Month: May 2005

RUDUD (happy birthday to you)

My daughter Carolyn’s second birthday is on Sunday. She is very cute. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Try this: go to the Musipedia Melody Search web page and enter these characters in the search field: “RUDUDDRUDUDDRUDDDDURDDUD”. As it happens, this sequence is a perfect match for the Happy Birthday song (copyright Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill). The sequence uses the so-called Parsons Code, which simplifies music to such an extravagant degree that all it keeps track of is whether notes go up (U), down (D), or stay the same (R). Against expectation, this stripped-down format retains enough information to zero in on tunes you only know how to hum. Musipedia (“Inspired by, but not affiliated with Wikipedia” as they say) has a giant catalog of tunes to compare to, but many of them seem to be things like Mahler’s unfortunate “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen No. 2 Ging heut’ morgen” (DUUUUUUUUD!). Still, it’s fun poking around. I found Another Brick in the Wall by typing in a random sequence (UUDDUUDDUU). I haven’t tried it, but they even have a way to whistle to your computer and have it look up the song automatically.

Until next time, we’ll sign off with the Rambles Weblog theme song…
DUDUDUUUDDUDUDD.

Doubled vowels and Elvish ASCII

My Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes continues to be the leading traffic generator for my site. Since that’s where the crowd is, I spent some time tonight freshening things up a bit. In particular I’m providing more examples that treat doubled vowels, something I get asked about a lot in email.

I’m also unveiling my new text notation (which I modestly call “Gulley’s Practical Method for Elvish Text Notation”) that should help me communicate with people who seek me out for electronically moderated Elvish consultation questions. Read the article and you too can learn why AMELIE is rendered as

     A E I
   _ : M L _
         E

Companies move into the network cloud

The early promise of web-based application service providers seems to be coming to fruition. Not only that, many of the most useful applications (like Gmail) are free. Evan Williams, creator of Blogger (and now at startup Odeo.com), talks here about running your company on web apps. As he says, “One interesting thing about starting a company today versus a few years ago: Lots of cool web apps are now available that you can more or less run you company on.” He rattles off a short list of online software they use and then continues, “The improved efficiency of having these apps available, and not having to install and maintain servers for them is huge.” Williams is certainly an early adopter in an immature field, but there’s no question which way the wind is blowing. Salesforce.com is damaging PeopleSoft (er… I mean Oracle), because you can just hire sales people and not worry about hiring IT staff. Fewer IT staff means fewer ferrets in the bag when you’re trying to move quickly. Companies in the future will come and go like foam on the waves, because everything, aside from the actual innovative force driving the enterprise, will be virtualized and outsourced. Barriers are dropping and boundaries are blurring.