The jagged chunks of the broken window splintered with a satisfying crunch.

“Try the big one!” my new friend suggested. I wasn’t sure what he meant, until he gestured to the large sliding-glass window. It was intact. I threw a few pebbles at it with no effect. Eventually, the blonde boy handed me a very large rock.

I knew I couldn’t reach the window from that distance. “I think I’ll have to move up,” I said. I walked within a few feet of the window, and threw with all my might with both arms.

The plate glass exploded inward with an amazingly rich, vibrant sound. It was pretty darn cool, I thought, and a really good throw of a really big rock for a scrawny five-year-old.

However, it was also really pretty darn loud. My new-found buddy glanced around nervously, peeked over the fence, and explained that it was time for him to go home for dinner. I followed, since without anybody there to notice my efforts, it was pointless to throw the rocks.

The policeman arrived at my door a few hours later after I’d gone to bed for the night.

Think about the picture, for a moment. Allow me to use my mother’s words to describe the scenario:

“These other boys were bigger; 10 or 12 years old. They were breaking windows out of the vacant house 2 doors down from us. The home had been vacant for quite some time. You started breaking windows, too. When the cop came and got the older boys, they blamed you and said you were the one that started it and were the leader. The policeman was trying to find this hardened criminal, the boy who started it all. They said it was your fault, and you should be in trouble instead of them. “After he showed up on our doorstep, here this tiny five-year-old comes down the steps in his pajamas, the supposed ringleader of this little gang. and asks “what’s wrong?”. The police officer looked totally stunned for a few moments. The policeman said, “I understand you boys were out there breaking windows”. You said, “Well nobody wanted that house!”. Anyway, the policeman gave you a talking-to. He told you, “if you were eight years old, I’d take you to juvenile hall”. He also told you that you were sure lucky, since you were the ringleader, that you were only five. Afterward, he verbally took the other boy by the ear, and got on his case about trying to blame a five-year-old.”

From my perspective, I remember the blonde boy, standing next to the uniformed man with two other boys I’d never seen before, all three of them saying they saw me breaking the windows. I readily admitted that I’d broken the windows, not knowing it was wrong. However, I protested that I was being blamed by the kid who broke them with me, and didn’t know the other two boys, so how could they possibly blame me? It seemed colossally unfair that I was receiving a lecture from the policeman about my behavior when the original perpetrator, who’s example I’d followed, stood there guiltless. I think I missed the part where the police officer castigated the other boys for blaming me afterwards.

Regardless, I received a stern warning from the policeman, with a solemn explanation that, had I only been a few months older (8 years old), he’d have taken me into juvenile hall due to my actions. I didn’t know what juvenile hall was, and upon being told it was “jail for kids”, I was terrified.

I never broke another window in anything until the day I wrecked my car at 17. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, that’s my history as a lawbreaker. I’ve occasionally broken the odd one here or there, as most people have. Youthful indiscretions, you know. Regardless, due to these somewhat traumatic experiences as a youth, I grew up fearing and respecting the law, and not wishing to cross it ever again.

Yet today, with a better understanding of the nature of law, propriety, politics, and human relationships, I can’t help wondering if there aren’t times when violation of law is called for. I respect those with the courage to face jail time in support of civil liberties.

• Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. And went to jail for it.
• John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Marion Barry (yes, the same Marion Barry) courageously purchased items and sat at a lunch counter reserved for white people, the restriction enforced by law. And they went to jail for it.
• Indian Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi repeatedly violated laws throughout his life because he considered them unjust. And went to jail for it.
• Tennessee resident Joe Hogue went to jail for telling his son that gay people aren’t damned to hell for eternity.
• Early unionizers endured beatings, jail time, and in some cases, completely “legal” execution for sedition trying to obtain rights to fair compensation and safe working conditions for factory workers.

I find myself wondering what the frontiers of morally-correct lawlessness are today? What is the unjust legislation the people are rejecting en masse?

The largest one I see is copyright law. I suspect that our current situation of draconic copyright lengths, litigation, and enforcement cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Petty shoplifting and vandalism aside, when do you think violating the law is justified?

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” — Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT

I’m ramping myself up for the arrival of my new DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on April 14, and felt like I wanted to archive some of the tips I’ve picked up over the years. Thanks to the Harmony Central Board for several of them!

• Can’t stand headphones for a vocal recording session? I know I’ve been in that boat before, because I can’t hear myself well, and I hate having one ear open. So you can set up your mic and two monitor speakers as an equidistant triangle, making particularly sure that the microphone is exactly the same distance from both speakers, and the two of them are at the same height. Then just reverse the polarity on one of the monitors, pan all your tracks to perfect center, and record. You’ll get the vocalist’s voice, and the phase of the two monitor speakers will cancel one another out so they don’t show up in the recording.
• Use a highpass filter to cut out low frequences in your tracks, all the way up to (maybe) 500Hz or more. This will help give a lot of clarity in the mix to instruments that might otherwise have “boominess” (think: acoustic guitars and vocals).
• If the take sucks, do it again. Hard disk space is cheap. A good performance is priceless.
• Keep your “dry” signal mono, just pan the effects and “special effects” tracks. This makes for a less-muddy tune. Wish I’d known this two years ago.
• When mixing, get your kick, snare, vocal, and bass to about -6dB. Adjust the master volume to the bare minimum you can hear anything at all. At that point, adjust your mix so you can only hear the snare drum, and even that, just barely. Then raise it a bit more; adjust the kick’s volume until you can hear it, too. A tad more, and adjust the bass. A tiny smidgeon more, make it so you can barely hear your lead vocals. Once you’ve done that, you generally have a pretty good rough mix to adjust the mix of everything else around. Go back once you’ve adjust levels and make sure you follow that foundational order as you ramp up the volume in tiny increments: snare, kick, bass, lead vocal.
• It’s hard to beat a visual indicator to see if you have the sound that you’re looking for. Look at a spectrum analyzer of your tune next to a spectral analysis of the frequency response pattern of a well-mixed representative sample of the genre you’re doing. If the spectral analysis is pretty close, then you are probably pretty close to the right high/low mix for your genre. If it’s off, look at EQ’ing and listen to the differences to make yours sound more professional.
• Fast release and moderate attack on your compressor.
• Avoid overlapping sonic lines. If you have one instrument playing a line centering around a certain frequency, try to give other instruments room to work.
• A good mix can’t substitute for poor musicianship. Make sure your drum, bass, and guitar players are in the groove and tight. Otherwise people will complain about a muddy mix even if the mix is perfect.
• When recording bass or guitar, play hard, try to fret nearly on top of the frets, rather than behind them, and remember to try to damp at least a little bit between notes where possible. The recording will come out cleaner.
• Be upbeat and positive. And get the money from the people in your studio before you record.
• Good recordings can’t improve poor arrangements.
• If you find your drum track a bit thin (a tip I’d wished I’d known for Void War), split the track off to a bus, give it some good stereo compression, and then mix it back into the dry signal. It will fatten the drums without them sounding over-compressed.
• For removing “mouth sounds” from vocals and spoken tracks: try using a noise gate, set to around 200ms attack and 180ms release.
• A pencil or straw taped to the front of your mic can often dramatically reduce “popping” with no reduction dynamic range or high-end response.
• Some old pantyhose and a coat hanger or embroidery hoop also work as great, cheap pop-filters.
• A 27ms delay on a vocal or bass track, mixed with the primary track, can really fatten the sound. Avoid exactly 20ms, though, that’s the delay which causes phase cancellation. Pan hard left and right to really give the sound some depth.
• This sounds basic, but every drum gets its own track if you can do it. This will let you do things like add reverb to your kick and cut out some of the 12KHz-ish frequencies from your cymbals.
• Get both a clean feed and a a feed with effects on from the guitar when playing (split the signal, one dirty, one clean, record both at once if you can). That way, if you want to go back and fix the sound, you can.
• Record a bunch of sybillants — d, ssh, p, fff, t, th, etc. — into a track before laying down the recording. If you find that the vocal track isn’t clear enough though it’s in-key, you can drag-and-drop with a little mix creativity to fix the sound.
• If you’re going to EQ and compress a track, put the limiter first in the chain.
• Use about -6db as the max target for your raw mixes, rather than 0. This will give you a less artificial sound and give you headroom to work with in post-processing (mastering) to CD.
• A little duct tape on a cymbal goes a long way to shortening the decay time.
• Play your mix on your home stereo, car stereo, headphones, neutral monitor speakers, and everything else you can find before you decide it’s “done”. I played my Void War soundtrack on my car stereo, and MAN, I mixed the high-end way too hot.
• If you’re doing MIDI first, get the MIDI mixed perfectly before dumping it to audio. It makes it much easier to mix the audio.
• Don’t use new strings on acoustic guitars in the studio. Dead strings let more of the resonance of the instrument shine through, rather than just the high-end resonance of the strings themselves.
• Keep your original takes pristine. If you must add effects to tracks, dupe the original track, archive it (that’s a Cakewalk term; other editors may use a different term), and apply the effect to the dupe. That way, when you screw up the effects, you can try again. Archives just take up disk space, not CPU time.
• If the take sounds bad, try moving the mic and re-recording before trying EQ to fix it.
• Use the highest-quality, longest-shelf-life CDRs you can for both burning your music and backing up your data. Many cheap CDRs have a half-life of just a few months. Burn your masters at 1X (the slowest setting) for maximum playability.
• Beware hidden fees for out-of-state, “cheap” mass-duplicators.
• Take a break every few hours when recording. Your ears get tired, and just like beer goggles, that track that looks great the night before has you chewing your arm off in the morning.
• Do the same with vocals as with guitars: get one take through the compressor, and another one totally clean. Mixing the two can give very pleasing results.
• Try using a parametric EQ and cutting heavily and narrowly in the 8-10KHz range to make that heavily-distorted electric guitar sound more “real”
• If you want to thicken an acoustic guitar, try duping the track, panning one a little left, the other a little right, and EQ them a little differently.
• Effects: less is more.
• Having trouble with volume in the high ranges on your tune? Sing it in your regular voice, then double a falsetto on top of it.

Just some thoughts, some debatable, and some are a case of “TMTOWTDI”: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Hope it’s helpful 🙂

I don’t know how many of you have found Google almost useless for finding product reviews on certain things, but I have. Recently, I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do to get a better offboard DAC and MIDI controller for my recording rig. I decided to put up a blog page so that I can find products and reviews which are helpful.

• The M-Audio Firewire Audiophile has gotten panned pretty hard, as has

The M-Audio Firewire 410

• The Presonus Firepod has gotten some good reviews, and it has a ton of inputs, but
• its little brother, the Firebox, might be more suited to my work.

Looks like I might want to avoid the M-Audio firewire 410 and Audiophile; either people love it or they hate it. On the plus side, if I do decide to get it, I can make sure to get it from somewhere with a very liberal return policy.

The Ozonic looks like a nifty product, but it’s so new (February 2005 release) that nobody’s reviewed it that I can tell.

The main reason for this change? Well, I’m buying a new computer. A Laptop. A Dell Inspiron 9200, to be exact. The WUXGA screen (1920×1200 pixels), gigabyte of RAM, and processor which can pump out performance 3 times my current machine make it a great deal, and I haven’t replaced my digital audio workstation in four years; it’s about time!

I’ll be picking up some cheap Firewire external converters for my existing IDE hard drives (a pair of 120GB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracudas), so that I won’t have to rely on the little 5400RPM 80GB hard disk built into the unit. Too bad I can’t use the RAID controller I had them hooked to. Then again, disk throughput was very rarely my problem. The CPU bottleneck on my little Pentium III-933 was the biggest thing causing me grief while doing multi-track audio recording.

The challenge with this laptop is that there is no MIDI interface on the box, and from what I understand, the analog-to-digital converters on the line-in and mic-in are not really professional-grade. They may work out for the 48KHz video-game and rock music I’ve been doing lately, but as my ear has improved due to experience, I’ve begun to hear the shortfalls of that sample rate. I can hear the “graininess” due to my post-processing.

If you’re not familiar with audio stuff, this may make little sense to you. Basically, a 16-bit, 44.1KHz sample (the same as what’s on CD’s) has an aliasing “threshold”. That is, this audio standard is “good enough” that the average listener thinks it sounds great, but once you actually start munging the sounds with effects, the 44,100 “snapshots” per second begin to show their ragged edges. 48KHz remedies this a bit; 96KHz is much better. I’ve also been working with 16-bit samples, and upping that to 24-bit will give me finer-grained amplitude and dynamics resolution. This is becoming increasingly important as I learn to mix stuff better, and play with compressor thresholds.

I’m in the market for a 96KHz ADC/DAC unit, and MIDI converter, preferably in the same unit. The laptop only has one PCMCIA slot, so I’d kind of prefer to avoid buying stuff that fills it up. USB and Firewire are logical, expandable choices. I can leave them home if I’m just hauling my laptop with me, or tote the stuff around in a gig bag if I’m doing recording somewhere else.

I’ve seen some products (the Ozonic is an exmaple) where they tie a MIDI controller keyboard, audio inputs/outputs, and MIDI into one. That sure sounds like the kind of thing I’m looking for. I just need to find more things like it, because the price tag (about $700) is a little too steep…

Other interesting stuff I ran across in my research:

If you bought a Soundblaster Audigy (Hey, Justin!) in 2004, Creative owes you $62.00 for lying to you about the card’s capabilities.

There’s a universal ASIO driver which can enable extremely low latency (below 10ms) for ASIO-enabled applications called “asio4all“. It’s supposed to be very good, even on hardware that, with the stock drivers, doesn’t do low-latency very well. If I can reach the point that I can play my guitar, plugged in through my computer, and the sound that reaches my ears almost instantly is the really fat, distorted, chorused, delayed lead that I want, I’m in heaven. Right now, I try to pluck the melody, and it reaches my ears a quarter-second later. That’s very distracting!

This page will be updated as I encounter more reviews to decide what ADC/DAC and MIDI converter I’m going to pick up. No need to watch this space, really. Just using it as a dumping ground for my product research.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: He: Let’s end it all, bequeathin’ our brains to science. She: What?!? Science got enough trouble with their OWN brains. — Walt Kelly

Note: Due to the size of this thread and the difficulty navigating it, I have closed it to new comment entries. Thank you for understanding.

For those of you who are only interested in getting to the moral of the story, there are two:

• Be extremely cautious and conservative buying stuff off of eBay
• Anything which sounds to good to be true probably is.

The other day, my wife’s passing hand, combined with some static buildup, managed to shock my aging, decrepit laptop enough that the network card and PCMCIA slot failed to work for the next hour and a half. Eventually, they “came back” on their own (several reboots later), after a great deal of monkeying, shaking, powering-off, unplugging, removing batteries, and general hair-pulling and curse-slinging.

I realized then that my old, reliable Sony Vaio PCG-Z505SX had seen better days. It never has really been a “desktop replacement”, but much more a “desktop adjunct”. The thing I really like about it is the size. It’s small — only a 12″ screen — and the keys are in intuitive locations. It has a positive “feel” why you type on the keyboard, and that’s 90% of what I do: typing. Well, if you exclude mousing.

When I want to play games, I go sit in front of my big desktop computer and play. I also use that same workstation to record music, and frequently I’ve found that drivers or updates which I need to play a given game conflict with what I need to run my digital recording gear. It sucks, but recording wins out over games. I have a few still sitting in their boxes because I found that, in order to run them, I had to upgrade drivers which would then cause my recording rig to not work right. Darn. They remain unplayed.

Anyway, I got laptop-hungry. This laptop broke, and I realized that it was last mass-produced in 1999. That’s a good run for a piece of hardware, and other than having to replace the hard drive a year ago, it’s been really good to me. All good things must end, and I suspect this recent ethernet/PC card failure is the first of many failures to come. Besides, it can only fit 128MB of RAM. I have more RAM than that on the video card of my desktop PC. It does make it a somewhat slow, frustrating experience to use, ameliorated only by the fact that I have it running GNU/Linux, which handles aging, under-sized hardware much more gracefully than Windows XP.

Here’s where the real adventure begins. I spent some time early this morning, over lunch, and this evening investigating laptop options. I checked out the most recent models, read a bunch of reviews, and decided what kinds of features I wanted. Initially, I really wanted an Apple PowerBook, but I abandoned that plan. As much as I love my Mac upstairs, I realized that I could replace my 4-year-old recording rig with a new laptop. I don’t want to re-invest the money in a Mac-based recording rig, really. It was too expensive, and took too much time to build up, for me to want to do it all over again on a different software platform.

Besides, there’s that whole learning-curve thing. I’m comfortable with Cakewalk Sonar. I really don’t want to learn ProTools if I can avoid it.

I found some great deals on eBay. Being somewhat naive about these things, I followed the instruction on the posting which said, “I have a buy-it-now price for this auction; contact me at b_blancoo0@yahoo.com for the price”.

I did so. Here’s the e-mail exchange. I quickly became very leery. See if you can spot what’s wrong with his responses…

From: Me To: b_blancoo0@yahoo.com Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:27:30 -0700 Subject: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

You mentioned to write you for “buy it now” pricing on the Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD . What is that?

Thanks,

Matthew P. Barnson

From: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 18:42:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

the buy it now price is$825 with shipping included reply me asap!

From: Me To: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:19:37 -0700 Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

I apologize for my incredulity, but that seems to be about $1,000 less than competing similar laptops. How do you sell them at such a low price? Is this simply a great deal for the ethically-challenged?

In addition, your eBay account seems to have been suspended due to your request for offline “buy it now” requests. Do you plan to reinstate it? I would feel more comfortable making a purchase knowing that your account is in good standing.

From: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:26:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

sir i have a problem with my account and i stop the auctions and ebat will resolv this problem i sell at this price because i need this money for my soon life reply me asap and tell if you make this deal with me

Yep. 100% criminal. Important tip for would-be criminals: if a customer asks why something is such a good deal, telling them the price is good because “i need this money for my soon life” is probably not a good gambit. This would be laughable if it weren’t for the next closed-bid seller whom I contacted regarding the sale of a laptop who was so remarkably similar.

From: Emicrox11@aol.com <Emicrox11@aol.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:46:53 EST Subject: Re: Question for item #5567966663 – BRAND NEW ALIENWARE AREA-51M 7700 3.2, WI…

HI First I want to tell you that my laptop are brand new, unopened box all accessories included and also an international warranty . My price is the best you could get: 900USD(not euro), including the shipping and insurance taxes. We will pay them because the package will be delivered from Europe. As delivery service we use UPS2days air service or overnight (with insurance and 15 days return policy), because it’s the faster. And if you will have a quick payment, we must also have a quick delivery. So that’s why we use as a payment method Western Union money transfer, the fastest and also very secure way of sending money. I just open a electronics company here in europe If i will make with you a good deal,you will recommend me ,maybe ,to your friends or to other persons.For me it is very important to have permanent deals on ebay, any negatice deal will not make good to me,That explain the price So, if you agree with my terms I’m sure that we can close the deal as soon as possible. Waiting your quick answer right now, THANK YOU

Another important tip for would-be criminals: Asking people to send money internationally via Western Union is almost a sure tip-off that this is a version of the Spanish Prisoner, a.k.a. the Nigerian Scam. Of course, hundreds of people fall for this every year, to the tune of thousands and possibly millions of dollars…

I did not purchase from either seller. I value my money. Here are my suggestions when you make ebay purchases:

1. Check the seller’s history. Not just their feedback rating, because these days so many accounts are getting hijacked, but actually what they have sold, how much they’ve sold it for, what their payment requirements were, etc. For instance, the feedback history on the second seller was great. But all he had ever sold were sporting goods, and he had only ever accepted PayPal. This is a sudden, out-of-character change. Even if it were legit, that sudden of a change would leave me leery.
2. No Western Union or Money Orders out of the country. It doesn’t matter how good the deal is, it’s not a good deal when they walk away with your $1000 and you have nothing to show for it.
3. As much as I hate to say it, check their grammatical habits. “Nigerian Scammers” have a peculiar writing style. It’s an immediate red-flag to a potential ripoff. On the other hand, someone being smooth and well-spoken is no guarantee of truthfulness. That’s why con artists do so well in this country, too.

I despise criminals. My greatest concern is simply that I’ve given these scammers my real-life email address, and I’m really not that tough to locate. Ahh, well, there’s no such thing as privacy anyways.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Of course there’s no reason for it, it’s just our policy.