I have just listened to a composition by Aykut Çağlayan: Carillon Tekbir A fantastic piece composed using Common Music system. You can download and listen to the file and according to the composer its story is as follows:
What would you compose for a fantastic carillon, which has MIDI port? A fantastic piece, which allows you to explore the carillons sonic capabilities? I didn’t do that. Since the carillon has religional /cultural functions and it always chimes a sound icon; I focused on sound icon concept in this work. I structured the piece basically as ‘A – interpolation from A to B – B’. The A is the well known gong tune: E C D G C D E C… and the B is also a very well known sound icon, but in a very different cultural context. I took the Tekbir of Itri as B. Itri is an Istanbulian composer from 17th century.
Carillon
To acquire an interpolation between two different tunes i used the technique dynamic markov. Our decision maker for next note is a first order markov chain, but the probabilities of every notes are changing as a function of time. This piece is composed for McFarland Carillon at Urbana. If you wanna hack this code and generate the result by yourself, download and install Grace: http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/
After listening to Aykut’s piece I had the urge again to go out and record some of the fantastic pieces played by the cathedral in Antwerp (last time I checked a melody from Verdi was reaching to my ears from the big bells of the cathedral 
PS: For the meaning and history of Carillon please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carillon. This makes me wonder if Aykut earns the title of carillonneur in this case.
My colleagues recently told me about a very interesting Internet application for learning Dutch.
The application is called Alane Newsreader and by using that people can learn and test their Dutch at their own level. This clever digital newsreader automatically selects actual and real world news at the current level of the learner. The system tests the knowledge of the new newsreader words after the
student has read the text.
The Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs selected the Alane Newsreader as one of the top ten successful innovations in the public sector. Since January 1, it is available in all libraries in the Netherlands. A demo video shows you how to practice with Alane Newsreader.
You can try it yourself at http://nieuwslezer.bibliotheek.nl/ for free. Here’s a couple of screenshots from my recent sessions (and some criticisms):
Learn Dutch by using Alane Newsreader
Recently I had to create a multi-site Drupal system for a project (that means different organizations will be able to use the same Drupal system but with completely independent database, themes, modules, etc.) . Even though there are lots of documentation on this spread over the Internet it did not turn out to be very easy for my case.
Description of my case:
- An Ubuntu GNU/Linux server
- Drupal version 6 installed by aptitude install drupal6
- No domain names. I reach the remote server by its IP address e.g. http://100.101.102.103/drupal6
So the default set up is OK, I can visit http://100.101.102.103/drupal6 and see the content but I wanted to create another independent Drupal site using the same source codebase., e.g. http://100.101.102.103/drupal6/iris
The most critical part turned out to be not the instructions in the Internet documentation but in the /usr/share/drupal6/sites/default/settings.php file:
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Tags: drupal
Here is a nice graph showing bicycle statistics by country and obesity relationship (and raw image is available, too):
Bicycle statistics by country (and obesity relationship)
It seems like Netherlands and Belgium are very good in terms utilizing bicycle. For comparing the efficiency of a bicycle to a typical car please read http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/energy/bicycle-energy.html#s3
Tags: bicycle
My friend and former colleague Tolga Kürkçüoğlu told me that JiraTouch team released JiraTouch for iPhone.
One of the most interesting parts of this story is the use of open source tools for the development of this product. JiraTouch team says that they used Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch for developing the software that runs on iPhone.
JiraTouch for iPhone
For details, screenshots, and videos you can visit http://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/jiratouch/id355922987